We only managed a couple of visits to the allotment last week. We had a couple of appointments and the drizzly rain was enough to make gardening a less attractive proposition.

Most mornings we have pulled back the curtains to evidence that it has rained during the night but unfortunately this has been drizzly rather than the much needed heavier rain. Overnight our rain gauge has only collected millimetres or even fractions of a millimetre. During the day, it felt more like we were surrounded by low clouds rather than actual rain. Our couple of days of heat was certainly a blip and it certainly hasn’t felt summery.

The wetness, I can’t bring myself to call it rain, has been enough to encourage the weeds and the grass to grow. During our couple of visits there was little time to deal with weeds or cut grass as our priority was to harvest. A tidy plot isn’t much good if you allow your crops to spoil.

We just managed to catch the calabrese on the point of going over.

We have a couple of varieties of dwarf French beans, our usual Safari and Pongo gifted to us by Bill and Val. Both are now producing plenty of beans which I am trying to pick whilst still quite small. A couple of the Pongo plants are being left to provide us with seeds for next year.

Although the French beans are cropping, our runner bean flowers seem to be reluctant to produce flowers and those that are produced are failing to set.

Sometimes having an allotment is very frustrating. The bean vines are growing really well but just not producing beans. Let’s hope that they buck up their ideas.

The Amsterdam Forcing carrots have only produced very small roots but we are comforted to know that baby carrots are at a premium on supermarket shelves. The flavour is as good as larger roots and, as the skins are unblemished, they don’t need peeling which would leave little behind. 

The yellow climbing French beans – Moonlight are easy to spot. The Cobra beans were missed so they didn’t manage to join in the group photograph. Fortunately, I spotted them before we went home.

As the few plums on our Oullins gage tree start to ripen the wasps are moving in, so we decided to pick some whilst under-ripe and try to ripen them at home. Hopefully it will work as supermarkets advertise fruit either ready to eat or to ripen at home. 

The apples aren’t quite ripe and a bit tart, but the blackbirds will soon set their sights on them. For now, they are content to browse the fruit that has dropped providing easy pickings on the ground

Martyn, decided to dig some roots of the Charlotte potatoes. The tops of these died down much earlier than they should have so we feared that there would be no tubers to uncover. We were pleasantly surprised, all things considered. The potatoes were smaller than usual but again were unblemished and so didn’t need peeling. A video is posted here.

Martyn, also dug up one row of Casablanca potatoes, again the yield was smaller than usual but the plants had hardly any water throughout their growing season. Despite the ‘rain’ our soil is still bone dry below the surface.

We paid our usual visit to Nostell Priory, where the cygnets continue their progress into adulthood. They are still sticking close to mum though.

They are now big enough to be safe from the resident heron who has to content itself with smaller morsels. I don’t think he or she has read the no fishing signs.

Ruby always steers us to the fenced area that is set aside for dogs to exercise. She’ll first check out that no one else is occupying the area and then will, optimistically, head for the gate. Once inside she can’t wait for a game of chase the tennis ball. Martyn had posted a video of the fun here 

The photos are a bit blurry as she is like a little bullet. Someone watching once commented that she was faster than his greyhound.

Finally, how have we made use of some of our harvesting?

I made a Thai green, vegetable curry that incorporated our courgettes,  green beans, peas, onion, garlic, and coriander. I used coconut milk instead of milk.

I made a rice dish that used our onion, garlic, broccoli, green beans, frozen sweet corn and coriander.

I also used some of our courgettes, coriander and onions to make some baked courgette and onion bhajis. I had to leave out the rice flour as I didn’t have any and I only baked the bhajis for 15 minutes as I froze them and will complete the cooking once the bhajis are needed and have been defrosted.

Details of our July harvesting are posted here.

That’s all for now, as always stay safe and well.

I am as usual linking to Dave’s Harvest Monday post over at his Our happy acres blog