Last week was a bit of a mixed week weather-wise. It’s difficult to remember that we are now in June and the beginning of summer. On some days we have a taste of summer and winter in the same day.

On the allotment we have gone from the stage where we wonder whether we will have enough to fill the beds to concern over whether we will fit everything in.

Last week, legumes took centre stage. We planted out all our climbing beans.

One lot was a heritage variety – Liberty – sent to us by Bill and Val. We follow them on YouTube and they kindly gifted us a few heritage pea and bean seeds.

We also planted two varieties of climbing French bean – Cobra & Golden Gate and two varieties of runner beans – Moonlight and Celebration.

Bill and Val also sent us some Pongo, dwarf French beans and we also planted some Safari dwarf French beans.

In the same bed as the Safari beans, we sowed a long row of Onward peas and a shorter row of Early Onward peas. We had sown some Early Onward pea plants in pots with the intention of filling gaps in our earlier sowing, In the end, the early sown peas have grown well and so instead the few pea plants were planted alongside the later sowings.

A couple of courgettes were planted out. 

We had intended planting more courgettes, squashes and brassicas on Sunday but it was very windy and we didn’t want the young plants to be battered.

As well as planting we also did quite a bit of weeding and strimmed the grass. You would expect the grass to stop growing and turn yellow due to the lack of rain but it is continuing to grow quickly, Maybe the cool temperatures mean the grass isn’t suffering from the lack of moisture.

The calabrese in spite of our best efforts at watering has only managed to produce small main heads.

Another job was to tidy up the strawberry bed. Plants were sending out unwanted runners and the soil in between the plants needed hoeing, Whilst working on the strawberries, I was dismayed to find lots of berries had been prematurely discarded. It looked as though we would lose most of the berries. 

Martyn, gave the plants a really good watering in an attempt to salvage something.  We try to avoid watering once the fruits are beginning to ripen as too much water can lead to tasteless berries. In this case, it was either water or end up with no fruit. It paid off, as just a day or so later, we had a lovely harvest of ripe berries. Happily the flavour hadn’t been spoiled.

I used some of the strawberries in a batch of flapjacks. A layer of sliced berries was placed in between two layers of flapjack mixture.

We usually take some flapjacks as a snack to have with a drink after our walk around Nostell.

At this time of year, one of our priorities at Nostell is to look for the family of swans.

Those of you with eagle eyes may be able to just make out some small patches of white at the far end of the lake, somewhere near the centre of the line of trees.

I managed to get a shot. It’s a bit fuzzy as it’s tricky to keep the camera still when on full zoom but it’s good enough to confirm that all six cygnets were present.

The wild orchids that were growing in the meadow made a much easier subject to photograph.

Although we have only just planted our climbing beans, we still have some of last year’s harvest in our freezer. Some of these were used, last week, with some of the last stored summer onions in a chicken and green bean curry.

This was served with some of our homemade, frozen onion bhajis.

As always stay safe and well

I am linking to Dave’s Harvest Monday post on his Our Ha[[y Acres blog.