Tag: courgettes

Summer is finally here

It finally feels like summer is here. We’ve been harvesting plenty of fruit and veg from the allotment and took our first holiday of the year to Cornwall.

We managed to have our first dinner where all the vegetables on the plate were picked fresh from the allotment just hours before. There’s something satisfying about knowing where the food comes from and the effort it took to grow it.

We had chicken cooked in sweet chilli sauce, accompanied by a medley of freshly harvested potatoes, courgettes, carrots, spring onions, and sugar snap peas. It went down a treat and reminded us why we love our allotment so much.

Chicken with vegetables from the allotment

Onion harvest

A couple of days before heading to Cornwall, I spent some time at the allotment to ensure everything was in order while we were away. One of the jobs involved harvesting some of the onions. I pulled up half my onions and left them to dry in the greenhouse. There’s something so wholesome about the smell of freshly pulled onions; it’s one of my favourite times of the year. The remaining half was pulled up when we returned from our trip, and they are currently drying out in the greenhouse, waiting to be stored.

Harvested onions

Our Cornish Adventure

Cornwall was a breath of fresh air. We stayed just outside Lizard and spent a lot of time exploring the local area and Cornwall itself. I’ll let the pictures do the talking here:

Back to the Allotment

When we arrived back from Cornwall, I popped down to the plot for an hour; first to feed the chickens and second to see if there was anything to harvest. To my pleasant surprise, the allotment had thrived while we were away. I harvested runner beans, more peas, beetroot (one of my favourite vegetables), raspberries, tomatoes, cooking apples, and some of the onions that had completely dried out.

Another allotment harvest

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time, so I had to head back home, leaving quite a bit still to harvest. This week, I plan to spend more time at the allotment to gather the remaining crops.

 

Looking back at 2022

I realise we’re at the end of January, but I thought I would take the time and reflect back at 2022, and look at our successes and failures.

After moving plots in autumn 2021, 2022 was the first year growing on the new plot. We managed to clear a large bed in time for spring (in fact it covered almost half the plot) and gave enough growing space for what we needed. We kept to our core veg; potatoes, beans, onions, sweetcorn, pumpkins and courgettes.

The potatoes started off well and we managed to harvest all our first and most of our second early potatoes. However, we left the main crop in the ground for too long, and when it come to digging them up in the middle of winter, they had rotted away.

The beans done extremely well, but started to suffer a little during the heatwave. They soon bounced back in late summer.

Our onions were fantastic, in fact probably the best crop we’ve ever had and we’ve still got some left in the cupboard.

Sweetcorn started really well, but we had a few succumb to smut, a fungal disease which affects sweetcorn. Smut thrives on hot dry summers, so it’s no surprise we had it considering the temperatures we had.

There’s one major issue that cropped up in late autumn and that’s rats. Rats have moved in underneath the chicken coop and while we are keeping them at bay with traps, they are still a problem. Fortunately, they seem to be leaving the chickens alone and more interested in digging holes everywhere.

Here’s some pictures from last year.