The warm weather we had in June is now slowly fading in my memory as more rain is forecast for the oncoming days ahead. It has been a "bad" summer for gardeners as it started too hot and dry when the vege plot needed it the most which has now affected a lot of them with a result of very low yield of fruits.
We dug up our potatoes the other day and have never had such a pathetic harvest of it! Only 3-4 kg (!!) not worth the hard work that we put in - well, hubby's hard work this time as I didn't plant them in this year as you probably know - I was galavanting away in Malaysia! Blame it on acts of God - the volcanic ash in Iceland, to be exact and as I didn't managed to come home in time so he had to put them in. :) !!
Anyway, our raspberries are also having the same effect. Most of it eaten by birds/squirrels and also a few of them were broken off at the top as those big fat pigeons were seen sitting on them while pecking them off !! I counted 10 were broken the other day and all had good bunches of unripen berries on them too. Having said that we still managed to harvest about 6 - 8 kgs so far with half of that already been made into jam for this year. Pic above shows the jam being cooked before it was put in jars - about 14 of them!!. I hope I shall continue to pick them until the first frost and keep these back for tarts and maybe I will have a go at making some ice cream later in the year - maybe ? - I can try anyway.
We had given up on planting tomatoes for about 2-3 years when we had a very bad attack of what they called over here as the tomato blight - basically the stems and leaves go black and then the unripen fruits will get affected too which left us with nothing in the end. Well, this year my neighbour gave us 20 tomatoes seedlings as he planted too many of them and didn't want them to go to waste. We thought we give them another chance and see how it goes. So far I pulled up one of them as I thought it was showing some early signs of the same damage but (at the moment) the rest seems to be ok. Having said that I am still not too sure about a couple of them but as there are quite a good bunch of tomatoes on them and they seemed to be ripening I have left it. Judging from the above pictures we may be very lucky this year but fingers crossed!!
We had a late - very late - and small - very small - crop of radishes, just three of them in fact !! They are very spicy though nothing like the ones that we get from Tesco which were probably picked a week before they got to the supermarket.
As for our carrots, they seem to be doing pretty well. Last year we had a very good crop but as we had to go on our holiday we gave it all to my father in law which he said was very nice :)! We tried some the other day and they were indeed very fragrant and sweet. We normally save them for our salad instead of cooking them in order to get the real taste of it.
As you can see they are of all sizes and of all weird shapes and knobs !!
We have a very good sowing of beans this year - all 16 of them which went in the ground. They started off very healthy and seemed to have an abundant of flowers which beans will form when they are polinated. Unfortunately again I was told is probably due to the hot weather very few of them got polinated and I kept finding the dried blooms on the ground with nothing left on the stalk.
This is what we pick every other day compared to four times of that EVERYDAY last year! Another failure there !!Just as well we are not relying on all these to survive as we will probably not have any vegetable to eat ! Hehehe!!
Better luck next year then !!
