Proof of the potato?

Shetland Black

before...


...after


The flavour was excellent!

And here's Kerrs Pinks:



And if you want to know how we are coping with all these potaotoes and courgettes:

Robinta

Another potato - a redskin this time!

Black and Blue

Well, actually more purple than blue. As the rain stopped today I decided to dig up some of the more interesting potatoes. They are Edzell Blue, Arran Victory and Shetland Black. They don't look so very exciting in the field:



But with a bit of a wash and a scrub up:




The Edzells and the Arran Victory are quite similar but I have yet to test their eating qualities. The Shetland Black were small and hard to find in the soil. The yield was disappointing, halfe a row giving up the same as two plants of the other varieties. Some had been attacked by eelworms. Again, I reserve judgement until I've eaten them. They have characteristic blue markings in the flesh (see below) but this is reported to have no effect on their taste.



Of course these vivid colours do not survive the cooking process, but I'm pretty excited about them all the same!

Harvesting Parsnip Seed

A bit of experiment this week.



In a corner of my plot I left a couple of parsnips to go to seed and forgot about them. It doesn't look tidy (see below). Now I notice that the seeds are dropping off so I reckon it's time to chop off the seedheads and collect them in a bag where the seeds can be rubbed off the stems without losing them.



collect the results in an envelope and pop them away somewhere safe and dry.



I wonder if they will be viable next March!

It's been a fennel of a summer

I've hardly stopped to take breath since returning from our Pembrokeshire holiday. The weeds are relentless. One success this year has been the two rows of fennel, planted about a month apart. We've had good eating off one already, and the remaining plants are now at the optimum distance from each other at last (I just can't steel myself to do enough thinning out when I should - when they are still seedlings that is). In the past fennel has had a tendency to bolt. Aside from the thinning, the weather conditions this year have been wet enough to arrest this - so far.



The second row is well hidden between the leeks and the French beans.




Jocelyn Dimbleby has an excellent recipe for Fennel and Potato bake. Aside from being delicious it uses lots of two ingredients that are in abundance just now. I'll see if I can find a link.

It's like this one but I recommend Gruyere or Emmental rather than Cheddar. And if you use your home grown potatoes you won't need to bake it for nearly that long.

http://www.cookitsimply.com/recipe-0010-0360k2.html

Look Away Now..

It's a time of plenty. The spuds are ready the mange-tout (see below), runner beans, courgettes, beetrot and chard are coming on stream. The family is fed up of lettuce while huge rosettes adorn the plot, surplus to requirement and a bit over the hill.



So why be glum? Well here the rogues gallery:

We returned from holiday to find the broad beans looking like they'd been through a forest fire. A consultation of the books suggested root rot. (Do not grow the same crop in this area for 8 years)



Next to them the onions were also ailing with white rot (9 years sentence)



... and the last straw is that 6 potato plants have developed tell tale brown spots on their leaves in the course of the last week. This is blight and I have chopped the haulms down and removed them in an attempt to stop this spreading to neighbouring plants. The six plants were all Kerr's Pinks which I bought at the potato day. I'm not too chuffed with the supplier!



I know it has been exceptionally wet but my greatest fear was slugs. So to be told that broad beans and onions are out of bounds, in one corner of the plot at least, is a galling!

How Green is My Plot?

Two weeks away and there has been a green revolution. Brassicas:



and the view from the end.




Of course a big element of the green is the weeds! I've been weeding 90% of the time on this weekend's visits. On the plus side:

We are eating first potatoes (Ballydoon and Sharpe's Express), lettuces and broad beans. The runner beans are flowering nicely, as are the mange-tout (both in the forground, above).

Note strawberries finished by first week in July.