Monsters in the patch

Every now and then I'll miss one of the zucchinis and they turn into monsters like this one. It seems such a waste to chuck these out but with the pithy centres they make pretty ordinary eating. There are some recipes where you dig out the pithy seeds and stuff them with savory mince or sausage meat. Maybe I'll try it with this one. That's a 400g tin of tomatoes next to it to give the scale of the thing. I might let one of them go at the end of the season to see how big it will get.



Eggplant

I've started picking the Lebanese Eggplants. I planted out a punnet of six of these, way too many, and given the number of small fruit on the plants I might be overwhelmed soon. Though it's fun to grow big black eggplant these are much better for a small garden.



All Season vs Chantenay

Well here's the two of them together. The stumpy one is the Chantenay and the other one isn't. I mentioned before the Chantenay are ones of Peter, "The Man", Cundall's favourites. As for taste, I've just had these two for dinner and the Chantenay are definately sweeter. I'll grow these again. Not sure I'd bother with the All Season in winter, they take forever to grow. I'll try other varieties in late summer to grow through autumn and then again next spring.



Many Nuggets

The golden nugget pumpkins are growing well, but are a bit varying on how many fruit they have. This one, obviously, has plenty while the one next to it has only two. I don't know why this is. Also, they seem to have stopped producing female flowers. I've never grown these before but so far so good, apart form the uneven fruit production. These are the same pumpkins shown in the Pumpkin Fruit post so you can see how much they've come along in the last two weeks.



Tommys

The tomato picking is picking up pace with the Mortgage Lifters stating to ripen. They're a great tasting tomato, with more of a ruby colour than the normal tomatoe red. I'm having a problem with leaves dying back on these plus one of the romas. I've had this happen late in the season, which I think is a normal part of the plant's cycle, but not in spring. There doesn't seem to be any mites around, but we've had such a hot spring this year, with days varying from mid thirties back down to high twenties, so maybe that's to blame. I've also been a bit ambitious with the plant numbers and they're badly overcrowded.

Mortgage Lifter

My suffering Roma

Todays picks



Harvesting

I'm still picking carrots and beetroot along with the zucchini. Here's some of them in a poorly plated, and poorly photographed, meal of roast carrot and beetroot with zucchini fritters. I'm still trying to perfect the zucchini fritters, luckily I'm not short of zucchinis to practice on.



Flowering Corn

The sweet corn has produced it's male flowers and the silks of the female flowers. It's the females that become the cobs. Each silky hair is attached to what, with good pollination, a kernal. It's been really windy lately in this hottest spring on record. This can some times lead to poor pollination, as the pollen blows away from the crop, and subsequently the cobs aren't fully filled with kernals. I've planted in a block of four plants x three plants so hopefully this will help.