Hello my name is Moog and I have too many cucumbers (now with pictures)

You may consider my recent lack of blog posts as a stunned silence. The reason, for the first time ever since taking on my plot, we have been basking in what can only be described as a 'summer.' Yes, you read that right. Think for a minute. When was the last time a British summer wasn't declared a washout by the tabloid press (and by me)? I'll tell you, it was 2006. Just before I started allotment gardening.

This has led to a period of new discoveries for me. of course no allotment year is ever exactly the same, but a certain depressing regularity has formed, mainly involving failures caused by too much rain and cloud. This year, after a ridiculously cold spring, we've been treated to nearly a month of wall-to-wall sunshine. It rather caught me out as I've never actually experienced a year like it on the plot. Suddenly, things they say in gardening books started to make sense. Like, "you can hoe on a dry day" and "don't forget to water stuff." Suddenly, crops (and weeds) have started behaving like they're supposed to.

Since my last post, harvesting has begun and taken up large amounts of my time, along with watering in all the hot weather. First I started harvesting my over-wintered onions, some of which grew so large that there was no space between them - from sets planted a hand-span apart to begin with.

Then came the strawberries. I have never seen so many. They started ripening mid-way through Wimbledon fortnight and didn't stop until the end of the Tour de France (I find sporting events a good way to plan the year). Our freezer is full to bursting waiting for jam-making to commence, and so, for a while, were our bellies. Raspberries followed somewhat later with a decent crop but have not been so prolific as the strawberries. This is a nice payback for the grim moments I remember from last year, trying to harvest strawberries in the rain. This year it was done with the sun on my back and the Iseley Brothers' Summer Breeze playing through my headphones. The strawberries, warmed by the sun, were sweet and delicious.

Strawberries

Toward the end of July as rain began to threaten, I harvested my garlic, which had done all the growing it was going to do, and my maincrop onions which were threatening to get too large. I also wanted to take them out of the ground before they could be re-energised into growth by the rains. Salad onions have also just got big enough to eat, and I have a very large row of salad bowl lettuce. I am surprised the lettuce hasn't bolted yet. It goes limp if you try to harvest leaves at the plot, so I have taken to potting up plants and taking them home that way. With a plastic bag over the bottom of the pot to retain moisture they have kept re-growing at home.

Main onion crop drying in the shed

And now, I have too many cucumbers. Both plants (variety "Ridge Burples") survived this year and broke out of their plastic tunnel. At first they were only ripening slowly and I got one or two in mid-July, but a visit to the plot yesterday in the first week of August produced no less than 9 large cucumbers. They are delicious, but we have too many. The plants have taken over an entire 4x9ft bed and are now exploring outside it too.

Butternut squash coming on at last

Other crops have been slow to catch up. pumpkins and squashes are only now getting going and we have only had two courgettes from the single plant I purchased. If there were more plants, you could guarantee each one would be heavy with fruit, I suppose. But at least this way I don't have a glut, as I do with cucumbers. Parsnips have failed to germinate this year, I have just a few very young specimens that won't be big enough to produce good roots this year. Potato plants are doing well, but have a few gaps in the rows, one of which has been filled by a rather spectacular volunteer tomato plant.

Volunteer tomato plant, variety unknown

Thankfully I have been able to keep up with watering and harvesting due to the lack of growth in both weeds and grass - meaning less mowing and weeding. I have, however, let a rather large infestation of bindweed creep up on me, and the potatoes in particular are badly choked by it. My wildflowers didn't germinate very well either, but every now and again a new flower pops up and the seeds will probably keep doing that over the years to come.

My first attempt at a wild flower display

Summer update: jam

It's been a while since I've had time to blog. Work continues on the plot of course, assisted, sometimes punctuated by, the tiny human. Over the summer I've been combining evening trips to the plot with dog-walking duties, so Moog has had more than his normal share of visits.

Mrs Moog Keeper has mastered the art of making jam this year, so instead of having no idea what to do with all our raspberries, we now have a steady supply of delicious jam. In fact I now can't keep up the supply of raspberries to match Mrs Moog Keeper's new-found appetite for jam-making. Thankfully the autumn bliss variety is just coming through to keep her in fruit. I may have to extend the amount of fruit I grow at this rate. Jam can be very easily made in the microwave, I recommend trying it. All you need is the fruit, some jars, plus some special jam sugar (easily found in the sugar section of the supermarket)- there's a recipe on the side of the pack.

Sadly we were not able to make such good use of the strawberries which looked so promising earlier in the year. The plants were laden with young fruit at one point, but I think mainly due to a lack of watering at the critical time (remember the really dry spring we had?), lots of them dropped off the plants, still green. We had a reasonable crop but not as good as I was expecting. Better luck next year.

Late summer on Plot 29

The Moog and I have been a bit busy to update the blog recently, or possibly a bit lazy, take your pick. I'm going to have a go at bringing things up-to-date over the next few days. Let's start with the end of August.

It occured to me in August that it's a full year since I've had my plot. You may have read that I invested my £7 winnings from second place in the 2007 "Britain in Bloom" competition; this year, ta-da, I have won first prize! a whopping twenty Great British Pounds, and a certificate to boot. I will post some pictures of my front garden for curious blog readers when I get round to it. This year, I invested my winnings in a delicious curry from Cafe Balti in Wolverton.


Also in late summer (Hmph! What summer?! I hear you cry) harvesting was in full flow. I was a bit worried about carrots splitting, so I pulled most of them up in late August and put them in storage. There were loads, as you can see from the picture. Some of them were forked, some of them were split, but overall they've been pretty good. No carrot fly attacks. To store them, I bought a grow-bag for about £1.25 from the nearest DIY shed, and filled two cardboard boxes with layers of carrots and compost. So far (November) they're as fresh and crunchy as they were when they went in. Mind you, the bottom did fall out of one of the boxes last week, covering my shed floor in carrots and compost, you can imagine how pleased I was.


Onions were also dug up, dried in the garden at home (between rain showers), and strung up in the shed. We've been gradually working our way through them, and they're storing really well.

From the greenhouse at home, we collected a big bowl of green tomatoes and ripened them on the window sill. I have to say I couldn't tell the difference between ours and shop-bought ones (that is, ours were not the delicious globes of sweet flavour that I'd been led to expect). And if one more person mentions green tomato chutney, I may have to set an angry Moog on them.

The final crop I started harvesting in late summer was potatoes. The Sarpo Mira variety have been really successful, lots of nice big potatoes, no blight, and they seem to store really well. They eventually all came out of the ground in mid-September, although I think they might have been happy to stay in the ground a bit longer, they were starting to receive attention from slugs, so they came up.