First harvest

Just a few teeny baby spuds and some minute broad beans (I was too impatient to wait while they grew) and some very peppery radishes, but how exciting! The potatoes were fantastic: Maggie went mmmmmmmm and kept asking for more (no, because I only dug up a few) and even Tamsin polished hers off! Growing your own is fantastic. Even if I did have to extract them from a sort of muddy soup rather than digging in the true sense of the word. It’s soggy up there.

I pulled the garlic last week, too, because it was rusty and getting rotten: not an unmitigated success, but I’m drying them out in the kitchen and some will be fine bulbs to be proud of. (The rest will become compost.) I’d intended putting the PSB in its place but I (blush) left it up there in small pots while we had a mini-heatwave and they all dessicated along with a tray of lettuces – had it been this week, they’d have drowned – and slugs ate the artichokes. I do feel a little like King Canute holding back the tide (of weeds) at the moment but I understand that is normal for veg gardening in June – and my modest aim at the beginning of this first year was that I wanted to get out more than I put in.

Thanks to you all for your good wishes: M is now almost completely recovered if quite unsightly. (Old ladies still recoil in horror but as they are the same old ladies who unfailingly tell Tamsin she’s a lovely little man, I don’t care.) She returned to preschool today, thus preventing me from using my planned title based on the fact that it was the longest day ever, groan groan.

We are heading south tomorrow for our trip to Ascot: my outfit is assembled even if I have failed to try the whole lot on simultaneously. No point now as I can’t go shopping again so it will just have to do. There’s enough champagne flowing at these occasions that I will look lovely through everybody’s soft-focus eyes by lunchtime anyway.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 7:25 pm and is filed under allotment life, parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.