Out & About

After spending Monday processing some of our harvest, Tuesday was just a matter of a bit of watering in the greenhouses. In theory. Of course there were a couple of strawberries to pick, but they didn’t make it into the bag. The taste of a strawberry straight from the plant is just too tempting.

Wednesday we were away, down to north Oxfordshire to see my mum, bearing bags of veggies. She’s moving shortly so we’d promised to help with some sorting. This involved going through some of my late father’s papers, which I found poignant.

There were a couple of photos he’d got from the second world war. The first is a really dramatic shot of a bomb going off and the second is the downed Stuka that dropped it with the pilot dead on the plane. Apparently the plane was downed and the pilot tried to surrender but the bombed soldiers who had lost comrades just killed him.

You have to wonder if the pilot would have had children and grandchildren, as would the people he killed, if the world had been a saner place.

Back to the plot on Thursday where, apart from watering, there were a few more things to harvest. In the greenhouses we have peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and still some carrots.

The tomatoes are doing very well, indeed. The Green Zebra are strange, as someone kindly told me, you can see when they’re ripe because they go yellow with green zebra stripes. Really nice flavour.

Val asked me for a few runner beans so over to the bean patch. Cleared the rest of the broad beans, just half a carrier bag full. Then a carrier bag of runner beans. It’s amazing how you think you’ve got them all, then you look at the frame from another angle and there’s yet another load to pick.

More or less the same from the climbing beans, Cobra. They’re doing so well this year. I was looking at the photos from July 2007 where yellowish dwarf plants were struggling to climb a few feet up the poles. This year they’re at the top and producing like crazy.

Runner beans do freeze quite well, but they taste better fresh. Talking of freezing, my mum has offered us another freezer. We have two freezers and a fridge freezer already but we’re thinking about saying yes. The only thing is that we seem to over produce from the plots. In a reasonable year, I could keep a family of four going in vegetables. There’s no point in storing enough for 3 years in there, using electricity. Perhaps we should just keep the relatives fed as well.

Last June we had a holiday with our friends in France and they’re coming to us for a few days today. We’ll be taking them out and about so not much plotting going on until next week. I do hope the lotty lives up to her expectations!