Bumper Harvest

I’m afraid I’ve been unwell for a couple of weeks so have been unable to get to the allotment – am hoping that next weekend I’ll be well enough to get there and I’m certainly a lot better than I have been, which is good news. Anyway, my husband has been working hard in my absence and here are a couple of pictures for you.

This is last week’s harvest:

And here is this week’s harvest for you. As you can see, the French climbing beans and courgettes have been amazing, and the flowers are also wonderful. And the lettuce is great too. Plus plenty of soft fruit for a crumble.

Here are this week’s flowers at home:

Have a good weekend, everyone, and try to stay well!

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Seasonal planting and a poor harvest

Last week, there were some lovely & caring people worried about my one lone pea plant, but all is now well as it has a couple of friends which have come to join it! It’s a shame that there’s nothing at all so far from the other peas we planted, but we live in hope.

In the fruit cage, we put down another strip of weed suppressing fabric, but will need to bring more from home to finish off the job. We were thrilled to see that the gooseberry plants both have fruit on them already! They’re always the first to produce any fruit (which is why we’ve lost all their crop in the past to the birds as we hadn’t got round to netting them) – and as they’re safely in the fruit cage this year, we hope they’ll be fine. It will take a while for them to be ripe enough to pick though.

We have now planted some of the French beans – but we ran out of useful sticks for them to climb up, so we’ll have to do the rest of them next week:

I also planted a courgette in one of the old daffodil beds – I lifted those bulbs first and put them in the shed for next year.

And a very poor harvest this week! It’s a shame about the lack of flowers – all our tulips peaked way too soon though they were a lovely bumper crop. We will have to think of getting some later season tulips for next year if we can. So here are some asparagus we found – am hoping for more next week though!

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

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A Host of Golden Daffodils

Goodness me but Wordsworth wasn’t wrong – the allotment is awash with golden daffodils today which is just a real treat and SO uplifting.

Not to be outdone, however, the tulip beds are definitely on their way – and I have high hopes for the job-lot of striped tulips we bought last year. I LOVE striped flowers!

Meanwhile, in the perennial bed, the roses are showing distinct sign of life, which is great news:

The rhubarb is also definitely growing, though it will be a while until we can harvest it, I think!

And in the fruit cage, the gooseberries and blackcurrants are coming into leaf, and the haskap berry actually has flowers. So we hope there will be more than a mere handful of haskap berries to enjoy this year:

So, here is that golden daffodil host as our harvest this week:

And here are the gorgeous flowers themselves at home. Some of them are scented as well, so that’s amazing:

This week’s book news is that my latest novel, paranormal comedy An Unexpected Haunting, gained its first Amazon review which I was really thrilled about: the reader wrote the following:

“Anyone who loves books, ghostly fun, and stories with plenty of humour will find this novel is just their cup of tea.” (5 star Amazon review)

So that’s put a smile on my face for sure! Have a lovely weekend, everyone – and don’t forget if you’re in the UK that the clocks go FORWARD tonight!

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Last of the Sprouts

We’ve not been well for a couple of weekends (bad head colds all round!) so today was our first day back in the allotment for about three weeks. It’s not looking too bad as the frosts have dealt with most of the weeds, which is good news.

We have cleared out the rest of the sprout plants and raked over that bed ready for spring:

We also have some rhubarb on its way which is great news – though I do think we need to divide the largest plant at some point soon:

In the meantime, the daffodils are doing well:

And we even have some daffodils sprouting from the ones I threw away in the compost heap! So I’ve left them there for any flowers that may turn up:

The tulips are also coming up in one of the beds so we have removed the protecting netting as the squirrels shouldn’t steal them now they have actually sprouted – we hope!

K also did some pruning of the gooseberry plant and the blackcurrants in the fruit cage, so I think that job is ticked off the list. Here’s a view of the allotment all cleared up ready for spring:

And here’s our harvest of sprouts – alongside the sprout plants which are too thick to compost on the allotment so we have taken them home for the garden waste bin.

In other non-allotment news, my latest paranormal chick-lit novel, An Unexpected Haunting, is now available at Amazon so do feel free to have a look at the Kindle version here: https://mybook.to/HauntingBrooke or the paperback version is here: https://mybook.to/HauntingBrookePB.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

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An autumn crop

A nice bit of rain during the week which is great news, so the allotment doesn’t look as horrendously dry as it did last Sunday. I was cheered up enough by this to do some weeding, which I haven’t had the heart for recently, as well as some composting. However, K has made more composting by cutting back the currant bushes, so I hope to tackle that next week.

There are still some blueberries in the fruit cage, which is good:

And one of our courgettes has finally got bigger though the others are still quite small. Apologies for the quality of the picture – the courgette wasn’t actually moving!

So today’s harvest definitely has more than a hint of autumn in it. We have gladioli, gazanias, blueberries, a few redcurrants and gooseberries, the large courgette, beetroots, a cabbage and the shallots (for drying off at home – they last all year once dry):

Here are the vases at home:

Have a lovely Sunday, everyone.

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And finally the lilies!

Fabulous news from the allotment today – FINALLY the lilies have decided to bloom – they look incredible and the scent is AMAZING. I am just so happy to see them at last.

In other news, the Fluffy Chicken is once again back on our plot so we said hello and had a quick conversation with her (as you do), before secreting her away in a prime position on another person’s plot. Who will remain nameless, LOL! This week our chicken has gained a peg for a longer beak but she seems to quite like it so we have left it on!

The courgette plant is looking good, though it did have a couple of rotten fruits which I have removed. The rest are nice and firm though.

And it’s definitely the last of the mangetouts harvest which we divided for our lunch today (there were other things for lunch too!):

So we have now removed the whole of the mangetouts planting and I’ve put it next to the compost bins so we can compost it as and when we get a moment:

Still some soft fruit for today’s harvest then – which consists of one mangetout, French beans, a courgette, blueberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, lilies, gladioli, alstroemeria, one dahlia, sweet peas and roses.

Here are the gorgeous lilies at home filling the house with their scent:

And here are the rest of the flowers:

Have a lovely Sunday, everyone.

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The fluffy chicken moves in …

At the allotment today, we discover that the fluffy chicken has now moved in and is sharing our plot with us …!

We are of course deeply honoured and suspect we know the identity of the chicken kidnapper which could only really be one of our allotment friends (Helen, I’m looking at you!), but we feel the chicken might be a bit bored after a while as our plot is at the end of a row so not that sociable for chickens. So we have placed her back at the entrance in a handy pot where she can have a chat with anyone who comes in. She certainly looks happy!

Anyway, we have done a heck of a lot of watering as the allotment is now like a desert. I suspect we’ve lost the sweet peas for the season now and the nasturtiums looked sad. But nothing stops the gladioli and they are even flowering where we didn’t plant them in the first place!

The gazanias also look amazing but, sadly, don’t last that well in their vases – so I think next year I shall take them home and plant something else on the allotment instead.

The courgette is doing well but none of the fruits are large enough to harvest this week:

Meanwhile, the soft fruit cage is going utterly crazy and we spent quite some time picking gooseberries, white currrants, redcurrants and blackcurrants (hidden underneath the white currants on the right). We’re certainly pleased with the harvest (and look at the numbers of French climbing beans too!):

Here are the flowers too, which include gladioli, roses, sweet williams, gazanias, dahlias and one alstroemeria:

And here are the flowers at home:

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

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French beans and fruit

Lovely morning at the allotment today which seems to have suddenly jumped into summer. The soft fruit is looking amazing:

It’s particularly pleasing to see the gooseberries doing so well as usually they get stolen by the birds. But this year, they are safe in the fruit cage so hopefully we will have more of them.

The mangetouts are looking good too and we have our largest harvest of those so far this year:

Plus we have our first few French beans which is lovely to see:

Some of the French beans have a black fly infestation on them so we have cut off the soft tops of the beans to deter the wretched beasts and I have also sprayed just to make sure.

Meanwhile, the cabbages are doing fine:

As are the Brussels sprouts:

The roses have a lot of flowers, but they’re very floppy so I’m going to have to think of a way to contain them a bit better:

And the sweet peas are still surviving!

So today’s harvest is mangetouts, a few French beans, asparagus, roses and a couple of gazanias:

Here are the flowers at home:

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

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Planting up the season

We really focused ourselves at the allotment today and planted up the rest of the vegetables we’ve been looking after at home, so it was hugely busy but fun. First off, the beetroot is now all done:

And we have put in the cabbages, netted them, sprayed and put slug doom down so we hope they will survive!

K also built the structure for the French beans and we have put those in as well. There were some left over so we put those on the allotment shared table for people to take if they would like some – such a useful facility to have!

The Brussels sprouts which we planted earlier in the month continue to do okay:

The fruit cage is also really going for it, with lots of flowers so that’s good news:

The gerberas I planted last week are still there but a bit slug-chewed so I put some slug doom pellets down to protect those too:

Whilst there this week, I also planted three more rows of gladioli – though the bucket I’ve been storing them in appears to be doing its own planting without needing me at all! That’s the joy of gladioli – I swear to you I could just chuck them onto the bed without bothering with planting them at all and they’d STILL produce leaves and flowers, no problem. I could probably leave them in that bucket and they’d look fine!

Here is a view of the allotment which almost makes it look as if we know what we’re doing – as if, LOL!

Here is the harvest of asparagus and sweet williams, plus a bed of tulip bulbs I dug up which I will take home to plant in November:

Here are the sweet williams at home:

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

Anne Brooke Books

Tulips and soft fruit

A lovely display of tulips at the allotment today, which is very heartening. Most of them are tall enough for cutting too.

Meanwhile the daffodils are continuing well and the scented ones are just amazing.

I planted some more gladioli rows this week.

And, while I was doing that, K had a good look through the soft fruit cage and things are definitely coming on early. The haskap berry (a type of blueberry) even has flowers and a bee was hovering round enjoying that treat.

One of the blueberries is in leaf:

And the smaller of the two gooseberries is coming along well too – though watch out for those thorns!

Sadly, the sweet pea plants near the shed are definitely on the way out so we will have to get some bigger ones later and hope for the best. Oh well. You win some, you lose some!

However, the shallots always make me smile – they’ve not done much but they just look so weird and alien:

The rhubarb is definitely growing and more plants are appearing too:

Here is the harvest of daffodils and tulips:

And here are the vases at home:

Have a great Mothering Sunday and start of British Summer Time, everyone!

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