Harvest Monday - 24 August 2015

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

While we were away on holiday, my “Garden Helpers” picked some produce for me – beans, tomatoes, lettuce – but I never got round to photographing them because I was too busy with other stuff. This week though, I have given the garden some attention, which included a lot of harvesting.

This basket contains Runner beans, “Kew Blue” beans, “Kentucky Wonder Wax” beans, an “Elyburg” lettuce, some spears of “De Ciccio” broccoli, four “Boltardy” beetroot, some “Kelly” carrots, and five different types of tomato – “Orkado”, “Clou” (yellow), “Primavera”, Primabella” and “Maskotka”.

We now have tomatoes in sufficient quantity to be able to cook “properly” with them, as opposed to just snacking on them. After last year’s disaster, this is a big relief!

Likewise, we also have enough beans for me to be able to freeze some. We can’t keep up with eating them fresh, and we do enjoy having some available in the depths of Winter. On Saturday I picked this batch, weighing about 500g.

The Kew Blue are doing very well, but the Kentucky Wonder Wax are producing only a very small yield.

At the weekend I also lifted the first of the Sarpo blight-resistant potatoes. These ones are “Shona”.

At a little over 700g (from one seed tuber in one pot), the yield is OK but unremarkable. The tubers are clean and unblemished again. We haven’t eaten them yet, so I can’t tell you what they are like in terms of taste and texture. I’ll report on that next time.

Bringing the week’s harvest full circle, this is what I picked on Sunday afternoon:

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