As I’ve said before, this year has been strange. The cool start to the season meant that many things didn’t germinate when I expected them to (in fact there’s been poor germination throughout). The result was that I sowed some things again and I ended up with more plants than I expected.
The second issue is that everything is late (I’ve yet to harvest the first tomatoes – two weeks later than normal) the same is true with my french beans (which are struggling to fend off the slugs & snails) and the lettuce came and went quickly with some sowings failing to germinate.
As a result, I have a strange mix of plants in my vegetable garden this year and I have a feeling that some things will suddenly generate lots leading to a glut over a short period of time.
The first to show this is my courgettes. The first sowing created only two plants. One climbing and one standard. So I sowed again but more than I would normally on the assumption that there would be failures again. As a result we’ve got 15 plants instead of my usual four or five. I picked the first nine courgettes last week (around 400grams in total) then when I went out this morning I realised that all the plants are generating fruit and, because the weather has improved, they’re growing quickly. So the nine fruits I picked this morning weighed in at 3kilograms (and there were a lot more looking like they’re really ready to pick).
The same is true of my tomatoes. The first few are starting to turn colour but there are a lot of tomatoes which I fear will ripen quickly. Hopefully the fact that I’ve got a mixture of sizes will stretch the season with the beefsteak coming in September or so but I’m fearing the worst and hoping that we have enough space in the freezer to store boxes of tomato sauce.
The climbing french beans have got pickable beans but they’re small in number, I didn’t put much in the way of goodness into the soil where the beans are because they’re behind the strawberries and difficult to get at, a task to improve next year.
Finally: the dwarf french beans and runner beans are setting (poorly because of the heat) so I don’t know what sort of crop I’m going to get; and the carrots are very poor, if I had something (other than courgettes) to put in the space I would. I think I sowed them too thinly trying to compensate for sowing them too thickly last year.
Anyway, courgette soup anyone?
