June harvest

OK - the allotment hasn't been going as well as we planned. By which I mean we haven't been sowing and tending as much as we planned thanks to Nick starting his work placement and me being increasingly tired and ungainly. The hellish end of May didn't help either. Still, a harvest is a harvest no matter how small; and June has been the first month where anything has actually made it back from the plot to our kitchen.

The tally so far, rounded to the nearest 100g -

Broad beans (The Sutton) - 4.5kg in pod, not including the several handfuls of tender young pods that never made it home as they were so nommable straight off the plant.  We eat the beans, the guinea pigs eat the pods. Next year we will devote a whole bed to these and pull a few plants as and when we need space for later legumes, because considering how little attention the 8 plants that took have had, they have cropped prolifically.

Garlic 'Solent Wight' - 2 bulbs so far harvested wet (about 100g). The rest will come up in about a month, if I can resist the lovely sweet bulbs as they stand now.

Courgette 'Black Beauty' - 2.1kg so far excluding one I forgot to weigh. 4 good sized tender courgettes and one heading for marrow-hood. Two of the three plants suddenly rocketed into action in the last fortnight and are thick with developing fruits. I hate courgettes from the shop, but fresh off the plant and sauteed with salt and pepper they are delicious.

Potato volunteer - 800g,  not from the allotment, but from a pot in the back garden. I was going to pull it but instead let it do its thing. We got a lunch out of it (a courgette potato rosti type thing) for absolutely no effort on our part.

TOTAL - 7.5kg. 

The sugar snap peas (Norli)  were poorly supported and turned into a tangled ground hugging mass of knots, but The Boy got a few on-plot snacks out of them. They will be replaced by runner beans this weekend. The potatoes are almost ready to be lifted too and most other things seem to to be doing well. The tomatoes are sporting a few fruits. I get quite disheartened when I look at our little plot, it seems as though large swathes of bed are barren or weedy, waiting for stuff to grow and fill up the space. This year is a learning curve - next year will be better. That's my mantra and I am sticking to it.