We’ve not had a lot of time for plotting this week as our friends Annie and Laurent have been over from France. Compared to her idyllic huge garden bounded by massive cherry trees our postage stamp is hardly impressive but I did hope the allotments might attract a few compliments.
Laurent had heard of allotments, they have them in France but coming from a country area, the Limousin, they’re practically unknown. Outside of the city where many live in apartments, the houses tend to have huge gardens by our standards. If you really get the growing bug, it’s not difficult to find a farmer or someone to rent you some land.
Luckily for me, they were quite impressed by the amount of runner beans and climbing beans – a whole carrier bag from one picking, not to mention a carrier of assorted tomatoes, 5 cucumbers and half a carrier of carrots!
Laurent came down to the plot with me for a couple of hours and helped with the harvest and then I noticed the potatoes were looking as if they might have blight. Yellowed foliage with brown patches. We’ve had quite a few Smith periods, so I wasn’t really surprised.
The reason for cutting off the haulm is to prevent the blight spores from getting into the actual crop below ground. I’m a cross with myself for not getting the rest of the second earlies up before now. Still, they’ll be OK for a while in the ground, although the amount of slug damage will be higher, despite a scattering of wildlife safe slug pellets.
I snipped away with my secateurs whilst Laurent carried the haulm to the compost heap. A lot of people feel it’s a mistake to put blighted foliage or any diseased plant onto a compost heap but my feeling is that there will be blight and disease floating around next year anyway.
The only real exception I’ve got is onion white rot. I do throw those away. I’ve a bit of concern that white rot might have come onto the site in the municipal compost but there’s so many other ways that I’m most likely being unfair. I’m not sure how resistant the white rot organism actually is.
One lovely thing is to be able to offer our guests meals where all the vegetables have come from our plot. From the shallots in a beef bourguignon to fresh beans and carrots, along with Swift potatoes to accompany a traditional Sunday lunch.
Back at home I decided to kill off the cucumber growing in a pot. Be sensible, I’ve three plants going at the allotment and we now have 9 cucumbers in the fridge!
Tuesday was a food processing day. We blanched a load of runner and French beans to freeze. The other night we had a Chinese takeaway and things were delivered in plastic boxes. These are ideal for the freezer, even if they’re not as tough as proper Tupperware style boxes.
They’ve now on their way back to the deep French countryside and we’ll be returning to normal. Laurent’s friends had told him how there was nothing to eat in England so we’d set out to prove them wrong, starting each day with a proper English breakfast, proper teas and even a couple of 5 course dinners. What amazes me is how they managed to eat it all.
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