Reaping the Rewards

6 July 2016:

We arrived back from holiday to find lots of produce ready or almost ready to eat.

We picked a large bowl of strawberries which have an amazing taste. Old varieties of which these must be one, are full of juice and much more succulent than the ones from supermarkets. You can see why shops don’t sell them as they almost melt in your mouth and wouldn’t be robust enough to store well on shelves. Such a shame.

The broad beans are producing well and will supply us in more than we can eat for the next few weeks. I normally make Courgette and Broad Bean Soup (recipe in my new book, Easy. Tasty. Healthy.) with any surplus but the courgettes aren’t quite ready yet. I will have to either buy courgettes or give some broad beans away though I could also freeze some for winter use.

The first lettuce I planted are starting to go to seed but hopefully not until we have used all the leaves for lunchtime salads. There is another batch in the wings almost ready so it’s not a problem and the seeds I planted before we left are already little plants.

Unfortunately, as well as the vegetables growing so has the slug population. A mild winter followed by lots of rain this year means that the garden is slug heaven! They have certainly had their share of the lettuce in the garden but the allotment has suffered worst because it is surrounded by grass. The follow-on chard that was coming on nicely before we left now looks more like net curtains. It’s just one of those things with gardening – you have to accept each year that there will be some failures but hopefully outweighed by the bounty of lovely produce.