Harvest!
Food glorious food! 2020 has been a good year for fruit and vegetables
I’ll qualify that subtitle a little. It’s been fairly good year on my allotment plots for fruit and vegetables — despite a number of challenges, that is. I’ve had better years. I wasn’t able to grow the full range of vegetables that I’d planned to.
For a start, I have had to dramatically reduce my attendance at the allotments as a result of the pandemic. Some seeds that I sowed didn’t germinate at all. In a few instances, I sowed seeds or bought seedlings in shallow troughs. For one reason or the other, those plants never made it out of those troughs. Many struggled, roots bound and constrained by the limits of the small pods they germinated in, were parched dry during the summer heatwave, and then they died.
This means I had no carrots this summer. No annual glut of runner beans either. You see, I moved house and that did me in for a time … By the time I got my act together, snails and slugs devoured the leaves of my young runner bean seedlings as they languished in their small pots, leaving naked stalks, stunted at about 10cm high. They soon perished.
So no home-grown carrots or runner beans for me this year. Despite my mis-steps, I’ve still only had to buy about 2% of my fruit and vegetables from supermarkets this year. So, not bad going at all!
I have been enjoying lots of fresh, vibrant fruit and vegetables of all types, all grown by moi, all year. You can call it year long harvest!
Mmmm!
The end of the main growing season in the United Kingdom, stretching from spring through summer, and into early autumn, is here. It’s now the time of year to harvest and bring in many outdoor-grown vegetable crops before first frost. Potatoes and sweet potatoes come to mind.
Some vegetables such as hardy kale and chard will continue to grow and give me much needed green throughout winter.
Below are pictures of some of the fruit and vegetables I’ve harvested this year. I can’t seem to find any pictures of the peas, asparagus, cucumbers and peppers I grew.
I still have autumn-fruiting raspberries to look forward to, after being thoroughly spoiled with more raspberries that the birds and I could eat this summer …
Yes!
And I mustn’t forget homegrown brussels sprouts for the festive season! As you can see, they are coming along nicely and they’ll be plump and ready by mid December. I’ll have to protect them from slugs and snails.
Sprouts on the way!
