Oh, the garden is so exciting!

So so much stuff happening in the garden.. raspberries starting to ripen - I've had three! Peas in quantities big enough to keep the kids busy for a while, strawberries ripening under their nets. Not enough for much, but they add a nice touch to a fruit salad.

This is a picture of the strawberry nets, with my legs and pink crocs in the background!

The spinach started to make flower buds so I pulled it all up yesterday and we will be having spinach and ricotta cannelloni tomorrow. Mmmmm.

There's enough lettuce to feed an army. The beans are flowering away, the climbing beans are climbing, some nasturtiums are flowering.

The butternut plants have recovered from their chill and have gone nice and green and have started doing a mile a minute growing. The tomatoes that I planted first out still look a bit sickly, but the ones subsequent to those are doing fine. It's a bit of a gamble with those tomatoes anyway as there is usually tomato blight at the allotments, which is why I have 24 tomato plants in pots on my balcony!

But most exciting of all, my gemsquash plants have flowers and one has a baby gemsquash! That's the picture at the top! I am so excited I can barely speak! If all we get is gemsquash from the allotment it will be worth it.

Next year I am definitely doing more pea growing, more strawberries and concentrating on getting a bigger and better harvest from the soft fruit. I should have a cracker raspberry and blackberry harvest judging by the amount of canes they've put up this season so far, but I'm completely unsure of how to prune the red and blackcurrants. The bushes look a bit elderly and one of them is completely dead in the centre.

The redcurrants in the picture above are from the younger plant. The older plant has tiny fruit and yellowed leaves.


More photos here.