Fruit picking

Hello again. The country has been overwhelmed with floods, I was watching the TV news last night and they showed dramatic footage of people's houses and gardens with swirling brown floodwater racing through buildings and making rivers out of roads. There was obviously a lot of damage. I'm sure many promising vegetable gardens were washed away too. If it happened to you, you have my sympathy.

Here, it hasn't been so bad, There's been a lot of rain, more than enough to thoroughly water the allotment and wash out a local garden party, but not more than we can handle.

We went up to the allotment this morning in a break between the showers, sensibly clad in wellies and with a big umbrella. It was just nice to get a bit of fresh air and I wasn't really expecting to do much up there. However, the sun came out and it was really hot for a few minutes so we stayed and picked fruit. The gooseberries are ready so I'm picking them a punnet at a time and using them fresh. Last year I put far too much fruit in the freezer and some of it's still in there so I don't want to freeze any more just yet.

We picked strawberries and raspberries too and the first tiny picking of redcurrants. Now I have to think of creative ways to cook them! Some of the gooseberries have already appeared in the form of crumble for tonight's dinner, the strawberries and raspberries are in the fridge waiting for inspiration and I think the redcurrants may turn into a sauce to go with tomorrow's lamb. Sometimes it's hard to know what to do with all this fruit. Yesterday I made a cake with raspberries and cream (which the boys loved) and there's still some of that left! At this rate I shall get dreadfully fat.

While we were on the allotment we had a good look at the broad beans. J's always very pessimistic about our progress up there and he was making gloomy noises about the blackfly on the beans. I hope they'll be alright, there are lots of ladybirds chomping away on the blackfly so maybe we'll get some good beans in the end. We ate the first picking of them tonight, they were lovely, very tender and young. I cooked another batch of supermarket frozen beans as well and spooned them out into separate piles on our plates so we could see if there is a significant difference in taste or texture. (Not much, but ours were definitely better)

My family is quite used to experiments like this.

The weather forecast is quite reasonable for tomorrow so I hope I'll be able to do a bit of weeding before the bindweed outclimbs the runner beans. There's a bit of a competition going on between them at the moment and I think it's up to me to make sure the beans win.
Happy gardening