I mentioned the quiche and here it is...

First onions of 2012

This evening we lifted a couple of the onions that we planted as sets last September. They seem to have done very well. They are a good size and free of disease and pest damage. Well, the couple we lifted anyway... The variety is Radar and they are marketed as being especially useful for autumn planting. I'll lift and dry the rest in a week or so. They'll keep us going until the spring plante ones are ready.

I have made a cheese and onion quiche with them since bringing them home. I expect to be stuffing some of the rest at some point.

We checked over the rest of the plot while we were there. The tomatoes are growing very fast and we had to tie them once more. There was some black bean aphid infestation on the broad beans but we are dealing with that. The crop will be good we think (hope).

Beetroot and a row of carrots

Tomatoes

Potatoes and vinaigrette

I didn't say how I cooked the potatoes. They were quite large and so I halved them before steaming for about 15 minutes. Cooked they are a firm and very white potato with almost no skin at all. Their flavour was very good.


I used our first green garlic to make a vinaigrette for the salad and potatoes. It was a little early to lift garlic but I wanted to reassure myself that the rust that has been affecting it hadn't destroyed the bulbs altogether. Once I had removed the outside leaves I could see that that although small they were fine. 

An early July evening

It's early July and for a couple of weeks we have been eating food that we have grown on our allotment. The 'we' I refer to here is me and my wife, Alison.


We have eaten most of green salad which we are using as cut and come again leaves. I am not very sure that all of the lettuce we are eating is properly suitable for that purpose but that is what we have done with it and it seems to be lasting quite well. If it doesn't bolt we'll be eating it for a while yet. I have developed a liking for a variety called Salad Bowl and have sown quite a bit more or it for later in the year. I have some cos type coming along as well.


We brought quite  back from the plot this evening. We went down to check on our potatoes. I was worried about blight. We have had some trouble with black leg rot already this year but I had seen a neighbour's row of potatoes flattened by something that looks very like blight and wanted to check it out. We cut off quite a bit of foliage but there were black spots everywhere I looked so we gave up and dug some for the table instead.

This was our haul for the evening. Not too bad and the potato tubers were unaffected by blight. They are a variety called Foremost by the way.