Colours of the Rainbow and YouTubers

Last week we ate the first of our courgettes along with the first of our mange tout (which stayed purple when cooked, yay!) and beans and half a left over yellow pepper - gorgeous! I do so love going into the garden and cropping stuff and eating it pretty much straight away, it feels fab, and must be doing us some good as well, eating such fresh produce. We had beets as well, just a couple of those left in the garden now, will be cropping the lotty beets soon I expect.

Of an evening we've been watching Rickvanman's allotment videos on You Tube, we started around video 95 and went through to the end, and now we have gone right back to the beginning when he first got his allotment. Last night we saw him crop his first produce, and his joy at picking his own veg, we can totally relate. Even now that we are a few years into this grow your own malarkey, we still get such a satisfied feeling when our meals contain our own produce. We got to Rickvanman via Mr Sam The Allotment Man (another You Tube channel), someone had posted a link to Mr Sam on one of the gardening forums we go on, so we watched all of Mr Sam, and he mentioned Rick, so we went off and found him. Neither Mr Sam nor Rick claim to be experts, in fact they both say quite clearly that they are gardening amateurs, and simply share their experiences of allotment gardening. Recommended.

The lotty pumpkins are getting rather huge, we have one about the size of a cantaloupe melon and one the size of a basketball! Both are sitting on a plastic layer to keep them off the ground and away from dampness. Hopefully they will both mature. We cropped a load of runner beans and a load more raspberries from the lotty at the weekend, and 3 courgettes, a plain green one and two stripey ones :-) very pleased with those. It feels wonderful to be eating our own produce, this is the time of year I absolutely love.

The Italian yardlong beans are finally flowering, so hopefully these will get going as the runners are finishing, they took a while to take off, but this is the first time we've grown them so maybe this is normal. The cannellini beans are producing lots of lovely pods, but these are beans eaten as beans not as pods, so they need to develop further before we pick them.