Invading Pumpkins and Redcurrant Jelly

It looks like we will get 2 decent sized pumpkins from the two plants this year, there are lovely big football sized globes, and the largest is beginning to change colour. We don't know what the variety is, hopefully it will taste good, or there is no point in growing pumpkins as they take up a lot of room. They are mighty invasive though, we had to pull them out of the broad bean plants and cut them back from the leeks and the courgettes and the sweetcorn. One plant next year - maybe!!.

The runner beans are being hugely productive at the moment, we may have to think about freezing some, although I'm not sure where we will find the space as the freezers are full of fruit, with apples to come, and beans from last year still in the drawers. We are eating lots and lots of lovely fresh runner beans :-) I even taken some into work for my colleagues.

Made redcurrant jelly at the weekend from this year's crop, and from 2.5 kilos of fruit I got 7 little jars of lovely clear jelly, really pretty. Last year I got only a couple of little jars, which shows how much fruit the shrub produced this year. This is going to be lovely with any meats, or cheeses. I made them by following a standard jelly recipe which I will include on the recipes page.

My darling hubby bought me a recipe book, entitled "What Will I Do With All Those Courgettes?" by Elaine Borish. It has a huge number of recipes in there, from starters and soups, main meals, salads, and even cakes. Looking forward to trying them out :-) If I find any really fab ones I'll add them to the recipes page (with acknowledgement to Elaine of course.)

We need to tend to the lotty, but the weather has turned rather rainy at the moment, so we know the soil will be muddy and sticky and hard work. There is always weeding to do, and I need to trim leaves off the tomatoes to let the fruit get the light. The Italian yardlong beans are still flowering, we are waiting for the beans to appear there. The cannelini's look to be full of beans, so hopefully they will be ok. The broad beans however look quite sickly, we have had a small handful of beans off them and they were delicious, but the plants look brown and crispy and unhappy. So they may be coming up in the next few days.