No Rest for the Wicked

Hubby and I have a couple of weeks off work coming up soon, and we have a long list of things to do. One of the items is to relax and eat fish & chips and drink mucky pop :-) but the others on the list are all hard work, including remove the ivy, remove the bamboo, paint the fence, move the greenhouse, move the compost bin, build the cold frame... so no small tasks as you can see. Fingers crossed for decent weather so we can crack on. Also during this time we will be taking our son back to his uni digs, so we will lose a helper for the hard work!

At the weekend son and I popped to the lotty to tidy and crop and weed, and we came home with so much food it was fab! I'd been feeling a bit despondent about the lotty, so much work, not much joy, trying to tame the rampant squashes, broad beans failing, yardlongs looking feeble; but this weekend changed all that. We got 3 massive cauli's (tasty gorgeous of course!) which hadn't bolted quite as much as the first one so that was good; a load of beets; a load of runner beans, a few yardlong beans (weird looking creatures they are); another couple of punnets of raspberries; some tomatoes; and 3 sweetcorn cobs. It turned out that only two of the sweetcorn cobs were properly ripe, so they will be another week or so before we can get properly stuck in. And a load of courgettes.

I made a heap of ratatouille with the courgettes, but not all of them cos they wouldn't all fit in the big stew pan! I had some peppers and onions already, added some of our own tomatoes, and a tin of toms, and cooked it down, om nom nom. So now the freezer is full of courgette based meals. And there are two fresh courgettes in the fridge, along with a heap of other fresh veg. Smashing.

I trimmed back the tomato plants in the back garden, to remove some of the leaves so the light can get to the fruits to help them ripen, and pretty much filled up the compost bin with the cuttings. Looks a lot tidier now mind you. The peas are finished, and I was going to pull them up but there is nowhere to put the plants now the compost bin is full so I'll do them another time. No rush, we don't have anything else ready to go in the bed so it can wait.