A few photos from late May. I’d spent a fair bit of time over the previous few days getting bits and pieces done in the veg plot, though hadn’t entirely finished.
In this corner I have some butternut squashes with lettuces planted around them. By the time the squashes take over the lettuces will be well eaten. Behind them are a few different varieties of peas and beyond them the climbing beans, still in their protective cages to stop them getting out and attacking any passing deer (I even saw one — a deer that is — in the orchard in the middle of the day over the weekend). At the top right in the background it’s just possible to make out all the beehive kit I’ve been moving from the old apiary to what’s going to be the new apiary for a year or two (it’s actually the pig run, but I have fencing repairs to do before we can have any more pigs and I’m not sure I’ll get that done in the near future).
This is mostly potatoes, in need of a bit of earthing up. The nearest row is (mostly) the same variety as Jersey Royal, then there are Charlotte in the next row, then King Edward and Maris Piper. The really boisterous ones on the left are Picasso, which came to me indirectly from a local farmer who grows them commercially. I was given them for free, so it seemed a shame not to plant them 🙂 There are a few failures it seems, which is a bit disappointing, but not as bad as the peas where one variety has completely failed to germinate but for one seedling 🙁
And here I’ve got a mixture of red and white onions, lettuces, carrots, radish and a few other salad veg. Some of the plants haven’t done so well near the edges of the bed. I suspect that’s because of the sycamore trees that are out of shot to the right. Over the winter I may well dig a trench just outside the veggie plot to cut all the tree roots off. It will still be a good five or six metres from the trunk, so shouldn’t destabilise them at all. Massively over-exposed at the top left is the polytunnel, behind which we have storage for five thousand litres of water that we pump out of our well to use to water everything. To my surprise given that we’re pretty much on top of a hill and have had very little rain for a couple of months, water is still pouring out of the underlying rock and our land drains.
That evening for dinner we had a salad from some of the thinnings from the row of lettuces and radishes with home-made fish cakes which was lovely.