Allotment and Garden Update

It's been a week or so since I last did an allotment or garden update, so I thought I'd post another one.

The garden at home is really growing fast. I'm so happy with the foxgloves I transplanted.  They are flowering now and look lovely.  They are in fact a mixture of purple and white ones. I'm so pleased that I didn't just discard them. I hope they will self seed in this corner of the garden and recreate the same effect year after year.

The lovely fern I bought at Chelsea Flower Show a couple of years ago, is looking great too.  This is a far cry from how it looked a few weeks ago.  I thought it was dying, but once I cut back the old leaves, lots of new bracts grew through and it now looks great again.

The allotment is coming along nicely, we've currently got potatoes, shallots, climbing French beans, broad beans, bush beans, asparagus, peas, white and purple kohl rabi, kale, plus raspberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, rhubarb and a red grapevine growing. Here's a few pictures I took the other day:

I have to admit that I can't take any credit for the way the allotment looks at the moment, because it is all OH's hard work this year. He's dug it over, dug in compost from the park, sown the seeds, nurtured them and planted them out.  In fact it's almost a coup. I will obviously partake of harvesting when the time comes around and watering, but for the most part he's very happy to make it his domain for the moment, especially during lockdown, whilst I work on things at home.

We've still got cucumber, tomato and courgette plants to go in and are rapidly running out of space for everything, but it's still a little early at the moment to plant them out. Maybe in a couple of weeks time.

He's done a very good job this year and we should have lots of crops to harvest later in the year. In the meantime, I'm focussing on using up any frozen crops from last year. We've eaten all last year's frozen tomatoes, pickled beetroot, blackcurrant jam and frozen sweetcorn during lockdown and I just need to make some jam from what remains of last year's blackcurrant crop, which is currently in the freezer, to make room for some of this year's harvest. It's feels good to use everything up and not let anything go to waste.

I bought a mandarin plant the other day when I did a shop at Lidl. I was so excited to see plants for sale outside that I just had to buy something.  As I didn't need any grasses or geraniums, it had to be a citrus plant. I'm excited to grow one for the very first time.

Still dreaming of a visit to a garden centre. Maybe one day very soon now that they are allowed to re-open.