For my Daddy....

Apparently my dad is very jealous of my speedy tomatoes - his are taking their time and just about at the 'pretty flowers' stage whilst I'm very near to having tomatoes for my salad.  Being the lovely daughter that I am I thought I'd do a whole post of tasty tomato pictures just to show him what's still to come (or praps just rub it in a bit more ;p).... dad, this one's for you! 

The Indoor tomato - recovering well from its fall

The hanging tomatoes almost have more fruit than leaves!

Different plant... honest!

The grow bag tomatoes are still all green

And finally the slowest of the lot - the 'extra' tomatos are limping along - the poor things managed to blow over in the wind and lost some branches.  I think they'll make it but they are definately looking worse for wear at the moment.  Just to clarify that bag is *very* heavy; I can kind of shuffle-walk it around if need be but that's about it - the force it must take to topple it would be pretty considerable; when I said we'd had  some bad weather lately I really did mean it!

Where did those come from?

The last couple of days we've had absolutely horrible weather in Southampton but today I managed to catch a break in the rain and dash out to check on the plants!

I was a little dissappointed when I looked at my broadbeans because they've lost all of their pretty white flowers

But then I looked a bit closer and saw these absolutely massive beans that have sprung in to being over the last few days - the scale is a bit hard to tell from the piccy but the largest are almost the length of my hand!  I don't think I have ever eaten a broad bean intentionally before so I may have to go find some recipes.  At the moment this looks pretty good:

Penne with ricotta, broad beans and mint
250g of pasta (anything short and vaguely tubular will do)
200g broad beans
125g ricotta
1 large bundle of fresh mint
Fresh lemon (juice and zest)
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper

Cook the pasta in boiling water - you can even add the beans at the end to save on washing up. Put in a bowl and stir in the ricotta, lemon juice and zest, and crushed raw garlic. Drizzle the oil on top, sprinkle over the mint and eat.

Recipe by Kate Carter from an article at guardian.co.uk

An Update

I spent most of the afternoon out in the garden today tidying up various plants and settling in a new one. 

This was an impulse purchase from Thompson & Morgan with Tesco Clubcard vouchers; the vouchers were due to expire and needed using up so I purchased a new blueberry bush (and some winter potatoes but they're due later) to use them up.  This little fellow turned up in the mail and is now settling in beside its big brother

I also have some 'new' strawberries - the existing plants have started putting out runners which I have been trapping in little pots around the big one and these fellows have finally grown big enough to strike out on their own (and make way for even more new runners!)  Jake unfortunately seems to consider 'strawberry runners' close enough to 'string' to be worth chasing round the garden.... I may have to keep an eye on my little ones!

The agapanthus is doing very nicely in it's pot by the stairs and looks like it's thinking about flowering soon

The rhubarb is also continuing to grow well, occasionally one of the smaller leaves seems to wilt and die but they always get replaced by new ones so i'm not too concerned about it!

This raspberry plant has got me totally confused!  I had read that the type of raspberry I had would fruit on last years canes.... but it's fruiting on new growth so I think I need to do a bit more reading!  Still... it looks like I might get 4 whole raspberries to eat this year so there's an unexpected treat!

The strawberry plants seem to either be doing very well or very badly; some of them (like this one!) are putting out beautiful crops of tasty strawberries whilst others have broken their stems and the fruit has rotted :(  I think I will need to modify these bags if I use them again next year or maybe look for a better pot with more rounded edges to give the fruiting stems a little support.

 All the tomatoes are fruiting now but the hanging baskets are definately leading the way - I can't believe that such a small plant can be so liberally covered in fruit - salads are going to awesome this summer.

And finally  my beautiful beans are thriving - this one is now going so well that i've given it a 'trellis' onto the roof of the shed!  I should probably have cut it down but its got flowers on the 'overflow' now so it seemed a shame to take them off.  I did think about tying on another cane but realised that there was no way I would be able to support it so left it at 2

I know what it is!

The mystery is solved!  I am growing Broad Beans which means that I appear to have a Spring GroBox and should thus also eventually see Onions, Peas, Spinach, Carrots, Ruby Chard, Tomatoes, Radish and Lettuce springing up!