Homegrown Goodies

I feel a strawberry glut coming on very soon and I’m not complaining, the jam cupboard is running low and you can’t beat homemade strawberry and elderflower jam! I took my special little basket up the allotment on Sunday to harvest some strawberries for pudding, last time I had a rather big basket with only 10 strawberries inside so I thought this small one would be perfect. Oh how very wrong I was… We had enough strawberries for pudding, for breakfast and some left over for yesterdays pudding too! They just so happen to be the reddest, juiciest strawberries ever, you really can’t beat homegrown for taste.

Along with the basket full of strawberries I also picked a few broad beans and a handful of sweet peas. The trick with most things is to keep on picking them and they will ultimately produce more flowers, fruit or vegetables instead of focusing all their energy on producing the seed. I also rather like the look of a few sweet peas sitting in a rustic jam jar of water, and they certainly small nice too!

I was rather chuffed with my little basket of goodies freshly picked from the allotment as I cycled home on Sunday. This is the first time I have managed to harvest a large amount of different things from the plot and I can’t wait until Summer gets into the swing of things, hopefully I’ll be filling the bicycle basket AND the trailer up with produce!

In between snacking on a few strawberries I also spent a good hour weeding and thinning out my carrot bed. This year I have three rows of carrots and they are all growing brilliantly, I placed a net around the edges to stop the carrot fly from nibbling them as they can’t fly higher than a metre you know! It was rather sad pulling out all these deliciously looking baby carrots and I felt very cruel doing it, but hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have some massive, fat, juicy carrots to harvest. Plus I’m planning on taking the baby carrots home to eat anyway.. Muahaha!