A glut of cucumbers

I went to tidy up the cucumbers today - our plants are twined through netting so in theory they grow vertically, but the plants often have other ideas - and found six huge cucumbers hiding underneath the leaves. I weighed them all after picking and those six came to 4134g between them. One beast alone weighs 1.1kg!
We've been sharing and trading with the neighbours, so in exchange for two of these I now have a head of cauliflower, a posy of sweet peas, and a couple of lemons, but that still leaves us with four huge cucumbers to eat before they go off. I think I'll have to find some more homes for them!

That's the cucumber trellis in the background of this photo. Haven't they grown wild? There are three plants there - two telegraph cucumbers and one other one whose type I have forgotten. I've never grown this before but based on this year's results I certainly will be growing them again. Now I just need to find a few recipes other than salad that use the stuff so we can actually enjoy it rather than giving it away!

The sweetcorn harvest

We picked most of the sweetcorn today. It's as ripe as it's going to get, and I don't want a repeat of last year where we left the cobs on the stalks for too long. They ended up dried-out and riddled with earwigs. Yuck.

From a patch that isn't much more than a square metre, we picked 2.5kg of sweetcorn - and that is what they weighed after we'd removed the husks and I'd chopped off any ends that hadn't pollinated properly. With such a small patch of corn there was a good chance that it wouldn't pollinate at all, so I was delighted with what we got. Sweetcorn in season costs next to nothing, but it's easy to grow at home and it's hard to beat the satisfaction of eating corn that we grew ourself.

There's still a bit left outside, but what we picked today is all in the freezer now, waiting to cheer us up in a pie or soup later in the year. I'm already looking forward to it!

Chocolate Beauty peppers

Last year we had a dismal pepper (capsicum) harvest - we grew our plants outdoors, but they failed to thrive and only produced one measly pepper between the lot of them. So this year I split the risk and grew most indoors in the conservatory and a few outdoors in the garden. Surprisingly, both lots have been doing quite well, but the indoor ones definitely have the edge and today we got our first ripe ones.

These are Chocolate Beauty sweet peppers, which are a lovely chocolate brown when ripe. I've never even seen these before, let alone eaten them, but I couldn't resist trying them out. Aren't they a great colour?

Harvest totals

Harvest total update:
tomatoes: 3787g
strawberries: 4385g
carrots: 1430g
potatoes: 113g
raspberries: 41g
spring onions: 80g
cucumber: 3395g
sweetcorn: 989g
peppers: 184g

Total: 14,404g

This is not counting any of the sweetcorn cobs which are just waiting for me to go and pick them. I'll do that tomorrow, as they're going to go past their best. We don't need them to eat right now but I'll freeze them for when we do.

A big cucumber

This is what you get when you grow your own veggies - non-standard shapes. They taste just as good as the straight ones!