catching up

Well its been a while, been busy doing stuff at the flat so blogging took a back seat but here are a few pics from the end of last year. One of our monster parsnips and our Halloween pumpkin...more to come soon.

little fella

Spotted this wee dude mooching around the pumpkins - hope he eats a few of those darn slugs

August part2

The pumkin is swelling nicely now we've had some sunshine and we hope to bring you a pumpkin special in the near future, charting the turbulent life and times of a Dundee pumpkin.




This is how half the plot is looking at the moment, beetroot, spring onions and leeks closest, Italian and French beans and sweetcorn behind. Sweet..totally.




Flowers - poundstretcher and freebie in cereal packet finest

August part1

Its been a little while since our last post because we've been moving house and have a new gardening challenge, yep its the one with towering weeds.




Meanwhile at eleven pole our apple tree has truly surpassed itself and produced an apple, from what we hear it will be the second in about 20 years so it shall be treated like royalty.




The grushovka tomatoes are plump and pink and make a very tasty sweet pizza sauce




We pulled up the rest of the carrots, a motley selection but very successful in terms of the amount we've had since june - more carrot cake is on the menu.

harvest time

Time to show off the fruits of our labours and the bountiful produce of eleven pole!




We had a grand jam making session after brief forays out in between showers. These boxes of fruit are now five jars each of raspberry and goosecurrant and two each of blackcurrant and redcurrant. Sticky. The carrots became spicy soup and the next lot we pulled turned into this rather delicious cake which was ravenously devoured.



These are our spectacularly plump and nubile courgettes which Large couldnt keep his hands off, they were made into fritters then dished up with stuffed courgette and pumpkin flowers.




You make the fritters by adding garlic, about a handful of parmesan, a bit of flour, egg and seasoning to grated courgette. Just dont leave them too long before cooking or all the water comes out and makes a big gooey mess.

beauty and the beast

The water butts are full to overflowing, as are the buckets in the shed...but it doesnt seem to have set anything back too much and there are lots of courgettes starting to form, the tatties are all flowering, strawberries fruiting, tomatoes appearing and beans still being decimated by some unknown pest.

The cabbage are looking good.



We've got these fantastic poppies although they only really flower for a couple of days.




Don't think we'd win top prize for all our carrots but they still taste just as good.




Beetroot is coming on, this is it just before planting out a couple of weeks ago.




We've just planted out our outdoor tomatoes only for it to pelt down with rain a couple of hours later so now we're hoping for some sunshine to warm them up again and bring them on.

broccoli, bangers and beer

Nearly all the ground is planted up at eleven pole with the purple sprouting broccoli and kale being the most recent additions tucked under a rather fetching floral net curtain. Apparently what everyone buys in the shops as broccoli is in fact calabrese which only takes 3 months to grow rather than almost a year for the real deal - it'd better be worth it.




We had two firsts this week, the first carrot which got scoffed almost the instsnt it was pulled up and the first strawberry from which we managed to restrain ourselves long enough to document the evidence.




Weary, aching and with our fingers worked to the bone etc, etc we got out the stove and cooked up a few bangers, had a couple of beers and decided job well done.

Oi! Bring back our worms

Its been all work, no play and lots of bashed fingers at eleven pole in a frenzy of building and planting...




We built a greenhouse - thus the bruised and battered fingers and requirement of several cheeky brewskies. We just put all our gardeners delight and gigante tomatoes into it this morning so we hope they like their new home and should be hitting the roof in another couple of months.





We planted out seventy-five leeks. Enough said.

Our cabbage frame is full, the last gaps taken up with winter cabbages donated by the ever optomistic Freddie. We are giving him a cucumber plant next week in return, did consider offering a melon too but fear the words of doom that would follow.

The new dwarf beans are coming through and have escaped decimation so far.




This cheeky little opportunist watched us digging with great anticipation and then proceeded to massacre all our worms. Some may find the following images distressing!