The green gym, working on the vegetable plot, and knowing your onions

No need for us to pay to go to a gym. Today I have
done a bit of  weight-lifting, stretched my arms out and done various other exercises, all in a couple of hours of working on the vegetable plot. Walking back and forwards to the bit of land we grow our vegetables on (an allotment) takes about half an hour. I have had to shift the compost from one composter to another one to turn it and to access the ready to use compost at the bottom of the compost heap. I also turned over the soil, where the potatoes had been harvested to check for any that had escaped my attention the first time round. I then spent half-an-hour pulling out weeds and harvesting the onion and shallot  bed, oh yes, I let the weeds over take me on that part of the plot.

 However, we  now have some fine onions and shallots outside on a wire-rack drying out in the sunshine. Which just proves that even if you do not get everything perfect you will still manage to harvest something good, most of the time.

I was cooking with our own grown onions yesterday and they have so much more flavour and 'crispness' when you are cutting them up to use, the shallots provide a sweetness to some of our favourite savory recipes.

This year I have had a bit of a disaster with the garlic, in that I have failed to produce a worthwhile crop from them. The truth is my time was taken up with other things and I got them in too late and the weather did not suit them, they seem to have vanished without a trace. A lesson to be learned there, it is true that it is best to plant garlic earlier, rather than later so that it gets the right conditions. I will post on the progress of my next planting time and growing of garlic. As garlic is something we use frequently in our cooking I am not going to give up on growing it in future, as I have had some very successful crops of it in the past. Home grown garlic is so much nicer than the shop bought ones, one year I had enough to store some in the garage from the rafters, not this year though, sigh.

Courgettes continue to produce a very worthwhile crop, so much to harvest for so little time and effort, indeed if you do not check them every day they will start to look like marrows instead of courgettes.

More soon about pruning the red currants and black currant bushes.