The weeds are also still growing like mad, so there's still a lot to be done, but there's nothing better than deciding what you want for dinner and picking it fresh from the field!
Having previously lived in chalky, flinty soil, the vegetable that has me most excited at the moment is carrots. They never grew well where I used to live, even the best gardeners I knew didn't bother trying anymore. So to have delicious, big, juicy carrots we grew ourselves is amazing!
 |
| Purple carrot with legs :) |
We've also been enjoying runner beans (as long as my forearm!), french beans and mange tout. We've had the most enormous chard plants which we can't keep up with, and courgettes which I've resorted to turning into chutney (which I'll thank myself for later).
 |
| Courgette and apple chutney |
 |
| Runner beans, delicious and beautiful |
I now only have one onion left from the field...note to self, plant at least 3 times as many next year! I didn't realise I ate quite so many onions...it's a wonder anyone dares come near me...
Along with the courgette chutney, I've also made some cucumber pickle and crab apple jelly, and we've also bottled up the elderflower wine, exciting! It's a good thing I don't have any new veg to plant out this month as it's been too busy in the kitchen!
 |
| Cucumber pickle and crab apple jelly |
 |
| Gorgeous crab apple jelly, I love the colour and clarity, not to mention it's scrummy! |
We have, in a way, been preparing for winter vegetables though, and are in the middle of constructing a polytunnel. This will mean we can (hopefully) grow food throughout the year and also start some veggies off a month or so earlier than we otherwise could outdoors. We've built 4 raised beds inside, this means I can still do my crop rotations within the polytunnel to prevent the spread of diseases, and also prevent each bed becoming depleted of certain nutrients.
 |
| Polytunnel in progress, with raised beds |
For example, growing tomatoes uses an awful lot of nutrients, especially nitrogen and potassium, so if you were to grow them in the same bed multiple years running, you'd find the tomatoes would become less flavoursome, smaller and there would be fewer of them, plus the plants would be far more likely to get a disease such as blight. By rotating to a different family entirely you prevent this problem. If you grew peas or beans it would, in fact, replace nitrogen which had been lost through tomato growing. This is because of a special symbiotic relationship the legumes (beans/peas/clover etc) have with a certain bacteria which is found on their roots. The bacteria brings nitrogen out of the air and fixes it into the soil...clever eh? :)
What's missing this month...oh, something big and destructive, full of noise and dust. Ok we'll knock the chimney down in our house then. Yes, yes we are indeed doing another big house project at the same time as trying to juggle everything else, because life here is never dull.
 |
| Living room fire and chimney |
So we've been umming and erring over the chimney in the living room for a while now, not deciding whether to do it up nicely or remove it and have more space. Well, we finally decided that, whilst a fire is nice to have, we do live in a pretty small space, and we do have another fire, so really this one is redundant. Our heating all seems to be working nicely now, so we don't need it for warmth, just a pretty thing to look at, so more space it is! We'll keep the stove and use it in a future project. :)
 |
| Half a chimney... |
 |
| ...Chimney completely gone and everything levelled! |
The room seems a lot bigger now, and hopefully with a bit of paint and a nice, new carpet, it'll be a cosy room for us to relax in after a hard days work. :)
