Fresh 'n' tasty

The past few weeks have been so rewarding because we have been harvesting vegetables at least twice a week and eating them within a day or so. We still have lots of salad potatoes "Charlotte" to harvest and they are great for making into potato salad, or slicing into favourite receipes or cutting into wedges, drizzling with olive oil and roasting for about an hour.

The courgettes continue to grow at a fair rate of knots and it almost seems that they grow before your eyes. One of them was the size of a small marrow because it had grown so quickly. Between arriving at the allotment and leaving a few hours later I'm sure they have grown an inch or so! They are delicious with pasta and vegetable bakes and they cook so quickly and are so lovely and tender.

The French beans are still doing well and the children love searching the plants for them and then picking them off. Some of them get eaten straight from the plant -can't get fresher than that.

The cucumbers "burpless tasty green" are now romping away and although some of them are a bit curly, they taste absolutely delicious and are so crisp. The straight, glossy supermarket cucumbers are not a patch on my curly, earth covered ones.

The tomatoes "Ailsa Craig", brandywine" and "legend" are all doing well and have masses of little yellow flowers. Quite a few of the plants have already set their fruit and some of them are quite big already. The wet weather recently has made everything grow like mad, so we haven't had to do any watering for a while - which is so labour-saving.

My son was ecstatic when he went to check up on his radishes - they were ready for harvesting and they were big, red and tasty and very crunchy too. We had them straight away for lunch with our cucumbers and salad leaves (from home). My daughter was so impressed with them that she has prepared a small patch of her plot ready to plant some seeds next time we go down.

Some of the onions are almost ready to harvest - they should be ready in a week or so. The red ones seem to have done much better than the white ones, but no matter, the white ones will be just as tasty I'm sure, just not quite so big! You can't win them all!