It's been a funny old year for the garden. We had a lovely warm week or so around Easter and then it's been chilly. A bit autumnal if truth be told. I think it's confused our garden as lots of things haven't bothered to even shoot let alone grow from the shoots.

We did manage to harvest some goodies though.

A grand total of 4 baby tomatoes, a pot of petit pois peas and lots of frothy sweet peas. In fact I had so many sweet peas I was able to put a glass full in the living room and a glass full in the bathroom. I love flowers in bathrooms, it makes them so much more welcoming.

We'd left our petit pois a bit long to harvest as we just hadn't realised they were ready. Oops! We had expected the pods to grow bigger and instead they just grew yellower!



This is what the ones looked like earlier in the week when I harvested them and shelled them. Super sweet and ready to eat!


This is what some of them looked like when we finally harvested them. All wrinkled and dried up. I added these ones to the compost bin. Ah well, a lesson learnt. Pick peas as soon as you can feel the bumps under the pod skin to encourage more peas to be grown.


We did get a nice haul of peas to eat, but disappointingly few compared to how many we had to compost.

One wonders how to be self sufficient when faced with the growers inexperience!

We also dug up our final 3 pots of potatoes which had been growing. There are another two pots which don't seem to have done anything so we've left them to see if they are just late starters.

Here is our massive haul! We had so many that we had to fit them into two massive salad bowls. When they were dry we were able to bag up a couple of bags full to give to a few couples at church. It's nice to be useful.

Dus has decided that it's best to wash potatoes as soon as you harvest them so that you don't have to go back to do it when you want to eat them. I can see his logic.

My top tip for harvesting potatoes is to use a metal colander to collect the harvested ones. The first few you pull out and drop into the container will make a nice ting sound like you've won a point on a game show. It's the little things that encourage and I like to think that each potato is a small prize for our efforts.