Charlotte delight...

After the poor show with the Carlingford potatoes in the green wheelbarrow I was delighted with the yield of Charlottes that I got today.

Nine pounds of good-sized tubers from three plants growing in black flower buckets.

So, for all those people who say you can't get decent yields from container grown spuds, na na ni na na!

Today I also harvested my first courgettes of the year and for the last week we've been wandering down the garden every day to pick peas and eat them straight from the pods. All the effort of the first half of the year is paying dividends, but we still can't manage to eat it all. A friend who visited last Thursday left with a bag of spuds, three onions and a lettuce.

When I planted out the Alderman peas I also put some sweet peas in among them. At first I thought they had been strangled by the Aldermans but the recent rain has brought some of them into bloom.

They add a bit of colour and interest to a two metre column of green.

The dwarf french beans now have plenty of small pods so they are getting a high potash feed now and then. The secret with these is to pick them small so that they keep on producing.

dwarf bean 'Tendergreen'

Their cousins the climbing beans have almost reached the top of the wigwam and are producing flowers so they won't be far behind. Last year some high winds in September blew over one of the wigwams so this year I've put in a central support pole and sunk it well into the ground.