Wednesday 24 August 2016

August's Hottest

Monday was a miserable day with light rain on and off throughout the day whereas Tuesday was a lovely sunny day with the temperature reaching 28.6°C (83.5°F) making it easily the hottest day of the month.
We made the most of the fine weather on Tuesday to do a little bit of harvesting on the plot. Sue did most of the harvesting while I strimmed the grass.
You might notice that there are a few plums in the box of goodies but this year's crop has been very disappointing. Our last five Oullins plums to be harvested are in the box bringing this year's harvest to a meagre 3.0kg or 6.5lbs. It's the same story with our greengages. We've a few fruits which aren't yet ripe as the they are really hard but that doesn't seem to be stopping the wasps making the most of the few greengages that we do have.
We do have a few Victoria plums but we are having to share these with plum moth maggots. It's more or less a case of one for them and one for us at the moment. It means that all plums are first cut in half to check for intruders.

We've started to pick our first few apples which although they aren't quite ripe taste very good. This year I forgot to put up any codling moth traps. The result is lots of damaged apples which easily fall from the trees that form our apple hedge. I picked a bucket full up from around the trees which will upset the blackbirds who unsurprisingly don't seem to mind eating the damaged apples.
I'm sure I will have left a few apples in the grass for the blackbirds and in any case I don't suppose they will have to wait too long before more apples decide to fall from the tree.

2 comments:

  1. Your harvest looks very pleasing to me, especially the beans. I like reading posts like this one because it shows that not everything is perfect however much we wish it were. Growing vegetables is a challenge. The weather is always changing. That's what's fun and lively about these hobbies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My problem is actually taking photos of gardening failures. We can never be sure of how our gardening year will turn out.

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