We're producing....

Yesterday evening's haul....

Courgettes Iceball, Rond de Nice and Précoce Maraichère, squash Gold Nugget and yellow crookneck

And ready to harvest / just harvested ...

• Cucumbers La Diva and Marketmore
• Tomatoes Nectar, Sungold, Bleue Fruit
• Chard Fordhook Giant and Bright Lights
• Onions Stuttgart Giant, Sturon and Centurion (500 gm of sets of the latter yielded 16kg of onions)
• Shallots Jermor and Red Sun
• Runner beans Moonlight
• Lettuce Rosedale and the tail end of Gourmet Blend, new Gourmet blend just planted
• Cabbage Tête de Pierre
• Carrots Nantes 3 improved 
• Beetroot Cylindra
• Kale Red Russian (the furthest on among the kales)
• Chilli peppers Pili Pili and Cayenne (green as yet)
• Potatoes Red Duke of York and Charlotte, more to come
• Plum Reine Claude Dorée
• Mirabelle de Nancy / Myrobalan - 1 fruit

Meanwhile, in the orchard, the apple trees have lost most of their fruit to brown rot, possibly linked to hail damage. The pears were better protected due to their close habit of growth. The old Reinette Blanche should more than cover our apple requirements. The birds have had all my early redcurrants, but there's one ray of sunshine - they don't understand white currants. To a bird, a ripe fruit is red. Or yellow, in the case of our Reine Claudes. Or purple, like our quetsches. Not pearly white. So they left them alone. Result: 1.3kg of whitecurrants are ready for sorbet, icecream, cake decoration...

White currant, variety "Blanka"

Choice strigs of white currants. Have I got some matching ones to go in the show?

We used to enter white currants in the "any other fruit" category at the Burley Model Allotments show, held annually at the beginning of September. Here in France, the growing period is compressed and everything comes at once. Our single redcurrant bush of a late variety is covered by netting to keep out the little perishers. The 23 other redcurrant bushes may have 50g of currants hidden away beneath the leaves, but as far as I'm concerned they're for the birds.

The bad news is that three tomato plants appeared to have been affected by blight (already) and we have cut them down and binned them.

Even worse news is that my little Fuji Finepix camera has died (the captor, I think) and these photos are taken using my Iphone, so I've had to learn how to do that pdq. 

Tim has a new dancing partner

From last autumn up to about three weeks ago, the ground in our potager was too wet to dig. We had a week of perfect digging conditions. Then suddenly it all baked into a layer of concrete. We struggled to put in the first two rows of potatoes, then I realised that we weren't going to make it without help. Tim later confessed to being about to give up on potatoes altogether.

So I ordered a Mantis Tiller gardening package from Mantis France.

From the Mantis website... on ideal soil... it is an advert

A phone call of confirmation from a lady with the clearest French telephone voice I have ever heard indicated that it would arrive in the following ten days. It turned up the next day. The day after that Tim finished assembling it. Alex Crawford appeared just at the point where Tim was about to try it out. He started the engine, engaged the drive - nothing. The manual was no help. Alex went home, leaving Tim in high dudgeon, but returned a few minutes later with the answer. There was a gap between the clutch case on the engine and the worm gear housing, a known problem easily fixed (apparently). The intrepid engineers applied the fix, and hey, ho and away we go! Many thanks, Alex!

The Mantis will cultivate soil, and till it, and dig furrows, earth up potatoes, dig planting holes, strip turf, mulch weeds...  It's just a matter of changing the tines and attachments around. The remaining potatoes were planted in three sessions, and Tim cultivated and tilled five other beds in between so I could start planting. The "Gardening package" consists of the Tiller, kickstand, Planter Attachment and Plough Attachment. Yes, it cost quite a lot of money, but it has transformed our gardening.
.
Mostly, it spits out stones and even quite large rocks. If the stone is a certain size, however, it jams in the tines. You have to turn the machine on its back and wallop the rock until it comes out.

The Mantis is on Tim's left (upside down)

Tim suggests that the manufacturers have missed a trick - a kit consisting of a mallet and a billet of wood, for knocking out rocks...

Wallop! Ting!!

 Across the field we can now see the houses of Moulin de Chevarnay, and a fine weeping willow, rather than an enormous hedge. A much better view!

[Personally, I don't regard "Attilla the Mantis" as a new dancing partner...
she's far too reluctant... I have to drag her around... she wants to go forwards when I want to go back... Tim]

The Mantis tiller works best by being dragged backward through the soil...
doing a "Jim" in our allotment parlance.
Jim was an elderly... even by allotment standards... gentleman who waged war on weeds.
We always wondered how he managed to keep the soil loose between his rows.
Never a footprint!!

He was an early bird...
and was never there when we were...
but we suspected he hovered....
until we actually saw him in action one morning and all was revealed...
he dug or hoed backwards... thus never setting foot on freshly turned soil...
The Mantis works the same way...

How does our garden grow?

Our potager is now producing healthily. We are experimenting this year with varieties that we know and love, and that have performed well for us on our allotment in the UK, as we still have plenty of unfinished packets. We are also trying French varieties, sometimes alongside British ones. Astonishingly, our stony soil produced insanely long carrots and parsnips (both locally purchased fresh seed), straight as you like with no forking! Beetroot and chard, both sown in trays and transplanted, have done really well. Climbing beans are feeding us nicely, and we may have overdone it with eight cucumber plants. Still, we have some nice pickle recipes, of which more no doubt in a later blog.

A tasty trugful.

One particular thing we noticed is the short harvest period for some crops. This was most true with the Petit Pois variety "Peawee" (available from Marshalls). I could pick a row on the allotment for about three weeks. Here the window between the mange-tout and marrowfat stages was about three days. Once the pods set, there were no more flowers. We picked the peas industrially, by uprooting the plants and stripping them, shelling them on the spot and freezing them.

Scuse the gardener's hands!

Generally, summer brassicas have performed poorly, under attack from battalions of flea beetles and aphids. We know a song about flea beetles, don't we? Back in May I tried red cabbage and tenderstem broccoli, both hopeless!
Disaster area featuring red cabbage and field bindweed.

The kales I planted recently are looking quite strong, and I hope they may do better. Red Russian Kale is a wonderful vegetable, highly decorative as well as excellent to eat, but I had to order it from the UK. Kings came up with the goods, bless them! Black Tuscan kale, by contrast, was on sale among the bedding plants at the Point Vert in Loches.