Berries and Borage

OH has cut and laid the rest of the hearth pamments and I gave them another acid clean earlier this evening. Then out to the plot.

Here OH harvests another bagful of new potatoes for our dinner while I weed the borage out of the cauliflower bed. Some gentle weeding in the evening sunshine while another massive raincloud bulks up in the southwest. We have about an hour.

The redcurrant harvest is very disappointing this year, despite netting, but the two blackcurrants, only in their second year mind, have yielded a lot.

Both of us are very pleased that our plot neighbours, a couple in their 60s, after one year and two generous parsley goodwill donations on our part, have finally initiated a conversation with us. We can learn a lot from them: their plot is very organised, each of their strawberry plants seems to have at least a kilo of fruit hanging from it, their broad beans are chest-high (ours are half-knee-high), their currant bushes are huge and laden with fruit, their cabbages are massive. During the course of the conversation, we learn that they had five children, all moved out by now, so a hyperproductive allotment makes a lot more sense. Their stakes were higher, for a start, compared to our oh-well-grow-or-leave-it approach.