August 17th -- some failures!

Today was a "game in two halves" as they say... Really grim weather for most of the day, followed by some bright sunshine late in the afternoon. Some successes and some failures in the garden too.

SUCCESSES
How about these?

Autumn Bliss raspberries

Not many just yet, but there will be more soon...

More raspberries coming on...

And how about this for a nice pair???

Apple "Scrumptious"

Compare this photo with one of the same fruits I took about a month ago

Immature apples "Scrumptious"

Beetroot
The next success story is bit more mundane you may say, but Jane is making these into a nice dish of Scandinavian-style pork meatballs with baked beetroot, based on one which appears in the September 2010 issue of Delicious magazine...Delicious    Here's the journey from plot to plate..

Grow the beetroot...

Harvest the beetroot...

Peel the raw beetroot

Quarter the beetroot, sprinkle with oil and caraway seed

Go easy on the caraway seed- use about half what the recipe says, until you are confident in its use. Too much caraway can easily overpower the dish and spoil it. Bake the beetroot in the oven (can't really show you this)

Make some home-made meatballs with minced pork, breadcumbs and onions, bound together with cream instead of egg.

The raw meatballs

Combine the part-baked beetroot with the raw meatballs, and return to the oven. I'm deliberately not giving you the details of oven temperatures, cooking times etc, because this is a blog mainly about growing veg, not cookery -- so buy Delicious magazine and look them up!

Pork meatballs

Bake the meatballs and beetroot...

Add some soured cream...

Stir in the soured cream

Serve: the finished article -- delicious!

Serve the meatballs and beetroot with cucumber ribbon salad -- see my blog post on cucurbits...

FAILURES
Whoops, nearly forgot to tell you about these!

Some of my Maskotka tomatoes have begun to split -- a sure sign that it has been too wet for them. Because of this I have picked quite a few under-ripe fruit for ripening indoors. A few of the fruits (fortunately very few) have been attacked by slugs -- see the one in the bottom left of this next picture.

Maskotka splitting, and damaged by slugs

Here is today's other failure. Some of the Delinel French Beans are turning yellow before maturing. They are also flat and soft (unlike the plump green one at the left in my picture).

French bean failures

Still, I have had a fair few pods off these plants already, and I also have another batch of plants coming on, so all is not lost.

More Dwarf French Beans coming on...