Potatoes and Jam

Been an interesting weekend. Saturday was the more conventional "down the plot stuff to do" sort of day.

Apart from potting on tomatoes and other stuff that we have in the greenhouse, it was also time to start putting out the courgettes. The first four went out onto the "new" mound. Well I call it the new mound, but it's actually the mound I made last year for the pumpkins which got sluggified. Hopefully this year will be better for the courgettes.

But that wasn't the first lot of courgettes to be planted out. Earlier in the week I planted three at work for the canteen.

The potatoes seem to be coming along just fine. Although some of them have definitely failed. Maybe I left them chitting far too long? Either way I have a few bags left empty.

So, pick an empty bag, and put the carrot seedlings in.

Last year out carrots grew all stunted because the soil compacted and forced them to bifurcate and generally go into strange shapes. This year, this bag as 20kgs of sand mixed in which hopefully will prevent that.

The outside strawberries are now starting to bear fruit... yet they still have a load more flowers which is probably good news for when the Championships rolls around.

And our first main harvest this year is a truly heroic amount of rhubarb.

Slightly over 4kgs of the stuff once it was chopped and processed. I left it to "soak" over night in 4kgs of sugar.

Sunday was rather wet and dreary. So after a quick stint on shop duty in the morning (only one customer!) it's back to the warmth of the kitchen to get cooking. I put everything into our big cooking pot. It just fit.

Which was actually a mistake. Throw in about half a kilo of freshly grated ginger and the resulting amount, though it still looked to be able to fit, bubbled up and over and made a sticky mess all over the cooker. I had to scoop some out into an additional saucepan so that it could properly be dealt with.

Eventually a suitable amount of liquid was boiled off and it bottled into a shade over 14 jars of rhubarb and ginger jam.

Now I have to clean the sticky mess before the wife finds out I made a big mess everywhere.

Oooops. Too late. Dog house time for me.