Harvest Monday

Well, technically it is now Tuesday, but also technically it is still Monday somewhere!

Apologies if anyone who actually has an allotment is reading this, but I’m going to assume that 95% of my readership consists of my mom, my aunties and the neighbours, and that this is the only allotment blog that they are following. The “Harvest Monday” theme is a bit of a staple on the allotment blogs. Basically you take pictures of what you harvested and write about it.

There are a few things that have always puzzled me about Harvest Monday. For a start, why Monday? While some bloggers appear to be retired, quite a few seem to be managing their allotment alongside work or even school, in which case surely it is more like Harvest Sunday, or even Harvest Saturday? Also, do “the rules” stipulate that your photo can only include one day’s worth of harvest, or is cumulative harvesting allowed? Are there really rules for this or is it more of a “this is what I have left over from the weekend after my home-grown dinner on Sunday” sort of theme?

In any case, since The Aunties (Hello!) were apparently asking when my next blog post might be, I thought I could latch onto the Harvest Monday theme and knock out a quick post. I was hoping to do this before midnight, but that didn’t happen. Moving swiftly along, we have, clockwise from the bottom left:

– Half of the Cobra beans.  The other half were eaten for dinner on Sunday.

– Chioggia beets.  The Enabler cooked them before I got a chance to take the photo. They are much more photogenic when raw, as they have a bright red color and more distinct candy stripes on the inside.

– Sweet peas, actually harvested on Monday.

– Lollo Rosso lettuce, starting to bolt.

– More sweet peas and then dahlias and scabiosa stellata, allegedly, but am now rather doubtful on that one… when I looked at the seedaholic catalogue to check the variety it looks suspiciously like scabiosa columbaria. Not super impressed.

– Carrots, including a rogue yellow one!

– One of many cucumbers.

– Lady Christl new potatoes, minus what we ate yesterday for dinner. This was from four plants, and I must say that the harvest seems a little small. These got rather badly frost bitten back in May, and am not sure that they fully recovered. They do taste really nice though!.

Also, I have a few pics of raspberries, some herbs and another (different) cucumber that The Enabler took on Saturday. I’m convinced that there is some pooling of harvests going on on some of the blogs, but at least I’m upfront about it! Also, I did not have the option of putting them in the same photo and try to pass them off as Monday’s harvest because that particular cucumber has been eaten already and the raspberries were bunged in the freezer. Perhaps I can make jam at a later date and incorporate it into a future Monday photo? That seems like bending the rules a little too far!