A Crazy Spud and Crimes in Cold Blood

The work of some utter shithouse or other

Sunday gone was a day of tidying up, weeding and covering up sections of the plot that shall harbour no more crops until next year. Such activities do not make for great or interesting pics, so apologies for the lack of veg-porn, but the season's abundance is very much drawing to a close.

We'd finally hacked down the insanely prolific climbing bean plants the week before and have frozen a couple of large bagfuls of what was left on them. The only harvesting of any note that went on over this last weekend was the digging up of the last spuds to remain in the soil, our Pink Fir Apple main crop. I had only planted three small rows of these as for some reason I doubted whether they would grow well at all. These fears proved fairly groundless as I ended up with a a fair trough full of them, most free from slug damage too. This in spite of the shameful mess I'd allowed the patch to get into; see if you can spot a spud plant among the docks and poppies.

Embarrassing

As well as growing in reasonable quantities, this type of spud wins the award for daftest-shaped potato hands down. In addition to some snigger-inducing tripod shaped affairs were such beauties as this.

This is all one potato. Mental.

Elsewhere, we plucked a few more cougettes and a decent batch of raspberries, which have confounded expectations - I thought we were going to have to pull the canes up and start again - to produce a very welcome and enjoyable crop. I think we have a quite late variety as they are still producing perfectly good fruits even now.

Still going strong

All of which relative positivity leads me to the point where I have close this missive with much darker tidings. **Spoiler Alert- Mild Swearing Ahead** You see, some absolute neanderthal piece of shit fuck-wit (or fuck-wits?) decided it would be a great idea to go drag their knuckles around from tap to tap, taking a hacksaw to each, removing the (more or less worthless) plastic taps as they went (see pic at top of post). Presumably whoever did it has some unresolved beef with the people who run the allotments, but quite how they think sawing a bunch of taps is going to advance any particular cause is beyond me. At least they did it now when water is not scarce, rather than in the height of the heatwave when this would have been a total pisser. It must have taken a fair bit of time to saw through all the taps that have been done. If people can't grow a bit of veg next to each other without falling out to the point where criminal damage seems like a proportionate measure, it doesn't bode well for some of the globe's more intractable problems. Israel/Palestine? Forget it mate. Sometimes people are such unutterable shits.

Anyway, sod them. There are still more than enough very nice people on the plots to make it a pleasure to be down there.

Finally, I cut off as many green tomatoes as I could find on the remaining plants, and put these, optimistically, on the living room window. Who am I kidding? There's no way these will ripen before going off. Looks like another batch of green tomato chutney is in the post.

Chutney to be.