More about garden produce - now well into August

Our figs, gooseberries and damsons are over and a lot of jam has been made.  The blackcurrants were a complete failure.  The thinned out beet root have swelled to be unusually large.  The courgettes and climbing French beans are still going strong. We have finished eating the first early potato crop and have lifted a few of the main crop which proved to be delicious and completely free of pest damage.  I have put in a couple rows of broad bean plants where the early potatoes were.  I am not sure that they will produce anything but we live in hope.  Fingers crossed, the tomato plants (all outdoors) are about to start giving us ripe fruit.  Our big cooking apple tree has suffered from the dry spring and the crop will be very poor.  A lot of the apples have fallen, small and very early. I have cooked about 40kg to extract what syrup can be saved.  The brassicas are flourishing in their netting cage and we have been eating lettuces and, yesterday, our first pointy cabbage.  Mini-cucumber plants didn't do so well but we have had a dozen or so. There is a good crop of quinces on the tree and their increasing weight is bending the twigs. The fruit show the typical slightly furry skin covering.

The sorbus domestica tree (seedling from St Ann's hospital grounds) is showing its first fruit ten years after it was planted out.  It is a very slow growing tree and the fruit are useless, but it feels like a small victory.