Salad days

At last the sun shines and the temperature rises bringing the first crops of tomatoes and cucumbers. I forget just how good they will taste.

The cucumbers sweet and crunchy and the tomatoes juicy and tangy - a little salt and summer heaven has arrived.

The best tomato croppers are the cherry types and baby plums. Their flavour improves as the summer goes on especially if kept on the dry side. Two new varieties I'm trying this year are Rosada - a cherry, and Harbinger - a traditional type. They are competing against favourites Sungold, Sweet 100 and Chiquito. I also have Golden Santa, Roma and an unknown variety which appeared in a pot with some flower seedlings and I didn't have the heart to discard.

Sadly my favourite Marmande - a lovely beefsteak tomato which is delicious grilled till soft and squidgy and liberally sprinkled with black pepper - will not be enjoyed this year. Last year 

my lovely healthy plants succumbed overnight to blight and disintegrated into a sorry mess of blackened foliage and fruit so I didn't sow any this spring. [ As expected - no blight this year, as yet....]

Cucumbers are Cucino and Boothby's Blonde. They are both small types and I'm trying them in the greenhouse and outside. You can never have too many in our house and they make a fantastic accompaniment to a spicy curry chopped into chunky pieces and mixed with yoghurt.

A surprise success in the garden was from one tiny potato tuber left over from the main planting at the allotment. 

Put into a large flowerpot with some multi-purpose compost and watered when remembered it has yielded enough spuds for two meals.

Best from the allotment at the moment are the sugar snap peas - Zuccola, Romanesco calabrese and  Purple Teepee dwarf  beans. The calabrese should really be grown as a late summer cropper but I tried it early as an experiment to avoid the cabbage white butterfly. So far so good.