Allotment harvests, and waiting for harvests

While we could spend all day, every day, picking French beans and still find when we got to the end that some beans had magically matured at the other end of the row, there are other crops that don’t quite want to get there.

I know that we have a while to wait for our borlotti beans. In fact, I’m wondering whether it was a good idea to grow them in the UK at all, given that they apparently have to be dried on the plant and given that our September, last year, was notable for its peculiar blend of rain and fog, meaning that sometimes you got wet vertically and sometimes you got wet horizontally, but either way, you got wet – that doesn’t bode well for beans drying on the plant at all. They are shy beasts too, given how colourful they are, it took me ages to find any to photograph.

The other crop that is keeping us hanging on is the sweetcorn. Whenever I think about it, my mouth waters, but each time I peel back some of the covering leaves and pierce a kernel with my nail, it still runs clear, not milky, which is the sign that the cob is ripe. It’s Lark Early which should be ripe by now, I’m sure, but it simply isn’t and I’m not sure if:

1. I’m impatient
2. We’ve done something wrong
3. Our corn is jinxed.

Okay, I know that last one isn’t true, but never having grown corn before, and having had only a 50% germination rate, I can’t help expecting the worst all the time. Is everybody else’s corn ripe, or am I jumping the gun, sweetcorn-wise?

Labels: allotment-borlotti-beans, allotment-french-beans, allotment-sweetcorn