Gardening update
----------------

Harvesting from our allotment garden[1] is well underway!  The stand
out success story by far are the squash.  We planted zucchinis (aka
courgettes) and pattypan squash (aka a whole bunch of things: scallop
squash, sunburst squash and button squash are the most sensible
sounding to me!), and both have done incredibly well.  We've grown
pattypan squash which are literally the largest I've seen in my life,
although apparently that could be because they're more flavourful when
immature and so they usually get picked before they are fully grown.
Even our large ones have tasted just fine to me, though.  Squash are
really great for a home garden: each plant produces multiple
vegetables, and they come in waves, not all at once, so you don't have
to worry about how to consume a huge quantity before they start to
spoil.

Amusingly, none of my Finnish friends have ever seen or even heard of
pattypan squash before, and have had to do some Googling to even know
what to call them in Finnish (literally "disc squash", it turns out).

Our onions have technically done okay, I guess, but in contrast to our
gigantic squashes, all the onions are smaller than a typical
supermarket onion.  Also in contrast to squash, if you plant one onion
you get back one onion, so large yields are only possible if you
dedicate a lot of space to them.  I think perhaps they should go in
the same category that we placed carrots after last year's efforts:
*can* be grown here, but generally aren't worth the bother.

The potatoes have done well, and are perhaps what we've ended up with
the most of.  At one point I dug up a bunch of spuds which had a lot
of small white spots on the outside which earlier ones hadn't had, and
I was worried they had some sort of disease.  A quick web search
revealed that this was nothing to worry about - the little organs
(called lenticels) which potatoes breathe through can become clogged
during very wet weather (and we did have some periods of protracted
heavy rain a few weeks back), which causes them to swell up and become
visible to the naked eye, which they normally aren't.  These potatoes
are still perfectly fine to eat, they're just liable to spoil a little
earlier than usual.

The very first things to be ready to harvest were peas, which it turns
out come all at once early on, so I missed out on the majority of
these as I was travelling at the time.  My wife assures me they were
good, though!

On the whole, even though we've been a lot lazier and less organised
about the whole thing than I'd have liked, I'm still prepared to call
this year's gardening effort a marked improvement over last year's,
and that alone is enough to make me happy.  Hopefully we can do even
better next year.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/my-hundred-square-metres.txt