free food

This year a lot of plants have appeared in our garden and allotment that have self seeded.  Once I recognize what the seedling is trying to be I tend to just leave them to get on with it unless they are really in the way.  It's also really interesting to see when they naturally germinate, especially when compared with the ones I am trying to force to grow in little pots way out of season.

This year there was so much self seeding going on that I can only put it down to a complete lack of weeding meaning that everything was pretty well established before I got there.  We had five or six sunflowers in the garden, which had much bigger flowers than the ones we lovingly grew on a windowsill.  We now have five well established alpine strawberry plants which have fruited solidly for the whole summer and are still going now (the one in the swede patch is a little hard to get to, what with all the netting, but worth it for that taste).

And we have tomatoes.  Literally hundreds of cherry tomatoes, mainly yellow and mostly growing in what was the pea patch.  They are sweet and delicious and out performing everything in pots in the garden.  Now we are on a full tomato diet as they will end as soon as the weather turns and people are starting to complain about tomatoes with tomato sauce for dinner again...I love it because they taste great and are all free...

...so I have 'sun-dried' several trays full in the oven, put pints of yellow pasta sauce in the freezer and tonight we have made yellow tomato ketchup.