Oh Gawd, here we go. Yet more courgettes. There’s no such thing as a bad courgette right? It does stretch you ever so slightly when it comes to your cooking options.

My very limited culinary skills have led to two options when it comes to the courgettes that are currently taken over the allotment:

The obvious choice is to add a little colour palette to fresh pasta. They need to be diced, and then preferably mixed in with red pesto. Job’s a good ‘un.

The second option is a little more adventurous. I’m calling these courgette fritters. I don’t think that’s actually a technical culinary name. As ever with most things in the kitchen, I’m making this up as I go along.

My technique is to shred the courgettes with a grater. You then build up the mixture into a dough using flour and some finely grated cheese. These little bundles of green joy are then fried at a very high temperature until slightly singed.

Of course you could always go down the more schoolboy humour route of just arranging courgettes into various phallic style art sculptures and posting them all over the modern interweb.

A courgette hearing aid, innit.

To the allotment! …late on Saturday afternoon. I was under strict instructions to complete one task, and one task only: Mow and strip back the grass verges ahead of the next Town Council Gestapo allotment inspection.

I rocked up at the allotment. It was bone dry absolutely bloody everywhere.

This meant that the prim and proper grass verges around our patch were singed and flattened. My nifty electric fly mow wouldn’t have even touched the surface.

What a waste of a trip.

Instead I hung around for a few minutes to see what the fruits of our labour will soon deliver. The courgettes look like we are about to have a wheelbarrow load. Likewise for the tomatoes. I like that. I can live off courgettes and tomatoes, right?

Elsewhere I confess it looked a bit of a mess. We had some wonderful wild flowers and poppies blooming all over the allotment before the most recent three heat waves. These now look almost skeletal and are a rustic brown colour.

I think I need to dump my cheapo Lidl lemon tree that has failed me yet again this summer over on the allotment.

I wasn’t even sure that there was such a thing as spaghetti courgette. I thought my allotment partner was taking a piss when she returned with the green curly wurly and declared it a delicacy.

A quick online shifty confirms that such a thing does exist. Gawd knows what it bloody tastes like. And why is it so wonky anyway? What’s wrong with a more conventional courgette?

So far we’ve returned with two courgettes from the patch. One was shaped like a football and the other looks more like a rather long elongated earpiece.

Funny old business this allotment growing.

And so it begins. The first courgette harvested from the allotment. I say courgette, it looks more like a kid’s football. How the fuck did this happen?

I blame the intense heatwave of the past few days. Somehow it has got to the heart of the courgette and exploded it from within. We were tempted to leave it for another few days but it will take over the entire bloody patch.

This is just the start. Don’t be fooled by courgettes, they are Cucumbers from the Gods.

We’ve harvested hundreds over the years in our garden. Now we’ve taken the game up an extra level over at the allotment.

You learn to be creative with the courgette once you get bored of them being fried with pasta. Then it’s time to turn towards courgette fritters.

The courgette needs to be shredded and then you add in some grated cheese and plenty of flour to hold it all together. These need to be fried at an extremely high temperature.

Job’s a good ‘un.

To the Allotment! …on Sunday lunchtime.

We had been given prior warning that the Town Council are going to be inspecting the patch sometime next week. Fix up, look sharp etc.

I had one task and one task only: to mow back the borders. I do enjoy a neatly trimmed border.

The rain in recent weeks, followed by a brief burst of Essex sunshine, has led to extra growth elsewhere around the allotment. It seems that our country patch of land has become more of a flower bed than a growing vegetable patch. This wasn’t the plan but it looks pretty all the same.

Surprisingly it was very peaceful up there for a weekend. I think Sunday morning is the time to avoid the allotment. This is when the allotment anoraks are out, pestering you to swap seeds and exchanging tips about how things grow. I just like to shove things in the ground, water them, and then walk away.

The only other sound I could hear was leather on willow as the cricket team were going through their Sunday game in the adjacent field.

Our allotment neighbour came a cropper last week when a ball was hit sweetly and landed straight in her greenhouse. Glasshouses etc.

Half an hour later and my mowing was complete. Jobs a good ‘un. I thought I had mowed over a dead snake. It turns out it was a ropey old piece of string, natch.

A little later on Saturday afternoon and the rain had subsided. We had a more fuel in the legs and time to undertake some allotment bits and bobs.

I should rephrase that: A had a little more time than I had. She was quite content to arse around doing her thing. I simply sat on the bench, took pretty pictures, and watched her go about her business.

It was a good time for an allotment inspection. I was the inspector. I didn’t really have any point to prove. We had been forewarned that proper allotment inspectors may soon be on our case, and so this was a bit of a dry run.

The sun and the rain of the recent weeks has led to the allotment absolutely blooming. We thought it would be a patch of land where we could grow spuds and carrots. It turns out it’s a bit of a garden of delight for poppies and other colourful plants that I haven’t got a chuffing clue what they are.

Elsewhere and A has been busy with her sowing and planting. She did give me a tour of the various seeds and subsequent sprouting shoots that are coming through.

I lost a bit of interest when I could see a game of cricket breaking out at the cricket club on the other side of the allotment. I really should pay more attention.

From the allotment: 🍓🍓 Keep ‘em coming #homegrown

More homegrown goodness from the allotment. We’re rather happy with the strawberries and raspberries, that are starting to come into fruition. These are genuine homegrown goodness, transported from the back garden and planted at the allotment just in time to catch the May heat wave tanning session. Expect more of the same over the next month or so.

The first major harvest of the season. Ha! Blink and you might miss it, etc. But yep, these are nature’s bounty from our own first personal harvest. We inherited a patch of land that included some very limp rhubarb stalks, as well as the fag end of a leek crop. The strawberries and the raspberries are our own making. Tuck in!