Tiny toms and preserving produce

We ate our first two red Tomatoes today.
They were dinky little things.
I cut each one as small as I could and DS and I had them in 1 sandwich each !

I have been dehydrating this week also.
Not bodily, I am drying produce.
The L'equip machine I bought a few years ago is still going strong.
This weekend I dried about 9 courgettes on Saturday, 9 on Sunday
Monday I dried about 5 and around a cupful of runner beans
Today was 6 trays of Spinach
Tonight will be 3 more trays of courgettes(about 5 or 6 fruits) and a cupful of runner beans.

When they are dry, they are put into screw top jars till we use them.

Drying is an efficient way to store produce and takes up less room than most other storage.
Also it is cheap fuel wise as it is an overnight job to dry them and then they don't use any more  until you cook them which you would have to do anyway.
We still have a jar of dried onions from about 3 years ago which is perfectly edible.

I pickled a large jar of onions for Christmas.
We  have 2 jars of pickled beetroot from several years back which is fine still.

I looked up courgettes online and discovered Asda selling 4 fruits for a whole £1

The Kale is now edible and very flavour-some after a couple of months of just spinach interspersed with Molokia

The row nearest the camera is the Kale. I am used to curly leafed Kale so was it took a while to realise that this plant was really Kale and not just a mis-labeling error for which I am notorious.

The carrot bed did turn out to be mostly grass pretending to be carrot seedlings sadly.
I have resown but don't know if it will be any more successful this time around.
There are about 7 actual original carrots remaining.
The box in the greenhouse is looking quite leafy.

There are actually carroty ends showing which look about 1/2" thick!

Just as well with the price of grub at the moment.

I was cleaning my bike up yesterday and found the panniers we bought for it in Holland.
They are sturdy and well made ,not like the rubbish you can buy here.
I fitted my bike rack on and then added the panniers and bungeed the lock to the rack between them.
Inside one were 3 or 4 receipts for sainsburys from 2003.
Carrots were 40p a kilo and brocolli was not much more.
Milk was about 29p for a litre of UHT


On Friday,I finished clearing the next bed of weeds.
It is sown with Alfafa which I think I remember is from the bean family.
This will get chopped off and dug in in a few months time the same as the clover and phacelia.