Harvesting traumas

August is the time I should be harvesting, but I'm having a bit of a difficult time with it. It seems like most of my vegetables have a single day peak-harvesting moment and I have a habit of missing it. I was hoping to have tomatoes to eat with my cucumbers by now. I've got dozens of tomatoes sitting on the bushes, but they are simply not going red. My cucumbers, on the other hand, are more than ready. I'm having to cut the seeds out the middle (and also peel the skin off, as they're very spiny). I haven't yet managed to harvest one before it's ended up with loads of seeds in it. They're also rather non-EU compliant with their shape:

I also failed to harvest my first sweet corn at the right time. I tried to follow the rule that the tufts on the end need to turn brown before you harvest it. But this wasn't enough:

 As it only produced this:

I have now started feeling the tips of the corn to see if they've filled in yet. I suspect I'm going to go in the other direction with the next one and leave it too long.
My courgettes and runner beans, however, have a tendency to get huge before I have an opportunity to use them. The courgettes are still usable, albeit not very flavoursome. They can be frozen, but they go rather mushy if you do, so I really want my tomatoes to ripen so I can make ratatouille and freeze that. This also relies on my courgettes not succumbing to powdery mildew before I can use them.

Some of those beans are actually still usable and I'll be having them for tea tonight or blanching and freezing them if there are more. In contrast, onions have been brilliant, we sue those in most things we cook and they don't go past their best quickly.

In the good news though, I now have strawberries. My neighbour Lucy popped round with some of her spare runners. This was handy, as I got a planter for strawberries from my parents for my birthday, but I left it too late to buy any plants this year. I now have it all planted up and ready to go and I've even put copper tape round the legs to give them a fighting chance against slugs.

White spots on my cucumber leaves

A couple of days ago I noticed that there were white spots all over my cucumber leaves. After a bit of googling I came to the conclusion that this was powdery mildew. I also came to the conclusion that I need to get rid of it before it spread to the other cucurbits. I didn't have time to get an organic solution (neem oil, now ordered from Amazon, the stuff sounds amazing, it also kills pests), I decided just to take the leaves off and put them in the green waste bin so the mildew won't infect my compost.

I took this many leaves off and it looks pretty bare there now. I also took the four full-sized cucumbers off the plants so that they didn't sap any more of the plants' energy.

It does, however, reveal what a lot of squashes I have growing and how huge my huge courgette has become.

Unexpected onions

It turns out that when you grow onions, you should dig around in the ground afterwards because you can't always tell where all of them are. All of these come from the dug up area and were completely invisible from above the ground:

I have also learnt that I should have kicked the onions' leaves/stems over at an early stage, as that way they put all of their energy into their bulbs and can't grow flowers. Speaking of onion flowers, mine have moved onto a new and beautiful stage where they've begun to turn into seed heads.

Once I was done, I then took some of the leeks out of the row that I hadn't fully thinned and created another row where I'd previously been growing the onions.