Celebrating the rainbow coloured summer allotment
Sitting down to Saturday lunch with summer salad: ruby-stemmed baby chard, bulls blood, purple basil, orange and yellow calendula petals, red nasturtium and blue borage and every shade of green salad leaf you could ever want. A feast for the eyes that dances on the taste buds, too.
From the start, colour has been important to our allotment. We first fell in love with purple-podded beans and then, of course, borlotti. Some of it was practical: discovering rainbow chard thrived where old-school spinach bolted. Some almost by accident: gifts of purple stemmed oriental kale, Fire King tagetes, Nick’s flashback celendula, Peace Seed sunflowers. Some inspired by others (Jane Scotter’s stunning salad bags and sweetpeas), but above all because we, the kids and the insects love it.
The Blauhilde beans are on full stream (I am rather relieved Howard is back home to share in the flood). The purple-pod Trail of Tears are forming fast and the borlotti starting to colour.
The bulls blood is eating beautifully steamed as well as raw in salads.The stems of the ruby, golden and rainbow chards are lighting up the evening allotment and the Painted Mountain corn are filling out (we will save the seed from the best cob this year rather than eating it like last).
The Fire king tagetes are about to bloom and the flashback calendula are still showing strong, but at the moment maybe my favourite flowers are on the marjoram, an opinion shared by the bees. And above all this, 12ft sunflowers like a rainforest canopy so tall you almost expect to see lemurs swinging through.
The summer is starting to fade, the heat and light just beginning to dim, but for now we make hay (or at least multi-coloured salads) while the sun shines.
But enough about us, what is growing well where you live and garden?
