Lovely Home Grown Veg

The runner bean crop has been really good this year and I am busily picking beautiful long bean pods every day. Those that I cannot eat immediately will be frozen to give me a good supply of home grown veg in the coming months. Runner beans are easy to freeze - just prepare them as if you were going to cook them, plunge them into a pan of boiling water for a couple of minutes to blanch them, then drain and rinse them in cold water and bag them up for freezing.
The last of the potatoes were lifted today and stored in a hessian sack in the pantry. Even though the weather has been very dry during the growing season the crop has been pretty good and should last me a while.

The beetroot crop has also been good this year but it is usually a reliable crop. I always plant 'Boltardy' and it has never produced a poor crop yet no matter what the weather is like,
I boil up the smaller beets to eat with salad, cooking and pickling the larger ones to store and use throughout the winter months. I find that using a solution of roughly three parts Sarsons pickling vinegar to one part water produces the best results