Garden Bears' World - The Harvest Begins!

Hello again, everyone!  It's Endon Bear here with another Garden Bears' World for you, looking at our latest visit to Polar and Grizzly's allotment - although that was almost a week ago!

 My first job was to help Polar feed the tomato, pepper and chilli plants in the greenhouse.  Polar uses tomato feed for all her vegetables, but uses a weaker solution for the outdoor crops. 

While she poured the water and feed from the watering can, I used the spray to mist the flowers to help the fruit set.  Polar let me have the first ripe tomato for being a helpful bear!

Then it was time to feed the squashes and cucumbers, so I went to check on them before Polar made the ground too wet for furry paws.  Some of their leaves are bigger than me now!  The squashes are a French variety called Potimarron and the one I am standing next to is Queensland Blue, an Australian squash.

The runner beans needed a feed and water too, so that was our next stop with the watering can.  They have lots of flowers on them now.  Most of them have red flowers and are our magic beans from our pal Chomper, but there is one with white flowers and a bi-coloured one too, which Polar thinks are from her old seeds.  

They have got very tall now but Polar is pinching out the tops, so I don't think we will be able to climb up and look for giants.

Grizzly had found a job for Hanley Bear to do - turning down the tops of the onions to encourage the foliage to die back and help the bulbs to ripen.  Hanley is quite strong for a small bear and managed to fold them all over, but he smelled of onion so strongly afterwards that he was afraid he might have to have a bath.

Sonning did some weeding around the sweetcorn plants and the courgettes.  He was pleased to see some small fruits starting to form and reminded Polar that they needed some feed too.

Then Hanley and I laid all the garlic, which Polar had lifted earlier, in nice, neat rows so it could catch the sunshine and start drying out.

'Poo!' cried Hanley.  'We both smell of garlic now!'

And look how much there is!  We are hoping Polar will make garlic bread for us to munch for our supper.

In the little patch behind the shed, we found a few tiny plants growing, which we hope are some of our wildflowers.  It is hard to tell at the moment.  Polar says we can have some foxgloves, comfrey and honesty to plant there and some poppy seeds to sprinkle, so even if nothing much grows this year, there will be plenty of flowers next.

While we had been doing our various jobs, Grizzly was picking broad beans.  There are lots of them growing on the allotment and at home in the garden.  We scurried into the middle of the plot to get the ones Grizzly couldn't easily reach from the path.

Soon we had lots of them and, when we got home, we helped Grizzly to shell the pods to get all the juicy little beans out.  Polar cooked some with our roast dinner and put the others in a risotto with peas and mint a couple of days later.  They were very scrummy.

I've just remembered that I never showed you how our bucket new potatoes turned out, so here are some pictures of me helping Polar to cook them, with the first broad beans from the garden, back at the beginning of June.

Mint is delicious with new potatoes and with broad beans too.

As you can see, broad beans have extremely cosy pods to grow in, as they are all soft and fuzzy inside.

And here are some of our carrots from the big plant pots too.  Polar was pleased enough with the results that she's sown some more and is planning to grow carrots in pots again next year, as they were so tasty.

It's almost tea time now and we're going to have broad beans and carrots with our dinner again tonight and, hopefully, we'll start lifting our 'second early' potatoes soon too.  Aren't we busy little bears?