At last, runner beans. But not tomatoes. Yet.

Today I picked our first roast dinner-for-two sized handful of runner beans. (I had picked four or five beans earlier this week, but they don’t count.) Obviously the lateness of the beans is down to our dreary summer, but actually looking back at last year’s posts, the beans aren’t that late – maybe a week or so, perhaps.

The same cannot be said of our tomatoes, none of which are ripe yet. This time last year we were picking Gardener’s Delights and hanging basket toms every single day. This year, there are a few Gardener’s Delights which look almost on the point of turning red, but none of them are actually edible yet. We do have hundreds of tiny green fruit though. My feeling is that all our tomatoes will ripen at once in mid-August, thus prompting a frantic session of cooking: freezer portions of tomato, onion and garlic pasta sauce on the one hand, and chutney on the other. Mr Beans makes fabulous chutney.

I’m glad I never bothered with courgettes this year. I think I will wait until the sunspot cycle does its thing and we’re back to sizzling summers again.