It's the start of the month!

Which means it's time for the now customary pictures of how the plot looks. What follows is a lot of photos with very little commentary.

General site overview
While it may look like there's some spare space in the left foreground, there isn't. It's just that the plants that are there are too small to be picked out by my camera. (Notice also the rare glimpse of the Allotmentboss's Boss.)

Unusual vegetables
I don't really have a good definition of unusual. I suppose in this context it means "things we haven't grown before".

The one and only yacon is growing quite strongly but slowly. Despite the dry weather it's being a bit of a martyr to slugs. The Chinese yams are doing well. Simon Hickmott, in Growing Unusual Vegetables, writes that they're unlikely to make much progress in their first year, so that they're about 18 inches tall seems pretty good.
The American ground nut (Apios Americana) is similarly climbing strongly, but it's hardly a mass of dense foliage. I'm not too worried; both plants appear to be happy enough.
The ulloco have put on a good spurt of growth over the last few weeks. That may be due to the hot weather, or it may be due to the lashings of home grown compost I've given them.
Finally, the oca are definitely the early winners of the unusual vegetable competition. They're fairly big plants now, and the leaves taste wonderful. While I'd like there to be tubers at the end of the year, oca is definitely worth growing just as a salad vegetable.
(In the foreground is a line of Swiss Giant Zermat leeks.)

Usual vegetables
(Or, "things we have grown before".)
Firstly, it looks like our first early potato plants are just beginning to get some black spots on their leaves, indicating the first signs of potato blight. It's not too bad so far, but the maincrop plants will need to be watched carefully to ensure they're lifted before it gets too much of a grip. In each of the three years we've grown potatoes we've always ended up with blight, but we've never had a problem lifting and storing a good supply of perfectly healthy tubers. Blight always comes, but it nevers seems to get a killer grip on our plants.

Anyway, given that the blight is coming, that we'd like some new potatoes for our dinner, that we need the space for brassicas and that it's always nice to harvest things, we dug a few up (hence the empty patch down by my feet). Four kilogrammes of near flawless tasty looking salad potatoes (Charlotte) - great!
The space was immediately replanted with kale (Pentland Brig). Over the coming week I'll probably lift all of the Charlotte plants, and replace the whole bed with brassicas, thus partially overcoming our little space crisis.

Slightly above the potatoes are the sweet potatoes; Beauregard in the front row, T56 behind. This is not the best bit of real estate on the plot. It's laced with large clumps of heavy yellow clay, and it's noticeable that there aren't even many weeds growing up here. Comfrey and grass survive, but not much else is tempted. Still, it was the only space we had. In typical Allotmentboss style I threw in two large bags of home made compost, and so far so good.