Vegetable garden update.

It's been a week or two since I last posted photos of how the vegetable garden is doing, so here they are. 


In short, everything is growing nicely, with the exception that we've noticed some browning on our potato plant leaves. If it's blight, it'd be a bit of a disaster. Fingers crossed that it's not!


Most of the work on the allotment has been carried out by Clare, who has been keeping on top of the weeding, and doing essential work such as thinning out the carrots.

Our carrot bed / jungle has gotten to the point where it needs to be thinned out, so last week we did just that, and picked a decent amount. 


We ate about half of them, and Clare has frozen the others (to be used as soup mix).

Our parsnips are getting bigger and bigger, but don't need to be thinned out - but I'm really curious to see exactly how well they've grown for us! 


I'll just have to be patient...

Our celery has been a resounding success. We've harvested a good deal of it, and Clare transplanted the younger plants into the spaces the older ones used to occupy. 


Some of the celery has grown so well that it went to seed. This hasn't stopped us using it, however. 


Clare has frozen out portions of it, mixed with the carrots we thinned out, for use as soup mix. 

Our onions are close to being harvested, but I'm inclined to give them another while longer to let them get a little bit bigger. Then we'll have to decide on where to hang them to dry!

Not really much to be said about our lettuce bed - they're all coming along nicely. Towards the front is our "little gem" variety, then chard and "butterhead" varieties.


At the back, our garlic really hasn't grown that much, but it's still alive, which is something. 

We've harvested most of our first crop of lettuces from the "square" bed, and Clare has replaced these with younger ones. Between the lettuce, spring onions are growing well.

The potato bed is also doing well, but there's still no sign of the potatoes flowering. 

Our beetroot was thinned out a while back, they've a lot of growing to do yet.


In front of them, the couple of corn plants are growing well. 


At the front of the bed, the swedes are doing just fine. 

Our peas have really come into their own, and are cropping heavily. Most of the peas are then consumed by my son Thomas, who delights in popping open the pods to devour the sweet peas inside. Next year, I'll definitely have them climbing up chicken wire, as the garden twine is sagging slightly under the weight of the plants. 

The slow progress of the bean plants continue! They really seem to be proverbial late bloomers, and are now in danger of being overtaken by the peas we planted alongside them (when we thought that the beans weren't going to grow!).

Our courgette plants are growing well, and have started to flower and produce fruit! I was delighted by this positive development, as it shows that they've taken to the soil. The flowers are lovely too, and add a dash of colour the the predominance of the green and brown in the allotment. 

The yellow courgette flower.

In the absence of purple sprouting broccoli, which we haven't yet been able to get a hold of, we've planted some chard in the bed instead.  

To the rear of the bed, the white sprouting broccoli is coming along well, but we'll need to keep a close eye on it to prevent it from bolting. 

To the right, you can see our leeks are growing well. (no photo of the bed though).

Our brassicas have grown huge in the last couple of weeks! 

As I'm missing a photo of our leek bed, it can be seen to the left of the photo. They're now substantially thicker than they were when we planted the out.

Finally, as always, a picture of how the allotment currently looks. Gone is the vast triangle of brown! 

At the homestead:

Most of this years crop of strawberries has now been eaten, either by Thomas or by slugs. The strawberry plants are now sending out runners, which I'll have to plant into soil. Next year, hopefully most of these will become established plants, increasing our crop. With Isabelle being able to eat them, we'll need the extra fruit!

Our blackcurrants have finally turned black, and while they're still a little hard, they're just about ready to eat. 

The berries themselves have grown far larger than I expected them to.

Our four chili plants have produced abundant amounts of fruit, which are eventually turning from green to red. When they do, I pick them off, to encourage more to grow. 

I then put them in a container and leave them in the hot press to air dry. After a couple of months, when they're totally dried out, I blend them into chili flakes. I've repeated this process for a few years now. 

That's it for this update. Feel free to let me know your thoughts!

Growth update.

I've been working nights for a week - and combined with the fact that the week just past has been exceptionally rainy, has meant that I haven't been up to the allotment (again!). 


Clare went up to weed the beds yesterday, and came home delighted at how things are getting along. After getting up this morning, I went over to see this for myself.

The carrot bed.

I'll begin with the carrot bed, which is the first bed to the left of the gate when entering the allotment. Most of the shoots are now at least 10 centimetres high. While the carrot bed looks quite cluttered, this is as it should be, as thinning them out can attract carrot fly. 

The parsnip bed.

Next to the carrot bed is our parsnip bed. Much like the carrots, these are coming along well. 


The front of the bed had be left empty as we had initially run out of parsnip seeds to plant. We've since sown more seeds in that spot.

As we move past the parsnips, we come to the celery. As mentioned in previous blogs, there's two stages of this - at the back, the first lot (looking beautiful and healthy), and towards the front, the younger lot, which are coming along quickly.

Moving right along, our onion bed is one of the highlights of our unfinished allotment, as it is one of the beds where the growth of the veg is at its most visible. 

In the next bed, we've planted garlic (at the back), and "butterhead" lettuce beside it. The garlic is, at present, practically indistinguishable from the onion plants. Despite being planted out late, it's growing well.  
I didn't hold too much hope for the lettuce, but they seem to have taken to the soil well. 

After the butterhead lettuce, we've chard growing - but I don't have a photo of this taken  (my bad...) 
Beside the chard, we're growing some "cos" lettuce (pictured, left). While small yet, these are growing well. 

At the very front of this bed, we've a couple of rows of radishes growing - staggered so that we'll get two crops of them. I love the speed at which radishes grow (we harvested one yesterday, which I ate raw - delicious and peppery!).

After this bed, we've two separate square beds. In the back one we've a couple of rows of potatoes growing. While they're growing, again I haven't a photo taken. Beside that we've a bed of lettuce growing. 

Following this are three parallel beds where we've sown beans and peas. One of these was pictured in the last blog, so I didn't rehash it here. 
More interesting, I think, is that the beans and peas that we sowed out have sprouted (as per picture on the left). We'll have to train these up the frames built for them.


After the pea and bean beds, we've planted fifteen asparagus plants in one bed, and finally , at the very top of the allotment, we've one last bed where we're going to plant out two year old rhubarb plants that a friend donated to us. No photos of these yet, but will hopefully update this in the next post.


Back at home:


Things are growing well back at home. 


We've four chilli plants that reside in the kitchen window. These have grown substantially taller than last years variety, and have started producing chilli' already. One chilli was so large that we cut it off after a while for fear that the plant was putting all its energies into that one fruit. 

Outside, our two cucumber plants continue to grow, but alas, there's no sign of flowers on either yet! ;o(


They've got so big at this stage, I've had to build climbing frames for them. Fingers crossed that it won't be too much longer before they start to flower and produce cucumbers.

At polar opposite to the lack of progress with the cucumbers is our blackcurrant bush. 


This has grown about two foot so far this summer, and produced so many new branches that I think I'm going to have to prune some of them back before the summer is over.
The year old branches have produced large amounts of currants. While still hard and green, there's definite progress in how big they've gotten.  

The couple of strawberry plants that are growing randomly about the garden are all fruiting too. It looks like this year we'll produce at least twice as many strawberries as we did last year - not that I'll be eating any, as the kids always have first "dibs" on them!

Several of our tomato plants didn't survive the frosts of April - and a few more just died. I'm not sure why this was, but I suspect the PH of the compost I used may not have been ideal for growing them. 
On the other hand, enough of them are growing well, and my next task is to re-pot them so that the surviving ones are grouped together. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... (part 5)

It's been a while since I wrote about how our veg is growing at home. There's some new stuff growing, so I guess now is an appropriate time to write a blog about it. 

I'll start with the tomatoes. 
These have been planted outside for a week or two now, albeit underneath a sheet of transparent perspex (which has fulfilled the duel role of slightly warming the air underneath it and also protecting the tomato plants from overnight frost).


They're growing well, our next job is to put wire up in the troughs to allow the plants cling to when they send out creepers. 
All the troughs (or pots) that the tomatoes are growing in are filled with compost that's been rotting down in our compost bin for the last two years. 

Leeks

The leeks we planted are growing taller by the day. Clare rotates the box the leeks are planted in every day to ensure they all receive an equal amount of sunlight. They'll be left in the box for another month (till June) before we plant them out in the plot. 

Cucumbers (the pots to the left)

We're also growing cucumber - the seeds were quick to germinate, and the plants are even quicker to grow. In the above photo, the cucumber plants are the large plants in the pots to the extreme left (the next two rows to the right are peas, but more of that below). 
We had good success with the cucumber plants we grew the year before last - growing decent sized (and delicious) cucumbers. 
The cucumbers will be planted out in our back garden, as I think they'll require more care and attention than the other veg that we'll plant out in the plot.


The reason that we're growing additional peas is that by "staggering" the growth of the plants should give us a constant harvest of peas throughout the summer. 

Clare's also growing some veg we've never tried before - Cos Lettuce (pictured left) and "Purple Teepee", a type of bean that grows long, purple (surprise!) pods. I'm looking forward to see how these come along (pictured right). We're experimenting by germinating the seeds in "Jiffy 7's", which are basically recycled coconut fibres packed into a small disk. After watering them, they expand and you then sow your seeds into them. So far they seem to be working out pretty well. 

We split our chilli plants into two different good sized pots, suitable for sitting on the windowsill where they'll reside all summer. They're growing well, and already we're starting to see the first flowers coming out . These will of course eventually transform into hot chilies. 

 Now, time to go back outdoors. Last year we bought a shoot off a blackcurrant bush (pictured below). To be honest, as it looked like nothing more than a twig, I didn't really hold out any hope for anything growing from it. How wrong I was. Over the course of last summer, the twig grew into a bone fide blackcurrant bush. It eventually reached a height of about two and a half feet before the autumn kicked in and slowed its growth. 
A couple of weeks ago, buds started to appear on it, and at this point, it's continuing its skyscraper-like growth. We're collected a bucket of composted manure from the plot, and scattered it over the base of the bush. 

The blackcurrant is a really decent addition to the garden. It's a decent looking plant, and gives off a fantastic aroma. 


(Pictured right, you can see the original "graft" that the blackcurrant grew from - its the straight "twig" in the dead centre of the bush). 

The extent to which the blackcurrant has grown this year is obvious from the photo to the left - last years growth is the "woody" grey part of the stem towards the bottom. All the green stem is this years growth (so far!). It's about fifteen centimetres growth so far. 


I'm training some of the branches against the trellis to ensure they don't get crowded. Hopefully this will also make it easier to pick the fruit in years to come.
The leaves will come in useful to make a fruit tea. 

And, leaving the best news for last, our blackcurrant bush has started to produce fruit (pictured right). There are several bunches of these berries growing on the bush. I'm really excited about when I can finally harvest them, though I'm in several minds as to what to do with the berries - jam? - cordial? 
Any ideas greatly appreciated, please just leave a comment on the bottom of the blog.

There's also some good news on the gooseberry front. The gooseberry sapling I planted this year hadn't shown any signs of life, and after the frosts of early April, I had given it up for dead. 
However, after checking on it today, I discovered a few buds shooting up. 
It's not much, but the blackcurrant had small beginnings too, so I'll be patient. The idea of having both gooseberries and blackcurrants growing in our back garden next year is a very satisfying one!  

Strawberries

Last year we planted out a few strawberry plants, which grew some decent strawberries (every single one of which was enjoyed by Thomas!). In the autumn, these plants sent out "runners", which I replanted around the garden. These runners are now starting to blossom, as can be seen from the picture above. Not sure quite yet how many strawberry plants survived, but every one is a bonus. More details will follow on my blogs in the future.

On a final note - the forager in me wouldn't be happy unless I mentioned that some "hairy bittercress" (Cardamine hirsuta, pictured left) is growing fairly prolifically at the bottom of my garden. 

Most people would think of this as a weed - myself included. However I also know that this is a perfectly edible little gem of a weed - and it's not bitter at all.

As its name suggests, it tastes almost exactly like the "normal" cress most people will be used to - i.e nice and peppery, a lovely addition to a summer salad.