crops

My online seeds have arrived

Today I’ve been outside cleaning seed trays, ready to plant tomato seeds. Speaking of which, the ones I ordered online (a variety called Brandywine) arrived in the post today, along with packets of rainbow chard, mizuna, giant red mustard and another Oriental leafy thing called Green In Snow. There’ll be lots of stir frying going on in a few months’ time!

The Brandywine variety of tomato is described on the Tamar Organics site/seed packet as “a large pink-fruited tomato regarded by many as the best flavoured”. If it lives up to its billing, I will be a very happy tomato eater 😆

Rhubarb shoots

The temperatures may have gone down to winter levels, but there are signs of spring in several places, including our rhubarb patch (see below). It’s in a corner of a shady raised bed which contains comfrey and Jerusalem artichokes as its edible components (not much other than that, apart from some elephant-eared saxifrage and a lot of snails). The plastic-coated chicken wire is to stop our cats from using the rhubarb patch as a toilet, and will stay in place until the rhubarb gets more established, using bricks/stones to adjust its height above the soil!

At last – elephant garlic!

This is a message of hope to anyone else out there who planted garlic cloves (elephant or otherwise) and thought they’d been killed off in the cold weather! All four of my elephant garlic cloves have now sprouted – one of them is shown below. Not only that, but all my cloves of conventional garlic have now done so too. Looking forward to roasted elephant garlic in the summer!

The garden in late November

Being the end of November and bitterly cold, there’s nothing much going on in our garden at the moment so I thought I’d post a picture of how the back garden as a whole looks, to put everything in context. I took this photo from the top of a flight of steps leading down from our back door. From the bottom of the steps to the green door is about 4.5 metres. As you can see, it’s tiny by a lot of people’s standards and yet we still manage to grow quite a bit of stuff! I say there’s nothing much growing, but I have still managed to pick a bit of fresh mint to make tea with and I did also pick some Jerusalem artichokes to put in a risotto last night. (In case you’re wondering, you can just about see the Jerusalem artichokes in the photo – they’re the two dead stalks to the right of the compost bin, in the raised bed.) Were I ever to become a proud allotment holder, Jerusalem artichokes would definitely be a “must grow” crop – they’re extremely tasty, and very low maintenance too!

Garlic’s taking its time

Three of the normal-sized garlic cloves I’ve planted have finally poked their heads above the parapet, so to speak.  But no sign of the elephant garlic yet.  I have a feeling that it might be something to do with the torrential rain we’ve been having recently, which has turned the compost in my pots to a sort of spongy mess.   Will leave all the garlic cloves in situ for a bit and see what happens, although surely there should have been signs of life by now?

My elephant garlic cloves have arrived

The four cloves of elephant garlic, ordered from someone with the eBay user ID grahamdn1a (presumably not his real name lol), arrived today. Total cost including postage: £4.80. This might seem a lot but I am hoping that these babies will be the gift that keeps on giving, year after year. When there’s a break in the rain, I plan on planting them outdoors in similar (but deeper) containers to the ordinary garlic I planted at the weekend – there should be just enough fully rotted home made compost left!

‘Tis the season for planting garlic cloves

There’s nothing much going on gardenwise at the moment, although I was glad I watched Gardener’s World the other night, because there was an item on planting garlic. (If I hadn’t seen the programme, I’d probably have forgotten.) Last year at thsi time, I planted a single trough with half a dozen cloves of ordinary supermarket/greengrocer garlic. This July, we wolfed down our garlic harvest in next to no time – they were lovely and tasty, and I wished that I’d planted some more. So this year I’ve done two troughs (each one of which is about 65 cm long by 12 cm deep). I’ve also ordered four cloves of elephant garlic off eBay. I’ve never had elephant garlic – apparently it’s a bigger, milder version of bog standard garlic. Sounds as though it would taste fab roasted as a vegetable.

If you’re wondering what the chicken wire is for, it’s to keep the cats off until the garlic sprouts!

Last of the tomatoes

I picked about three pounds of green tomatoes today – they’re hardly going to ripen off outside in the middle of October and in any case my OH has offered to make chutney out of them! (I would have been foolish to turn this offer down, because I didn’t fancy making the chutney myself as it would have involved spending several hours in a very steamy, vinegary-smelling kitchen.) Plus my tomato plants are going brown and wilty looking (I believe the technical term is “dying” LOL), and many of the remaining tomatoes are acquiring a frostbitten, bruised look – see the bottom pic in this post.

I wasn’t sure whether I should compost my dying/dead tomato plants, because there’s always the risk that I could pass on disease to next year’s crop. Given that I will almost certainly be growing next year’s tomatoes in pure home-made compost, I have decided to err on the side of caution and throw the old plants away. I’d be keen to hear any thoughts from other tomato growers out there though.

Still going strong!

On the tomato front, that is. We must have made about five or six pasta/chilli con carne dishes solely out of fresh, home-grown tomatoes (with a dash of tomato puree for good measure). As I write this on October 2nd, the tomatoes have definitely “peaked”, but we’ll still be eating fresh ones for the next couple of weeks, I think.

At this time it’s a good idea to review what went well in the garden and what didn’t. So here goes:

Tomatoes: huge success
Salad leaves (rocket, spicy leaf mix, oak leaf lettuce mix, sorrel): big success
Chard: Not bad
Rhubarb: success. It was definitely worth planting some in a corner of our raised bed, which doesn’t get much light and wouldn’t have supported much else
Spring onions: success. This is another crop (like salad leaves and tomatoes) which is well worth it, even if you don’t have much space. You can pick them a couple at a time, rather than buying a bunch from the shops and throwing half away
Runner beans: got some nice ones, but on the whole a huge disappointment
Carrots: epic fail – an unidentified pest ate all the leaves.
Courgettes: almost complete fail, although we did get a few small ones
Herbs (mint, chives, thyme, sage etc.): success.

Still picking plenty of salad leaves even now, and am looking forward to next year!

Me and carrots don’t go :(

I thought I was being clever when I improvised a cover for my container of carrots, which consisted of an upturned empty hanging basket covered with fine net curtain. However, whatever it was that had nobbled my carrots before must have found a way inside, because the leaves have been completely eaten. Not just nibbled a bit, eaten. I just have to face up to the fact that I don’t have orange fingers (:sigh:).

On the upside, the tomatoes keep on coming. If there are some tomatoes at the tail end of our crop that refuse to ripen, a neighbour of ours has offered to take them off our hands and make green tomato chutney.

Runner beans are nearly over – they’ve been a real disappointment. The beans themselves have been gorgeous, but there just haven’t been as many of them as last year.