the year of exotic fruit

Although it has been a real struggle to get worthwhile crops of many things this year my frantic sowing of just about any seed I could get my hands on has had some interesting results.  I've never grown squash before but here's a nicely swelling uchiki kuri growing in a sheltered spot outside.

and a melon 'charentais' spreading all over the greenhouse. The plant has a number of fruit showing and I just hope it doesn't get too cold too soon to give them chance to ripen.

For the first time ever I'm getting a decent crop of aubergines. I've often grown them before but usually only get the odd fruit as most just seem to rot away.

aubergine 'halflange violette'

I know that tomatoes are not especially exotic but the outdoor ones are actually ripening this year. Normally they struggle but these 'Maskotka' (freebie seeds with a magazine) seem to be enjoying our Cumbrian climate.

Now, in case you think I have a magic touch I must add that the butternut squash haven't produced a single flower, never mind any fruit, and the peppers are still as green as the front lawn! You can't win 'em all.

food hedge

My experimental 'food hedge' has proved a great success. I've only grown runner beans against it this year but it will be climbing peas and anything else that I can find suitable next year. The pics show what it looked like at various stages.

I'm amazed at how well the runners have done, considering they are in containers and not the open ground. (many thanks to Elaine of U.K. Veg gardeners for the seed). Today I picked just short of one pound of beans and I've previously had a couple of similar pickings.

beans means.....beans!

Harvesting and preserving are continuing to occupy a lot of my time. Apart from having the chest freezer almost full I've done pickled beetroot and onions and made the first lot of chutney. Heaven knows why I'm making more chutney when I still have about twenty assorted jars from last year but it just feels the right thing to do. Saw some Kilner jars on special offer in a local shop the other day so I might have a go at bottling as well. Mmm, might have to find another cupboard somewhere!

In order to make best use of the space I have available I make small sowings throughout most of the year to ensure continuity of supply and try and avoid gluts of any one type of veg. Today I've done one tub of carrots (Early Nantes), spring onions (Lisbon) and lettuce (Little Gem). When ready the lettuce seedlings will be transferred to individual pots placed in a large tray so they can be moved in and out of the greenhouse when bad weather threatens. You can also bring them into the house and grow them on a windowsill if you don't have a greenhouse. By doing that you can have something fresh from the garden even in the depths of winter.

flat out...

....not on my back but at work in the garden and the kitchen. Well, it felt like flat out to me but I suppose most folks would consider it a little gentle exercise!

After more than a week of decent weather there is just so much to do.  I guess all British gardeners have been hoping for some relief after a miserable summer. So there's the inevitable weeding, summer pruning, planting out of winter veg. and harvesting all the maturing crops. And it's not just the harvesting but all that's involved in preserving for the winter. The freezer is filling up nicely and I've made some pickles but there's a load still to be done.

After cleaning and prepping, these turnips and cabbage are now in the freezer

 

 

I'm growing melons and squash this year and noticed the first baby melon yesterday. Not sure how it's going to perform but it's in among the cucumbers in the greenhouse and being treated the same as they are. 

Talking of cucumbers, how's this for a  curly cue

I bet you won't find one like this in a supermarket!

That's it for now. The trouble with being out in the fresh air all day is that you get that lovely warm glow and want to just curl up in bed!

still here, still gardening

For one reason or another I've not been able to keep my blog up to date. I suppose it's mainly down to the long awaited decent weather which has meant a stack of work to be getting on with. The harvesting, preparing and storing of food has to be dealt with on top of all the general work such as weeding, grass cutting, hedge clipping, summer pruning of the fruit trees, etc.

I finally did get blight on the potatoes but I recognizedt it in time, chopped down the haulms and managed to get a reasonable yield considering they were lifted three or four weeks too early. Top performer and one I'll definitely grow next year is Picasso which has the potential for some huge yields, given decent weather conditions.

This morning I noticed that one of the trusses had broken from the tomato plant stem due to the weight of fruit it was supporting.

Three and a half pounds of juicy toms on one truss ain't bad. I've had to tie up the other trusses with strings from the greenhouse roof to stop them suffering the same fate. The variety is Hildares F1, seed bought from Lidl.

And on the subject of tomatoes I'm picking a couple of pounds a day at the moment. Some are being eaten fresh but a lot are chopped and frozen to use in the winter.

These are Amish Paste, supposed to be good for making sauces, etc.

Cabbages have done quite well this year, they must like cool conditions. This one is 'Greyhound' and weighed in at over two pounds.

Earlier in the year there were very few cabbage white butterflies around which was a blessing but they seem to have appeared with a vengeance now the weather is better. Most of my brassicas are under debris netting but I do have a few unprotected and it's a pain having to constantly check them for butterfly eggs.

Well, I'm blogged-out now but I will try and keep things up to date as the harvest progresses.

how close can you plant onions?

This close it seems.

Early this year I had quite a few spare onion sets so I decided to plant them in containers for use as salad onions. This lot are in a supermarket mushroom tray and they've been buried behind beans and assorted other crops until today. Surprisingly none of them have bolted and I've ended up with a good bunch of usable onions once they've dried.

I've also grown picklers in nine-inch pots quite successfully this year.

These are De Barletta but any bulb onion sown from seed seems to work.

The food hedge experiment is coming along nicely with the runner beans in tubs flowering as they twine their way through the privet. Many of the flowers are white and don't show very well but they are there!

If this works as well as I hope it will I'll be on the look out for more climbing vegetables for next year to fill the fifty foot or so of hedge that's available.

I shouldn't complain, but...

everything's coming at once. I always sow/plant small blocks of veg. in order not to have a glut but this year, because of the weather, the early plantings just sat there for ages and have now all spurted into production. Broad beans sowed six weeks apart are all at the same stage and ditto the peas. That means I've spent most of the day picking and shelling for the freezer.

Some of the overwintered onions and the shallots had started to rot so they've all had to be lifted and are trying to dry. A week of sun would help but I'm not sure we'll get that.

shallots drying

The shallots harvest is a real disappointment. Those that haven't bolted or rotted are often no bigger than spring onions. On the other hand I've got some good big onions if I can get them dried. The problem there is that you never know how well they're going to keep until you open the net and find the rotten ones.

the biggest of this bunch weighed in at 353g

I also had to cut three cauliflowers today as they were getting very close to 'blowing'. Another couple of days and they would have gone, so more chopping, blanching and freezing. Cabbages I always sow in modules then pot on into 3-4 inch pots before putting them out on the plot with a good root ball. This ensures a good start and a quick getaway for them. By only putting them out a few at a time with a couple of weeks between them I aim to have a constant supply of young cabbages through the season. Not this year, though. When I removed the anti-butterfly netting to get the cauliflowers I found about a dozen mature plants ready for cutting. They will stand for a while but I prefer them small and tender.

Picked tomatoes are now starting to pile up in the kitchen (not literally, but there's more than we can eat) but I still have loads of chutney from previous years so I'm going to have to think of something else to do with them. I might have a go at making ketchup if I get the time.

OK moaning over but you know that gardeners and farmers are never happy unless they're complaining.

Those of you who like to grow things in neatly ordered rows should look away now. My theory is that the space between rows is completely wasted so you might as well fill it with something. If you do that there's no longer any point in the rows in the first place and you end up with a chaotic mix of plants like this. It works and weeds are not a problem because they don't stand a chance among this lot.

tippin' oot the tattie barra

as they say up north.

The centre display of my back lawn, the wheelbarrow with potato plants, has yielded up its bounty.

The five plants (Novella) gave just under 4kg or 8.5 lbs of decent tubers. Not a great yield but hardly surprising given the appalling weather this year.

After re-charging the compost with a scoop of chicken manure pellets and some BFB it is now home to five cabbage plants. These are 'Golden Acre', a compact fast-maturing variety that should be finished in time for me to get some winter lettuce in. That's three crops from the same patch of ground.

Small space gardening forces you to be inventive and to maximize whatever area you have at your disposal, especially if the intention is to feed your family. I've said before that the ideal of the self-sufficient gardener is to get at least one pound of food for each square foot under cultivation. Given that the cabbages will come in at one or two pounds per head depending on when I harvest them I could easily be looking at 15-20 pounds of food from this barrow which has a surface area of three square feet.

One thing that seems to be enjoying the cool, wet conditions is bush fruit. I picked two pounds of blackcurrants from one of the bushes today and hardly made a dent in the crop.

blackcurrants

The gooseberries are all picked and yields have been the equal of any other year. Also, for the first time, I've got some blueberries. The big problem here is that although you could probably survive for quite a while on jam and fruit smoothies I'm not sure I'd really want to!