A New Home

It's taken a little time and a little fiddling, but I've finally moved this blog from Blogger to it's very own domain - www.alondongardener.com

First Potatoes

Dug up the first of our early potatoes this week – starting with the Home Guards. These have been looking increasingly floppy in the heat, although they don’t appear to be particularly diseased, I think they’re just reaching the end, and aren’t particularly enjoying all the heat!

Anyway, only a single plant dug up (on the basis that “underground” is probably the ideal storage conditions for potatoes right now), with a slightly disappointing yield of just over half a kilo – although there may be a few more potatoes that I missed, as I didn’t want to go digging wildly around and disturb the neighbouring plants.

Absolutely delicious, egg-sized and below new potatoes – and they go wonderfully with the freshly picked sugarsnaps!

A Belated Update

It’s been a long time since the last update; we’ve got a lot done, but it’s always been in such small, bitesize lumps that I never really got around to posting about it. I feel suitably guilty..

Our early crop potatoes have been earthed up, and are just starting to struggle into flower. We’ve already dug up one of the ‘rogue’ potato plant and enjoyed some delicious (mostly quails-egg sized) new potatoes; I’ll probably finish cropping them before moving onto our intentionally grown ones!

The greenhouse is now filled with it’s normal huge tomato plants, all in furious flower and the first fruits on the Marmande are already set. The gerkins have produced their first fruit which have been duly pickled, and even the sweet peppers are slowly growing, although not as rapidly as I would have expected by now.

Out in the garden itself, just about all our courgette plants have at least one small courgette forming up; we now have three rows of sugarsnap peas (sowed at roughly monthly intervals) and already have the first row producing meal-sized crops. The outdoor tomato plants – dwarfs compared to their greenhouse companions, sown at the same time! – are also starting to flower.

Our leeks are growing happily, our broccoli has survived the interest of the local sky-rats – although I noticed this evening that they have now been found by cabbage whites instead. Grr. Sweetcorn is growing quietly and without fuss, as it always does.

Our raspberries have been rather confused by the odd start to the year; a couple of the (autumn!) canes flowered early and have started setting fruit. Quite whether they will sort themselves out enough to fruit at the right time as well, only time will tell. We’ve acquired both wild and conventional strawberry plants over the last few months and if I can stop the damn birds scoffing everything before it ripens, we may even eat some one day…

Finally, there are a couple of rows of lettuce and carrots lurking under our super-bargain mini polytunnels from the Pound Shop. And that, I think, is all our crops summed up!

Click on image to view full size and read text

Almost There!

This weekend saw another visit from my sister, Mary-Ann. Weekends with her are always very productive, largely because she drags me out into the garden at some absurd time of day (i.e. in the morning) and keeps saying "let's just finish this bit" whenever I want to stop and have a cup of coffee.

The practical upshot of this is that we have now, for the first time ever, reached a stage where the entire garden is now cultivated - with the exception of a very small square yard which is currently filled with wild flowers such as forget-me-nots. The original plan was to dig all that up as well, but as I've been working in the garden I've noticed it tends to be covered in bees and other good insects so it seems foolish to stop attracting them in!

Anyway, as a result of some fairly furious work, all the maincrop potatoes are now in; we've also uncovered (over the last few weeks) another half-dozen or so "rogue" potatoes dotted about the place. Now, I understand the ones which are appearing in ground we grew potatoes in last year, but there are a couple in places where I'm sure we haven't had potatoes for 3 or 4 years! Not sure quite how that happened, but I'm happy to take free crops when I find them...

A lot of our seeds have finally made it outside - the courgettes, broccoli and leeks are all now in the ground and hopefully enjoying the warmer, wetter weather we're finally getting. All of our various fruit canes (raspberries, gooseberry and tayberry) are looking good, with the exception of the raspberry from Poundland, which seems to have been dead. Oh well, it was only a pound!

We also picked up some free wild strawberries from a friend; at first I was pretty convinced that none of them had survived the transplant, but I think at least half of them are now showing signs of new life so hopefully we should get even more fruit there.

The one slight disappointment is our rhubarb plant. It seemed to be initially happy, quickly putting out a third leaf and looking quite content - but for what seems like the last month it hasn't grown any more, and looks somehow 'flat'. I'm hoping that it's just down to our recent burst of cold weather, and now that spring is restarting it will leap back into life, but I'm not confident. Still, our current plan is just to leave it alone for this year, and hope that something happens.

25 April Update

Pete's been hard at work in the garden these last few days.

A couple of days back he potted some of the tomato seedlings into grow bags in the greenhouse and the gherkin plants were potted into a large rectangular window-sill pot, also to live in the greenhouse.

Today we could see the first tiny green and purple leaves of the potato plants pushing out and also some teeny tiny shoots from the polytunnelled sugarsnap peas.

Pete planted out the sweetcorn seedlings. After last year's disaster when I'd asked him to cover them, he'd pooh-poohed the idea, only to see them eaten and destroyed by vermin overnight, he duly covered these beautiful speciments in a cunningly jerryrigged metal hoop and netting protective cover.

He planted several marigolds in different areas of the garden, to attract insects, especially hover flies which eat many of the nasties.

And some busy lizzies for colour.

He also popped some sunflower seeds we'd had lying around for eons into the ground behind the apple tree (which has lots of leaves and a few tiny buds already).

And he planted some courgette seeds in the heated propagator, in the conservatory.

Oh and lots of weeding, clearing away more of the bolting cabbages, emptying out the old grow bags from last year and general maintenance work.

Seedlings of purple sprouting broccoli, lettuce and various herbs are looking lively in the greenhouse too. And the pepper and chilli plants are growing fast too.

Pictures to be added later.

Getting Going in the Garden

This post was originally written and posted at Kavey Eats, Kavita's food blog.

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I love that so many people are becoming more and more enthusiastic about growing their own produce. Allotments waiting lists are several years long and eager gardeners are turning to gardens, patios, balconies and windowsills in a bid to give life to tasty, fresh, home-grown fruit, vegetables and herbs.

If you haven’t tried it yet, do give it a go – it’s easier than you think and so satisfying – there’s nothing like popping into your back garden instead of the local supermarket for super fresh produce that you’ve grown yourself!

Pete and I have been growing an increasing variety and volume of vegetables for several years, increasing the space year on year, and we’ve finally reached our goal of converting our whole back garden into a kitchen garden. This year we’ll be growing many vegetables we’ve grown before (potatoes, courgettes, tomatoes, cabbages, leeks, sugar snap peas, peppers, sweet corn, carrots and parsnips) and a selection of things we haven’t (purple sprouting broccoli, lettuce and gherkins).

Plus, this year, we’re finally growing some fruit too. With the exception of a couple of low yield attempts at growing strawberries, and a wild blackberry bush that sprang up in the garden many years ago - much to our dismay, they’re a bugger to get rid of - we’ve no experience with fruit so are very excited.

From a reputable garden centre we purchased a self-fertilising Cox’ Orange Pippin apple tree trained into a flat fan so it can grow in front of the wall and fence without intruding too far into the garden plus raspberry canes and a rhubarb plant (I know it’s technically a vegetable not a fruit but hey, I included tomato in the list of vegetables…). In a pound shop (so not sure whether they’ll survive or grow very well) we also bought a different species of raspberry, a red gooseberry and a tayberry.

I’m really excited about our produce in the year to come!

We still have cabbages and leeks to harvest, the cabbages didn’t do too well – we planted them late and last year gave them very little sunshine to boot. But spring has given them a bit of a boost and some are finally hearting up. We’d better harvest the leeks before they bolt to flower too.

Images from March 23rd 2010:

2010 Fruit

So, we've been wanting some fruit as well as veg.

From Ayletts yesterday we bought:-

An 8 pack of Autumn Bliss raspberries £15.99
A Victoria rhubarb for £4.99

From Burston yesterday we bought:-

A Cox' Orange Pipping apple tree trained and caned into a flat fan shape for £54.99 but unfortunately we couldn't quite fit it into the car so have had to pay an extra £20 for delivery.

Today we popped to Poundland (looking for some cheap pansies to give temporary colour to the front bed until we get the front garden re-done later this year). Didn't find any but did buy 1 each of:-

Rubus idaeus raspberry
Rubus tayberry
Ribes Uva-crispa gooseberry (a dark red variety)

For £1 each!

Pete and M-A have planted all the above out this weekend (except 3 of the 8 pack of raspberries as M-A is taking one and my mum is having the other 2).

Carrot Love!

We ended up leaving the carrots in the ground far too long, what with the snow and our inherent laziness! But we decided we'd better harvest them (and the parsnips) before we left for the Falklands at the end of January, incase they ended up rotting in the ground.

We got kilos and kilos of both!

Here are a pair of giant entwined carrots:

2010 Seeds

Just been to Ayletts for our 2010 seeds:

We have:-

Potatoes: Home Guard and Red Duke of York for earlies and Rooster and Pentland Dell for main crops (£3.15 for about 35 in total)
Leeks: Musselburgh Improved (£1.99)
Lettuce: Chartwell (£2.19)
Gherkin: Diamant F1 (£2.19)
Sweetcorn: Honey Bantam F1 (£2.89)
Courgette: One Ball F1 (£3.40)
Carrots: Supreme Chantenay Red Cored (£1.89)
Tomatoes: Sungold F1 (£2.99), Super Marmande (£1.89) and Harbinger (Free)
Sugarsnap Peas: Sugar Ann (£2.49)
Peppers: Golden Bell F1 (Free)
Purple Sprouting Broccoli: Extra Early Sprouting Rudolph (Free)

Almost the End...

Despite everything being under snow for a big chunk of January, we're still managing to pull some crops out.

Today, we finally dug up all the remaining carrots and parsnips, to be chopped up and kept in the freezer. We managed 3.5kg of (uncut) parsnip and 7.5kg of (uncut) carrot. Considering we only had a couple of short rows of each, that seems a pretty good yield!

Main crop potatoes harvested

And yielded 15 kilos!

OK, so another courgette over 700 grams this week.

I think I may have missed a couple too.

Today I harvested 2.2 kilos green toms and 500+ grams of orange/ red ones.

Used 1 kilo of greens for a chutney. Am intending to make a ketchup with rest.

All apart from 2 tiny toms were tigarellas. We had 2 tiny yellow ildis, the only ildis we got.

More!

More missing posts, I've enjoyed the first 2 cobs of super sweet sweetcorn! Unbelievably good!

Oh and almost a kilo more of courgette too!

More yield

I know we've missed recording a little of the harvest, such as a few tomatoes, a couple of courgettes and a handful of carrots.

Today's courgette 524 grams and is going into a courgette-sakka!

:)

Carrots

As well as the courgette haul yesterday we also pulled 3 carrots, two quite large and one tiny. They were soooo misshapen and cracked it was a lot of work to cut away the bad bits without wasting any of the good bits.

Weight before peeling/ cutting away was 120 grams.

Crikey!

Mary-Ann is here to help with the garden again this weekend.

Today we harvested some more yellow courgettes - these really needed to be picked as they were getting rather large AND crowding against each other so much that one had started to rot.

We took 4 of the spherical ones plus 1 large and 2 small regular ones.

The spherical ones came to a whopping 2645 grams and the regulars to 750 grams!

That's 3.5 kilos!

Giant Courgette!

We're starting to get into a proper courgette flood now; I've just harvested the biggest one for dinner, and it weighed in at a whopping 820 grams!

As well as the regular shaped (but yellow) courgettes, our "ball" courgettes are also maturing nicely - I think I saw at least three, tennis-ball sized (and coloured!) fruit waiting to be eaten. What we need now is lots of courgette-based recipes!

Also, a quick update on planting - once we'd harvested the first early potatoes and pulled out the pea plants, the winter Savoy seedlings (which were getting pretty long and weary-looking in the greenhouse) took over their ground.

Recording yields

More harvesting!

Monday 20th July:
Early potatoes 660 grams
Sugarsnaps 110 grams (though some were shelled as a bit far gone)

Wednesday 22nd July
Early potatoes 964 grams
Long yellow courgettes 590 grams
2 teeny parsnips

Saturday 25th July
Early potatoes 6500 grams
Extra red potatoes 300 grams
Plus the peas and sugarsnap plants were shrivelling up so we took off all the rest and shelled them (even the sugarsnaps as the pods were not really edible)
Peas shelled weight 900 grams
Sugarsnaps shelled weight 120 grams

Regular meals from the garden now!

It's all kicking off now!

We had our first two little cherry tomatoes a few days ago and another two yesterday.

Also yesterday, we harvested our first regular peas. Shelled, we collected 238 grams. Delicious! I ate mine raw and Pete had his lightly boiled with chocolate mint and butter.

Today we took another 106 grams of peas from the garden (shelled weight again).

Plus we enjoyed our first courgettes of the year, three beautiful yellow ones. Together, these weighed 828 grams.

We used both the peas and the courgettes in a thai red chicken curry. Wonderful!

A Working Weekend!

Oh thank goodness for Pete's sister, M-A!

As she's done previously, she took Friday off, came to us on Friday night and worked hard on our garden all day Friday and much of Sunday! (We let her take Saturday off!)

Between the two of them, Pete and M-A completely cleared a huge pile of rubble that had gradually amassed to one side of the garden and then flattened the entire area, distributing the extra earth across the rest of the garden. I did minor wheelbarrow duties but the hard work was all theirs!

As well as this, tomato and pepper seedlings were planted into larger pots in the greenhouse with some of the extra tomato seedlings going into the newly cleared beds outside.

We continue to harvest great yields from the sugarsnap plants though the yellowing appearance of a couple of the plants is leading us to wonder whether they're near the end of their productive life already. Neither of us are too sure how long sugarsnaps naturally crop.

Normal pea plants have loooooots of pods hanging from them so we're looking forward to these filling up with fat round peas soon!

Potatoes are, as ever, looking vigorous.

Carrots too are looking fabulous, though one pulled up against my advice, was just too small to consider harvesting them yet.

The courgettes are still looking feeble. The two larger ones do flower frequently but we're not sure any insects are assisting pollenating male to female flowers so we don't know whether the tiny fruits will grow or drop off. The two smaller ones are looking healthier but small for the time of year.

The sweetcorn seems to have had a massive spurt this weekend, so we're hopeful a summer of sun will result in lovely cobs this year.

Incidentally, the rubble clearing unhomed a cute little mouse who is likely the culprit who has been feasting on some of our planting these last couple of years. He's so cute we hope he finds another home in our garden though we won't miss his vegetable thieving ways!