Well, just to harvest some crops anyway. Christmas dinner with home-grown baby carrots and incredibly short leeks. I really should have listened to the books and earthed up the leeks. After months of no frost, December gave us a lot of it, and about 6 inches of snow as well. Now, where could those carrots be?
I planted the carrots quite late this year, but they seem to have put on a bit of a growth spurt with the very mild weather this year. Still no frost! I expect to get baby carrots and not massive ones. The carrots are on the left.
The Pot Marigold at the front are still brightening up the grey days. They are all self-sown from last year. The next bed up has Lamb’s Lettuce and Spring onions in it.
Generally the plot is looking quite bare as you can see in the next two photos. You might just be able to spot the shabby looking raspberries at the front. We planted them very late (March) and only two out of eight actually grew at all. The rest were still just bare sticks.
It’s the end of October and there is still no frost yet. many of the plants are looking a bit shabby, but most of the flowers are still in bloom. We took delivery of a massive pile of well-rotted manure in preparation for the winter digging.
As you can see the two Jerusalem Artichokes are getting very tall and starting to flower. I would guess-timate that they are about 10 foot tall. Recent stormy weather brought down a few of the thick stems, but it still looks healthy. I wonder what it tastes like?
In front of it is the Corn that is not doing so well. They need a lot of sunshine and I don’t think they are suited to our heavy-clay soil. Not many cobs on there as yet. To the left are the courgette plants that have been prolific this year. We have to water and harvest them every 3-4 days. They are currently covered in mildew and are only have a few yellow flowers on them. I think they will need composting soon as frost is due at this time of year.
We planted florence Fennel and Leeks in July – a little outside the last planting dates. The leeks are are the top bed out of the main three, and the fennel is the front one. Not sure if there will be enough sunshine or a long enough frost-free period for them to be worthwhile, but We decided to risk it. As you can see, the middle bed is still producing lots of healthy cucumbers and self-seeded nasturtiums.
I’m still please though as they are notoriously difficult to grow. They need a lot of water, food and protection. The butterflies managed to get through the butterfly-proof netting many times and we didn’t really weed the bed much, so it’s amazing we got anything. 4 cauliflower heads out of 7 planted.
I spent a bit of time this weekend tidying up the pond. Mainly weeding as I never really dug out the horsetail from this patch of land before I put the pond in, and the spent compost I’ve been using to build it up keeps sprouting stray plants. I also levelled it off on one side and expanded the other. The plan is to put quite a few spring bulbs and some perennials in here to keep the weeds down and make a nice little corner for sitting next to in the summer heat. Well, that’s the plan anyway…
The dreaded blight has taken hold of my tomatoes once again. Last year i got relatively few cherry tomatoes, but this year i was pleased with the fruits that were showing. We had taken about 15 tomatoes already from the six plants and i managed to save all the green tomatoes below:
Not sure if they will ripen yet, but i read somewhere that they can be cooked when green and used in chutney.
I like courgettes, but we are struggling to eat enough of them to keep up with our harvesting. Currently we have eight in the fridge, have used six this weekend and brought back this lot yesterday. Courgette ‘Black Beauty’ are the green ones, while the yellow ones are ‘Soleil’. The yellow ones were much sweeter and more moist than the usual green ones.
The runner beans continued to crop well as you can see below. The dark ones are Scarlet Emperor and quite tasty. The lighter ones are smooth and not so nice. These were described on the packet as climbing french beans, but look almost identical to runners beans except with white flowers. They were billed as a heritage variety, but i won’t bother with them again. The other picture is of our first cucumber crop this year. Both are outside varieties and are very spiky on the outside. The yellow ones have lots of tiny spines on them (making them difficult to pick up without gloves) and we might have to peel them.
