Tag: vegetables

First Earlies

First Earlies

This is my entire crop of first early potatoes – a 14cm plant pot almost-full. Okay, so that’s not very many potatoes from four plants, but there were dozens more teeny-tiny ones clinging to the roots. Skycarrots reliably informs me that if I’d been better at watering them, the tiny potatoes would have been much bigger – which would have doubled my crop!

So, I’m trying to remember to water my main crop potatoes more often (not that they’ve needed any help this past couple of thundery days!), but I’m a bit worried about some yellow and brown patches on a few of the leaves. I’m not sure whether it’s the beginnings of blight, or whether the plants have just gone a bit crispy in the hot weather. I think I’d better get rid of the affected leaves, just in case. If it is blight, and it travels to my tomato plants, I’ll be very upset!

It’s alive!

Sweetcorn

I’ve been a teensy bit busy lately, and that’s meant I haven’t had much time for blogging. Plenty to blog about, but no time to sit down and write about it! I haven’t had much time to pay attention to the garden this week, and I’ve mostly been watering it in the dark, so somehow I hadn’t noticed quite how many things are just about starting to grow!

Above, you can see what will eventually become sweetcorn. I’ve got four plants and two of them look like this, so that seems quite hopeful.

Teeny Tomatoes

Teeny tiny tomatoes. These are Sungold, and there are a couple of fruits on the Moneymaker plants as well. My other six tomato plants are considerably smaller, and really need separating into six separate pots. That means a trip to the garden centre, so they might have to manage being a bit crowded until the weekend.

Almost Aubergine

Look! The World’s Smallest Aubergine! It’s currently about the size of a blueberry, so I’m hoping it’ll survive and grow a little bigger. I’ve only managed to grow one solitary aubergine in the past. I had to harvest it when it was about the size of a tennis ball, before it was eaten by insects. And I still ended up sharing it with a woodlouse.

Proto-pumpkin

Hopefully this will grow up to be a pumpkin. I have four pumpkin plants, two of which are absolutely bursting with flowers. I’m kind of hoping that most of them are male flowers, otherwise I could end up with a lot of pumpkins!

Almost courgettes

This is quite exciting – there are about half a dozen budding courgettes on this plant. I’ve grown courgette plants before, but never managed to harvest an actual courgette, so I’m really pleased to see these.

Courgette!

And then I spotted this! A whole, real, actual courgette! So exciting! It needs to be a teensy bit bigger before I harvest it, but look!

Ahem.

Sorry about all the exclamation marks. It’s just that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, and I’m really excited that I might actually get some food out of it!

Potato Flower

Potato Flower

Today I found out what a potato flower looks like.

If only I could remember which varieties I planted, I could find out the right time to dig them up!

(Seriously… how do you know when your potatoes are ready to harvest?!)

Harvest Festival

Harvest Festival

Over the weekend Skycarrots hosted a harvest festival!

A small group of us got together and brought masses of food and drinks that we’d grown, foraged, brewed and baked. All of the salad and vegetables were from Sarah’s allotment, with the addition of my cherry tomatoes. The big square pie is pumpkin and feta, and the quiche at the bottom right is tomato and ground elder. The only cheat was the bacon quiche which Paul baked. He may have made the quiche himself, but he foraged for all the ingredients at the supermarket. 😉

If you click on the photo it’ll take you through to Flickr, where you can see some notes about each item.

There were also drinks a-plenty. Mark and Kath had made wine, which they’d nicknamed “wynamite” because of its strength! There was also Sarah’s beech leaf noyau, some cherry-ish brandy, and the remains of our elderflower cordial – now rather fizzy, and probably pretty alcoholic by itself.

Half way through the evening we went on an impromptu foraging trip to a nearby tree, and we all ate raw almonds for the first time. Almonds are related to peaches, so you get a fuzzy fruit with a stone inside it that looks like a peach stone. Crack it open, and inside is an almond! Very exciting.

Our next food mission is to go out sloe-picking, so we can start getting some sloe gin ready for bottling at Christmas. We first made sloe gin two years ago, which was so well-received that people gave us back the bottles asking for a refill! Unfortunately there were virtually no sloes growing locally last year, so we had to disappoint everyone. Thankfully this year there looks to be a bumper crop, so we should be able to make enough for everyone.