... and I'm off! Sowing for the 2012 season has finally begun; a little bit later than originally planned, now that I think (hope) there won't be any more harsh frost.
Everything is in the potting shed with the tender stuff in unheated propagators, so fingers crossed it all germinates. I have sown:
- 40 tomatoes; 8 varieties (moneymaker, roma, gardener's delight, cherry, principe borghese, sub arctic plenty, rio grande, san marzano lungo)
- 40 chillies; 6 varieties (hungarian hot wax, rokita, orange wonder, aji crystal, cayenne, unknown from a mexican restaurant)
- 40 sweet peppers; 5 varieties (california wonder, corno rosso, bellboy, diablo, ozarowska)
- 6 aubergines; 2 varieties (viserba, black beauty)
- 6 cape gooseberries
- rocket
- mixed salad
and finally, the charlotte seed potatoes have been put out to chit.
Bring on Spring!!
So, 2012... year of the London Olympics and time for a new sowing schedule. This year I will be expanding my beetroot selection to include chioggia & burpees golden and also a new lettuce, webb's wonderful.
I have also come to the conclusion that I do not have enough space to grow as many brassicas as I would like, so this year I am trying some smaller varieties; cauliflower (fremont), broccoli (matsuri) and cabbage (caraflex).
Back in October I sowed some broad beans for the first time; this was shortly after they'd poked through the compost
after a couple more weeks
and today
I have never been a fan of broad beans, so this is another of my "if I grow it, I might like it" experiments.
Other than those few changes, everything else I intend to grow remains the same.
This year I am also going to weigh and price up everything that I harvest, just to see what value can be attached to it. I won't include things that were grown for last season, like these last few potatoes that I uncovered today
or the remaining leeks and parsnips that I still have in the ground. In a week or two I will start sowing... bring on the new season.
Today I have chosen to relent and buy-in some vegetables... this is not to say I don't have any of my own; there are still a few parsnips and leeks to be harvested, and I have courgettes, peppers and a few tomatoes in the freezer, but the final carrots, swede, beans, sprouts and romanesco were enjoyed over the festive season.
I don't think I what I have left would sustain the household over the well known "hungry gap" and I'm not going to beat myself up about having to buy some veg in because all-in-all I think I have had a pretty good growing year.
So, even though total vegetable self-sufficiency eludes me again I am not dis-heartened and will come back stronger next year. I will be taking inspiration from one of my Christmas presents.
As the rain pours down and the wind blows outside I will be planning my growing season and reading this book from cover to cover.
So, what became of my attempts at potatoes for Christmas? Well, a couple of weeks ago I thought I had failed miserably... I had some friends over for dinner so decided to liberate one sack of red duke of york for roasting and discovered that 99% of them were covered in what I think is scab and the remaining 1% were rotten. Peeling didn't bring the scabby ones back to edible status.
Completely my own fault I think; I hadn't been taking care of them properly for a while and kept telling myself that I needed to move them undercover but never got round to it. The sacks had been waterlogged and I just left them to their own devices.
Anyway, I left the remaining sacks outside to deal with another day; one more red duke of york and two charlottes.
Today, I went out to pull up parsnips for tomorrow's dinner, more about them in a minute, and decided to empty one of the charlotte sacks just to see... well, I was pleasantly surprised.
There were a couple of dodgy ones in there but the vast majority were practically perfect. Now, the yield was a bit smaller than I got from the summer spuds, but as I have never successfully grown Christmas spuds before, I don't know if that's normal?! I will empty the other two sacks after Christmas, just to see what they are like.
Right, back to the parsnips... the final row has now had a couple of frosts so should be sweeter that the ones I have previously pulled up. This row was sown too close together so are smaller in size individually, but were much easier to get out of the ground than the earlier mammoth ones... I got these up with my bare hands.
Today's final harvest was a few lettuce leaves; these will be joined by some prawns for that classic starter we all know and love.
I already have my own carrots, sprouts, swede, romanesco and french beans in the freezer and am so excited about bringing it all together for Christmas dinner.
I hope everybody has a good one!
I've had some whopper parsnips so far this season, most of which I have had to fight out of the ground
Other roots; carrots and beetroot have been pretty good too, producing a constant supply
I ended up having to pull up all of the carrots at the start of October because something started eating them in the ground. These were the last ones that came up.
Swede is technically a brassica but they look and grow like roots so I'm including them here. I have only had a couple of decent ones this year but as that's more than last year I'm treating them as a success.
I have a freezer well stocked with both carrots and parsnips and also another row of parsnips still in the ground. The remaining were sown quite close together and thinning out has never been a strength of mine so at the weekend I pulled up a few of the smaller ones
Very tasty there were too.
