Inspiration

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.

Christmas Veg

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!

Good Roots

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.

Brassica Saturday...

... occured the last weekend in September. I harvested 2 cabbages, 2 romanesco cauliflowers

and my second batch of brussels sprouts

The first batch were picked the previous weekend: here they are with their follow Sunday dinner accompaniments

Having never successfully produced sprouts or decent cauliflowers for that matter I was pretty impressed with myself. Some of both are currently stored in the freezer.

Magnificent Peppers

I have had some spectacular peppers this summer, both sweet and chilli

The last sweet peppers were picked in mid-September. They freeze extremely well and I have a few batches tucked away to use in all manner of recipes.

In the main, chillies kept producing until mid-October and I had to pick them all at once because they were starting to dry on the plants

Scotch bonnet came in later than the other chillies; this pic was taken on the same day as the above

and I picked this very one today

I repeated my successful preserving method from last year for the excess chillies and pickled them

or turned them into traffic light chilli jam

Potatoes

I emptied the last sack of main crop potatoes today,

which reminded me (again) that I have not posted for ages. Potatoes have served me well since I emptied the first sack so here is selection of pics since then

In other potato news, the Christmas sacks were coming along nicely, but then a month or so ago the haulms started to fall over and then turn brown.

I just left them to it until today when I had a rummage in one sack of each variety (charlotte & red duke of york) and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of decent spuds in each... which I pushed back under the soil.

I doubt they are still growing, so I might do what I did with the earlies and main crops; chop the tops off and leave them in the soil until required. Hopefully they should be okay, but I'll move them undercover if it gets too wet or cold.

Seedlings

Most of my sowings from last week have already come up; in the potting shed, chinese cabbage

and lettuce

Outside in the wicker planter, both chicory and wild rocket have come up

I may get some autumn / winter salads after all.

I also have some larger seedlings in the potting shed. I went to a food festival a couple of months ago and one of the pop-up restaurants was giving away chilli seeds. Even though I thought it was probably too late for them to mature and produce any fruit this year, and unlikely I would be able to successfully over winter them I sowed a couple anyway... this is them now.

Will just have to see how I get on with them.

Dancing Vegetables

I like to think that my produce is talented... this is what someone else managed to get them to do.

Vegetable Dance

It made me laugh.

Summer Sowing

Once again my good intentions to sow successionally have fallen by the wayside, so today I attempted to rectify that by sowing a selection of lettuce (reine de glaces, little gem, romaine ballon and romana bougival), chicory, wild rocket, spring onions, chinese cabbage, calabrese and autumn king carrots. I'm about a month behind with the carrots so will just have to wait and see if anything comes up. It would be fantastic to have some to pull up on Christmas day.

On that subject, the potatoes for Christmas are coming along nicely; the plants are now peeking over the top of their sacks and looking very healthy

I gave them one last topping up with compost so they should be okay outside for a while yet.

Today's harvest made for a very pretty trug so I thought I'd share a picture of that too

I have decided that the peppers are actually sweet banana... I saw some similar plants in the garden centre today and they look exactly the same, plus the description that they ripen to orange then red was exactly what mine have done.

Similarly, I think that the orange chilli peppers are cheyenne because I saw them in the garden centre too... mystery solved.

This is what it's all about...

... first corn on the cob of the year, off the plant and in a pan of boiling water in seconds

:-) :-) :-)

Ripe Sweet Peppers... almost

Sweet peppers are starting to ripen... the red ones (bellboy) - need to find a way to turn this round without snapping it off as the back of it is still very green

the yellow ones (luteus)

but these ones (sweet long), according to the picture on the label are supposed to be dark green

I suppose I should have thought something was amiss because they started out a light green / yellow colour so it was probably unlikely they would ripen to dark green.

It's not just restricted to sweet peppers, I think I have previously mentioned that one of my cayenne plants doesn't seem to be producing cayenne chillies... don't think they are supposed to be orange / yellow and they are the wrong shape

The jalepenos on the other hand which should be chunky and are ideal for stuffing, look more like cayenne

I previously suspected a bit of label swapping as I bought all my peppers as little plants, but who knows. As long as the chillies are hot and the sweet ones are sweet, it doesn't really matter that much.

More Fruit...

... just the regular kind though, pears and plums to be precise. Both trees have now been stripped of fruit.

I read somewhere that you are supposed to pick pears when they are slightly under ripe, which is how I prefer to eat them anyway. So these have been picked at the perfect time.

The plums on the other hand are probably a bit over ripe. I'll know for next time to give them a squeeze rather than look at the colour of them. I can't remember what variety they are but for some reason I thought they wouldn't be ready until they are red. A few of them should still be okay to eat now, but most of them will go into a preserve of some kind.

I made a small batch of jam with some of them a week or so ago, so maybe I'll try a chutney recipe with these ones.

Exotic Fruit

When growing something for the first time I'm always a little bit cautious about when to harvest, so with regards to my cape gooseberries I thought I'd go with how they look on top of desserts in fancy restaurants.

I know that the outside is supposed to be light brown, a bit see-through and feel like paper, so this one looked about right.

You can also see that the fruit inside is orange and when I gave it a squeeze it was firm with a little bit of give. There is also a very sweet smell coming off the plant. So I picked it and was not disappointed.

The taste was amazing!

There are a few more that are ready to be picked now, but also lots of green ones

and even some new flowers appearing

I have no idea how long it is supposed to produce fruit for but hopefully for a while yet.

Last of the Courgettes...

... and it's a bigun!

I did actually let this one grow on purpose, unlike previous specimens which caught me by surprise.

I didn't notice any smaller ones on any of the plants so I think this might be it now.

I'll leave the plants in the ground until I need the space just in case there are a few late arrivals.

A few more firsts for today

First ripe chillies were picked this morning.

According to the label the orange ones claim to be cayenne... don't think that's correct though. All my chillies were bought as little plants this year so I guess someone was having fun label swapping. I'm not too fussed what they are as long as they are hot.

I haven't successfully grown beetroot for a couple of years; I think they just failed to grow... all leaf and no root, so I was glad to see these ones sitting proud of the soil. There are still a few more in the ground so hopefully they will root up too.

I was surprised when the beefsteak tomatoes started to ripen so soon.

They are not the biggest beefsteaks I have ever seen... only slightly bigger than the regular tomatoes, but last year most of this variety had some sort of deformity so I can cope with them being a little under-sized... good things come in small packages after all.