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!
