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.