Taking up the tuber

I was a little bit concerned that I might have over-cooked it with the number of seed potatoes I bought earlier in the year. I looked at the fact that I was growing two large dustbins and 14 potato bags worth of potatoes, with the prospect of another 8 potato bags for the Christmas potatoes and thought, "I've bought too many; I'll never eat all those."

All the potatoes I own in the world at present.

There are still 8 potato bags which were planted with Christmas potatoes back in August/September, but the problem is that the green tops died off/were eaten very early indeed. So I'm not 100% convinced that there's anything under the soil at all.

Is it a root vegetable? Okay, is it a parsnip? No? In which case, there's a very high probability that it can go fuck itself.

I think I may have spotted my weak link in the Challenge. If there's one thing that I have learned out of this year, it's that subsistence farming is hard. I knew winter would be challenging, but it's very hard living off just what you've grown. Plus, I'm not living solely off my growing: I can buy as many onions, tomatoes, and oven chips as I like, I eat extraordinary amounts of meat and my daughter's food is entirely exempt so I don't have to worry about her. In a survival situation, this garden would not be enough to provide all the food needs of my family, let alone give me enough to trade with the other apocalypse survivors.

My route forward is clear - in the event of the breakdown of society, the entire garden gets converted to parsnip-growing.

I am growing another type of tuber this year to help bolster my dwindling potato supply - jerusalem artichokes. These are very rarely grown in the UK (and bloody expensive if you want to buy them in the shops; last time I saw them in Sainsburys were £3 for a small portion's worth!), but they are a very nice vegetable. You use them just like a potato and they taste like a cross between swede, potato and parsnip - just slightly sweet and nutty.

However, this is the first time I've grown them, so I'm not sure how successful they're going to be. They're supposed to grow big sunflower-like flowers on top of 6-7ft stalks, but everything's died off before the flowers came out, which was disappointing.

I've tried scraping away a bit of the earth and can confirm that there is at least one artichoke under there, but that's about all I'm sure of. It'll be another magical mystery tour when I run out of potatoes.

Not at parsnip levels, but still better than carrots or swedes. PS. Fuck carrots.

PJW

Squirrelling away for the winter

This weekend has mostly been a weekend of worrying about whether I'm going to have enough food to last the winter. The garden has gone back to the same level of production that it had in June - if I harvest enough vegetables for a full meal then it feels like I've taken half the available plants. No beans, no broccoli, no courgettes means there's almost nothing that's cut and come again and so I'm actively ripping up 4-5 plants just for one meal, which is dispiriting.

It's not helped by the fact that most of my early winter vegetables are a pathetic failure. The late broccoli is just sitting there producing nothing, the kale and spinach are doing a brilliant job feeding the local wildlife and my winter cauliflowers are going the way of all cauliflowers in my garden. Plus one of my successful crops from last year has massively let me down - I've had swedes taking up a plot in the garden since May and they're producing sod all. The green tops have died off most of them without a root being formed. I might get one, if I'm lucky.

Not pictured - actual swedes

In addition to this, I've learned a valuable lesson about leeks this year. I'd always assumed that they were above ground plants because, well, they're green and leafy at the top. However, the key words there are "at the top" - the white edible bit is underground and you want to bury as much of the leek as possible so that the white bit is longer. The idea is to dig a hole, drop the baby leek at the bottom of it and then progressively fill in the hole as the leek gets taller, blocking out the light to more and more of it and making it have a long white stalk before it gets the reward of green leafy bits in the sun.

Wrong.

I misunderstood these directions and planted the baby leek on top of the compost. By the time I'd realised my error it was far too late to do anything about it other than to make little hillocks of dirt in an attempt to blot out the light. I've never been particularly good at building sandcastles and so I've ended up with massive leek plants and only enough edible leek for a third of a meal from each plant.

I can also bring you the results of the great carrot experiment, which were... not what I'd hoped for.

Looks promising...

The most flagrant false advertising of size since my size 13 feet. There's no teaspoon for comparison in this picture, but I feel you don't really need it to get the idea.

I'm not even angry - this is just amusing now. I put in so much work into that horrible sand and compost contraption, spent a silly amount of money and my reward is a lot of greenery and three pencil-thin carrots that were actually inedible anyway because I'd left them too long and they'd started to go to seed. I suspect the compost was too rich for them - I did try and weight the fertiliser towards root-growing, but it clearly hasn't done the job.

So, what have I learned from carrots this year? They don't like growing too close together, they don't care about getting special treatment in pots, they don't like having an open bed for them, they don't like being fertilised too much or too little, you can put in a phenomenal amount of effort only for your best results to randomly come from a bed which you did as an afterthought, and any attempts to replicate the conditions that led to a good result lead to sod all the next time.

In short - fuck carrots.

Parsnips are my new best friend now. I don't even like the taste that much, but fuck carrots, seriously. I grew the parsnips on a whim because my daughter and wife like them. They were put into a random cheap pot that I happened to have spare, with whatever compost happened to be left over, and they were just left to get on with it.

I literally gave no fucks about the success or failure of the parsnips - daughter's food is exempt from the challenge (as she gets to eat stuff that's good for her regardless of whether daddy's capable or not) and wife can live without parsnips - but that appears to be the key with root vegetables as they grew quite happily on their own. I only realised that I might have a bit of a success on my hands when I moved the pot for some reason and realised that there were parsnips trying to grow out of the bottom and into the concrete.

The next shock came when I tried to harvest one, only to realise that I couldn't get it out of the pot because it and its neighbour has grown so big that they were wedged in against one another!

Given the personal space requirements that carrots have been having, it's quite refreshing to have a plant that will literally expand to fill the available space. I emptied the entire pot and got this haul:

Every single plant had grown so wide that it was rubbing shoulders with its neighbour; they literally could not have done more with the available room. Notice the one on the far left - it's reached the bottom of the pot, taken a right turn and just kept growing sideways cause physical limitations are for wimps. Did I mention how much carrots can go fuck themselves?

So, yeah, I need to learn to like the taste of parsnips as they are now my forever friends, fuck carrots, and they will be forming a bigger part of my winter diet than I'd originally planned.

On the bright side of winter food, it is now November and I still have a freezer drawer full of frozen vegetables from my success earlier in the year. I'd hoped that I would last all the way until December before having to dig into this, but at least it is there. I've planted some late broad beans and cauliflowers in the hope that they'll overwinter and be ready for the spring, so maybe I'll have some extra fresh veg in March/April. Then again, we are discussing cauliflowers in my garden, so maybe not.

Spring's December's Tomorrow's food.

I've started stashing away potatoes in the freezer too in preparation for the void between the last ones being dug in December and the first new ones being ready in May/June. I've ordered a new variety of seed potatoes this year which are supposed to be very, very quick and will be ready by May. I'll wait and see.

PJW



PS. Fuck carrots.