Overwinter vegetables and first meal of the growing year

Yesterday, I ate my first full meal from the garden, a good two weeks earlier than I did last year. I was very pleased with this. It was horrible. I learned a lot.

The meal was this:

Invisible chips!

Steak, chips, early broad beans and carrots, with the latter two coming from the garden. In theory, fairly simple.

The broad beans came from a November sowing to survive over the winter and provide first vegetables in March/April time. They did the surviving thing great, but failed to produce anything more than leaves and some very nice flowers in April, upon which point, I promptly forgot about them. April's a very busy time as just about everything wants sowing then and my wife and daughter occasionally want attention too, they were right down the bottom of the garden and they kinda... well, fell out of the back of my head.

Until yesterday, when I spotted there were beans aplenty and harvested some of the bigger ones for dinner.

Now, broad beans can be harvested at two stages - either really early, when you can eat them whole like a French or runner bean, or quite late, when you remove the seed pods and just eat the beans inside. Yesterday, I thought I was eating them early. Turns out I'd missed that point by about a week or so. Bugger.

Still, my incompetence aside, there are other beans developing on the plant, and I have now learned to pick them before they look like the above picture. The bitter horrible taste has helped me grow as a person and as a gardener. I'm not sure what my wife gained from the experience. Perhaps nausea.

Still, that was only one vegetable on the plate. Surely the second vegetable could make up for it. Not as though it's my nemesis or anything...

You may remember last year that, in the midst of the great carrot experiment disaster, I had a problem with non-sprouting seeds late on in the planting season and subsequently planted a quick-growing variety in the hope of trying to get them up before the end of the year. I failed utterly at that, but decided to keep the pots going in the hope of overwintering the carrots and getting something useful in the spring. You're not really meant to overwinter carrots, but I thought, if it's good enough for the broad beans, it's good enough for the carrots.

It worked:

Holy crap, actual carrots!

Sort of. These carrots were perfectly edible, if not particularly well sized - that little collection up there was worth just under one adult's portion and I ended up scrubbing them rather than peeling them for fear of them disappearing on me. However, planting in August and harvesting in May has ended up with some very confused carrots.

Carrots are a biannual plant, that we treat as an annual. Basically, they're designed with a two year lifecycle - they grow first year, survive the winter and then use the second year to turn into pretty flowers so that they can spread their seed. The tasty bit is where they're interrupted halfway through, when they've stored up enough food to survive winter, but before they've put any of that into being a flower.

These ones have survived the winter, started thinking about turning into flowers and then have been yanked up and eaten. As a result, they ended up being neither one thing nor the other. The outside was nice, but each one had woody cores that just had to be eaten around. Considering that they were too skinny to peel, that didn't leave much actual eatey-bit.

Tasty. I don't think my wife's forgiven me for cooking her dinner yet.

However, overwintering carrots is still a partial success story, and I think there's options to improve. People on the interwebs have tried this before me and a bit of research suggests that I want to plant them a month earlier and harvest them at least 2 months earlier, in order to give them a bit more time to prepare for winter and a bit less time in the spring to think about flowering.

Basically, overwintering beans and carrots is great and could feasibly result in me getting first meals as early as March. I've just been slightly incompetent this year.

In other garden news, I am very close to my first functioning cabbage, which will no doubt be used to further my 1 year old daughter's education in her Polish heritage with glomkis. I think that'll be ready for next weekend. We had also had our first five strawberries from the clay pot, which I made the mistake of harvesting while carrying said daughter. She took one out of my hand, decided it was nice, and then demanded the rest. Wife and I shared one between us.

The strawberry plants that were involved in the accident appear to have mostly survived, although they're still a bit too traumatised to produce fruit yet. Lots of flowers and leaves, no fruit.

And finally, as I'm sure you've all been waiting for, the results of the final two Ruby Queen sweetcorn sowings:

Guess it wasn't the plastic root-trainers that caused the last 52 seeds to fail, huh.

Nothing from another 5 seeds. Quelle surprise. Also, bollocks.

Still, I have planted out my three successful Ruby Queen plants and hopefully they are enough to be fertile with each other and not too inbred.

Cletus, the slack-jawed sweetcorn husk, in the making

PJW

My mind is going... I can feel it.

Always label everything in the garden. You always plant seeds and you're so enthralled by the idea of what you're planting that you're convinced it's burned into your memory. Then you go away for a week or two and do real life stuff, only to end up with this:

I have no idea what these are. They're definitely intentional, but that's pretty much all I've got. Courgettes, maybe? Asparagus peas? I don't think they're dwarf beans, but I can't rule it out. What really bugs me is that I distinctly remember being pleased about planting them, about having found a place where they'd fit, because I was worried I wouldn't have room. But nothing besides remains - it's been eaten by mortgage broking.

I don't even remember if there's actually meant to be three of them or if there's only meant to be one and I was going to weed out the weakest two seedlings.

It's made worse by the fact that this is one of a set of two identical planters in my garden, which I normally plant identical crops in. The second one also has something unidentified growing, but it's clearly not the same thing.

Don't drunk-garden, kids.

Chard? Parsnips? Beetroot? Spinach? Could be anything. Vegetable surprise.

What hasn't been a surprise is the winner of the sweetcorn race of last week. Bloody Butcher produced seedlings in 7 of the 9 pots planted and actually produced 2 seedlings for 4 of the pots. That's 18 seeds, 11 germinations, resulting in 7 successful seedlings that are now thriving in the Three Sisters bed.

The second batch of Ruby Queen, on the other hand...  has been slightly less successful.

ONE!?

One damned seedling, again growing at a ferocious rate yet surrounded by barren earth. That's 1 from 26 seeds in this sowing, bringing us to a grand success ratio of 3 from 55 seeds. Radioactivity be damned, that's a shitty strike rate. Unfortunately Ruby Queen is very difficult to get in this country, as it's not a popular cultivar (no idea why!) over here, so I can't even change supplier and blame the seed.

My only thought is that the Ruby Queen has been planted in the plastic root-trainers, while the Bloody Butcher has been solely planted in the little degradable fibre-pots. Technically speaking, the root trainers are supposed to give better performance (which was why the Ruby Queen got in there, being first-sown and the preferred crop), but I suppose it could be a factor. I've planted the last five kernels of Ruby Queen into two fibre-pots, in an attempt to get one more seedling to at least allow me to plant a block of four plants.

Soon to be 3 from 60

That picture is everything that's growing under the artificial sun at the moment and represents the tail end of the indoor planting season. On the left are my new sweetcorn disappointments, the middle is swede and the right are replacement courgettes for the one casualty of the garden so far, which was either squashed by cats or hamstrung by slugs.

This weekend, I'm sowing the beans for the Three Sisters, a couple of rounds of dwarf French beans and the winter vegetables and then that'll pretty much be it for sowings for this year's crops. Next up - the actual eating.

I hope.

PJW

Sweetcorn racing

One fact which I was interested to learn recently was that modern sweetcorn is entirely impractical and mostly nuclear in origin. Wacky American scientists in the 1940s put lots of different seeds and plants in the path of atomic radiation, as they believed that nuclear war was inevitable and the best thing to do was research which foods would survive the radioactive fallout and be available to the post-apocalyptic survivors. Most plants, unsurprisingly, didn't take very well to irradiation, but a random mutation in corn resulted in a multitude of new varieties that decupled the amount of sugar of ordinary corn.

Since this discovery, people have been breeding these new varieties to try and get sweeter and sweeter corns. Nowadays, you'll struggle to find a variety of sweetcorn that isn't "super-sweet" (and, incidentally, less nutritious), signifying its nuclear origins. However, like the bulldog, cross-breeding in search of a few characteristics has left us with a poor fragile cripple that can no longer reproduce on its own. Corn kernels are supposed to be fat and puffy, as they store starch that keeps the seedling going through the long and drawn out germination process. Modern super-sweet varieties have nice tasting sugar where the blah starch used to be - quick energy that doesn't store well and doesn't last long. So the kernels look like this:

The now traditional teaspoon for scale in the background

The above picture is the super-super-sweet Ruby Queen that I've been trying and mostly failing to grow this year and the above theory explains a lot - they're just running out of stored food before they've managed to germinate properly.

2 from 18 isn't a winning strike-rate

This has left me in a bit of a bind though, as I need more than two plants to run my planned Three Sisters bed and it's not possible to mix-and-match varieties. I've planted some fresh Ruby Queen kernels in the hope of getting some more, but there's a fairly good chance that I'll get the same result again. Plus, even if I do manage to get another 2-3 viable plants from this new sowing, the two that have succeeded won't bloody stop growing and any new plant may not mature in time to fertilise the first duo,

Yep, the bloody thing's outgrown the seedling root-trainer before its fellows have even broken the surface. Strikes me as somewhat rude.

When it's good, it's very, very good. When it's bad, it's indistinguishable from a bag of Swift potatoes.

So, plan B has now come into effect. Still a red sweetcorn, but this time less sweet and more savoury and with the bonus of an awesome name - Bloody Butcher. The difference in the kernels is clearly visible.

See the results that you get with the Charles Atlas home bodybuilding DVD. Now only £9.99 for all three discs! The planting that made a seedling out of Sid!

And it seems to be paying off. I sowed nine pots last week and I've already got five seedlings poking their noses above the soil.

The pots on the left are the chard plants to replace those arbitrarily decapitated by the tortured brassica cage last month and which totally aren't my fault for killing.

It's possible that they may not taste quite as good as the Ruby Queen, but if I can get at least six viable plants (enough to do the 3 sisters), then I'll count it as a win. And hey, maybe it'll taste better? I wasn't overwhelmed with the super-sweet sweetcorn that I grew last year - it was nice enough and better than any sweetcorn I've previously had, but as someone who didn't like the sweetcorn he'd previously had, that's damning with faint praise. Maybe something a touch more savoury will hit the mark?

Alternatively, the Ruby Queen has 25 new seed sowings and about two weeks in which to impress me and produce another 4-5 plants. The race is on.

Yes, there have been more boring races than pitting two varieties of sweetcorn against each other; I just can't think of any right now, cause I don't want to. Because shut up, that's why.

PJW

Internet fame and other setbacks

I was at a wedding party the other night and someone, in the middle of normal conversation, made a reference to "Fuck carrots, eh?" It confused the fuck out of me; I was under the impression that only a couple of friends read this, possibly out of pity (and my wife, of course, who's contractually obligated).

It turns out that it's more popular than I thought. At a party mostly full of people who I know and like, but don't get to see very often, no less than 6 people came up to me specifically to say how much they enjoyed reading about my vegetable garden online. Not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with an audience. Hi guys - I'll try to keep doing whatever it is that makes you read this and not do the other things.

This time of the year is where the garden work switches, from sowing and cultivating seedlings, to planting things out and letting them grow and spread. I now have most of my major summer/autumn vegetables planted out in the ground and thriving.

Brussels sprouts 

Broccoli 

Experimental tomato bed and oca 

A plethora of beans - French, runner and broad from left to right. 

More oca, more French beans, some mange tout and a nasturtium

I have also planted out my leeks for the winter. If you remember last year, I learned a valuable lesson about leeks - despite being a leafy plant, the actual eatey-bit needs to be buried underground. Those who plant their leeks on the surface get lots of inedible green leaves and not very much in the way of an edible white stalk. I'm actually following the instructions and planting them in deep holes this time, so that they can be buried as they grow taller to elongate the stalk.

Thinking of things which need to be buried, I'm attempting something new with my potatoes this year, which may or may not work. In order to get the best harvest of maincrop potatoes, you're supposed to "earth-up", which basically means burying the leaves in dirt to encourage the plant to produce more potatoes higher up the stem. With the quantities of potatoes that I grow, this requires a lot of expensive dirt and a lot of backbreaking effort to apply it.

STRAW!

I did some research on the interwebs and found a lot of people claiming success with growing potatoes in straw. The idea is that the straw blocks out the light as well as dirt, fooling the plant into thinking it's underground. It's quicker, cheaper and requires a fuck of a lot less effort to apply. Plus, it has the added advantage of being easy to lift away and compost once harvesting's begun. No more digging for potatoes; now I just have to lift away the straw et voila.

At least, therein lies the theory. I'm willing to give it a go because it'll save me so much work, but I'm not convinced that it will block out the light well enough to not affect the harvest. Plus I've got trust issues with straw due to previous bad experiences. This time, I bought the straw from a local farm shop instead of pet straw, which brought its own issues. A bag was £2 and a bale was £3. I'd be a fool not to buy a bale, right?

Turns out that bales are very good value for money, as they are very heavily compressed and contain a lot of straw. The tied bale just about fit in the boot of my estate car. I put it in my shed and then cut the pieces of string that were holding it together so I could get some out. And then it just about fit in the shed. I used as much of it as I could, but I still have this much left:

Let's hope I don't need anything towards the back of that shed for another year or so.

Not a clue what I'm going to do with it.

The other disaster recently was not self-inflicted, but was instead the actions of the bloody winds that will not stop whistling about. My beautiful vertical gardening strawberry planters survived everything that nature could throw at them. Unfortunately, the fence that they were hanging from did not.

 Before

 After

After repairs. I was too upset to take a photo of what they looked like when I found them.

Thankfully, they all appear to have survived their faceplant to the concrete and I've managed to replant all of the ones that were thrown free. Whether they'll produce anything this year or be too traumatised is in the balance. I've also got my nifty vertical gardening planters, that are supposed to lift the strawberries into the sunlight and away from slugs and other pests, sitting on the ground, which is far from ideal. At some point, I'll look at finding somewhere else to hang them, but at present I just don't want to risk them going for a burton again.

Still, to end on a cheerful note, here's a picture of the vegetable garden in all its glory, lovingly stitched together from several different photographs.

PJW