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