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

Artificial sun, mk 2

About a month ago, I decided to adjust the reflector on my seedling sunlamp just a tiny little bit. Unfortunately, as you may recall, the reflector's build quality was typical of my construction work and was held together by sellotape, blu-tac, inertia and prayer.

The inevitable happened and I just managed to catch all the pieces before they destroyed my latest set of seedlings. Thankfully, my baby daughter was in bed at the time or she would've learned several new and interesting words.

It was at this point that my wife decided it was cruel to let me struggle on alone and offered her expertise. She designed and built for me this magnificient creation:

I don't think it looks that much sturdier than mine, do you?

Instead of being built from cardboard, wire and sellotape, this setup is built from hardboard, square dowel and metal fixings to hold it all together. More importantly, the reflector itself is supported from a base on the floor, rather than the previous method of having everything attached to the light fixture and creating a single point of failure.

So, this brand new and improved reflector was created, and that was of course the signal for the bulb to break. Massively annoying; it didn't even have the decency to break in some devastating fashion - the pin broke on the bayonet fitting. It still works, but it won't stay in the socket anymore.

However, that was the excuse I needed to buy another and buy bigger. The new bulb is 105W and kicks out 6800 lumen rather than the paltry 4300 lumen of the old one.

In laymans terms, it's gone from "Ow that hurts," to "AGGGHHH!" if you look directly into it.

Unfortunately, the month-long gap has not been kind to my seedlings. The best windowsill I have is still not particularly bright, as we're semi-detached and the south side of our house is the adjoining wall to the next one.

Up == Light, right? The carrots told us that was right.

The current seed tray is replacement cauliflowers for those lost, chard, tomatoes, peppers and a rather optimistic attempt at growing a globe artichoke plant from seed. None of them are particularly irreplaceable, but I'm really hoping that I don't have to start again.

With any luck, the extra power will be enough to rescue these ones and I can look at moving them outside next weekend.

PJW

Sometimes, I'm not that bright

My last post featured two things - indoor carrots that were struggling from lack of sunlight and couldn't go outside because of the bad weather, and the new sunlight lamp that I'd built to help my seedlings along.

Somehow, I didn't connect these two together until today.

In case anyone's interested in what leggy, undersunlighted seedlings look like, here's the carrots today. Hopefully they'll recover, while also providing a valuable test case to see if the sunlight lamp actually works.

Up == Light, right? Right?

I genuinely can't believe that I didn't realise this before.

PJW

The end of the world in fire and water

The first bit of news is that I have indoor carrots growing!

Need a magnifying glass? I swear they're there.

This is wonderful, as I'd given up on them and gives me the possibility that I may be able to harvest them at the start of April. However, this very much depends on the weather - the half of the experiment that was outside in the plastic greenhouse died a death due to the wind physically removing the greenhouse and tipping the pot over, so I think putting anything this small and fragile outside is asking for trouble while the UK weather forecast still reads "Götterdämmerung."

On the flip side, the plan had been only to keep them inside until they started sprouting, as they don't get much sunlight where they are. I think I'll make a decision after the weekend - given that the wind has managed to rip a wooden post out of a wall and bean me across the head with it; I'd like it to calm down before I put any of my new-grown treasures out in it.

Of course, the current weather also means that all of the preparation work that I spent last month doing for the vegetable garden is in danger of travelling to Oz and setting up a benevolent dictatorship there. The brassica net cages are wired very firmly onto walls, the bottom 6" is buried in the soil and there are bamboo canes acting as struts for all the corners. So far, only one of the four is still standing. I'm hoping the wires have broken, rather than the nets themselves.

I have managed to do one exciting bit of preparation indoors, which is the new seed trays for growing my vegetable seedlings, complete with a sunlight lamp.

Not pictured - the windpocalypse outside

 

Last year, I got a bit overexcited with the idea of planting seeds and started around this time of the year. I revelled in the little green sprouts, and made all sorts of detailed plans about when I was going to put them outside and then was well and truly scuppered by the fact that snow lasted all the way through March.

A valuable note about seedlings on windowsills - they're not very tolerant of not getting much light. A seedling's very simple idea of the world is up = light, light = up. Therefore, if I haven't enough light, then I need more up. There's no use explaining to them that up won't help and that light is hidden behind the horrible slate grey clouds and that they're already on the best windowsill in the house for what little light there is. I'd woken them up and they were going to keep growing till they had enough light dammit.

I ended up having to put the gangly poor things out of their misery when they reached 4 inches long and relied mostly on shop-bought seedlings that year.

This year, I'm hoping to cheat with technology. Indoor lighting normally does nothing for plants, as the light that they give off is a) too weak and b) the wrong colour, being tilted more towards the reds and yellows of the spectrum. This bulb gives 4300 lumen in the same light spectrum as the sun, which involves more blue light which is the one that plants photosynthesise from. In theory, in close proximity to the seedlings, it should be enough to help them alongside the sunlight from the window.

Building the lamp itself was a challenge - I started with a cheap clip-on socket for £2.99 and came up with the plan of clipping it to the window catch. This worked fine until the bulb arrived - it's about as long as my forearm and quite heavy. It wouldn't physically fit into the socket until I cut some of the plastic away and then when it did, it wasn't keen on staying horizontal without support.

One jury-rigged bracket from scrap wood later...

The reflector frame is made out of a wire coathanger, a cardboard box, tin foil, some gardening wire and prayer. There is no adjusting of it - it took me three hours and a great number of swear words to get it into place, and another hour after that to put it back together after I "just move this slightly"ed and the whole thing fell apart. It works though - the light is reflected back down with enough force that you don't want to look directly at it when it's on.

No doubt it will encourage my seedlings to grow beautifully, right up until the point it comes loose and crushes them like the hand of a temperamental deity.

The first seeds are sown next weekend - early cauliflower and cabbage. Looking forward to growing again.

PJW

Beginnings and experiments - January carrots

The first seeds have been sown.

You're not supposed to sow vegetable seeds in January as a rule - too cold, too damp, not enough sun and any gardener who gets overenthused and sows too early will get nothing but disappointment and sickly seedlings that are starved of sunlight. I know this mostly cause I did it last year, but it's very hard not to. Winter's back is broken, the sun's coming out again (in patches) and the month of January is filled with preparation of beds, acquiring of compost and planning of where everything's going to go. All of the seed packets you ordered have arrived and it's very hard not to jump the gun and get right down to it in the hope that the weather will have picked up by the time you come to plant out, right?

I'm attempting to stop myself from giving in this year by giving in in a very controlled fashion and experimenting with indoor carrots.

Carrots are supposed to germinate at 10⁰C, but air temperatures outside at the moment are wavering from freezing to a max of 11⁰C, which is far from ideal. Quite apart from that, soil temperatures in the ground and raised beds won't warm up for at least a month without help. So my theory goes that maybe if you plant them in pots, in an area that will always be >10⁰C, you might be able to trick them into thinking that it's February/March (when you're supposed to plant them). Our baby daughter is going to be looking to try out solid food for the first time in a month or so and it would be lovely if we could start her with some homegrown carrot.

I've got two experiments on the go at once for this. The first is inside my raggedy plastic greenhouse thing, which in theory should trap heat and lead to a warmer air temperature than that outside. This works in theory and would probably work a lot better if the plastic greenhouse weren't riddled with holes. We live on top of a very steep hill and when the wind blows, it howls, so the plastic greenhouse has been wired down in several different ways since it was bought last year and each tiny hole for wiring has allowed erosion to eat away at the plastic cover. Frankly, I'm a little dubious as to how insulating it might be compared to, say, a colander, but it's all I have at the moment. The pot is swaddled in bubble wrap as an insulator and hopefully it'll be slightly warmer than if it were just outside.

The second is actively indoors, on a table near a window. This has the advantage of being guaranteed to be above 10⁰C, but the disadvantage of not getting a brilliant amount of light. We don't have any south facing windows in our house (being semi-detached) and growing things on windowsills has proven a challenge before. My hope is that carrots don't need a huge amount of sunlight in their early days and that the weather will pick up enough/they'll grow strong enough for me to put the pot outside before they suffer too much.

In theory, it should work. Maybe there's a reason that back garden gardeners don't grow carrots inside and maybe I'll find out, but as for now, it's an adventure and it's saved me from the urge to plant anything else too early.

PJW