Weird and wonderful vegetables

One of the aims of the gardening this year is to grow new things and in that vein, I spent yesterday planting out some sea-kale seedlings.

Sea kale is interesting, because it's one of very few vegetables that are actually native to the UK, rather than being imported from another country, yet it's actually on the verge of extinction in the wild for the crime of being too tasty. It used to grow quite freely on British shingle beaches, but the Victorians ate so much of it that it nearly died out and only the fact that it was made illegal to harvest it in the wild has let it recover.

Naturally, cool + rare + too tasty to be allowed to survive = a vegetable that I'm interested in. Although one of the risks of growing odd stuff is that tasty is a very variable concept. These are described as "creamy", "maritime" and "kind of like asparagus" (which is spectacularly unhelpful as I don't know what asparagus tastes like either!) as well as belonging to the brassica family so having some taste relation to cabbage, kale, broccoli, etc. There is the very real risk that I might put a lot of effort into growing something that it turns out I absolutely can't stand. However my last gamble on jerusalem artichokes worked out very well (which I must write up as a blog post, now that I think about it), so what the hell - sea kale it is.

I actually bought a first lot of seedlings before the winter, planted them up and was very annoyed when they died off in the first cold snap, despite having fleece jackets over them. I had bought from an online nursery that I'd never used before (as rare plants are unsurprisingly hard to get hold of from regular suppliers) and was pleasantly surprised when my complaint yielded the immediate offer to replace them when they had new seedlings in the spring.

When the replacements arrived, I took the fleece jackets off what I'd thought were the dead seedlings, only to discover that they hadn't actually died, but just died back. They had in fact bounced right back with the spring.

In my defence, every other perpetual plant behaves in exactly the same way, so how was I to know?!

I feel kinda bad about the nursery sending the replacements now, so if anyone does want any seedlings, please consider Victoriana Nurseries, who do some very interesting things like perpetual cauliflowers, samphire and giant onions.

The actual growing and harvesting of sea kale is enjoyably odd too. You grow them like rhubarb - while plants like light (expert!), these are more tender when deprived of it, as they form slender white stalks while applying the up == light formula that we're all so keen on. Therefore, I have rewarded my seedlings for surviving the winter by putting a bucket on their head.

Allegedly, that should result in this:

Lifted from https://etaiyy.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/sea-kale/

Although I don't expect to see very much in the first year. As appears to be traditional at the end of every damn blog I write at the moment, I have seedlings going spare if anyone wants to join me in odd creamy salty leafy thing that you grow like rhubarb, I can provide the goods. Although this time it's only partly due to the garden centre only selling in bulk and partly because I've accidentally defrauded them. Someone take some off my hands to help me feel less guilty?

The other new thing I'm growing at the moment is oca, otherwise known as New Zealand yams, although no-one really knows why - they're not from New Zealand (although they are popular there) and they're not yams. They're a tuber from Peru which somehow failed to take off in Europe despite coming back across at the same time as the potato.

Not my hand - lifted from http://thriftyliving.net/2008/11/20/the-mystery-veg-revealed-mystery-veg-2/

They have advantages of being much more resistant to disease, not being damaged by exposure to sunlight (in fact, they taste better if left in sunlight for a few days after harvesting), not requiring peeling and being ready to harvest late-November through December when potatoes are hard to come by. The production of tubers is actually ignited by the plants being able to sense nights being longer than days and is accelerated by the first frosts.

The taste of them varies depending on how they're prepared - straight out of the ground and raw, they are sharp, sour and tangy, but leave them in the sun for a few days and the acid starts to convert to sugar and they can be steamed or roasted like a potato or other root. Plus you can use the leaves as salad greens. As mentioned before, I don't eat many salads, but I might be tempted to try one for these.

I planted out the tubers into pots last month and I'm already getting signs of life.

Trying hard not to make the "not Swift" joke again. We already have the running joke of FuckCarrots and that one's not funny in itself!

Unlike everything else that I have bought, oca tubers are available in sensible quantities and no-one can have any! Although if these are a rousing success, then I will undoubtedly keep back some tubers to replant - the growing process is very much like that of potatoes in that you grow oca plants from planting uneaten oca tubers.

One of the major advantages of oca is that they grow massive bushy green tops, but are generally non-competitive with other plants, which makes them excellent ground-cover crops for tall plants like beans and tomatoes. I'm giving serious thought to including them as a fourth sister for my Three Sisters bed, although I'll probably leave that for another year. I should probably try to achieve actual success with the basic Three Sisters before starting to screw about with it!

As it stands, I have my tomato beds laid out for the oca to be planted into, including this masterpiece which I'm quite proud of:

This bed will be combining quite a few theories together. The red bit is plastic mulch, which has the dual effect of stopping weeds and reflecting red light at the tomatoes. The science says that tomatoes recognise red light as a sign of competition which kicks them into higher gear. The white bits are bits of PVC pipe that watering can occur through, so that the water is going down to the roots rather than sitting on the surface. The dirt is especially mixed to be right for tomatoes and in the middle (where there's no x marking the spot yet) is going to sit an oca, which is a natural anti-fungal and will help support the tomatoes.

So yes, loads of science going into this particular tub of vegetables. The actual tub itself looks kinda familiar, doesn't it, especially in the context of putting a lot of science and effort into a particular vegetable with a foolproof plan for better results. I wonder why that is...

Oh dear.

PJW

And so, it ends

Not with a bang, but with an "Oh, for fuck's sake." This was what I harvested today:

In my garden at present, ready to eat, there is one potential swede, the bags of potential Christmas potatoes and the jerusalem artichokes. That's it. And the freezer drawer from the autumn is looking empty already. I think we can officially say that I would not survive winter on my own and while it would theoretically be possible to go the year round without buying any vegetables, that would mostly be through takeaways and pizza.

Today, I go to the grocer's. Sad times.

Still, while the challenge is ended (and I don't think I'll ever try it again in quite so stern a format as I did this year), it has been fun and a hell of a learning experience. It's a long way from over yet - there's still brussel sprouts (hopefully) and purple broccoli, with cauliflower, broad beans, carrots and sea kale overwintering to hopefully come up in the spring. However, I thought that here (at the end of all things), might be a good time to reflect on things that I've learned:

1) Brassica cages and other forms of netting are brilliant. Everything wants to eat your edible garden if it can and even lethal amounts of pesticides don't really do the job. It's a hell of a lot easier to just seal off anything leafy from the evil things that want to destroy it.

As a corollary to this, I think that kale, spinach and chard may become indoor plants next year. I had great success with bringing lettuce inside and keeping it on a windowsill last year, with the only problem being that I don't actually like lettuce that much. I like kale, spinach and chard, but unfortunately so does the local wildlife, so I don't see much of it.

2) Some things aren't worth the bother. The white cauliflowers that I grew squatted in my garden, taking up masses of space and produced the square root of fuck all. The carrots also achieved little to nothing for lots of effort. Don't get me wrong - I like eating both cauliflowers and carrots, but I can go to the grocers with a fiver and come out with three large cauliflowers, a massive bag of carrots and change.

Next year, I'm cutting back on growing things that I can easily get the same quality easier and cheaper from the grocers. Purple carrots and orange cauliflowers are going to be the order of the day, along with asparagus peas, kokihi, purslane, sea kale, day lilies, dahlia yams, chinese artichokes and oca.

3) Other things are definitely worth the bother. Fresh potatoes, while still being a pain in the arse, do taste better. Sweetcorn, courgettes and mange tout as well. Broccoli and green beans aren't massively different in taste to those from the shops, but they produce masses of edible goodness in a relatively small space and the cut-and-come-again means that you get loads of meals out of them. Parsnips will also get a pass for being awesome.

4) Sometimes it's worthwhile buying seedlings rather than growing from seed. This entry shows the difference between a commercially-grown cauliflower seedling and my windowsill effort. It's very satisfying to grow something just from seed (the fact that I not have a fully-fledged globe artichoke plant speaks to that), but on other occasions it's not worth grinding your own flour.

Secondary to that is making use of grafted plants. My aubergines that I grew from seed achieved sod all, while the grafted one kept going way into winter and had to be actively put down to save the soil for next year. Little bit more expensive than growing your own, but a heck of a lot less frustrating.

5) Raspberries kick the shit out of strawberries. They've not come up on the blog much, but I bought 12 raspberry canes earlier this year and they've been producing solidly from August right the way through to December. Meanwhile, my strawberry bed emitted a brief flurry of strawberries in May and June and then settled down to producing leaves and nothing else (despite the bed allegedly containing several different varieties that should've done the whole season). Plus, there's very few pests willing to climb to get a raspberry off a cane. I think the strawberry bed might have one more year to try and redeem itself and then it might get repurposed the year after that.

What I did have success with was strawberry hanging baskets by the door. They also only produced a brief flurry, but they had the advantage of being a) away from pests and b) right there when I walked out the door. An experiment to be repeated.

I also managed to get at least 4 edible pears and 5 figs off my trees, although I expect more next year as they mature and come into their own. The dessert grapes were a massive, massive disappointment - lots of production, but what we ate made us horribly ill. There's several theories for this: I possibly accidentally picked from the wrong vine and picked unripe red grapes instead of green ones, the grapes themselves were small so perhaps not ready, we maybe didn't wash them as well as we could, the grape vines may possibly just be evil and looking to destroy us - there's lots of possibilities.

Unsurprisingly, we waited until the grapes were 100% definitely ripe, possibly even overripe, before picking the next set. Then we let them rot in the fruit bowl as my wife and I engaged in a grape-based Cold War of seeing who'd break first and eat the grapes "that were probably totally fine, really!"

Next year, there may be some kind of grape jam or amateur wine so that the evil can be processed out before we consume them.

5) Fuck carrots. Also leeks grow underground, courgettes grow huge when not in pots, pumpkins are a danger to everything while producing nothing, and parnsips can (and should) be grown in whatever leftover pot and space is available. Also, I should not be allowed to build things.

6) Winter vegetables need their own, dedicated bed with a brassica cage. Having watched my winter kale and spinach die horribly out in the open (partly through pests, partly through next door's cats pooping on them), I've decided that they need to be undercover. Also, everything needs to start earlier if I'm expecting to get crops through the year, which rules out any more misguided sharing with other main crops. I may plant quick-growing catch-crops, like mange-tout, rapini, ball carrots and chop-suey greens, for the spring, but nothing which I wouldn't be happy tearing up if the winter veg needed to go in before they were ready to go out.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the growing year so far. I went from June to December without buying any vegetables (a month longer than last year) and I got to eat many more things than I did last year. The count of things which I successfully ate from my garden this year is: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, courgette, mange tout, broad beans, green beans, french beans, sweetcorn, spinach, kale, nasturtiums, carrots (for certain values), parsnips, leeks, lettuce, aubergines, green peppers, red peppers, potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, figs and pears. Plus there is still rapini, brussel sprouts, swede and jerusalem artichoke to go.

The most important this was that I learned a lot and, as we all know, knowledge is half the battle. The other half is brutally murdering slugs.

PJW

PS. Fuck carrots.

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

Winter is coming

I'm always a bit ambivalent about this time of year - it's sad to be throwing away hard-grown plants and acknowledge that there will be no more courgettes this year, but it's also the time of planning for next year and clearing out soil for potential new crops.

Most of the beds have gone from this:

to this:

There are a few vegetables left from this year's planting, mostly the long-growing ones that get planted at the start of the year and don't come up until November/December time. The brussels sprouts, leeks, parsnips and Christmas potatoes are looking very promising indeed, whereas I suspect the swedes and jerusalem artichokes have decided against forming any kind of root in protest at being shoved at the back of a bed and ignored. It's the problem with root vegetables - you can't predict whether you've got a bonanza or bugger all until you dig them up, meaning "What's for dinner?" doesn't really have an answer until Schrodinger's vegetable is unearthed.

Still, even without those two, I'm confident of surviving winter. There is a whole freezer drawer packed full of frozen vegetables, even if half of it is my sister's courgette. Plus almost all of the winter vegetables are now properly planted in their rightful positions (finally!), although whether any of those will produce anything is a different matter altogether: I've never tried growing purple sprouting broccoli before, my cauliflower record is shoddy regardless of the season and my previous attempts at kale and spinach have proven delicious to the slugs and snails. Ah well, it's part of the adventure.

Part of putting the winter vegetables in has been drawing up the plans for next year. My gardening schedule is relatively intensive on the soil, but because I use raised beds that are on a concrete base and have year-on-year expanded my operations by handing over my paycheques to the garden centre for more dirt, it's not proven a problem as it's practically new dirt every year. Next year is going to be different, as I'm reaching the practical limits of how many beds can be fit in the garden and so I need to make sure I'm not overtaxing or building up diseases in the soil. A bed which grows broccoli from April to September, purple sprouting broccoli from September to April and then more broccoli the next year is soon going to run out of the minerals that make broccolis and be full of the germs and pests that like to live off them.

The answer is crop rotation where you grow a different thing each year to give the soil time to recover, but unfortunately a lot of my favourite vegetables all belong to the same plant family of brassicae, which makes it hard to move things around. Traditionally, you're supposed to replace brassicae with root vegetables the next year and put the brassicae into the space vacated by legumes (green beans, mange tout, et al), which wouldn't really be plausible in my garden. I'd have 5m² worth of onions and carrots, with 1m² in which to fit all my broccoli, cauliflower, swede, brussels sprouts, cabbage and kale. Not really going to happen.

So I've decided to set to one side the two oldest brassica beds, as they have grown the same crop family two years in a row, and turn them into something else next year. The other two are going to grow brassicae again next year, but they'll get a green manure of field beans (which are a legume) grown on them over the winter to replenish the soil and also have a top-up of new compost to hopefully keep them happy.

As such, the winter veg is being grown solely on the to-be-retired-from-brassicae-beds, as the others need to be left unproductive to replenish them for next year. Which is hard to remember when I'm trying to find a position to home for all of my kale seedlings.

PJW

Finally, cauliflower!

Only two and a half months late cauliflowers, but never mind.

I finally got head! Wait, let me rephrase. My cauliflowers have finally produced something edible and I have eaten it!

This is a major first for me - I did plant some cauliflowers last year and did technically get something onto my plate, but it could by no stretch of the imagination be called edible. It was yellow, riddled with holes, infused with a dozen horribly invasive pest-killer sprays, covered in the mucus of a thousand pests that apparently didn't care and it looked like it had partially rotted. It tasted like despair. I tried eating it anyway - it was my garden dammit and I was at least going to eat as much of it as the pests did - and I only stopped trying to choke it down when I realised I was physically retching after every mouthful.

Have I mentioned how much I love my brassica cages? There's no way I would've got a successful cauliflower this year without them. Life becomes a heck of a lot easier when all you have to defend against is ground-based pests and even they have trouble getting in.

As if this two-portion head of cauliflower wasn't enough reward for my work, a couple more have decided to get in on the act and start creating heads. I don't think I'll have enough to freeze some for the winter, and sadly none of the interesting coloured ones seem to be producing, but it's a hell of a lot more success than I had a few weeks back!*

A lot of my gardening thoughts are going towards the plan for next year already, as harvesting creates spaces that will either need to be filled or protected from weeds. While I can't purchase vegetables until next June in order to complete the challenge, I don't think I'll be keeping up such stringent rules after the challenge is over, so I'm looking at my plans for next year with an eye to whether it's better to grow something or buy it.

I like cauliflower as a vegetable, but it's taken up a phenomenal amount of space in my garden for an awfully long time and so far has produced two portions of vegetables. The stuff that I ate was nice, but I couldn't really say it was a significant amount nicer than one from the grocers or farmer's market. And while it's relatively expensive to buy in the shops, one can't say that my garden produce is in any way designed to be thrifty, especially with the amount of dirt I have to buy each year.

The major merit of growing cauliflower at home is the chance to get interesting colours and types that are rare and/or expensive in shops, but so far this year those varieties have produced sod all. So, right now, cauliflower is sitting right on the line of "Can I be bothered" for next year, especially since crop rotation and better planning for winter veg means I'll likely have less space for summer brassicae next year. Maybe I'll just try the interesting colours and not bother with any white ones.

This eventual cauliflower harvesting has allowed another sprouting broccoli to finally take its place in the ground, probably just in time. The orphanage for displaced brassicae was an utter failure and I eventually gave in, dismantled it and attempted to squeeze the potted denizens into spaces inside the brassica cages (after, of course, having made sure that they'd been thoroughly deloused. Didn't want to go to all of the trouble of protecting my brassicae all year only to introduce a Typhoid Mary at the last minute).

It provided as much protection as an out of date condom that's been attacked by a porcupine. This is what happens when you don't have a brassica cage!

I harvested the last of the onions that had been in a bed next to the orphanage, topped up the bed with spare compost from the harvested potatoes and then inverted the orphanage netting to create a new covered bed.

It's covering a smaller, squarer and shallower shape than the orphanage was and is naturally given shape by the trellis that lines the bed. All things told, I'm hopeful that this will actually be fit for purpose this time.

I give it a week.

Although there is one definite winner in this debacle. When I inverted the orphanage netting, I discovered that, not only were there two butterflies under it (whom I swear mocked me as they flew away, but they didn't come back when I challenged them. Yeah, you'd better flutter, you loud-mouthed punks!) and a veritable colony of snails, but there was also tangible results from my devoured sprouting broccoli.

I was going to kill it out of revenge, but realised how churlish that was. Far better to take it like a man -  well played caterpillar, good game, I was well beaten, I'll get you next time (Gadget).

At least someone's going home happy because of my poor construction skills.

PJW

*And to think you wanted me to sacrifice them Bexx! For shame! Actually, you were probably right, but hey - edible cauliflower!

Vegetable jam

I haven't had a chance to do much in the garden of late due to work, family and other commitments and my to-do list was filling up, so I was very glad to set aside this morning as my day for doing all of the gardening chores.

Thor is angry that people are butthurt about a female Thor!* The sky must be rent!

I quite like rain, so I went out anyway, but only lasted about 10-15 minutes before coming inside as drenched as if I'd jumped in a swimming pool fully clothed.

The one advantage of having a rainy gardening day was that it gave me a chance to plan the garden a little bit better. When I decided that I wanted to try a year without buying vegetables, I sat down and planned out how I was going to get things year-round. I have a schedule which details when I need to plant seeds, when I get to harvest things and which new plants will go in to replace the harvested stuff. This was all painstakingly researched and I thought I had a foolproof plan.

However, either I am too much fool to be stymied by mere foolproof or the interwebs research I made led me astray. The plan tells me that I ate three cauliflowers and two cabbages by the middle of last month, making room for the winter cabbage and the overwintering sprouting broccoli. The reality is that none of my cauliflowers have formed a head yet and I have harvested only my first cabbage today.

Photo not taken in June

Granted, this is much better than last year, in which the Very Bastardish Caterpillars ensured that I didn't get any cabbage and that most of my cauliflowers never formed a head (the only one that I did get, I threw away halfway through eating for being utterly disgusting and riddled with dead caterpillars). So +1 for the brassica nets for doing a brilliant job. However, it has left me with something of a log-jam. The seedlings for the winter and spring brassica have grown up big and strong and are ready to be planted, but there's nowhere to plant them.

This is further complicated by the fact that I can't just put them in any bed that has a space - any bed that I grow spring brassica in won't be usable for brassica next year as there won't be a season in which it can be rested and used for green manure. My grand plan took that into account, as I had set aside which cabbages and cauliflowers would be harvested first so that it would fit perfectly into my crop rotation scheme. Unfortunately nature doesn't appear to've read my grand plan, as the only things close to being harvestable are in the beds that I wasn't planning on rotating!

All things told, it's a mess and has left me trying to fit a quart into a pint pot. I've had to pot up seedlings, then repot into bigger tubs when it became obvious the problem wasn't going to be solved before they became pot-bound, then find a place to put them where the butterflies won't get them. I did have them in the brassica cages inbetween the actual planted cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbages, but the summer vegetables have grown now so there's not enough space.

Thankfully, I got rid of a shed last month and opened up a whole new area of space in my garden, allowing me to create... this thing.

It's like an orphanage for displaced brassicae... in a shanty-town. Made by people who'd never built a shanty town plant orphanage before. Out of inferior materials. Yes, this literally was the best I could accomplish. There's a reason why my wife does the construction in our house.

It's just about sturdy enough to keep the butterflies off, which is the main thing, and has managed to keep most of the winter brassica alive long enough for the first one to be planted into its final position.

Thrive, little sprouting broccoli. And don't let those big kids push you around and steal your lunch sunlight.

The important thing is that I've learned a valuable lesson about trying to cram too many plants into my garden and will learn from this experience next year by reducing my ambitions and growing slightly less. I definitely won't just react to this by trying to build more vegetable beds and expanding the empire further.

Honest.

PJW


*The best stupid comment I've heard about it was someone on Facebook who mentioned off-hand that superhero comics now have an unrealistic and unnatural number of characters as women just to placate 'liberals'. Unfortunately, it was a topic on a friend of a friend's post, so couldn't ask him exactly what percentage of people being women he thought to be "realistic."

Glory or scurvy awaits!

Last day where I can buy vegetables and I'm cooking a roast tonight to use up the last of everything in the house. It's a little bit worrying, as the garden is yet to conclusively be providing. I see salads in my future, as the lettuces are the only things producing reliably.

Windowsill lettuce! You are my only friend.

There is the promise of carrots, but I've had the promise of carrots before, only to discover that the massive great green heads are there because no energy has gone into growing the tasty orange bit. I'll be pulling them up tomorrow to either be elated at the bounties of the eart or distraught at the prospect of a month of pasta bakes and rice-based meals served with needle-thin carrottettes.

Schrodinger's Carrots - the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until it is pulled from the earth by its green leafy tops

Aside from that*, I'm vegetableless. The cauliflowers and cabbages haven't grown as quickly as expected and the mangetout that should be producing now is instead recovering from being mostly eaten by slugs. This month, I are to be mostly eating carrots.

I did have a few tempting thoughts of delaying the challenge for another month, or even calling the whole thing off with some comments about how silly I was being. However, I've put quite a bit of work and planning into this and I refuse to be thwarted in the first month. Needle-thin carrots for dinner it is, every night!

On the bright side, the new daylight bulb and reflector is working great. Due to the dim weather of late, the latest set of seedlings has been pretty much solely under artificial light and they're doing great. Much better than under the old system.

This is especially important as these are swedes for Oct/Nov, purple sprouting broccoli for Feb/Apr, chard for Nov-Jan, and kale and spinach for Jan-May. And pumpkins, just cause I can. Basically, this is the seed tray to make sure I'm not suffering from deficiency diseases** at the start of next year, even if I will be a bit tired of leafy green winter vegetables.

I'm off to go cook my last broccoli for 2 months and my last parsnips for 4 months and I guess we'll see the state of the carrots tomorrow. Wish me luck.

PJW

*Well, there's some new potatoes that won't get used tonight, which is kinda cheating, but I'm not going to throw them away on an arbitrary rule!
** On a side note, my daughter's food will be separate from this challenge if I do run short of vegetables!