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

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.

The Carrot Experiments III

Constant readers will of course remember how my tiny carrots led me to try an experiment involving boring holes in a tub of sand with a drainpipe in order to produce something worthwhile and met with mixed results a couple of months in.

A couple of months on and there's been a bit more progress. I came back after my month away from the garden to a bit of a shock.

AHHH!

Ten minutes careful work with a trowel allowed me to peel off the top level of dirt and sand to reveal that the moss, weeds and mould were not a deep-set problem.

Hi! Barry Scott here, asking whether you've got problems with limescale, rust, ground-in dirt.

However ten minutes after that, the rain came down and washed the sand and soil together again, so I'll probably be cultivating some more mould shortly.

The carrots are growing some very impressive leaves, although so far there's only very slender roots underneath. One trick which I've learned this year is that it's possible to see what you're getting with carrots without pulling them up. If you scrape away the soil at the base of the leaves, you can expose the top of the root and see how thick the actual carrot is without doing any damage to it. The biggest ones on the right of the picture currently have roots that are no wider than my little finger, so they're barely broader than the green bits. Given how much effort this whole sand and drainpipe business has been, it's not really giving a good return on investment.

However, it's doing better than my other carrot-related experiment that I mentioned last time - that of growing them in a bed rather than in containers. The theory was that I've found a lot of vegetables grow better in the open dirt than in pots and I wanted to see if it held true for carrots:

Sadly, this is the after shot. The bit of plastic fencing is intentional, btw, rather than just being tramp chic. It's there in a vain attempt to keep cats from using it as a bathroom, although I should really have let them go at it. That way at least somebody would've done something productive with the land.

Apparently not. It could be because the dirt was cold; the seeds were planted late and a big bed takes longer to warm up of a morning than a plastic pot. Or it could be the universe's sign that I should give up with carrots altogether.

Carrots are currently circling the drain as far as growing them next year is concerned. They're cheap to buy and have been a pain in the arse for very small yields this year. I guess I'll see whether I get anything from the multitude of little seedlings that've come up from my frantic plantings at the end of August, and try to take comfort in the one small fillip that I got last week:

Check it out - it's a purple goddamn carrot! Woo!

That was from an ordinary pot, done with my usual method. So much for experiments.

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

Insecure plants

This weekend is the first time in over month that I've been able to get into the garden. September was a month where three weddings and an overseas trip meant that we were not physically in the city for a single weekend and my few weekday evenings were spent recuperating and coping with a fractious and unsettled baby.

Coupled to this was an Indian summer which made the weather unseasonably hot and dry. I came back to pretty much what you'd expect.

Basically, my garden now has abandonment issues. After a long summer of watering, fertilising and regular harvesting, it's panicked at being left alone and different plants have reacted different ways,

- The green beans and courgettes have attempted to buy my love back by putting out as much food as they possibly can, only to realise far too late that I really have gone and the watering is not coming back, resulting in dozens of immature and withered courgettettes and beanlings hanging off desiccated plants.
 - The winter cauliflower seedlings on the other hand just gave up without a fight - they've been dead for weeks, having apparently abandoned all hope the minute I left the house.
 - The fig tree and raspberry plants have demonstrated their pre-existing hatred for me by ripening as much fruit as they possibly could in the first week and then letting it rot while laughing behind my back.
 - Two of the leeks have decided that they don't want to be vegetables anymore, they want to be pretty princesses flowers instead. I have taken measured and fair action, listened to their feelings, tried to understand where they were coming from... and then decapitated them to put an end to that deviant behaviour.
 - The broccoli and brussels sprouts don't appear to have noticed I was gone at all.
 - Two of the cauliflowers saw what the raspberries and fig were doing and decided to try their hand at it because they wanted to be cool. Unfortunately, they must've failed to take into account how incredibly slow they were, as they've managed to produce some perfect cauliflower heads just in time for me to harvest them. Thanks guys!
 - The pumpkins are the clear winner in terms of outward expressions of disapproval at my absence. They have decided that, since there was no more food and water coming at the base, the only solution is outward expansion to go find more supplies. While the base of the plant has withered and died, the vines have kept pressing further outward, forming little pumpkinettes along the way before abandoning them and moving onto fresher ground. In the process, they've been clinging onto any plant foolish enough to be in their way, like a drowning man after a lifeband. In the course of their ramblings they have ensnared a tomato, potatoes, sweetcorn, blueberries, gooseberries, a grape vine, several random pots and a shed.

See that plant pot in the background, nearly 3m away, with the withered plant sticking out of it? Yep, that's where the base of the plant is.

This has basically meant that I've spent the day closing down a lot of the summer cropping section of the garden, which basically means digging up and composting. The courgettes, green beans, cabbage, sweetcorn and most of the cauliflowers are now done for the year, although I have got some frozen and stored for winter. The broccoli is mostly done for as well, although I have a late summer planting which I'm hoping will come to something before the frosts come.

I have also finally taken Bexx's advice and sacrificed one of the crap cauliflowers (actually the one in the picture on that link!) in despair that it would ever produce anything more than leaves.

All mouth...

Although on breaking it down for composting, I did discover the fruits of its 6 months worth of squatting in my brassica cage...

...miniscule trousers. 

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!