A surfeit of cauliflowers

Speaking of not liking to throw viable plants away, my order of 21 cauliflowers seedlings was delivered today.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I made the decision to just buy cauliflower seedlings to avoid the debacle of last year and was kind of narked that I could only buy interesting colours in a quantity sufficient to cover 3m2 of nothing but cauliflowers. I have room for 5 cauliflowers in my vegetable plot according to my plan and I reckon I can probably squeeze in a sixth if I harvest a cabbage next week. This means that I now have I now have 12 cauliflower seedlings in various-sized pots, taking up the patio space in the pretty garden, with another 4 still in the packet because I didn't have enough spare pots of sufficient size.

I told you - strawberries were just a red herring the thin end of the wedge,

I'm telling myself that I'm keeping spares in case of the ones I planted out dying, but I can't see myself needing 15 spares, even with my cauliflower-growing skills. Don't suppose anyone wants some cauliflower seedlings? They're in funky colours? Anyone? Bueller?

Anyway, amidst all the shocking waste, those cauliflowers mean that I've just about finished planting for the year. The only things left to go are the climbing beans for the Three Sisters (atMFWTWKLitA) and the winter vegetables - kale, purple sprouting broccoli, over-winter cauliflower and perpetual spinach.

On the subject of over-winter vegetables, I've decided against planting more broad beans for next year. The ones for this year have been a phenomenal success, providing massive plants, loads of veg and doing exactly what I expected of them. The only downside is that I've realised that I don't really like broad beans. Only a minor drawback, I know, but probably enough that I won't try and grow them again next year.

Probably.

Finally, does anyone have any idea what purslane is meant to look like? It's one of my exciting new vegetables for this year and it's supposed to grow really well as ground-cover under broccoli, but I'm having a little trouble.

See the four big things in the corners? Those are definitely broccoli - I know this because I planted the seeds in deliberate locations and marked where I planted them. See the green bits in the middle? Yeah, they could be anything.

I may have improved a lot from my days of categorising every plant as "probably a nettle", because it stood as good a chance of being right as any other guess I made, but I apparently still can't tell the difference between a weed and something I want to grow. Usually, I rely on just murdering with a hoe everything that's not in the precise location where I know I planted something, but that doesn't really work when the sowing instructions for a vegetable are "chuck on ground and eat whatever comes up."

Hopefully none of the weeds in my garden are nightshade.

I think I might just plant some more broad beans.

PJW

The Ocaey-Cokey

So, anyone remember the new experimental tomato/oca bed, that was based on top of the bones of the failed carrot experiment from last year? The theory was very simple - a ring of tomato plants, which would grow big and tall, with a bushy oca plant in the middle that would spread out and provide ground cover without shading the tomatoes overly.

I'm beginning to think that pot's cursed.

Big and tall.

This is the problem with growing odd vegetables - it's very easy to get information on how a broccoli plant grows and what to expect of it, but more difficult to find what an oca does without growing one. I think it's safe to say it doesn't play nicely with tomatoes in that close a proximity.

I did consider trying to rescue the experiment - I turned the pot so that the shaded tomatoes would get their time in the sun, I fed them special tonics to encourage them to grow and I gave thought to trimming back the oca bush, as that allegedly wouldn't hurt the yield with the actual eatey bit being the roots. However, I quickly came to the conclusion that that was just shifting the deckchairs around on the Titanic - the pot either had to contain oca or tomatoes, not both. I had four other oca plants growing in various places in the garden, so that made my choice for me.

What was surprising was that the oca plant came out in one piece. I expected to have to hack it to pieces to get it out, but the root ball was compact enough to fit through the hole in the plastic mulch. I was left with a relatively undamaged plant and the sheer amount of crap that fills my sheds and attics testifies to my waste-not-want-not proclivities.

Thus, the Three Sisters bed has now been transmuted to "The Three Sisters and the Mad First Wife That We Keep Locked in the Attic."

Hannibal yams. Definitely not allowed out to play with the other children.

When I first started planning the garden for this year, I considered planting an oca in this bed on the basis that it would a) need harvesting far later in the year, b) have deep roots and thus not interfere with the sweetcorn or beans and c) is supposed to be low and bushy ground cover that's perfect for keeping weeds out of the empty soil that the sweetcorn and beans have between them. I originally decided not to, on the basis of getting the Three Sisters themselves to work properly before I tried fiddling with the theory and introducing something that could potentially fuck up three other crops. However, it turns out that I'm really bad at throwing away fully grown and viable plants, so here we are - another experiment, this one fenced in to try and keep it from eating the other children. Let's see how well this one goes.

PJW