Passed times

So, yes. A few things have happened since my last post. The most significant is the reason why there's been such a hiatus - my new daughter arrived earlier this month and preparations for her arrival took up a significant amount of my gardening time and all of my writing-about-gardening time. However, I am currently in a briefly quiet house, with two precariously sleeping daughters, and have finally had time to go through all of the photographs that I've taken of the garden things that have happened since Wednesday 10th June. It seemed like a good time for a blog.

Following on from one of the last posts, I've learned a great deal about my experimental vegetable of oca. Mostly, it's that the research I did on it which called its growth "low, bushy ground cover" have a very different interpretation of low and bushy to me. The tomato pot that I excised the oca from last month has since gone on to produce some thriving tomato plants, however, the ones where I left the oca in are struggling to keep their heads above water:

 Let's play the "Spot the Tomato Plant" game! I promise you, there are three to find in this picture. One of them might even survive!

I've tried trimming them, tying them down to reduce their height (they're supposed to collapse to the ground in autumn anyway), squashing them under the tomatoes which I've staked up to encourage them to grow above the morass. No joy - it seems they thrive on being beaten and take up waaay more space than advertised. I think if this bed is to be repeated next year (which isn't a given, considering I don't even know whether I like the taste of the damned things yet!), then it will be with one oca plant flanked by two tomatoes, rather than the current setup of two ocas and three tomatoes.

One thing which I did learn from researching whether I could prune them is that the leaves are edible and actually quite tasty. They're lemony and tart and would go very well in a salad, assuming of course, that I ever ate any. Still, a bonus for any salad eaters out there who fancy a dual use crop.

Speaking of salad-dodging, the exciting adventures in making a tower garden from coke bottles have ended in complete disaster.

It was such a good idea in theory, but the practice has been let down on two fronts. The first is that it requires constant watering - by dint of its position by the drainpipe, it is sheltered from the rain and the very small surface area at the top would minimise any weather-based watering anyway. This is exacerbated by the fact that the bottles are see-through and so the sun bakes the dirt with the greatest of ease, leaving a dessicated tower that's impossible to rehydrate. The water flows around the edge of the dirt without sinking in and trickles out of the planting holes rather than going all the way down to the ground. I just don't have the regular free-time to water this as often as it needs.

Secondly, the design of the thing means that there's very little space for roots, meaning that you're limited in what can successfully grow out of it. Lettuce works just fine, as does sage, parsley and chives. However, the things that I actually like to grow and cook with regularly - brassicae, thyme, rosemary, strawberries - have all failed miserably as they require more space than this is able to provide.

In short, its only flaws were that it doesn't suit my gardening style nor the foods that I want to grow. Aside from that, it's perfect.

In terms of other things that have happened, actual food has started appearing, including purple potatoes and purple carrots.

These are particularly pleasing to me given my failures last year. The purple carrots are these ones, planted inside back in mid-February under the artificial sun. It's taken 6 months, but they've grown to a pretty reasonable size. I think the major ingredient which I was missing last year was patience - carrots are alleged to be ready to pull within 3 months of planting, but that's certainly not my experience this year. I've got a few more tubs of them planted at 3 week intervals and the next batch are certainly not ready to be pulled just yet.

I did manage one purple carrot last year, but it was of a variety called Purple Haze, which is the most common and popular purple carrot seed available. I've got no idea why it's common or popular, as it's actually only purple on the skin outside with the inside being orange like any other. This variety is Purple Sun, which was harder to find, but much cooler for being purple all the way through.

The purple potatoes are also a significant improvement on last year, which again suffered from being purple on the outside while less purple on the inside, as well as being not particularly tasty. These ones are very good to eat and, while they do lose a bit of their colour when cooked, I'm still hopeful of getting my ambition of bright purple soup. The only ingredient that I'm now missing is a purple cauliflower. And what are the odds of something going wrong with those, huh?

The great STRAW! experiment is undetermined as to whether it's a success or not. I was led to believe that I would be finding potatoes in the midst of the straw and that's just not been the case. Mostly, I've just had to dig through a thick layer of straw that's gone ooky to get down to the dirt, which has been delightful. However, once the straw's removed, it's revealed some potatoes sitting on the surface - not quite as advertised, but better than a kick in the teeth. Hard to tell if it's reduced my harvest at all, or even been any improvement over not hilling the potatoes at all. I think we'll see how the harvest as a whole goes before rendering an opinion, but given how much of a pain in the arse the straw has been to handle, I don't think it'll be making a reappearance next year.

I've also had a courgette, cabbage and broccoli from the garden, but those are relatively regulation vegetables for me now as they're quite simple to get crops from. However, one of the new vegetables has been an unexpected and resounding success.

This is kokihi, or New Zealand spinach, which I mentioned in a previous post. It was advertised as growing like a weed and being invisible to UK-based pests. Given that three weeks before that photo, that plant looked like this:

...And that I have cut off this amount of leaves from the plant twice in those three weeks:

...I'm willing to buy the "growing like a weed" claim. A huge, huge improvement on the sorts of yields available from regular or perpetual spinach plants, which are barely worth growing at home. I've had more meals from two kokihi plants in a month and a bit than I did from four perpetual spinach plants all last year. The only restriction appears to be that it likes direct sunlight; my second kokihi plant is near a fence and is nowhere near as impressive.

Just as impressive is the quality of the leaves that I'm harvesting. There's nothing less appetising than green leafy veg that something else has had a nibble at first and no amount of pesticides, slug pellets, companion plants or prayers has seemed sufficient to keep slugs from dining on my previous attempts at spinach, chard, and kale. The kokihi hails from New Zealand and promises that nothing in the UK recognises it as food, which is backed up from the fact that not a single leaf on the plant has had even a single hole, nibble or slug trail. They're just not even remotely interested. It's wonderful.

And while pests don't recognise it as food, I certainly do. It tastes just like spinach, cooks and wilts just like spinach and can be used in all the same recipes. It's not quite as good for you in terms of vitamins and minerals as ordinary spinach, but it's a close-run thing and I'd wager when you take into account the fact that you can pick it and eat it within minutes, rather than buying it from a shop where it's probably a day or two old (not to mention pesticides), it's probably even closer.

I'm looking forward to seeing how long it produces for, and whether it can even be extended into being a vegetable that produces in winter, which would be awesome. I also want to dig it up and see how deep and widespread the roots are - if the roots are deep and narrow, then it might make a perfect ground-cover under brassicae next year (and maybe even keep slugs and snails away from the main event), whereas if they're shallow-rooted, then they'd be perfect under green beans or tomatoes.

Lastly, I've finally found a use for those surplus cauliflowers that I had to buy in bulk. I've left them in the pretty garden, in large enough pots that they'll grow plenty of leaves, but without enough space to really accomplish anything, and they are now providing excellent food and breeding space for all the butterflies brought into the garden by the buddleja. Helping butterflies + encouraging them to stay the hell away from my crops = success in my book.

PJW

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

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.

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

The carrot experiments - an update

Constant readers may remember that I was having a problem with this:

And so I attempted to do this:

To try and achieve this:

The results so far have been promisingish. There was a very long stage where I thought the entire thing would be an expensive mistake. The compost sank slightly and the sand didn't, which meant watering it resulted in the sand washing over the earthy bits where the carrots were supposed to be growing. In addition, water + sand resulted in a lovely greenish tinge, which didn't fill me with hope that I'd be growing anything but mould.

Maybe I could claim to be growing nutritious algae? Or creating my own penicillin? Would you guys buy that?

However, little shoots finally appeared and it looks as though we have full-blown carrot action happening.

In theory. I've been betrayed by promising-looking carrots before, the filthy leafy-headed liars. We'll have to see what's actually underneath when the time comes to pull them up.

The observant among you might notice that only half of the carrots have come up. When I decided to grow my second batch of carrots this year, I bought several different varieties of interesting colours to experiment with, but I also bought a good amount of a nice reliable orange type called Eskimo. It was basically my control group - the weird carrots might fail, but I could rely on Eskimo to come up regardless of weather, watering or whatever.

You can probably guess which seed variety was planted in the blank spaces. Bugger.

By the time I'd realised that the entire packet of seeds was rubbish, I'd already sown about 30 of them in various pots and planters around the garden. Every time a tub came free after harvesting onions, nasturtiums, mange tout or garlic, I'd followed the same plan as with the experiment - I'd bored out holes with the drainpipe, filled them with special compost and stuck some Eskimo seeds in there to provide autumnal vegetables. To say I'm annoyed at wasting my time and effort would be something of an understatement.

To make matters worse, by the time I'd realised that I'd effectively been carefully planting expensive grit, it was verging on too late to rectify the situation. You *can* plant carrots in August, but they have to be the quickest growing variety possible, you have to hope there won't be an early frost and you have to feel lucky. Plus, when the packet says you can sow in August, they really mean the weekend of the 2nd/3rd, rather than the 24th.

Still, I've gone around today and resown all the sites with a variety of carrot seeds that I know do grow very quickly. I used them last year to great success and I've got no idea why I didn't just use them again - I still had half a packet left! I suspect I got overexcited with the January seed-buying fervour and wanted to try something new. Shan't be doing that again.

I also took the opportunity to move some dirt around and built a new bed for carrots, as I've discovered that a lot of vegetables do better in a bed than a pot and want to see if that holds true for carrots. With any luck, the big sowing today should means that we'll be inundated with carrots for Christmas. We'll see.

In one last bit of more successful news, I finally have a confirmed cauliflower head!

It's only one, out of nine, and it is very petite, but I'm still claiming success. With luck, it's still growing and there'll actually be enough for a meal in there when it comes time to slaughter it. Here's hoping.

PJW

Look ma, I'm instagramming!

I hate to be *that* guy, but... well, here are pictures of three meals that I've had this week.

So far, we've had three meals worth of new potatoes, mange tout, nasturtia flowers, some broad beans, spinach and most importantly, carrots that can actually be peeled without halving in weight. We're not quite up and running full-time yet - the portions of vegetables have been minimalistic and the garden is now stripped bare until the next batch matures - but it's the sign of things to come.

I am now planning ahead and replanting for the next lot of food. November to January will require a bit of planning ahead - some of it is going to be winter crops like kale, spinach, chard, leeks and sprouts and some of it is going to be stored vegetables like carrots and potatoes.

Proud as I am of my humungous carrots, I don't think there's going to be too many spares to store if I don't work out how to grow them bigger, so I'm trying a new experiment.

This one comes from the top google result on "growing bigger carrots" and is an allotment diary of someone trying to grow carrots for exhibition for the first time. The idea is that, instead of growing in soil, you fill a box with sand for spacing and drainage, bore holes in it and fill the holes with a special mix of carrot-dirt. It worked for him in that he got some seriously scary carrots out of it, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I'm obviously starting later in the year than the gent on the website, but then again I don't plan on growing carrots big enough to use as truncheons, so I think I should be fine. I bought a big 50 litre tub, filled it with sand and then bored 16 holes using a bit of drainpipe.

I then made up a soil mix for the carrots to grow in. Carrots apparently like loose non-lumpy soil to grow in, so I started by taking some used potato compost and sieving out all of the lumps, twigs, and other bumpy bits. I then added a reasonable amount of bonemeal and some high potassium fertiliser, as these would help replenish what the potatoes had taken and then some. I then sieved in some top soil and some fresh compost before mixing the whole lot in a bucket with some vermiculite (a mineral that aerates the soil and keeps it loose, as well as absorbing water well). In theory, this should be carrot manna. We'll see.

Used a funnel to pour in the mix and letting the whole lot settle down for a day or two before putting the seeds in. I'm planning on having several options to keep myself entertained - orange, red and purple. The amount I've spent on this getup vs the price of a carrot in a supermarket means that I at least need to get interesting colours out of the deal.

Still, if all of them grow to a good size, that'll be 8 meals worth for me, the wife and the youngster, which'll do very nicely indeed. And I guess I can always get another 50l tub or two...

PJW

Success!

What I harvested from my garden this evening:

It's not perfect, but there's enough for a portion of potatoes, a portion of carrots and mange tout, and rhubarb crumble for me and my wife tomorrow night (plus some strawberries). And it all came from the magic seeds* I planted in my garden. Hurray!

PJW

*Technically speaking, the mangetout comes from magic seedlings bought from the garden centre as the slugs ate the ones I grew from seed. Still totally counts though.

More promise, fewer results

Long pause between updates, as the play I've been in came to conclusion. Great fun to do, but massively tiring and hasn't left me much time for anything that's not play or daughter. On the bright side, I've been surviving mostly on junk food, so the continued lack of vegetables hasn't proved too much of a problem.

Actual size

The carrots have continued to be pitiful, despite my attempts at appropriate fertiliser. I have some theories as to why that is - I think I've spaced them too closely together and have possibly pulled them up a little too early - but any suggestions from the audience would be appreciated.

On the bright side, the garden has flourished in the face of being neglected for a week or so.

From the humble original seedling of a few months back...

To the "Holy crap, broccoli!" of today

There's promise of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and also imminent courgettes and beans.

It still seems like magic to me that all of these came from tiny little seeds. Doesn't seem possible. Of course, the promise of  vegetables isn't quite the same as actually getting some. We'll see next month, I guess

The major change to the garden this month is that I've got rid of one of my many sheds. It was falling apart and a fortuitous turn of events allowed me to get it taken away for free by someone who thought they could rebuild it on their allotment, but it has given me the nice side-effect of giving me more room for another vegetable bed.

Spot the difference.

I'm resolutely not building anything there yet, as I want to see how this year's harvest goes before deciding what I want to put there. I'm currently struggling to fit everything in that I wanted to grow this year, especially the winter vegetables. The purple sprouting broccoli is going great guns and I've got nowhere to put it until I've harvested a few cauliflowers. At the moment, pots are my friend, but it's not a permanent solution. Hopefully, it won't stunt the winter vegetables; despite my appalling start, I really would like to have year-round vegetables.

Next challenge is going to be sowing seeds for the overwintering spring vegetables and then attempting to grow carrots that you can't pick your teeth with.

PJW