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.

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