Where the hell I've been

Wow. July, huh? That's quite a long time ago, isn't it?

The thing with gardening is that it requires time, especially if you're planning on writing about it afterwards. Something else happened in July which put something of a crimp on my time:

Daughter 2 of 2. Please see instruction manual for correct operation details.

Turns out that two daughters are actually more than double the work of one and I didn't actually get back out into the garden after that last post. This meant that a lot of it died a horrible, painful and messy death.

However, there were some successes from the year. I learned a great deal about sweetcorn and the fact that you do need to give it an awful lot of space if you want to get anything from it. I produced a massive amount of plant and sod all actual food from my Three Sisters garden. In fairness, the beans and the courgettes did produce, but I didn't get a chance to get out there and harvest, so they rotted on the vine.

I also learned about some of the odd foods that I grew. New Zealand spinach/kokihi - tasty, virulent, produces like nobody's business but not something I use very often in cooking. Oca - generally tasty, requires more space than I gave it, really didn't play nicely with the tomatoes. Purslane - hard to tell apart from weeds and probably got uprooted, as I got none. Sea kale - does not like pots and takes a year to thrive even in the ground. Daylilies - delicious to slugs and snails, dead now.

I also managed to achieve my goal of a purple soup. The purple cauliflower let me down, but I managed to use ordinary white cauliflower without diluting the colour of the purple potatoes and purple carrots too much.

So, now the daughters are both a little bit older and I have a little bit of free time back. Back to the gardening? Well, yes and no. I've just moved house this month, which gets me a larger house (to fit all the daughters that I have in), but significantly smaller garden space. I reckon I can fit in 2m² of raised beds in the back garden, which is something of a downgrade on the 14m² that I had at the old place, not to mention the myriad planters, pots and bags that were scattered inbetween.

This has forced me to a) concentrate on what I actually want to grow and eat, and b) get creative. The front garden now contains 2 x fig trees, 2 hanging baskets of strawberries, 1 hanging basket of blackberries, 2m of window box filled with strawberries, 2 blueberry pots, 1 gooseberry in a pot, some jerusalem artichokes, 3 planters for oca, and a bed which I plan on putting 2 rhubarbs and surrounding them with nasturtiums so that they don't look weird. I've also managed to find a very interesting bush raspberry - instead of growing up tall and taking over, it spreads outwards and can form a hedge, so I've got three of those on order. Oh, and a dwarf cherry tree. Front lawns are overrated.

Of course, this downsizing does mean that I've got an awful lot of stuff that I need to get rid of. Remember the broccoli cages that I constantly effuse over? Well, I have about 7 of them and need only 2. The spares are free to a good home, or even a mildly bad one.

Also, I have about 7-8 raspberry plants going spare, as well as some seed jerusalem artichokes. I would recommend both to anyone with even a little bit of space in their garden - they grow straight up, so require very little dirt, grow anywhere without complaint and produce loads of fruit/tubers. Anyone who wants one/some, let me know.

Oh, and there's plenty of mutant raspberry if anyone wants that. It has eaten through all of the barriers and colonised the bed next to it. I think moving was worthwhile just to put some distance between me and it.

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.

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

April Update

Spring is sprung, in sort of a damp way, and the garden is thriving. I have nascent figs on my fig tree, the grape vines have come back to life and all around the garden, things are sprouting that I intended to sprout. I love this time of year - I'm always shocked that things are doing what they're supposed to and the miracle of food from the ground might be likely to happen again.

Not pictured - all the things that've been eaten by slugs/birds already.

One thing which hasn't gone to plan is to start relying solely on my own produce from May, which was part of the original terms of the challenge. The plan was to plant seedlings early and use the sunlamp to give them a headstart, which hasn't worked as well as I would've liked. I hoped for cabbage and carrots to tide me over, but the January carrots are very spindly still and the cabbages are still more promise than reality and while we could survive by just not eating any vegetables for a month and having loads of pasta, I feel that would be somewhat against the spirit of the rules!

Next May, I will have the overwintered cabbages, carrots, cauliflower and kale to feed us with, as well as a freezer's full of stored veg, so I've decided to push the challenge back to run from June to June instead.

That looks a lot more likely to happen - the first set of seedlings that I grew have mostly survived the transfer into the ground. I started with 3 broccoli, 3 cabbages, 7 cauliflowers and 3 brussels sprouts. Of those, only 3 cauliflowers and 1 brussels are pronounced dead yet, which is a pretty good hit rate for me.

If anyone's playing along at home, the best advice I ever received was to use bell cloches to protect vulnerable seedlings - these are basically miniature greenhouses which you place over the seedling so that light can get in, but cold winds and predators can't get in until the plant is big enough to look after itself. I've managed to make my own, shockingly enough out of empty Diet Coke bottles and they're doing a really good job of keeping my future meals alive.

A surviving cauliflower

The next exciting stage is when they stop looking like leafy things that may or may not die and start looking like miniature food. Hopefully, that'll be in the next few weeks.

PJW