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!

Vegetable jam

I haven't had a chance to do much in the garden of late due to work, family and other commitments and my to-do list was filling up, so I was very glad to set aside this morning as my day for doing all of the gardening chores.

Thor is angry that people are butthurt about a female Thor!* The sky must be rent!

I quite like rain, so I went out anyway, but only lasted about 10-15 minutes before coming inside as drenched as if I'd jumped in a swimming pool fully clothed.

The one advantage of having a rainy gardening day was that it gave me a chance to plan the garden a little bit better. When I decided that I wanted to try a year without buying vegetables, I sat down and planned out how I was going to get things year-round. I have a schedule which details when I need to plant seeds, when I get to harvest things and which new plants will go in to replace the harvested stuff. This was all painstakingly researched and I thought I had a foolproof plan.

However, either I am too much fool to be stymied by mere foolproof or the interwebs research I made led me astray. The plan tells me that I ate three cauliflowers and two cabbages by the middle of last month, making room for the winter cabbage and the overwintering sprouting broccoli. The reality is that none of my cauliflowers have formed a head yet and I have harvested only my first cabbage today.

Photo not taken in June

Granted, this is much better than last year, in which the Very Bastardish Caterpillars ensured that I didn't get any cabbage and that most of my cauliflowers never formed a head (the only one that I did get, I threw away halfway through eating for being utterly disgusting and riddled with dead caterpillars). So +1 for the brassica nets for doing a brilliant job. However, it has left me with something of a log-jam. The seedlings for the winter and spring brassica have grown up big and strong and are ready to be planted, but there's nowhere to plant them.

This is further complicated by the fact that I can't just put them in any bed that has a space - any bed that I grow spring brassica in won't be usable for brassica next year as there won't be a season in which it can be rested and used for green manure. My grand plan took that into account, as I had set aside which cabbages and cauliflowers would be harvested first so that it would fit perfectly into my crop rotation scheme. Unfortunately nature doesn't appear to've read my grand plan, as the only things close to being harvestable are in the beds that I wasn't planning on rotating!

All things told, it's a mess and has left me trying to fit a quart into a pint pot. I've had to pot up seedlings, then repot into bigger tubs when it became obvious the problem wasn't going to be solved before they became pot-bound, then find a place to put them where the butterflies won't get them. I did have them in the brassica cages inbetween the actual planted cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbages, but the summer vegetables have grown now so there's not enough space.

Thankfully, I got rid of a shed last month and opened up a whole new area of space in my garden, allowing me to create... this thing.

It's like an orphanage for displaced brassicae... in a shanty-town. Made by people who'd never built a shanty town plant orphanage before. Out of inferior materials. Yes, this literally was the best I could accomplish. There's a reason why my wife does the construction in our house.

It's just about sturdy enough to keep the butterflies off, which is the main thing, and has managed to keep most of the winter brassica alive long enough for the first one to be planted into its final position.

Thrive, little sprouting broccoli. And don't let those big kids push you around and steal your lunch sunlight.

The important thing is that I've learned a valuable lesson about trying to cram too many plants into my garden and will learn from this experience next year by reducing my ambitions and growing slightly less. I definitely won't just react to this by trying to build more vegetable beds and expanding the empire further.

Honest.

PJW


*The best stupid comment I've heard about it was someone on Facebook who mentioned off-hand that superhero comics now have an unrealistic and unnatural number of characters as women just to placate 'liberals'. Unfortunately, it was a topic on a friend of a friend's post, so couldn't ask him exactly what percentage of people being women he thought to be "realistic."