2010 successes - home garden

Well, 2010 is not over yet, but we're transitioning into the colder autumnal darkness. Worth marking what were the successes and failures in the summer garden this year.


Upside down tomatoes - not prolific, but no blight. They are starting to ripen now. Yummy!
Courgettes doing great. Onions and shallots were fab - all harvested, dried and stored.
Some potatoes that self seeded produced a huge crop in a raised bed, and the spuds in pots yielded reasonably.
Garlic got rust, but it seems to be fine - lots stored, and lots saved for planting more in a month or so - will plant loads of hard neck garlic.

Sunflowers in a pot are great - just about to bloom. The cherries ripened, and were very small and tasty in September. No Damsoms. No pears - a few apples on one of the trees.

Lettuces did great in window boxes until July.
Beetroot didn't do so well. Carrots were a dead loss. Sunflowers in the front bed were decimated by slugs when they were several feet tall. Also wasps were harvesting cellulose from other sunflowers and weakened the stem, so the wind blew them over.

We saw lots of butterflies, bees and other bugs in the garden - which was great, the long hard winter would have decimated them. We will leave our teasel to provide homes for them again this year.

The tall beans are getting decimated by the wind - as always - but some nice borlottis growing there.

I have planted a lot of daikon and corn salad for the winter - and the leeks seem to be doing well. Have planted spinach also, it has germinated and is thriving in seed trays.

The home garden was neglected a little in favour of the allotment, and I have left a lot of leeks to go to see to save seed - they have now occupied the same area for > 12 months, so a good weeding is in order. The seeds don't seem to be turning into the small black seeds that I would expect - anyone know anything about saving leek seeds?

Purple podded peas - a picture

 

These are the flowers...

 

...and these are the pods .The flowers are beautiful - all pinks and purples, and smell wonderful. I had never noticed peas being scented before, but I guess they are related to sweet peas.
As I've mentioned the pods are good as mange tout, or you can let them fill out and eat the peas. They are easier to harvest, because the purple stands out against the green.

Purple podded peas

Big harvest today of Purple podded peas. They are really beautiful - I'll have to upload a photo - and delicious, of course. But the peas are not themselves purple, which is a little disappointing in a purple loving household.

However, I made a vegetable stock from the pods, added some garlic tops a bit of thyme and an onion - all fresh from the garden, and little detour for some before the compost bin. Now I have purple vegetable stock!

If you'd like to grow some yourself the Brown Envelope Seeds.

I will be entering my purple podded peas, and some other interesting looking veg in this weekends Mullingar Agricultural show (July 12th, Cullion)- I don't expect to win or even place, but my mother thinks it's important to participate to keep such institutions alive, and I am starting to see her point of view. The fact that her jams, breads, and cakes clear the board, and are fought over at the end is beside the point :-)

First quarter 2009

Got off to a good start with peas and broad beans - they are in the garden and doing well. Any leeks planted earlier are growing, but not terribly fast. All the rest - cabbages, onions, calendula, lettuce have been destroyed by the slugs. Vast amounts of egg shells are not working.

The second phase of planting - tomatoes, borage, ore leeks are doing ok, but I have not exposed them to possible slug predation.

This week I am going crazy planting - mostly in paper pots - and hoping that something will survive my extended absence in April. You spend so much time looking forward to this point in time, and when it comes, it's not what you expected.

Outside, I have planted carrots, beets onions and early potatoes - and some in pots - this weekend I hope to plant the rest.

We are harvesting Kale, parsley, thyme, chard, corn salad. The daikon is going to seed. The leeks are almost all gone, but the autumn sown onions might be worth trying soon.

Broad Beans and Peas

I planted two types of Broad Bean (the sutton, and aquadulce claudia), and some peas (Kelvedon wonder) on New Years eve. They germinated quickly - in a warm place - and then moved them to the shelf at the patio window. Soon they started to develop a bit of a lean, so got put outside for the day to get more light.

Last Friday (Jan 23rd) I erected a Lidl mini greenhouse/cloche/cold frame, and put it over one of my raised beds. One batch of the braad beans went in, and then a severe frost set in. I wasn't expecting the beans to survive -they are frost hardy, but they were pretty tender. But survive they did, so the peas followed today.

We collected a branch suitable for turning into pea sticks while on a bike ride by the canal - the council had been pruning, so we took some ready to go alder.

Also in the cold frame are some chives in pots, and some divided artichokes - we are having a good few sunny days, so it's getting nice and steamy in there.

Spring is coming!!!