Corn already?

Baby corn! 'Mini Pop F1,' to be exact.

These you are supposed to harvest as soon as you see a hint of the silks, but I forgot at first and left them a little longer.


Still, it didn't seem to matter and they were still tender inside and a little bigger for longer on the plant. Uncooked they were on the bland side, but once steamed they were delicious and nicer than anything we've bought in a supermarket before.


So far, out of the first block of 20 seeds sown, I have harvested 13 baby corns (I am keeping track of harvests with weights and numbers properly, for once!) I have also sown more baby corn successionally, so there are small, medium, and fully grown plants now, and yet more seeds in the packet for another round in a month or so.


We ate our corns together with a stirfy including yet more Redlegs spring onions (these just keep on coming and getting bigger and bigger. They were planted with a well over-packed punnet bought at a shop, but now I have seeds which I am also successionally sowing;


And a couple more Lebanese eggplants. These are small, but I am wary of letting them get too big and becoming inedible.


And in tomato news? The plants are still going great guns. My early planting of bought-in largish 'seedlings' has proved fruitful to say the least. I have picked almost 4kg in the last fortnight - not including the ones eaten while gardening and never weighed.

Some we eat fresh, some we cook into dinner, some have been frozen whole to cook with later in the year, and some I'm attempting to dry in the oven.

The tomatoes towards the top of this picture are either Tigerella or Green Zebra. I have managed to lose the label (I think it might have blown behind a pile of inaccessible renovation bits and bobs in the shed). The ones at the bottom of the picture are small Grosse Lisse. Now, those stripey numbers are a little on the bitter side if they're not totally ripe, I've found, so they were my chosen candidates for oven-drying (the Grosse Lisse are super sweet and completely beautiful).


The tomatoes are cut in half and spaced out on an oven rack, then sprinkled with salt, and dried in the oven for hours at a low temperature (between 60-80c, as low as your oven will go, basically). To be safely kept at home they need to be as dry as you can possibly make them, like leather, I've read, and even though they were in the oven at 60c overnight they were still quite squishy so now they are in the oven for day 2 to see what happens. They are so beautiful when they are cut, I love the way the seeds are still green inside!


I will let you know what happens with the tomatoes. If they stuff up, never mind, hundreds and hundreds more where these came from!

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Successes and failures

Remember how I mentioned our corn harvest about a week ago? We ate them last night, and they were delicious. Some were perfect and almost supermarket worthy...

And some were decidedly not! Next year I will shake those stalks more assiduously.

 

And out in the garden? The garlic has sprouted! I can hardly wait until we can harvest these babies (patience, Grasshopper, patience). Not much is more exciting than green shoots!

And the peas-straw peas which sprouted and I let run riot have the prettiest pink, purple, lavender and mauve flowers. Some of them have set peas already, too. Does anyone know if we can eat them? I'm thinking we could, but the question is: are they delicious?

April Harvest (2)

We made a visit to our little house the other day and found that there is still lots of edibles in the garden. The corn looked as ready as it was going to get, I peeled back the layers and had a look, poking it with my fingernail and the juices were foggy and yellow so I took the plunge to pick. The smaller patch had small cobs (although not as much as a failure as the back patch which had nothing!), the bigger patch had nice big cobs, almost supermarket-worthy. I gave half of it to FIL, payment for his excavation work so far ;-)
There were also a few long but thin Lebanese eggplants, and a couple of the 'Fairy' type which I picked even though they seemed quite hard. There were even a few purple capsicums ready to go. The capsicums and eggplants have all gone straight into a big pot of bolognese sauce for lasagne.

While I was picking the corn, I found a surprise! Here I was thinking that the rockmelons were a total flop, and yet, there, hidden amongst the corn was a fruit! I wasn't sure if it was actually ripe, the vine was still pretty green (though the leaves are just starting to yellow), but the millipedes had found it and were gnawing, creeping and crawling all over it, so I thought it best to pick it before our one and only rockmelon became food for legions of Portugese pests!

It wasn't bad actually, it weighed almost 1kg (2 pounds) and was very edible, though a little on the bland side. I think it just needed more time.

I pulled the last of the tomato plants from their pots because they really were just looking too shabby to go on with. They've been hung in the shed, a bit experimentally, because I've read that you can ripen late tomatoes that way. Besides, I want the big pots!

And out there, still growing surprisingly well is the pumpkin plant I thought wouldn't set fruit at all, and the rainbow chard which is so pretty and bright even though it's sorely neglected.