Today's job

After a strained groin muscle and two attempts at spraining my ankle out in the garden in the last fortnight, it has occurred to this heavily-pregnant woman that it might be time to take it a bit easy, before I find myself unable to walk in labour... Time for some non-strenuous work out there.

I found some garlic bulbs in the cupboard, neatly labelled, from last year's harvest. Normally they would have all been eaten months ago but this time, morning sickness put me off using them completely and so I have plenty left to plant (not to make this post entirely about pregnancy and garlic!)

I'm planting Dynamite Purple, Early White American, Cream, Melbourne Market and Australian White (not pictured). I love garlic as a crop: bung it in, and off it goes with almost no maintenance or care required at all. It will do better, however, if kept weed-free and fed.

What we are eating: December, 2011

There is so much going on in the garden right now, and we are starting to harvest some long-maturing crops planted earlier in the year as well as eating early summer veggies. It's all a bit fabulous!

The garlic I planted way, way, way back in April finally flopped over and the leaves dried out, so out of the ground it came. It was such a good crop to grow, set and forget! Needed nothing more than the occasional weed and it did it's thing (albeit very slowly, not a good one for the impatient).

The 'Early White' softneck garlic bulbs were quite small but came out of the ground largely intact and were easy to clean up.


The 'Early Purple' garlic is a hardneck variety. The bulbs are much larger, around supermarket size, but the skins tended to split or be absent from at least half of the cloves I pulled out and were a bit of a bugger to clean all the dirt out of. The skins were also very fragile and a number of bulbs were easily damaged by pulling and cleaning. As that's not good for storing the garlic, I crushed all the damaged bulbs and mixed them with oil and have frozen the mash to use as we go along (the oil makes it easy to just scoop out teaspoons of frozen garlic).


Now these, these are completely fabulous and I can't seem to stop raving about them. They are the first of the potatoes I planted in August. The potatoes themselves arrived in the post in June - you might remember I didn't know exactly what they were! - and I think they're fulfilling all the promise of that mysterious brown paper bag. Now, these particular potatoes I grew in green plastic potato bags and they suffered a Lack of Water while we were away and the tops died off in these particular bags so I unearthed the lot. There are still half a dozen plants growing well in the ground, and a few more still in potato bags for later in the season. So far we've had about 2kg of the beauties! Many of them were a lovely size which fit in the palm of my hand.


And an awful lot of them were the size of peas. After a thorough scrubbing, we boiled them up, then cooked them briefly in a pan with loads of home-grown garlic and parsley, salt, pepper and an unhealthy amount of butter. Despite their small size, they were delicious (of course!)
At my best guess these potatoes include Bananas, Cranberry Reds, Sapphires, and Pink Eyes (or are they Pink Edwards?)


We're also still eating mushrooms out of September's mushroom kit. You might wonder how we kept it going while we were away for a month? Well, I handed it to my mum who got about two mushrooms out of it, and then she went away for a while so she lent it to her mum who got a few more, and then it went back to my mum where it did nearly nothing, and then it came back to us and it's had it's first genuinely decent crop - 200g - of mushrooms, enough for one pot of mushroom sauce!


Added to that mushroom sauce was a glorious FAT Red Legs spring onion. I much prefer spring onions over normal onions. They are easy to grow (but much slower than I realised they would be) and they don't hurt your eyes when you cut them.


And for dessert? Muffins made with the first of the rhubarb.


And finally, though not for eating - unless they have seeds and then our future-chickens will get them - are my sunflowers. The yellow variety is beginning to open:


And the reds are open all the way and are much lovelier and more varied in their colour than I imagined they would be, shot through with russets, golds, oranges, and stems of deep purple.

Little veggie update

Just a wee update of what's going on in our veggie patch at home. More pictures than text: here we go :)

The garlic is doing quite well, needs a bit more of a weed but I've gotten rid of the worst of them.


My experimental Greenfeast peas look great in their tangles.


The broad beans - Aquadulce - have taken off. They're much more delicate and fragile looking than the variety I planted last year (I can't remember what sort that was, but it wasn't Aquadulce).


The pepino is looking blousey and lush, and it has striped violet and white flowers! I don't know how well it will set fruit, it's very cold outside and there aren't very many insects about for pollination.


And even though I pulled out most of the pea-straw peas a couple of weeks ago, I did leave one little patch to their own devices (mainly because they weren't in the way of anything else) and look how beautiful their flowers are, like dancing faeries.


SP thinks it's all super interesting. All the drizzle has been keeping us inside, and my poor little bird is bouncing off the walls a bit. She doesn't like being confined like that.


And last, but not least, I picked the little pumpkins and we ate them last night. I made that mistake of planting out a few varieties and not writing down which was where, and so of course I've forgotten which one this was. Most of them did nothing, but this wee plant made a couple of fruits. I think it might have been the Golden Nugget, but maybe it was just a plant which felt like making very small fruits? The little ones were too small and fiddly for me to be bothered with so they've gone to the fish tank for fish food. The bigger ones fit nicely in my hands, tennis ball sized, I cut them into slices and roasted them with Australian olive oil and a touch of salt. Pretty good! But if only they'd been more than two of them!


I've made a couple of gardening resolutions for next Spring:

1. Write things down! Make diagrams of what I've planted where, because my memory will surely fail me.

2. Plant fewer varieties of pumpkins, but more of each variety (ie not one butternut, one kent, one golden nugget etc, but maybe four butternuts, four kents...) and put some in the front garden where there are more flowers to attract the pollinators.

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

The Summer vegetable garden is slowly drawing to a close. Yesterday I pulled out the last of the zucchini plants and most of the tomato plants. Only the Amish Paste tomato is still going strongly now. I also took out the entire northern section of corn (flop!) and the remains of the butternut pumpkin plants (almost a flop: I got one lonely, very little baby butternut from them). The veggie patch is starting to look a little bare now. The Lebanese eggplants are still ticking along, and we ate our first broccolini recently, although some of it was so insect infested I had to throw it straight out.

Yesterday we also harvested our last pot of potatoes. They are Desiree, and were planted way back in Spring last year. I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for the leaves to die down, but they were showing no signs at all of doing so and I was impatient for the big pot (so I could plant my kiwi-fruit into a bigger pot), so we upended the pot onto the lawn, and look at them all! OK, so perhaps not so impressive to seasoned potato growers, but I was very happy with our little harvest, almost 1kg worth (2 pounds). Next year I will plant more, all into pots (to avoid another in-ground failure), Kipflers maybe, and those purple ones Digger's sell....

Speaking of Digger's, my seed and garlic order arrived the other day so I got cracking, planting lots into where the old lawn was. Lots of broad beans ('Aquadulce'), peas ('Greenfeast'... and then I read the label properly and realised they're supposed to go in during Spring. Oh. Oops! An Out-Of-Season trial?). The Garlics I bought were 'Early Purple' (a hardneck variety) and 'Early White' (a soft-neck variety), I have never grown garlic before but how hard can it be? (Say she who can muck up with peas!)

And the Piece de Resistance: Our Watermelon!
It was a potted variety. The first time I planted it, it was promptly eaten by a marauding creepy-crawly, so I tried again. It made a lovely big plant, but only one watermelon ever grew properly on it. This is one expensive melon! I will try again next year, but make more of an effort to hand-pollinate it (I did this year, but only half-heartedly). The plant had shrivelled and wilted to naught, so we picked our melon and admired it;

We felt it's hefty weight;

We cut it open with an old knife, on what was once the foundation of the laundry wall;

Tasted it, and deemed it delicious!