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!

*

Summer is here!

I mean here-here, really here, and loaded with tomatoes. The downside to summer is sweeping on us from the west with temperatures of 39c (102f) expected within the week and nothing under 34c (93f) for the next five days. We've had an easy start to summer throughout December, but it's all on from here out. Dry dry dry and hot, and that's not great for gardens, not even Mediterranean-styled ones. With plants, surviving is not the same as thriving.

Anyway, the upside to summer is also on us: veggie harvests! Yesterday I collected the first of the eggplants (two, Lebanese), a decent handful of beans (butter beans, and two other green types I forget the names of), yet more spring onions (Redlegs), and over two kilograms of tomatoes, and that's not even including the tomatoes I have been picking over the last few weeks and forgot to record, or all the ones I have been snacking on as I water the garden. We are going to be overrun. So far I am picking Tigerellas, Grosse Lisse, and Dwarf Figs and there are dozens upon dozens to come. Happy Happy!

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.

Winter wednesday #12 - Bountiful

Before the weather rolled in yesterday afternoon I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden, appreciating it in all it's blustery and soggy goodness. Look at all this! Spring onions, a baby beetroot (yes, just one!), more rainbow chard and...


...a cauliflower! I'm super proud of this one. Who'd have thought I could grow a real, live, edible cauliflower?


This little section of the garden is doing fabulously. At the front is garlic, in the middle are the experimental greenfeast peas, at the back are my tall broad beans.


I tried to take a photo to show you just how many flowers are on those peas, but I don't think it quite conveys it. There must be hundreds, and they are starting to set peas. I can hardly wait to start eating them!


The broad beans are suddenly bursting out with flowers all over too.


There are lots of spring onions out there too. These are called 'red legs,' and they are planted in a pot with my Tahitian lime tree.


The globe artichokes I planted sometime last year are finally looking a little bit happier and less weedy. Perhaps I don't have to pull them out after all? Behind them, looking good, are the second round of broad beans I planted a couple of months ago, such babies compared to the early sowing!


This little unknown 'gambler's choice' fig is sending out it's Spring leaves already, well ahead of the pack (I have, I think, five fig treelings now!)


The weeds are doing beautifully too. Look at them go, so lush and luxuriant!


Yesterday wasn't just about harvesting and photographing, I got a couple of important jobs done too.

I planted my new 'Nellie Kelly' grafted passionfruit, it's new leaves are almost metallic.


Her new home is up against a west-facing fence with the brown turkey fig. Now, please, a special request to whatever bugger ate the passionfruit I planted last year down to the ground: Please leave my newbie alone!
I'll rig something up on the fence between the posts to give her something to climb up against.


I also completed 'round one' of the potato planting. You're supposed to plant after all risk of frost has passed, and I figured since we don't get much frost in my area I could take a chance and start now. I planted 7 out of 20 gourmet assorted tubers.


Well, I say 'planted' but as I mentioned a few posts ago, I'm using a no dig method this year for most of the potatoes, so they were just plonked on the ground after I'd turned it over and tried to take out the worst of the soursobs.


Then I piled on the peastraw, manure, blood and bone, potash, and a sprinkle of Dynamic Lifter and a general slow release fertilizer for luck, and watered the whole lot in with a dash of Seasol (I love that stuff! It was a bit like making a giant, layered pie. I hope the spuds like it! It was quite a lot of effort.
I'd bought a bag of compressed peastraw to try out, and whilst I don't like to moan about such things, I have to say don't waste your money on it. I had this grand idea that I could keep the bag to plant some more taters in, and I did manage it eventually, but it was so hard to get out without destroying the bag that I ended up cutting it halfway down and making my bag half the size. That's not a reason not to buy the stuff of course, but the straw was very fine and would blow away in a light wind I think, and it didn't go very far and was quite expensive, so all in all I wish I'd just bought a couple of bales of normal peastraw and gotten at least 4 times as much for the same amount of money.


Lastly, just for kicks, I had to show you my 'firelight' kangaroo paw which has been slowly, slowly growing it's flower spikes up to chest height. Beautiful, hey? I wish I had more than one! That red against the grey of our house is pretty special.


Head on over to Hazel's to see how other people are getting through the tail end of Winter

Winter rainbows

Isn't this glorious? Sunny rainbow chard :) When I planted it as seedlings I noticed that even the tiny roots of each plant were brightly coloured.


Red, pink, orange, yellow... Brilliant in the stems and extends right through to the leaf veins. Pinks and reds have darker burgundy leaves, and yellows and oranges have bright green leaves.


I chopped it up with the first of the spring onions out of my vegetable garden. The 'red legs' spring onions have a pink blush on the outer layers.


I made a frittata with it all. I took photos, but deemed them far too ugly to share. Frittata is not such a sexy looking dish! But the rainbow chard is certainly very photogenic. You never see it for sale in green grocers, I wonder why that is? I bet people would buy it, attracted like magpies to the artist's colours.