30 September 2009 - Harvest shmarvest

A busy couple of weeks on the plot, aided by beautiful autumnal weather and punctuated by energetic communal effort on reinforcing our site with Council-donated fencing. Hard work from the various willing volunteers with just a bit left to do. We at last have made a noticeable impact on protecting our site - by ourselves.

N took some pictures last week of an artistic bent so they will be appearing in their own gallery in a separate posting. Meanwhile, we have been consuming broccoli (yes, still - even though most are now uprooted), cabbage (white and red and they are huge), beans, beans and more beans, courgettes, raspberries galore, corn (yummy when eaten raw - how sad that we have only just discovered this), parsnips, onions, tomatoes, chard, carrots and of course, potatoes. It is truly astonishing how much produce one small plot can supply.

We are beginning to do the autumn clearing bit by bit. It's odd how one day is broadly summer and the next - just by a hint - declares the beginning of the end. The courgettes have slowed down and are covered with downy mildew. We have cleared away one of the squash plants and its fruits for storage. The other is going great guns and has produced 12 offspring. One lot of beans is finished and we'll leave them up to get pods for next year. We've left the maincrops in the ground still but one of the beds is half empty and covered with good manure. On the right is a picture of one of our compost heaps with the leeks on top that we left to flower. When we pulled them up they had little bulb thingies at the bottom.

We're very pleased with the late sowing of runner beans which have been prodigious and the lovely apples about to be harvested. A triumph of hope over adversity. Also with the emergence of spring cabbage seedlings in - where else - the carrot bed, which we think we will make into the strawberry bed next year, as they are hard to weed in the Pagoda. We have cleaned and prepared the seed bed to accommodate overwintering onions - a red variety - and we are doing these as sets for the first time as an experiment. And, just to keep us on our toes, the old strawberry patch we think will be the new seedbed. This means we won't have to run the gauntlet of the raspberries to get to the seedlings next year - currently I have scratches all up my arms as they are very prickly.

What is so good about our plot is that there is always an answer to the question "where shall we put X". Often we come up with something quite unexpected (see above paragraph). Why should the seedbed always be the seedbed? Why can't the strawberries move? N is contemplating making a new carrot bed at the top where we now have green manure, rye grass. We are lords of this plot and we can decide - always observing where possible the primary laws of crop rotation.

While the summer crops are beginning to doze, the winter crops are beginning to look more feisty. The leeks are definitely improved as are the kale and winter cabbages. We think that we should be able to leave the few carrots in situ until needed, a lesson sadly learned with our parsnips, which have not stored well. It is at this stage that we realise that our winter crops do not include brussels sprouts which N loves with his Christmas dinner. We shall have to barter.

On the home preservation front, we have made another lot of chutney and pickled red cabbage. The neighbours have kindly donated some apples from their enormous tree so we will no doubt make some chutney - that's Christmas sorted then. The garlic is all plaited and neat and tidy looking, and has already received commendation in addition to the mighty victory in the Show. We endeavour to use our produce as much as possible, for example, in a beautiful minestrone soup or braised red cabbage and apple. Mostly we manage to keep on top of it and nothing is wasted which is the main thing.

12 September 2009 – Dig for Victory!

The 2009 St Stephen's Gardening Club Show drawn to a close, leaving us contemplating a strategy for next year.

We entered seven categories:

• parsnips - our finest three from those we dug on the weekend
• courgettes (zucchini) - three of our yellow variety
• garlic – our five best, out of 180 or so bulbs harvested this year. Entered in the 'Any Other Vegetable' category; it seems to us that garlic deserves its own category, but we think the categories must be those hand down by the Royal Horticultural Society
• jam – which K boiled down from several pounds of strawberries
  
• tomatoes – five of our greenhouse variety – in the Novice category, Novice entry being an option for those who have not previously won a Novice category
• raspberries – 12 on a plate, again Novice
• hand-knitted garment – K's birthday jumper for her sister, borrowed back for the show.

No doubt you'll be anxious to hear the results. On tenterhooks, I imagine.

Parsnips: overshadowed by other entries. Not even the courtesy of a Post-It Note. Ours were thicker, the winners were longer. To each his own.

Courgettes: we knew our three weren't very precisely matched in size, but we thought they seemed fresher, more exciting than their fellow entries. Result: Third Prize. No shame there.









Garlic: the competition included a giant pumpkin, sweetcorn and several squashes - eight entries overall, so the most competition. Result: First Prize. "Yes, we can!"















Jam: No prize, but a Post-It Note saying: "tastes good but a little stiff". Again, it must be pointed out, to each his own.














Tomatoes: First Prize! K's twice-daily watering has paid off! Now that we have the greenhouse, ready for a full season next year, nothing can stop us from Tomato Supremacy.














Raspberries: A respectable Second Prize.
















Hand-knitted garment: Third Prize. We feel the judges have a weakness for frou-frou over Vision and Execution.


We feel that The Future Belongs to Us. We're ready to take on the Big Boys. Bring on next year's show.

6 September 2009 - Bumper crops threaten to engulf house

Phew! We just can't keep up. There's so much to do at the moment with the harvesting, the pickling, the decisions about who to dispense to and the freezing. The overflow freezer in the attic is already nearly full. We have donated veg to various colleagues, friends, neighbours and family and still we can't keep up. Last weekend was our camping Bank Holiday and we provided the main ingredients for the camp curry.

We were visited on Friday by K's sister and godson, L, who was extremely helpful on the plot, particularly when collecting beans. He had an amusing distaste for two courgettes which I cut for him which were not quite perfect - so much so that he attempted to repatriate them under the plant of origin. I relieved him of anxiety by taking them on myself. The visitors went away with a bag full of potatoes, broccoli, beans, courgettes, the first red cabbage (albeit a bit sluggy) and raspberries. It was lovely to see them enjoying the plot.

We definitely have more varied produce this year. The challenge is to find new ways of cooking - beans beans beans and more beans. The garlic is now fully dried and cleaned and ready for the dreaded plaiting exercise. It took 4 hours to clean it all - you have to cut the bottom thingy off and scrape off the dirty top layer so that the bulb looks like it does in the shops. They don't tell you about that.

We've also had the challenge of cooking a pumpkin that we rashly purchased from another allomenteer a few weeks back. Very lovely soup (enough for several days), a pilav and lots of cooked pulp to add to the groaning freezer. And we have the gigantic monster on the bank which is looking to be our very best yet. It has been christened it Fat Boy. The picture on the left is N with our very first parsnip, dug a couple of weeks ago. This was a random seedling in one of the beds. It has an interesting structure. Imagine our joy and surprise this morning when we tentatively dug up on of the pampered parsnips to find it long and true - and eminently show-worthy. We displayed it to Jan who let out a little shriek of admiration (and no doubt envy). So the nasty thing that ate the carrots from the inside out didn't destroy our parsnips and the special treatment worked. We dug them all up and have three worthy of The Show. The others can be stored. Woo hoo. I dream of a whole bed of parsnips next year. We will take a special picture of all the produce we will put into The Show, still a closely guarded secret, so you can see our lovely parsnips then.

Other news - we've dug up most of the second earlies now. They are a bit disappointing, in that they are big and nearly all have little holes. But edible nonetheless. After watching Gardeners World, we take off the blighty foliage of the maincrops and weed the whole bed. We'll leave them in until the first frost then dig 'em up. We also harvested the rest of the onions a couple of weeks back. Most of them are like spring onions and are not what we thought they were going to be. This is where the greenhouse will help - getting a head start and starting them under glass is, we realise, the way forward for good big onions.

We ponder sowing green manure on an empty bit in one of the beds and then I realise with a shock - that we have to have a plan for next year to know what to do with the beds as they finish this year. It may be better to leave it depending on what we intend to grow. You really have to think ahead. It's already the start of autumn and you can see the first signs of it on the plot. Two of the three apples on one tree have dropped, leaving one enormous fruit. The coxes are probably ready to pick although some of them have "issues".

The butternut squash is doing fine. The fruits are hardening up and we did some trimming off the shoots that aren't going to produce anything new. The leeks are still looking a little unhappy but we remain confident that their time will come. Next year we will experiment with leeks that come into their own earlier in the year. We discover to our surprise a rogue courgette plant amongst the squash which is harbouring what can only be described as a marrow. We had our first corn last week - very nice if a tad underripe.

Beans are still coming from the main patch and the runner beans on the wigwams are really getting into their stride now, as are raspberries. We were too tired to strim today - having weeded the beds, harvested and tidied up we have just enough strength to lug home our produce, whereupon we had to make instant managerial decisions as to its fate.

One of the questions to ponder is - whether to grow more of the crops next year that last over winter (roots, potatoes, kale, cabbage, leek) and less of the more ephemeral stuff (beans, courgette). We're hopeful that the transplanted winter cabbage and kale will be OK but will they be enough to keep us going? Another question that we have been actively addressing is our consumption of meat. Without really discussing it, we have drastically reduced our meat intake - partly because we have so many other things to eat, partly because red meat is a prime contributor to global warming. It's odd to think of meat as a sort of special treat but it's surprisingly easy to get used to.

And we had our second Allotment Association barbecue this weekend too which was great fun. Doesn't time fly when you're drowning in vegetables!