Harvesting traumas

August is the time I should be harvesting, but I'm having a bit of a difficult time with it. It seems like most of my vegetables have a single day peak-harvesting moment and I have a habit of missing it. I was hoping to have tomatoes to eat with my cucumbers by now. I've got dozens of tomatoes sitting on the bushes, but they are simply not going red. My cucumbers, on the other hand, are more than ready. I'm having to cut the seeds out the middle (and also peel the skin off, as they're very spiny). I haven't yet managed to harvest one before it's ended up with loads of seeds in it. They're also rather non-EU compliant with their shape:

I also failed to harvest my first sweet corn at the right time. I tried to follow the rule that the tufts on the end need to turn brown before you harvest it. But this wasn't enough:

 As it only produced this:

I have now started feeling the tips of the corn to see if they've filled in yet. I suspect I'm going to go in the other direction with the next one and leave it too long.
My courgettes and runner beans, however, have a tendency to get huge before I have an opportunity to use them. The courgettes are still usable, albeit not very flavoursome. They can be frozen, but they go rather mushy if you do, so I really want my tomatoes to ripen so I can make ratatouille and freeze that. This also relies on my courgettes not succumbing to powdery mildew before I can use them.

Some of those beans are actually still usable and I'll be having them for tea tonight or blanching and freezing them if there are more. In contrast, onions have been brilliant, we sue those in most things we cook and they don't go past their best quickly.

In the good news though, I now have strawberries. My neighbour Lucy popped round with some of her spare runners. This was handy, as I got a planter for strawberries from my parents for my birthday, but I left it too late to buy any plants this year. I now have it all planted up and ready to go and I've even put copper tape round the legs to give them a fighting chance against slugs.

White spots on my cucumber leaves

A couple of days ago I noticed that there were white spots all over my cucumber leaves. After a bit of googling I came to the conclusion that this was powdery mildew. I also came to the conclusion that I need to get rid of it before it spread to the other cucurbits. I didn't have time to get an organic solution (neem oil, now ordered from Amazon, the stuff sounds amazing, it also kills pests), I decided just to take the leaves off and put them in the green waste bin so the mildew won't infect my compost.

I took this many leaves off and it looks pretty bare there now. I also took the four full-sized cucumbers off the plants so that they didn't sap any more of the plants' energy.

It does, however, reveal what a lot of squashes I have growing and how huge my huge courgette has become.

Unexpected onions

It turns out that when you grow onions, you should dig around in the ground afterwards because you can't always tell where all of them are. All of these come from the dug up area and were completely invisible from above the ground:

I have also learnt that I should have kicked the onions' leaves/stems over at an early stage, as that way they put all of their energy into their bulbs and can't grow flowers. Speaking of onion flowers, mine have moved onto a new and beautiful stage where they've begun to turn into seed heads.

Once I was done, I then took some of the leeks out of the row that I hadn't fully thinned and created another row where I'd previously been growing the onions.

Stripy beetroot

I've had my first harvest of beetroot.

4 chioggia beetroots and one boltardy beetroot

The dark one on the right is a normal beetroot (boltardy) and the lighter, brighter red ones are stripy beetroots (chioggia).

I didn't actually cut up the chioggia to see their stripes in their raw state, as I had read you were supposed to roast them whole to retain the stripes, but after roasting them for about an hour (possibly too long for such small specimens) they looked like this:

Roasted and peeled chioggia beetroot

They looked a bit better like this:

Roasted, peeled and chopped chioggia beetroot

We made beetroot tagliatelle with the beetroot though, and their residual stripyness was completely lost in the creamy sauce. The tastiness of the recipe also somewhat lacking. I think I'd have been better off using all standard beetroots, which taste stronger than chioggia, or better still adding some bacon. The mouth feel of the dish was good (i.e. satisfactory fat content), but the taste was a bit bland and I'm usually a fan of what other people call bland, so coming from me that suggests it really could have done with a little something extra in it.

Flowers in the vegetable garden

Cucurbit flower with bee

Although it doesn't look much like I have many flowers in my vegetable garden when you look from a distance, if you get up close and peer through the leaves (and don't forget the non-grass parts of my lawn), in fact there are plenty:


Winter squash "sweet dumpling" flower (probably, might be a courgette or butternut squash, they've all grown a bit together)

Flowers growing in the lawn:

Chamomile

Normal purple clover

Fancy red clover, presumably from the seeds my Mum bought me

More vegetable flowers:

Runner bean flowers

Pepper flower - maybe bell, maybe chili, I didn't check

Onion flower

Some sort of blue flowers that came with the garden

Ornamental poppy that just grew next to the peppers

Moneymaker tomato flowers

Moneymaker tomato flower

Cucumber Chinese Slangen flower

Radish flowers

Bumper vegetable crop

I've had rather a bumper vegetable harvest today. First off there's the massive courgette:

Huge Tondo di Piacenza courgette

Peeled huge Tondo di Piacenza courgette

Halved huge Tondo di Piacenza courgette

Apparently they're not as tender when they get that big, but the creamy courgette and bacon tagliatelle recipe my other half is cooking tonight called for grated courgette and we figured that being a bit firmer/tougher might actually be an advantage there and it seemed a shame to waste it.

Then there's the full-size cucumber I harvested for lunch.

Cucumber Chinese Slangen

Cucumber Chinese Slangen

Cucumber Chinese Slangen

It's really spiny. It even hurt my fingers when I was just carrying it – I assume that's also what kept it safe from my resident slugs and snails. So I decided to peel it before eating. It was deliciously coolly cucumbery and the perfect texture, which surprised me. A lot of what I grow in the garden turns out a bit tough (probably because I pick it too late or don't water it enough).

Cucumber Chinese Slangen peeled and sliced

What was a bit too tough was my kohlrabi. I let it get too big because I didn't need it until now (I should probably have started eating them earlier when they looked too small to me, or watered them more):

Purple kohlrabi - actually pale green on the inside

This is roughly the size you chop it to for a salad - although it could probably have been left a bit thicker if it had been less tough:

Cucurbits or triffids?

Cucurbits have taken over the garden. They've now escaped their allocated area (where they were given all the room the packet said they needed) and have spread over the path and onto the grass. I've noticed that they've also pretty consistently spread towards the centre of the garden, where there's more sunlight compared to the shadier area by the fence, so I'll take that into account in next year's planting.

25 July 2015

19 July 2015

11 July 2015

28 June 2015

16 June 2015

I also notice that my peas are now more yellow than green - next year I will leave more space between each plant in case that's the problem, but it could also simply be their natural growth cycle. Either way, I think more space would be a good thing, they seemed quite crammed in. My runner beans, on the other hand, are more than happy.