Showing posts with label Salad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Salad. Show all posts

Sunday, 2 March 2014

Planting 'em up

Last weekend we sat down with our box of seeds for a big sort out. We've thrown out quite a few unfinished packs that were several years old (one of the reasons we think for our poor runner bean harvest last year), and this is what we were left with:


Lots of sweet peas. Anyone who followed our harvest updates last year will know we had great success with these, and had bunches through the house all summer. At the weekend we planted loads again; half a dozen seeds per yoghurt pot. Later on we'll plant one pot per supporting pole of our teepee and then find willing friends for the pots we don't have space for.


We also had some nasturtium seeds. We've tried both planting these straight out and starting them inside with similarly prolific results regardless, so we've decided to go for the lazier option this year and we'll sow these outside in a few weeks. To finish off the flowers we have a mix of annuals. Again, we'll plant these all straight out later in the year.


We found the remains of last years salad seeds - a mix of different leaves plus some rocket. We'll be putting all of these to good use once spring has properly sprung.


A collection of herb seeds also came to our attention. We hadn't done much with herbs last year but decided to give these a go. Firstly some basil mats. These were several years old and should really have gone on the rubbish pile but we decided to give them a chance. To join them we have some slightly newer coriander, parsley, chives and basil seeds (yes, more basil). These have all gone into old yoghurt pots for now, hopefully they'll provide us with nice fresh herbs all summer.


Finally, we also planted our broad beans and peas. These have all gone into plugs made of newspaper so we should be able to plant these straight into the ground, plugs and all, in a few weeks.




All our seeds are currently sitting in our conservatory in lieu of a greenhouse or cold frame. It's not as warm as the rest of the house so makes a good gardening room for the moment.


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Wednesday, 5 February 2014

Making a Plan - January Gardening

It's planning time. We have three beds that make up our veg patch and we're starting to come to some decisions about what we want to do with them this year. Each bed is about 1.5m x 3m so we have plenty of space to grow a range of things - but not enough to be completely self sufficient in veg over the summer. Our plan has always been to both rotate crops through the beds and try a few different things each year.

Last year we grew onions and garlic in bed one, potatoes in bed two and salad leaves, beetroot, cabbages, runner beans, courgettes and purple sprouting broccoli in bed three. We also had tomatoes in pots.

Photo from May 2013

Our plans for 2014 are being guided by a certain bit of news though. We've decided to take a few months unpaid leave from our jobs and do some travelling. We'll be out of the country for all of September, October and November and we're going to spend most of our time in New Zealand, though we're also stopping in Canada, Australia and Thailand. As you can imagine we're rather excited about this and I'm sure you'll hear more about it all as time goes on.

This has made us think more carefully about what we're planting. Not being here during the autumn is a little limiting, but means we can focus on those crops that will keep us going all summer.

Bed One was an easy decision. We really enjoyed having a fresh spuds in the garden all summer, and it saved us quite a bit on buying little polythene bags of baby potatoes from the supermarket. We'd mostly finished our potato crop by September and so we'll just plant a couple less plants this year, focusing on early varieties.

We've gone for Pink Fir Apple and Pentland Javelin which we had great success with last year, and have added Red Duke of York as a variety we've not tried before. These all came from the garden centre where they have a range of loose potatoes on a "fill a bag" basis. We found last year that this worked really well for us as one bag is plenty for our space and we could fill it with a mixture of varieties.  Joe set these out to chit at the weekend.


Bed Two is going to be given over to fresh salad leaves this year.  We can plant these as we go along and again should keep us going for all those summer months before our trip. We'll let you know what we plant when we make such decisions.

We then had a bit of a debate about Bed Three. We had wondered about leaving it fallow, then considered planting a green manure, before stumbling on the answer; peas! We're going to fill the bed with peas and broad beans which hopefully we'll enjoy for several months (read: be fed up of by the time we leave), and should hopefully do the soil some good too.

We've chosen "Hurst Green Shaft" pea variety and "Red Epicure" bean variety this year. Yes - a red broad bean, we were intrigued and decided that this definitely needed investigation (particularly with a description such as "'beany' flavour" - who could resist).


And thats it. We're keeping it simple and hopefully this should leave us with some time to get on with the rest of the garden as well.


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Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Fruit of the Garden - July's Harvest

July has come and almost gone so it feels like a good time to post an update on our harvest. It has been a month of many salads with the perfect weather to get us into the mood, strawberries to go with the Wimbledon final and the first of our potato harvest. We also had some stray garlic that had been flattened by something so I dug it up and tried smoking it, as it was all quite small. More on that to come later!

Arran Pilot

More Sweet Peas

Smoked Garlic

Pentland Javalin

Strawberries

Mixed Salad with Nasturtium Flowers

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Wednesday, 3 July 2013

Fruit of the Garden - June's Harvest

This is hopefully to be the first post of many. We decided that the best way of keeping up with the garden over the summer is to post pictures of our harvest. As we had a long winter this year (and didn't plant any spring crops in the autumn) the first produce is only just coming in, eggs aside. Our potatoes are almost ready and our salad crop is coming on nicely. The tomatoes (in the conservatory) are flowering and 4 feet tall and we have a few flowers blooming away quietly. I shall try and include some of the flowers in here too even if they are not part of the traditional harvest.

Wooden bowl full of mixed salad leaves
Thinning out the salad crop - it would be a shame not to eat it!

A purple allium opening into bloom
Our alliums have been with us all month, blossoming quietly outside the window.
A vase of pink and purple sweet peas
The sweet peas have just opened this weekend.

Pink, bell shaped flowers.
We don't know what these are but they needed pruning and look pretty!

Linking in with The Impatient Gardener and Veg Plotting this week - everyone's enjoying their gardens it seems!
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