Harvest home

 

A morning's harvest

A morning’s harvest from the garden, for the evening’s supper, prompts me to review this year’s produce.

I’ve got the veg plot better organised this year.  The new layer of compost went onto the beds (most of them, anyway – some of the outer beds missed out, and one remains seriously weedy) later than it should have, in spring, but that didn’t seem to matter much.  First crops in were the shallots (good harvest), garlic (small bulbs again this year, but a good quantity) and broad beans.  The latter had to be re-sown after interference from the squirrel, and the plants were badly affected by blackfly; the ladybird larvae didn’t show up to eat the blackfly until late this year, but once they did, I managed a small late crop.  This autumn, I’ll sow my broad beans in modules and plant out under cover to keep the squirrel at bay. 

The shallot crop

I’ve done better with salads this year.  I got a nice row of corn salad until it eventually ran to seed (and a row of seedlings is coming up as a result), though the land cress didn’t do anything.  Lettuces were a success; the first batch bolted earlier than I expected, but the second sowing came along before too long, and I had a third lot, which is still on the go, ready when the no 2s started to flower.  I’m saving seed from the plants for next year.  And there’s a row of radicchio waiting to be cut (probably more than I need, to be honest). 

My leek seed, sown in modules, didn’t germinate well, and only a very few plants have been planted out into the garden, but I had more success with beetroot, after which I decided to use up my rather old packets of beetroot seed by scattering them on a spare bit of the plot, where the plants are now much too close together but doing well.

The more tender vegetables were started late because of the cool weather in April and May (June was hot, but July and August relatively cold and wet).  My three courgette plants are still cropping.  The two ‘British Summertime’ plants were the first to fruit (being bred for the climate here) and produced slim and attractive courgettes (first prize at the village Show!) but are now petering out.  This isn’t really a problem, as the single ‘Defender’ plant has made it its mission in life to single-handedly solve the world food crisis, and is producing courgettes from several growing points, mostly low down under the enormous leaves where I can’t see them easily.  Fortunately they’re good keepers, but there's a few meals-worth of roast courgettes in the freezer and a couple of courgette parmigianas have also been produced.  Courgette cake, anybody?

The summer beans have done well: only a few of the dwarf French beans came up (the squirrel again?) but they’ve cropped well, as much as we can eat, and are still producing.  Of the climbing beans, ‘Blauhilde’ and ‘Moonlight’ have produced well from one plant each, and I’m hopeful of saving seed from both.  I was also pleased with my ‘Alderman’ climbing peas (another first prize at the Show, although the crop hasn’t been large), now about to be pulled up.  The structure that they and the beans were climbing on, however, was blown over in the September gales and is now at a rakish angle; basically I’m waiting for the remaining beans to dry on the plant so that I can save the seed, then the whole thing can be pulled up.

A leaning tower of beans

It seems almost unfair to mention the leaf beet, which I didn’t sow this year: one of last year’s plants (or was it the year before?) seeded so prolifically across the plot that I have many plants this year; they’ve produced small leaves for salad and larger ones for stir-frying and are still going strong.  There is some flea beetle damage, but with so many plants it doesn’t matter.  I’ve put in a few kale plants to see me through the winter, but they’re still small and I’m not confident that they won’t succumb to slugs, pigeons or caterpillars.

One crop that didn’t succumb was the dense row of carrots that I sowed between the beanpoles; really it was a last-ditch attempt to use up old seed packets whose contents I thought would be too old to produce much.  ‘Maestro’ germinated prolifically and, remarkably, didn’t seem to be attacked by carrot fly; I’ve seen comments on a gardening website that carrot fly hadn’t been a problem this year, so it’s not just me.  On the one hand, this is good, but on the other, is it a sign of declining biodiversity?

Tomatoes: this year I sowed five varieties – cherry tomatoes ‘Cherrola’, ‘Apero’ and ‘Gardener’s Delight’, beefsteak ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’ and outdoor tomato ‘Harzfeuer’.  Strictly speaking, the latter isn’t true to type; I used seed saved from last year’s crop, and only discovered belatedly that it’s an F1 hybrid, so doesn’t come true from seed.  These were ok, but a bit watery in cooking, and the plants succumbed to blight after the wet summer, so I’ve pulled them up and consigned the plants and remaining fruit to the green recycling bin.  They had been poorly supported anyway and had collapsed on top of the parsley.  The other tomatoes, being grown in the greenhouse, have been fine; ‘Apero’ is a particularly well-flavoured tomato and keeps better after harvest than the other cherry tomatoes, so I’ll grow it again (as well as good old ‘Gardener’s Delight’, which I can grow from my own seed as it’s not a hybrid).  They’ve been prolific this year.

I’ve also managed a reasonable crop of parsley and dill, especially the latter, and oregano, rosemary and sage are always to hand in the garden.  I thought I had some coriander seed, saved from a previous year’s crop, but it turned out to be parsley.

The plum crop this year was much larger than we expected, and the plums were unusually large, but very early – they were all gone by the end of July.  Apples are doing well, except for the little tree in the middle of the lawn, which did so well last year but is clearly ailing this year – possibly because of damage to the bark by the woodpeckers; the fruit has been tiny, and several branches have obviously died.  Is it too late to save it?  Raspberries were prolific but there were hardly any gooseberries, and the blackcurrants have ‘big bud’ disease and need digging out and replacing.  Across the lane, there has been an excellent harvest of blackberries, but again they were early, and gone by mid-September.

Part of the cooking apple crop

Blackberries for free!

The squirrel has also been taking his harvest home; he has been bounding around the garden, burying hazelnuts all over the place.