• Home
  • Features
  • Talks
  • Learn with me

Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Tag Archives: harvesting

The October veg garden

02 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by sallynex in climate change, gardening without plastic, greenhouse, kitchen garden, my garden, seeds, self sufficiency, sustainability, this month in the garden, wildlife gardening

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

apple juice, apples, autumn, cloche, gardening without plastic, greenhouse, harvesting, juice, mice, newspaper pots, no dig, plant protection, sowing, tomatoes, windfall apples, winter salads

Life in the veg garden is taking on a definitely autumnal feel… it’s all fuzzy edges, like a woolly jumper


Harvesting this month:
French beans, carrots, the last of the courgettes and patty pan summer squash, Musquee de Provence winter squash, potatoes (maincrops to store), raspberries, curled-leaf and flat-leaf parsley, baby-leaf salads from pots outside the back door.

Sowing this month: Broad beans for overwintering, beetroot (for leaves), turnips (for leaves), spring onions, and round-rooted carrots.

This month I will be:

  • Clearing out the greenhouses
  • Pricking out greenhouse salad seedlings
  • Turning the compost
  • Mulching empty beds
  • Planting herbs and perennial vegetables
  • Juicing the last of the apples (mine and other people’s!)
  • Repairing fences

Mouse update

Remember my poor mouse-beheaded beetroot seedlings from last month?

The obvious solution was to trap the mice – and that’s certainly what I would have done before I became aware of the need for sustainability in the garden.

I don’t like killing things at the best of times: and with mice in particular they’re a really important food source for larger predators like owls, so every mouse that you trap is one removed from the wider ecosystem.

Also mouse traps are, usually, plastic, and I have vowed not to buy any new plastic for my garden (even if it’s not strictly for gardening).

The wildlife photographer Simon King once said to me that we humans are really, really clever animals: so if we can’t figure out a way to keep other animals away from our food without killing them, we’re not thinking hard enough.

Quite right: so I put my humanoid thinking cap on, and this is what I came up with.

I bought myself a big roll of 8mm gauge mesh from B&Q for about £20 and made myself a mesh cloche (the roll was big enough to make two or three, but one step at a time).

It took a while to get right: I had to staple the bottom edges to wooden battens, burying these in the ground to hold the whole thing stable and prevent mice from burrowing underneath, and the ends are squares of mesh tied in with wire, again buried a few inches beneath the ground.

But I resowed my beetroot seeds at the beginning of the month and they are already much bigger than they ever reached last month before the mice got them. It’s tricky to get in and weed, but I sow into mulch so the few weeds that have come up aren’t too troublesome. Once the seedlings have developed into sturdy young plants, of less interest to mice, I will remove the whole cloche and stash it to use elsewhere. It should last me several years of mouse-free sowing.

The big greenhouse clearout

That’s it: time to admit defeat. I had a good pick over of the last tomatoes to cook down and freeze, and now the plants are undeniably finished. They’ll go onto the compost heap (I had a spot of blight during the season where the rain got inside the greenhouse – but even blighted foliage can be composted as the disease doesn’t survive once the foliage breaks down).

Once the toms are out I’ll give the glass a good wash, then weed out the borders and refresh with a good thick (5cm/2″) mulch of garden compost before replanting with greenhouse salads (see below). My only dilemma is that I can’t bear to pull up those lovely French marigolds just yet; I sowed them back in February and they’ve been flowering their socks off all summer, no deadheading required. I guess the salads will just have to go in behind them till they’re done.

Pricking out salads

From this….
…to this: give them another few weeks and they’ll be the perfect size for planting into the greenhouse borders after the summer crops are cleared

All the salad plants I sowed last month are now big sturdy seedlings and ready to move on into their own individual newspaper pots (the above are Winter Density lettuce (left) and mizuna (right)).

I’m a big fan of newspaper pots: zero plastic and pretty much zero carbon (as you’re reusing waste newspaper to make them) and the seedlings do so much better as their roots grow through the sides and don’t circle as they would in plastic. I get much better results from them every year – well worth the extra 15 minutes it takes me to fill a seed tray with paper pots.

Juice!

The last of the windfalls: I have a lovely little Devonshire Quarrenden apple tree, very early eater with a lovely sweet, strawberry-like flavour. But my only slight problem is that it crops so early in the year – over by about mid-September most years – that I miss all the Apple Days and my windfalls are already long gone before I can juice them.

This year, what with the coronavirus an’ all, Apple Days aren’t really happening – or at least not the ones with the big community juicing events. Luckily, though, I’ve found a friend with access to a scratter, to chop up the windfalls into rough pieces, and a press, to make the juice.

I am taking along my own few remaining windfalls, and scavenging apples from everyone I can think of with a surplus. It’s one of the best ways I know of storing the abundance our apple trees provide: tip the juice into saved plastic litre bottles and freeze, then savour the rich, sweet flavour all through winter. Yum.

The September veg garden

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by sallynex in education, exotic edibles, greenhouse, kitchen garden, my garden, self sufficiency, this month in the garden

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

harvesting, mentoring, mice, perennial crops, pests, sowing, tomatoes

Harvesting this month: French beans, courgettes, patty pan summer squash, sweetcorn, potatoes (the last of the second earlies to eat, plus maincrops to store), apples and raspberries, plus cucumbers and tomatoes from the greenhouse, and baby-leaf salads from pots outside the back door.

Sowing this month: Autumn-sown (Japanese) onions and lots of salads, for outside (under cloches) and in pots to refill the greenhouse borders once the toms are out, including winter lettuce, mizuna, mibuna, American land cress, corn salad, chard, beetroot (for leaves), turnips (for leaves), spring onions, and round-rooted carrots.

This month I will be:

  • Clearing summer brassicas
  • Planting autumn-sown onion sets
  • Mulching empty beds
  • Saving seeds
  • Taking cuttings of herbs and borderline-tender plants like salvias and pelargoniums
  • Planting herbs and perennial vegetables
  • Cooking apples (and tomatoes) to freeze for winter

New perennial crops for this year

Perennial vegetables are so much more sustainable than annual as you don’t have to continually disturb the soil (so no carbon release) and they require much less input in the way of resources compared to raising seeds and using lots of water, warmth, feed and compost.

There aren’t many of them, though, and some are very unfamiliar. So one of my projects this season has been to start a perennial vegetable garden. No soil disturbance, a fraction of the inputs (feed, water, fertiliser, compost) of annual vegetables, and you lock up more carbon with permanent planting too. And a fraction of the effort of regular vegetable gardening. But the trick is to find perennial vegetables you actually want to eat: here’s what I’ve started with.

Daubenton’s (perennial) kale is growing well: it’s under a little tent of mesh to keep the butterflies off but I’ll remove that once they go away at the end of the season.

The skirret was a total failure: sowed direct in May as instructed, absolutely no seedlings. No idea if the slugs got them or if it was too dry or if they just didn’t fancy it this year. It may have been the seeds themselves so will order from a different supplier next year just in case. And I will be sowing them into pots where I can keep an eye on them.

Salsify were more successful: several good leafy rosettes now from direct sowing in May. I am leaving them to establish for a year or two before I try to pull a few roots.

American ground nut (Apios americana): I planted these odd little tubers (they are actually beans but are more like small, floury potatoes to eat) at the foot of canes by the low wall. Not all survived, but enough did for me to think this will be an interesting taste test next year!

Chinese artichokes: Easy as anything to grow – they’re related to deadnettle. I’ve got them in an old sink in the back garden: I will wait until they die back before harvesting some of the knobbly roots to try (probably next month: watch this space).

And a new addition: Turkish rocket (Bunias orientalis). It’s not the most spectacular plant, being a clump of fuzzy-felt leaves and not much else. But it is bone hardy and a useful spicy salad ingredient. And when I say spicy, I mean spicy: I had a little taste and like most things Turkish it’s ten times stronger than anything you’ve ever tasted before. I am not sure if I like it yet, but I will persevere.

New mentoring service

Well actually it’s not entirely new: I’ve been mentoring several students recently and have found it works so well I am offering it more widely.

The idea is that you have me “on tap” for advice and help about organic and sustainable methods of food growing, over email (no complicated technology to master!) and when you need it. Arrange an hour whenever it suits you and I can answer questions, give you loads of ideas and inspiration, guide you in starting up a new veg garden or help you develop an existing one. It’s entirely up to you what we talk about and it’s completely tailored to you and your garden. Book a one-off session, or a regular time each week. It’s up to you!

A lovely comment from one regular student recently: “I’m SO glad you’re there!”

For more details contact me at sally(dot)nex(at)btinternet(dot)com.

This year’s tomatoes: the verdict

I haven’t a lot of room in the garden to grow dozens of different types of tomatoes but I do like to try one or two new ones each year (there are about 7,500 varieties to choose from so there’s always one you haven’t grown before)

It has not been a vintage year. I’ve had lots of tomatoes: but only one of the three I grew came up to scratch.

Ailsa Craig Good old Ailsa. What would we do without her? There are relatively few straightforward medium-sized salad toms around nowadays – we all seem to be growing fancy cherries, black tomatoes and beefsteaks instead. But sometimes all you need is a straightforward slicing tom and this one is fantastic: reliable, prolific and great flavour too.

Coeur de Bue To be honest this is my own fault as I was being a cheapskate. I grew Coeur de Boeuf a year or two ago and loved it: all the flavour and size of a beefsteak without the difficulty (or low yields). This one came as a freebie and I thought, Bue? Boeuf? Not much in it… how wrong can you be. Insipid taste, pinkish red (so hard to tell when it’s ripe) and a sort of dry texture: a pale shadow of the original. Won’t be growing again.

Reisentomate Another freebie I should have turned down. It’s an interesting idea: a tomato that grows in segments, so you can pick off a segment at a time to eat rather than having the whole tomato. But beyond the novelty value, you’ve got to ask yourself….. why? Flavour insipid, texture dry, fruits small. Just no.

Mouse attack!

Mice got into the greenhouse and ate my low-hanging tomatoes…
… and then they nobbled my newly-emerged beetroot seedlings. The giveaway that this is not slug damage is that nipped-off leaf: a slug would have eaten them down to the ground.

I have been battling the mice. You may think this would be something of an unequal fight, being as I’m several gazillion times their size but they are obviously far cleverer than me.

It started with them taking munchies out of my low-hanging tomatoes: I have never had this happen before in all my 25+ years of growing veg but it was definitely mice as they climbed on top of one fruit and left a lot of poo as a calling card. Yum #not.

Now they’re after my beetroot seedlings. I sowed them direct and they came up within days. Yet along came my whiskery friends and… no more beetroot seedlings.

I do have a feral cat but she is getting old nowadays and spends most of her time on the boiler. I am also starting to think a cat brings too much in the way of collateral damage: don’t mind the baby rabbits so much, but the robins are heartbreaking. So Sooty is to be my last cat and I will have to think of other ways to keep the little blighters off my food in future.

I could trap them, but I always prefer a live and let live policy so for now I am trying an alternative approach. Come back next month for news of its success (or not).

Bean there, done that

13 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in greenhouse, kitchen garden, seeds

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

beans, borlotti beans, dried beans, harvesting, Lingua di Fuoco, shelling beans

borlotti_freshbeans

I do love it when you figure something out all by yourself.

I’ve always been slightly mystified by the instructions for drying shelling beans. You are supposed to dry them on the plant if at all possible: but of course this being Britain that’s a bit of a pipe dream as it always, always rains from August to about, well, June. And the September to October bit is just when your shelling beans – in this case, the sumptuously beautiful borlotti bean ‘Lingua di Fuoco’, or Firetongue – are mature and ready to dry.

So failing unending sunshine – and we really do fail quite well here – you’re supposed to take the entire plant and hang it indoors, upside-down so the beans can carry on drying.

Eh?

Anyone who has grown climbing beans knows they are monster plants, wound and twisted around their supports in a Gordian knot only the bravest would try to untangle in order to pull up said plant. It stumped me totally.borlotti_hangingupWell: I had a bit of a brainwave this year. It suddenly occurred to me that you didn’t need to take the plants off the supports: keep ’em on. And since at around 8ft high they were never really going to go literally upside down (the highest ceiling in our cottage is only about 7ft – we are not allowed to have tall friends, and bean plants are out of the question) – how about horizontal?

So I hung them off their handily sturdy cane, horizontally from the roof of the greenhouse. Took about five minutes: job done.

Trouble is I now have a further problem: I live in one of the damper corners of the world and it has been extremely damp in the last few weeks. So even the greenhouse hasn’t been the driest of places.

To harvest good quality shelling beans the pod should be crisp brown and rattle when you shake it. Unfortunately a couple of weeks later when I returned to my borlottis, too many of the pods had turned grey and mouldy instead. I wonder if I’d kept a closer eye on them and picked them as they dried whether I could have avoided this.borlotti_beans

The beans inside were quite badly affected, too. I got enough unblemished beans which should keep well enough to sow again next year. But it wasn’t quite the generous winter’s supply I’d hoped for.

Ah well: onward and upward. The search is now on for a properly dry place, large enough to take a hefty cane with attached beanstalks plus pods. Any ideas?

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • September 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • May 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006

Categories

  • book review
  • chicken garden
  • children gardening
  • climate change
  • container growing
  • cutting garden
  • design
  • education
  • end of month view
  • exotic edibles
  • France
  • Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day
  • garden design
  • garden history
  • garden words
  • gardening without plastic
  • Gardens of Somerset
  • giveaways
  • greenhouse
  • herbs
  • kitchen garden
  • landscaping
  • my garden
  • new plants
  • new veg garden
  • news
  • overseas gardens
  • Painting Paradise
  • pick of the month
  • plant of the month
  • pond
  • poultry
  • pruning
  • recipes
  • seeds
  • self sufficiency
  • sheep
  • shows
  • sustainability
  • this month in the garden
  • Uncategorized
  • unusual plants
  • videos
  • walk on the wild side
  • wildlife gardening
  • wordless wednesday

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy