The Harvest, 2019

With the back garden renovations that have taken place this year and us going away on holiday I was a little late this year in planting up the raised vegetable bed.  Following some problems in previous years with the carrots I decided to try growing them from seed rather than seedlings and so I decided to do this with all of the vegetables. 

I bought carrot seeds, beetroot seeds and runner bean seeds.  I didn't plant up until the first week of June and following the instructions on the packets I planted carrots and beetroot outdoors and within 24 hours of planting the seeds we had nothing but rain for a couple of weeks, a lot heavy rain.  The runner beans had to be sowed indoors and they were growing quickly.  I transported them outdoors and planted them in their growing place.

Some of the carrots started to sprout, but not many and the beetroot were a total no show.  I left it a few weeks but still nothing so I planted more seeds, thinking that maybe the first lot had been washed away with the sheer amount of rain we had had.  I kept looking in hope and eventually we had a few little leaves appear in a few places and out of about 300 seeds planted I counted about 40 tiny seedlings.  They were doing OK for about a week and then all of a sudden they just disappeared and not a single beetroot was grown and harvested this year.  I love fresh beetroot and I was devastated, given the glut of beetroot harvest we've had the past two years.

We didn't fair too well with the carrots either this year, I had to plant additional carrot seeds where there were large gaps where they just didn't germinate but we've not exactly had brilliant weather this year, its been quite wet, or at least that's what it seems to have been.  One thing we did do with the carrots this year though, and that was to get nice straight carrots!  I did make more carrot top dye again this year and I used it to dye some Jacobs fleece.

As for the beans, they went totally mad and I was harvesting huge amounts of beans every couple of days.  I'm not kidding, take a look at the photos, that is the same pile of beans from two different angles and that was the biggest single harvest but every couple of days I was harvesting half to thirds of that amount each time.  The freezer was full of bags of sliced, blanched runner beans.

The back garden is all done

Now that we are back from holiday and the kids are back to school I took myself off to the local garden centre to get some plants.  I didn't go with a definite idea of what I wanted exactly but I did know the kind of thing I was going to look for and go from there.

There were already a few plants that managed to survive, 3 roses, black mondo grass and geranium (cranesbill) and Liatris.  I bought a Verbascum - Dark Eyes, Dianthus - Passion, Poppy - Moondance, Petunia - Nightsky and a Garvinea.  I also bought some more solar powered garden lights from Aldi.

I also bought a large gothic style planter for the tomatoes that my father-in-law gave us.  We weren't planning on having tomatoes this year because we don't have room for them anymore so next year the planter will be used for something nice.  Believe it or not that gothic style planter was a lot cheaper than a plain terracotta coloured one, both of them plastic type of material.

Petunia - Nightsky

Verbascum - Dark Eyes

Poppy - Moondance, Dianthus - Passion, Oxalis, Lavender, Garvinea, Geranium Cranesbill

The Harvest

I've pulled up a load of beetroot and carrots today because they are starting to split in the ground so I thought I would make use of them now rather than loose any more to the weather.  The beetroot has been cooked, cooled and chopped up into cubes and the carrots have been peeled and put through the food processor to Julienne them and then blanched and frozen in portions.  I didn't think to weigh them before I done anything with them but the cleaned up and peeled weight of carrots is 2.5kg, so just a few!

Here are photos of just some of the carrots, still growing freaky shaped ones!

I've kept the green tops off the carrots, chopped them up and put them in a bucket of water to soak for a couple of days with the intention of making dye in a few days.

Today is about food

Thankfully our tomatoes have survived our few days away thanks to a special watering system we have so I have harvested some today now that they are finally ready.  There are lot of fruits on them, a good crop, but only a handful are ready.  The beetroot and carrots are doing really well and we've been harvesting those when we need to as well.

We have cherry tomatoes and chocolate cherry tomatoes, yes, CHOCOLATE.  They're not made of chocolate, nor do they taste of chocolate but they are a brown colour and taste very nice, better than those in the supermarkets which are forced grown and not particularly flavoursome.

I have also got my backside into gear and made the mincemeat for Yule and Christmas.  I usually do this much earlier in the year but it should still have time to mature in the brandy.

Produce from the garden

I've been harvesting the beetroot for a few weeks now, pulling up a few at a time, cooking them and dicing them to be used on salads and in wraps etc but its time to harvest some of the carrots.  Hmmmm, they are interesting aren't they?  I've never seen carrots like these in the shops, they must be a new variety that we've discovered.

They are full of Celtic knots and big noses.

Which came first, the chicken or the carrot?  Ooooh, Ooooh, Ooooh, I need a wee, carrot and them we have a weird little fat one that looks like a dolls or a babies hand, we had a few hand shapes ones actually.

Aye, aye, what have these carrots been up to in the garden then eh?  These are the naughty boy carrots.  Despite their weird appearance, the carrots are actually very tasty.

We're not doing any good with the beans this year, not enough for a meal from them this year.  Very disappointed.  Tomatoes aren't doing great again either as the insects are getting to them again.  Potatoes will hopefully do better this year and I'm hoping for a better crop from those. 

The carrot tops have been chopped up and soaked for three days in preparation to be boiled up and then the tops scooped out and the liquid kept to make a natural dye.  Beetroot is doing really well and I've been keeping the water from cooking those to use as a natural dye too.

What are we growing in the garden this year?

Last year we had a bumper crop of runner beans, a few potatoes, carrots and beetroot.  The cabbage and cauliflower growing was a waste of time because it became caterpillar feed.

This year we are trying dwarf beans in the hopes that we will have a crop of beans but not be over-run with them.  We are also trying beetroot again with a variety called Pablo, some multi-coloured carrots which are basically orange, yellow and white and then we have tomatoes, potatoes and strawberry.  We have had strawberries growing for a few years actually but they always get eaten by the slugs and snails so this year we have put them in a hanging basket to see what happens.  Slugs and snails can't climb up thin air can they?

I didn't actually take a photo of the hen house last year to show you what it looks like, I just took photos of the hens.  It has a run which goes underneath the sheltered house.  The beans this year are in the big red tub that used to have the strawberries growing in and the strawberries are in a hanging basket.

A couple of bags of potatoes and the chickens being nosy as always.

We also have flowers in the garden.  I won't show the lavender as that's in another post but here are some of the flowers we have growing too.  First is a scented rose that I've had for years, so long that we bought it with us from our first house to this one as it was in a big planter originally.  Its now planted in the garden properly and gives us a good display every year.

We have a massive shrub/semi-climbing rose from David Austin Roses called Spirit of Freedom.  Its beautiful, the flowers are ginormous and  heavily scented.  The only problem is that the flowers are so heavily that they usually hang down towards the floor and you can only see their beauty when you lift them.  I have a multi-coloured Spirea, it flowers white and pink on the same shrub and then that is Cranesbill Geranium and both are usually covered in bees.

In this last photo, I have two photos of a pink flowering plant that I have no idea what it is or where it came from.  Its not invasive, so I've ruled out it being a weed, when its overcast or dark the flowers close up tightly like they've been rolled up.  Then we have Campanula, which is pretty in masses of clumps but is very invasive so has to be controlled a lot.

Getting chickens and harvesting the vegetables

We are back from our camping holiday just outside of Wells, Gloucestershire and have been and got some chickens.  We have been advised that our house should be able to accommodate 4 chickens so we have chosen 4 different breeds.  Ranger the ginger one, Bluebell the grey one, Sussex the white one and Rocky Road the black one.  We have called them Ginger, Annie, Star and Roxsy.

The place we had them from has a return policy whereby if you have any problems with any or all of the chickens you can take them back within a given period of time.  We had issues with Rocksy, the black Rocky Road chicken where she was squawking loud all of the time and physically attacking the other hens to the point of there being blood everywhere.  We took her back and she was put in a special "ASBO" enclosure that they have for problem chickens, where they can keep an eye on their behaviour.  Our hen house became peaceful with the other hens getting along together really well with Ginger, the smallest of them, being in charge.

As you can see, our raised vegetable bed is green, with the runner beans being good producers.  The variety are "Gigantica" I think they were called, my father-in-law got them for us and they are big runner beans.  Quite a lot of them have grown in funny shapes due to lack of growing room and with me being only small I have to keep getting step ladders out to reach the tops of the bean plants and find all these beans that have been "trapped" and grown weird.

Whilst their plants have produced beans for them ours have gone mad and I've been harvesting them twice a week, cooking half of them and blanching/freezing the other half.  We have over 11lb of sliced green beans in our freezer so you imagine what kind of crop we have had this year, so many in fact that when I close my eyes at night that is all I see, they've even been calling to me and they must know my name as they have grown in shapes of the letters, J U L I.  They obviously come unstuck when it came to the last letter though but I suppose growing in the shape of an "a" is a tall order.  Amazing!

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the cabbage and cauliflower.  We have not had anything from them as we have been blighted with millions, and I mean millions, of caterpillars.  I got excited and took a photo of a purple cauliflower as it started to grow but it didn't get much bigger than that before it was covered in caterpillars.

We did plant some potatoes in bags and we did get a few from those but not very many.  Tomatoes, we had a few but mostly the insects got to them before we did.  We did get a few beetroot and carrots though.  Its the first time either of us have grown vegetables and its a big learning curve but at least the chickens are laying eggs so we have a ready supply of fresh eggs to enjoy.

Small garden, big change.

We live in a small mid-terraced house on a "walk" on the outer edge of a housing estate with a small front garden and slightly larger back garden with no direct vehicle access to the property.

Because the house is on a slight hill, the back garden is split into two levels and in the past, when the kids were little, we gated the lower section off for safety.  Now the kids are older and we have a small dog that gate has been removed and a small fence put up to stop the dog messing on the grass and killing it off.

We've had a change of neighbours on one side since we moved in years ago and to be honest they are not very pleasant to live next to in the slightest with regard to noise levels (in that it would be quieter to live above a nightclub), things being thrown over the fence, climbing up the fence to look over and just general intolerable behaviour that is not acceptable in normal society which makes it impossible to enjoy any time relaxing in the garden.  Our kids like to go out there in the summer, put up the little sun-protecting tent on the grass and make themselves a cosy reading/colouring nook with blankets and pillows etc, but not anymore due to the unpleasantness, so we gave them the option of leaving it as it is in the hopes things may improve or for us to turn the garden into a working garden where we can grow vegetables and maybe get a few chickens.  They both enthusiastically voted for growing vegetables and getting some chickens.

Here goes...

 The first photo was taken a few years ago, its the only one I have that shows how the garden was before.  We had to hire the grass cutter thing and it was hard work getting the grass up.

Then we removed the small pond, which had been neglected since the neighbours threw an egg over last year which hit the fence, smashed and the contents went into the pond on a hot sunny day and wrecked the water pump.  In its place we put the Railway sleepers for the base of the chicken house and I had to move my Jasmine.  The ground underneath the grass contains a lot of clay and is difficult to dig so we also built a large raised bed and started filling it with the contents of the two huge compost bins.

We put weed control sheet down and will get some shredded bark to put down as path.  We had to get a number of big bags of compost to fill the top of the raised border.  Yeah, that's me sifting through the homemade compost.  We also chose some vegetables to grow and this year we will try runner beans, purple cauliflower, savoy cabbage, small round carrots and we bought a small pot of rainbow beetroot.  We also have a small tomato greenhouse and we have cherry tomato, yellow cherry tomato and a lemon hot chilli pepper.  We also have herbs in containers of lemon balm, mint, curry plant and lemon thyme.

The chicken house is on order and we've found where we will get the chickens from but will wait until after our holiday to go and get the chickens.