Rain! Finally, as I sit here typing, it is raining! And not even just light rain — no, it’s the kind of rain that visibly runs down the street. After a mere 3.9 mm in the last month, and average daytime maximum temperatures of 27°C (peaking at 33.8°C) it’s not before time. My parents in the Highlands though somehow don’t take kindly to me complaining about a lack of rain…

Indeed, the last month has not been the best for the garden — a sequence of “other events” at Vine Cottage have had to take higher priority and the little time remaining has been pretty much entirely taken up with watering. Finding time to harvest, cook or even eat our produce has therefore been a challenge. And as for luxuries like weeding… Fortunately last weekend afforded me almost an entire day to blitz the jobs that needed doing.

Even so, there has still been plenty of (mostly good) news to share — it’s that time of year where I love the fact that you can have entire meals from the garden (which with garlic and shallots to throw into the mix is even more true this year than previously). I recognise though that this month’s post is a little “drier” than the clever and witty style that my readers are accustomed to (cough cough) — so give it a miss if you like, and just hop over to the new recipes page for some inspiration instead

Peas and Broad beans

This year has been something of a revelation where peas are concerned. My experience in previous years has been poor — you grow an entire row, it yields about enough peas for two portions of vegetables and they don’t even taste much better than frozen ones. This year though I tried some different varieties, and planted 1m of “Waverex” and 1m of “Progress No.9″, and they’ve been wonderful. Between them they yielded 3.4 kg of peas (in their pods), and the peas have been delicious — sweet enough to eat raw straight off the plant, and apparently very attractive to small children Growing to at least 3ft high, my row of Waverex accounted for well over half of the total yield, and tasted the best as well — I expect to find a row of these across the end of one of my beds every year in future!

And what’s more, it turns out that I do like broad beans! With roasts, in salads, as houmous and as a chilled soup — every way they’ve been great. And how can you not love seeing them nestled in their furry pods? Check out the new recipes page for our favourites. My 2m row produced 7 kg in their pods (roughly 2.5 kg podded), and I suspect the yield should have been quite a bit higher — I reckon only about 20% of the flowers turned into beans this year (possibly a lack of water at a critical time?)

Shallots, Onions and garlic

The garlic (I reckon the equivalent of 40 conventional supermarket bulbs) has all been harvested, and minus a few tasty bulbs that have already been eaten is now hanging in the shed. The shallots (”Echalote Grise”) are also up: a square metre plot has yielded 110 bulbs (3.75 kg), the first batch are now hanging in a net bag in the shed and the remainder are continuing to dry sheltered beneath the eaves of the house.

Finally the red onions are now swelling nicely thanks to regular watering!

Squashes

Having exhausted the yellow courgette seeds that I’ve been using for many years, this year I’m growing a more conventional green courgette (”zucchini”) and it is doing what courgettes do: producing courgettes pretty much daily.  Again, check out the recipes page for some of the best so far this year, with a special mention going to Carluccio’s “courgette pasta with spinach balls”.

More excitingly, I’m having my first go at growing summer squash (”Sunburst F1″), and winter squash (”Uchiki Kuri”).  The summer squash seem to taste basically the same as courgettes, but are an attractive yellow Patty Pan type.  The first fruit to form on the winter squash started to rot and dropped off at about the size of a golf ball (possibly a pollination problem?), but the next seem to be fine, and are now beginning to look quite impressive.  Hopefully the hot summer will go on long enough for them to fully form and ripen.

Elsewhere …

The tomatoes having looked on the verge of death when first planted out are now generally looking good and the first fruits are ripening nicely — the lack of rain has obviously had some benefits.  The Gooseberries whilst few in number were probably the best I’ve ever eaten (”Hinomaki Red” and “Yellow”) — let’s just hope we get rather more than a dozen of each in the second year!  And I’ve also started sowing follow-on crops of fennel and more spinach in place of the now harvested early carrots, spinach and shallots.

Finally the less good news

Sadly not all goes well …

One of the new rhubarb plants was diseased and has been binned.  I e-mailed a photo to www.brandycarrnurseries.co.uk where it came from, and they said “Oh dear — that doesn’t look good.  Dig it up, throw it away and we will send you a new one.”  Good service, but doesn’t change the fact that it’s now going to be another year before I can start picking from that plant.  Meanwhile the other plant (”Stockbridge Arrow”) seems to be doing its best to make up for it — romping away and swamping everything within a 4 foot radius including the back of my new herbaceous border …

The potatoes are also disappointing.  Yielding only about 500 g per plant, I suspect they’re barely covering the cost of the seed potatoes.  They’ve also been badly “scabbed” .  Personally I remain suspicious of the fact that the seed potatoes were infected before we even started –despite the fact that www.jbaseedpotatoes.co.uk assured me at the time that this was nothing to worry about.  Taste has also been disappointing: the Maris Bards tasted pretty good, but the Red Duke of Yorks (described by the website as “the best of the best in the potato world”) to my taste border on being unpleasant boiled, and not much better roasted.  Fingers crossed for the Edgecote Purple and Romano yet to come.

Finally, summer has arrived and the veg patch is once again becoming productive with an abundance of spinach, lettuce and mixed salad leaves. We also finished up the remainder of the late purple sprouting broccoli early this month, finally freeing up the space for baby fennel, more beetroot and even more lettuce (I’ve got my eyes on a lettuce, broad bean and chorizo soup which serves four and uses three whole lettuces — if it’s any good we will get through them pretty quickly!)

I’ve also lifted the first of my garlic — the Early Wights — which look great (I’ve never grown garlic before). Unfortunately I took my eye off the ball a little with these and forgot that the Early Wights (being early) should have been harvested before now. I thought I was supposed to be waiting for the tops to start browning which they haven’t really, but a little rummaging in the soil showed that the bulbs have started to split apart and the individual cloves have started shooting. Never mind — it probably just means that they won’t keep very well so I just need to find some good garlic recipes now (dough balls and garlic butter sounds like a good starting place)! To be on the safe side, I also lifted a few of the Mediterranean garlic. Now I just need to sort through the mountains of conflicting advice about how to dry garlic for storage — I’ve plumped for leaving them out in the sun during the day and bringing them in at night (night-time temperatures are currently dropping below 10°, and I’m told that temperature fluctuations can cause the garlic to start growing again). If anyone knows what I should actually be doing, please let me know!

Elsewhere the strawberry season has started (as would the currant season have done had the birds not beaten me to it), the peas are coming on nicely and we will make a start on the broad beans and new potatoes in the next few days. Still looking forward to trying to find a way of preparing broad beans that means that I actually like them — all recipe suggestions appreciated as usual We are also eating up the baby carrots to make way for the main fennel crop to go in next week. It won’t take long — the carrot germination was poor so there aren’t many and they are also pretty small. Never mind, you can’t beat lifting your own carrots, and it’s nice for Sam to be able to pull his own for tea. Of the two varieties of carrot we grew (”Little fingers” and “Nantes”) “Little fingers” wins in the taste tests — in my extremely humble opinion

The broad bean plants have reached the 6ft predicted, and the purple tinged flowers make them quite eye-catching. A week ago when these photos were taken, they were really too small still but they are coming on rapidly and I confidently predict an imminent glut…

If you’re interested, I’ve also added some new pages on the site.

* Spinach discusses the merits of the two different varieties of spinach I grew this year, and also the outcome of my experiment to see if Enviromesh would prevent the issues I’ve had in the past with leaf miner. It’s also got references to some of our favourite recipes.
* The plot gives a little bit of additional self explanatory background info.

Later in the year, I will probably add pages dedicated to our favourite veg recipes, the results of the 2010 “is it possible to make Mat like broad beans?” challenge and comparisons of the different types of parsnips, peas, gooseberries and currants I’ve grown (in the latter case if the birds actually let me get any!)

See you again soon!

As we enter our second summer, and with lots of new additions to the Vine Cottage garden, I thought perhaps it was time to start a blog… So what’s been going on?

The main vegetable patch

With the veg patch not completed last year until mid April, it was really too late for onions and garlic, so these are new on the menu this year. In the left-hand bed I’ve got three different types of garlic growing: Early Wight, Picardy Wight and Mediterranean. They were all planted last autumn, and are now well established. Meanwhile in the middle bed, I’ve got Shallots (grown from sets) and Onion “Red Baron” grown from seed. Also making a first appearance this year are leeks, where this month I have sown both Blue Solaise and Musselburgh to provide a crop through the winter months which were largely barren last year.

Moving away from onion related subjects, you can also see broad beans “Masterpiece Longpod” growing strongly along the back. Supposedly they’re going to reach something like 6ft which I certainly wouldn’t rule out the way they are growing at the moment. I only have two concerns with these: I don’t like broad beans (I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that growing my own will bring me round and secondly that the flowers have recently started dropping mostly without leaving any beans growing in their place. We shall see.

In the Enviromesh cage I’m growing a couple of varieties of carrots (the mesh providing protection from carrot fly). They’ve been very slow getting going though (the cold weather?) and germination has generally been poor. Hopefully they will get going soon, as they’re supposed to be a first crop followed in July by fennel.

Looking closer at the right-hand bed, we are finally enjoying the last of last year’s crop. Lesson: “late purple sprouting broccoli” really is late! I had expected this to be well finished by now, and to have carrots and beetroot growing in its place. Ho-hum. This year I will be growing “non-late” purple sprouting broccoli … That said, the broccoli is excellent. In the past we’ve eaten it as a normal vegetable, but this year it’s getting VIP treatment and being eaten like asparagus: as a starter served simply with butter and grated Parmesan. This year I’ve sown “red arrow” and “White Star”. And to the left of this bed, we’ve got next year’s parsnips coming up — three varieties this year: “Gladiator”, “Tender and True” and “Countess F1″. Fingers crossed they will be as good as gladiator was last year.

Strawberries. Last year I planted five plants of Calypso strawberries (perpetual fruiting) which were superb producing an extremely tasty crop non-stop well into the autumn. I tried to follow the advice of taking the fruit off them in the first year to encourage them to establish, but they were producing so much that in the end I gave up and enjoyed it instead. I also took five runners off them, so this year the patch has doubled in size, which I reckon is going to provide Helen and I with worthwhile portions of strawberries every couple of days.

Other fruit. This autumn also saw the addition of red currants, white currants and gooseberries (two different varieties of each all being trained as double cordons around the back and side of the vegetable patch — see top picture above), and Rasberry “Autumn Bliss” along the back and down the right-hand side. All are growing well with a healthy if small crop of fruit already developing nicely on the currants and gooseberries. My only concern is that a couple of the cordons seem to be growing lots of side shoots and no leader — I’m hoping this can be rectified simply by choosing one of the side shoots to establish as a new leader when they are next pruned in June.

Finally, that brings us to the potatoes. This central island bed is entirely new this year. The plan had been to grow potatoes in it the first year, and then in subsequent years to turn it over to grasses and perennials. The veg growing thing is a bit addictive though so the jury is still out on what it will be used for longer term. Potatoes are now growing healthily again after a bit of a setback due to the late frost earlier this month. Five varieties: Charlotte, Red Duke of York, Maris Bard, Edgecotte Purple and Romano. I will let you know the results of the taste tests later in the year …

As you can see from the wigwam, I’m also making an attempt to grow Runner beans, Borlotti beans and French beans in this new bed, but I’m not too hopeful — the soil is pretty poor and I didn’t have much in the way of organic matter to add prior to planting.

Oops — I lied! How could I forget the rhubarb Also new this year are two rhubarb plants: Stockbridge Arrow and Brandy Carr Scarlet. Both growing very well, and obviously loving their new location behind the (also new) herbaceous border. But how disappointed was my wife when having been watching them grow with anticipation she asked how long it would be before we could start pulling them and found that the answer was “next year” … Whether or not I will actually have the self-control to follow the advice of not pulling any stalks in the first year remains to be seen!