Climbing courgettes: basic care
This year I’ve had a series of disasters on the courgette/zucchini growing front. Seeds haven’t germinated, pots have been knocked over snapping the contents and when I finally planted the remaining three out in big pots in the kitchen garden they were guzzled by slugs. “I can’t face the thought of a summer without home grown courgette salads. “ Danny exclaimed. “We’ll have to buy a plant.” As home grown courgettes taste so much better than shop bought ones I was hoping for a courgette glut too. Apart from raw courgette...
read moreFinally I can grow mint!
When I moved to the cottage 18 years ago, I made a cute little herb bed just beside the kitchen’s back door. The marjoram, sage and oregano thrived. But the little thyme hedge died every winter and the parsley keeled over every summer. Since then I’ve learnt that parsley likes a lot of water and this border is very dry. And you know my history when it comes to growing mint. In the end, I gave up on the thyme hedge and Danny decided to grow his two favourite herbs (parsley and thyme) in an old bath that had been discarded by one of my...
read moreUpdate on the flower farming project
My project to grow and sell cut flowers is now getting exciting. We sold our first bunches this week to our local village shop.
read moreTurnip Oasis: a review
Last year Danny was surprised how much he enjoyed raw home grown cauliflower and raw courgette (zucchini) in salads. This year I thought I’d tickled his taste buds further by introducing him to raw home grown turnip. I’m not a big fan of turnips – they are fine in a winter stew but I’d been seduced by the description of turnip Oasis on the Thompson and Morgan site. Turnip Oasis is a new variety of turnip and when eaten raw has the taste of a melon. Danny was dubious about it. “Why would I want my turnips to taste of melon? I want...
read morePlanting potatoes in bags and borders
I know that I live with the Potato King who can eat a kilo of spuds at one sitting but I never thought that I would have so much to write about this particular vegetable. In fact growing decent spuds has become a bit of an obsession. Yesterday I took all the seed potatoes out of the new potato border. They’d only been in for a week or so. I had lost confidence in my ridges and during a sleepless 3am fret had come to the conclusion that they would be too fiddly to earth up. I decided to go for the Australian farmer’s method right across...
read moreExperimenting with intensive potato planting
Danny has been frantically busy for weeks now. So he swapped cooking for seven nights running (simple quick food) if I finished off his potato border and planted the spuds. As you know I’ve started practicing biodynamic principles in the garden this year. I’m hoping for an increased harvest and a healthier garden all round. I read what John Soper had to say about potatoes in his book Bio-dynamic Gardening –lots of good advice but he didn’t give spacings. So I consulted my gardening bible Joy Larkom’s Grow Your Own...
read moreKale buds, cabbage buds and Lucky (our dehydrator)
I had no idea that you could eat kale buds until Margaret Thorsom who writes this blog alerted me to the fact on a comment on my latest purple sprouting broccoli post. They are absolutely delicious and we are mixing them with our PSB. And Margaret Thorsom’s blog is pretty good too – she is a weaver and crafter and her husband is a vegetable farmer using hoop houses. I’d love a hoop house – they are really nifty. I’d also like to make rag rugs in the future when normal energy returns. Yesterday I spotted that a lot of the cabbages...
read moreHarvesting the purple sprouting broccoli 2010
Our farming friends dropped by for afternoon tea on Sunday. They are easy and relaxed and their little girl A is divine. She gave our biscuits the thumbs up – the past selection weren’t up to much and we found little pieces of half eaten biscuit hidden in the kitchen for several days after her last visit. Our kitchen is a messy, lived in room so the biscuits provided a great diversion for the dogs. I had fallen asleep after a late brunch on Sunday and woke with just time enough to fly into Newmarket to buy the biscuits. Yes I know that...
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