Vegmonkey and the Mrs.

The carrots are one of the slowest things to grow in our garden. I’ve been filling in the gaps of the ones that didn’t germinate with new seed, and all gaps are slowly being covered. I’m working on removing the onions soon, so i can get some new carrots in before the end of July. We’ve put purple carrots in this year, due to the benefits of purple veg on health, but also as a bit of an experiment! The first baby ones wil be harvested and taken to a BBQ we are going to on Sunday.

The Perpetual Spinach went in to fill the space, but also to provide us with a supply of leaves that won’t bolt (unlike standard spinach) like the chard and rocket have. It will hopefully keep growing if we keep harvesting, long into the colder months, and maybe even into January. We planted it closer than we should have incase plants failed, which they have…more than we expected actually.

This was taken about 3 weeks ago, and has since shot up amazingly. The stem has filled out and is beginning to thicken up ready to start providing us with little sprouts, i hope!

Ironically the two plants under the Brassica cage got a little attacked by caterpillars…nothing me and my trowel couldn’t handle though - but the ones in the old potato buckets have been completely left alone. Maybe they prefer the challenge?

I’ll post a lot more about the brassicas soon…they’ve been hidden away from the butterflies, but as i finish work for the summer soon, i’ll be able to get out there during the day, and take some pictures of them under the meshy protection.

The build-a-ball cage is intact and surprisingly strong.   It’s survived a proper battering by the wind. As the brussels inside are growing , they are growing out of the confined space.  I’ve taken out the six metal poles at the corners and in the middle and replaced them with garden canes instead, which are half the height again.

This way, i can match the brussels growing with new canes. We made sure we cut the mesh so we had spare as a skirt, so that it would be extendable.

I find runner beans good value. Once they are in the soil and are growing, they pretty much do their own thing aside from a quirt of something organic to kill the blackfly once a week.

I have absolutely no idea what varieties of beans are growing…one has red and white flowers, the other nice deep red ones, and they are intertwined. The reason for this is i planted about 4 different varieties in plugs, and put out the strongest plants from the cells. A friend of mine who has just taken on an allotment had the rest, so it will be interesting to compare our differing results.

There are some mini beans growing, so we should have something edible within 2 weeks (when they are about 5 - 7 inches long is ideal for us) …then it’ll go nuts! Last year we planted way, way too many beans…almost to the degree that the weight of the plants and size, meant i couldn’t actually get in to harvest the beans! This year i have put eight plants in, around six canes, which will be plenty for us for the rest of the summer, and into the winter when frozen. Freezing beans is a useful way of keeping them, after blanching, but they don’t taste half as good.

Now to go and trim the ivy, that is slowly trying to strangle the beans from above, and giving the slugs a nice bridge onto the crop!

I posted a while ago that a lot of out Spring sown onion sets were bolting. It turned out that only a handful went to seed. The rest have happily filled out so much that 80% or so are ready to harvest. I’m going to leave them for a week or so, then pull them up. The plan is to fill the space with carrots - if all goes to plan, the ground will have served us twice in one season, and we’ll be eating some nice Christmas carrots! Either way, i can’t wait to start eating them, particularly the delicious looking red ones…it’ll be a while though as we have loads. I am going to make a point of learning how to plait them correctly this year, rather than just hanging them up individually in the shed, a la last year.

This theory of using the ground twice in a year is a bit of a ‘Mantra’ for us here at Vegmonkey and the Mrs.  We have already grown a crop of early potatoes and Japanese ‘Senshyu’ Onions in the bed closest to the house, and it now has sweetcorn and courgettes growing well…and it’s only mid July. Also, as i posted yesterday, the second lot of cauliflowers have gone into the space the first lot came out of.

They key i think is having the foresight to plant the seeds and have things ready to fill the space. I’ve ended up with an excess of tomato plants and a spare courgette, which is never bad!

Hooray!

I find them to be the most difficult thing to grow for a number of reasons. They take a while to grow from seed to food, the slugs absolutely love them at a number of stages and they hate having a check in growth.

So i went to our very local garden centre and bought three plug plants for 20p each and planted them about 30cm apart in a row in our Brassica bed. Whoever said that they need a metre between plants, has never had the benefit of raised beds! All three of the caulis have matured at the same time, but that’s not a bad thing…seasonal veg is what it’s all about.

Now i said i couldn’t grow cauli’s, but that is not strictly true anymore due to a couple of our friends who moved from a house to a flat, gifting us a couple of propagators with lids, in the process. I planted some ‘Romanesque’ seeds and ‘Lateman’ into the soil, and covered it with the lid. This has enabled me to plant some decent sized cauliflower plug plants straight into the space where the caulis have just come out.

Two cauliflower crops in one season…that ain’t half bad! They are sat in the fridge ready to be devoured!

With all this rain we’ve been having the last couple of days, followed by the sun, stuff in the garden has gone nuts. It’s my fave gardening time of year as there is so much to go outside and have a look at after work!

I’ve planted a couple of the usual bog standard ‘Defender’ courgette plants, just ‘cos they are so easy to grow and give lots of reward for very little effort. The other two plants are a pumpkin kinda-thing called a ‘Gourd.’  I see a lot of inedible ones which can be used for decoration, but this is a variety called ‘Uchiki Kuri,‘ and is more like a Squash than anything else, and can be eaten.

I think the thing that attracted me to this was the nice bright orange skin, but also its apparent nutty flavour. The fruits also store well, not that we will have a huge amount from the 1.2 by 2.4 metre bed dedicated to these little beauties.

The plants went in late as the bed was being used for early potatoes and Japanese Onions. It didn’t matter in the end, as the courgettes have pretty much caught up with anything i could have put in earlier.  The Defender is above, while the Uchiki Kuri plant pics are below. I had to remove the flower yesterday and was worried that the first fruit of the season would rot, which would be good (mum!)…

I’m having to use canes to peg the plant inside the boundaries of the bed this year, so that it doesn’t disappear onto the slate or provide a ‘bridge’ for slugs and snails to cross the copper.  In the bed also are a load of lettuce variety plants to fill the space while other stuff is growing, and 4 sweetcorn plants which are tall and growing nicely.

The tomatoes are looking very good. They’ve been through the ringer a bit this year as i potted them on late, and quite a few got leggy due to being moved indoors. I forgot to water quite a few aswell, and, being in pots, this meant lots of droopy tomatoes.

Most finally ended up in one of the 3 grow bags we bought and are now huge! I put the spares into a bit pot at the garden, but they aren’t doing hugely well.

I’ve always been confused about this sideshoot lark, but went for it anyway. The plants looked a little mashed up by the time i’d finished, but the little yellow flowers have come up nicely.

Last year we only had 2 hanging baskets of tunmbling tom tomatoes so having 12 plants growing well means we will have a lot of tomatoes. I’ve just watered them with ‘Tomorite’ now that the little green toms have set…so it’s just a waiting game now.

Last year, our sweetcorn didn’t do very well at all. The first and second lots of seedlings got destroyed by slugs and snails. The third lot was molly-coddled so much it grew…just not very much. We had one cob, that was about 1 inch long. It tasted very sweet.

This year i planted enough for 15 plants. 4 were good enough to be potted on and are now growing in the bed well, as can be seen above. They should be planted in a block (if that is possible with 4 plants!) so that the fertilisation can happen by wind dispersal. I think i planted them too close, but there is plenty of room for their roots to roam, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Lots is growing at the mo, particularly the sweetcorn…i love this time of year!

A month or so ago, i wrote a post entiitled life saving veg. It explained about purple carrots, and i waffled a little about how they are good for the body. I came home from work today and switched on the laptop, only to find that veg really does save your life. Please bear in mind that i am in no way dumbing down cancer, i realise how serious it is, but it’s an interesting angle…

This article on yahoo here explains how brocolli can combat prostate cancer by altering the activity levels of genes involved in tumour growth.

FANTASTIC!

The results of the study showed that a broccoli-rich diet produced changes in gene activity that were likely to prevent or hinder cancer growth and inflammation in the prostate.

For the technical of you out there, the signalling pathways, involving two proteins, that typically stimulate cell division or development, and often play a role in cancer, were altered.

I can imagine it now…

Doctor: I’m afraid you have prostrate cancer, Vegmonkey.

Vegmonkey: What can i do?

Doctor: Well here’s some seeds for some ‘Early Purple Sprouting,’ and a few plug plants to get you started.

Vegmonkey: Err, thanks.

I got really narked off last month with the slugs eating all the lettuces that i had grown from seed directly in the beds. Really disheartening. So i poured about 50 seeds into a ceramic pot and waited. They grew…like mad. They got to the size where it was time to harvest them as baby leaves, which i did with some. The rest got planted out throughout the garden, to minimize the chance of them being munched.

I’ve just checked them, and most have settled nicely into the soil. The ones that looked like they were wilting, went into the salad bowl. The picture at the top is the lettuces all lined up on the side of the bed, ready for planting. I shook the roots into the bed, which covered the whole pile of lettuces with dirt..whoops! We have so many leaves this year, that we are eating them with all our meals, especially as the peas are slowing down…