Vegmonkey and the Mrs.

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…

Yesterday, i had three wisdom teeth out under a general anaesthetic at Cheltenham General Hospital.  Needless to say, i am suffering lots.  Happily there is no bruising…yet, but i’m still feeling lightheaded and can’t walk straight yet (some would say this is usual!).  As i can’t eat solids yet, i am limited to sloppy weetabix and tea drenched digestive biscuits. Nice. Not the best feeling, when walking past a pea plant dripping with mange-tout!

So i thought today, i’d write about something that i can eat, albeit slowly.  Lettuce.

One of the main reasons we decided to start growing our own veg was because we didn’t like the idea of it being flown miles and miles across the world to get to us, having been sprayed and pumped full of stuff to make it last longer. As i posted here last year the bagged lettuce you buy in a supermarket gets sprayed with chlorine that is 20 times stronger that that you would find in a swimming pool. That’s a reason to grow your own if any!

Last year, we did quite poorly with things like spinach, lettuce, chard etc, after our initial first sowings had died off.  There just wasn’t the space, what with all the companion planting we did with flowers (a lesson learnt - in a garden such as ours, flowers have to live on the outside of the beds…if at all…(evil Dr. Claw laugh…)).

This year, everything seems to have bolted, although we have been having a regular supply of leaves, mostly oriental things such as mustard and mizuna, with some lettuce and chard thrown in.  The ‘All year round’ lettuce picture at the top was harvested on Wednesday, in the sunshine. They take a while to fill out, but once they do, they sit quite happily for months without going to seed. It’s dead easy just to pop outside with a sharp knife, and take one inside. That turns our food miles into metres!

So to keep the supply of leaves up, we recently sowed a huge amount of Perpetual Spinach (better in hot weather), rocket, lettuce all year round and red chard. If we cover it when the cold weather begins to set in, we might have some nice leaves for Christmas dinner.