Vegmonkey and the Mrs.

We have had a lot of success this year with lettuce and the oriental veg we have planted quite regularly since March.  The problems we’ve had with the leaves have been with the rocket, spinach and chard, which have pretty much gone to seed as soon as they started producing leaves.

Quite annoying. To get around this we planted ‘Leaf Beat’ or ‘Perpetual Spinach’ as it is also known. It tastes just like spinach, but seems to grow a lot quicker, and doesn’t bolt! We’ve had two harvests this week as a side dish with our dinner, with a few cashew nuts thrown in, much better than buying bagged lettuce from the shop!

As the weather is a little duller this time of year i’ve decided to put a little rocket and chard into see what happens. Hopefully, it will grow well, and we’ll have a harvest well into the winter like last year!

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.