Vegmonkey and the Mrs.

I received a gift of a part tray of Brassica seedlings from the teaching assistant who worked alongside me in my class this year (before i broke up on Friday for 6 weeks fabulous hols!! - did i mention that?) that she got from the veg shop she works at on a Saturday morning.

As can be seen from the pic, they are a mixture of Cauliflower, Calabrese, Broccoli and (missing from pic) Brussels. I assumed that each of the corners represented the plants, but upon closer inspection this doesn’t seem to be true…most seem to be brussel sprouts! The tray was in quite a sorry state, so i have potted on about 9 seedlings, and binned the rest, plus i really haven’t got anywhere to put them, and i know I’m quite late getting them in anyway.

The theory is that when the current cabbages and caulis come out, these new little beauties can go in…here’s hoping!

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!

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.