Growing Your Own - Six Month Later
In March we cleared a neglected scrap of land and turned it into a small allotment - somewhere for us to try our hand at growing 'greener' produce, without chemicals and, as it seemed, any prior knowledge.
We simply threw seeds into the ground, watered and waited for them to grow. And grow they did!
We have had a bumper crop of runner beans, and as much as the neighbouring plants are all pale and at an end, ours are still furiously flowering and producing a large haul of non-stringy beans on a daily basis.
The peas went the same and were such a success, considering we sowed then too densely and they fought to survive. After such a good crop we quickly replanted in late August and, due to the mild weather, we are just beginning to harvest our second cycle from them.
After a slow start, the grape vines produced around 30 small bunches that we turned into a few jars of grape, lemon, pecan and brandy jelly.
The small fig bush we have planted in a terracotta pot has suddenly sprung into life and is well laden with small fruit, which we are waiting to see if the birds beat us to them when they are finally ripe.
After a small show of strawberries we gathered a huge number of offspring and have enough plants to hang around the green house for next spring, in the same way we would expect to see hanging grapes. Our Food Editor, Sarah, saw this idea a while ago and we think we will give it a go. Hopefully next year we will have more strawberry fruits produced, all hanging down, ready to pick.
Tomatoes were the biggest disappointment with only a handful grown from the four plants that survived our earlier lessons on planting out too soon. Luckily the pumpkins did amazingly well to produce after a mouldy infestation. We are currently battling this on our other 'squash' type plants that are growing. We have no idea what we planted but they look like squat, round courgette at present!
Our next harvest will be the corn cobs that are growing to a decent size. We have already taken off some of them as baby corn but are now allowing the rest to mature in time for a Halloween barbecue.
That just leaves us with the remaining kale, that still wants to grow, some small leeks that we are using in place of onion in our cooking, and a row of fennel that has suddenly entered the race a little late and is now standing tall in a line and putting on weight.
This weekend we will spend some time in the garden clearing the long grass away in the wild area and tidying up the beds, ready for a new level of soil and winter planting, once we discover what we can start to grow. Keep an eye on us for weekend update on instagram over at yoursourcetoday or on Twitter @Sourcelifestyle