Tiny toms and preserving produce

We ate our first two red Tomatoes today.
They were dinky little things.
I cut each one as small as I could and DS and I had them in 1 sandwich each !

I have been dehydrating this week also.
Not bodily, I am drying produce.
The L'equip machine I bought a few years ago is still going strong.
This weekend I dried about 9 courgettes on Saturday, 9 on Sunday
Monday I dried about 5 and around a cupful of runner beans
Today was 6 trays of Spinach
Tonight will be 3 more trays of courgettes(about 5 or 6 fruits) and a cupful of runner beans.

When they are dry, they are put into screw top jars till we use them.

Drying is an efficient way to store produce and takes up less room than most other storage.
Also it is cheap fuel wise as it is an overnight job to dry them and then they don't use any more  until you cook them which you would have to do anyway.
We still have a jar of dried onions from about 3 years ago which is perfectly edible.

I pickled a large jar of onions for Christmas.
We  have 2 jars of pickled beetroot from several years back which is fine still.

I looked up courgettes online and discovered Asda selling 4 fruits for a whole £1

The Kale is now edible and very flavour-some after a couple of months of just spinach interspersed with Molokia

The row nearest the camera is the Kale. I am used to curly leafed Kale so was it took a while to realise that this plant was really Kale and not just a mis-labeling error for which I am notorious.

The carrot bed did turn out to be mostly grass pretending to be carrot seedlings sadly.
I have resown but don't know if it will be any more successful this time around.
There are about 7 actual original carrots remaining.
The box in the greenhouse is looking quite leafy.

There are actually carroty ends showing which look about 1/2" thick!

Just as well with the price of grub at the moment.

I was cleaning my bike up yesterday and found the panniers we bought for it in Holland.
They are sturdy and well made ,not like the rubbish you can buy here.
I fitted my bike rack on and then added the panniers and bungeed the lock to the rack between them.
Inside one were 3 or 4 receipts for sainsburys from 2003.
Carrots were 40p a kilo and brocolli was not much more.
Milk was about 29p for a litre of UHT


On Friday,I finished clearing the next bed of weeds.
It is sown with Alfafa which I think I remember is from the bean family.
This will get chopped off and dug in in a few months time the same as the clover and phacelia.

Green everywhere

The good weather has helped things along in the garden.

This is the view now and the one back in April looking over the fence dividing the lawn and the veg plot.

The peas are doing much better than expected.

About 6 of the plants were transplanted from modules and the rest are direct sowings.

The courgette/Zucchini bed is about 3 feet tall and lush with growth.

I am picking them and dehydrating as there are too many to eat .

Outdoor tomatoes have picked up well. There are fruits on some which is rather suprising considering they were the left overs from those that are living in the greenhouse.

Here are the outdoor plants with the newly cleared ground  that I have been working on this week beyond.

Here are the washington cherry in the greenhouse

and the marmande with their unusual shaped fruits

Behind them is the old window blind that I had to incorporate yesterday due to the ridiculous 50 degree heat in the greenhouse with the windows wide open and the fan running for hours.

This is a quick snap of the strawberry beds with the cardboard mulch.

Most of the strawberry plants seem to have strawberry leaf spot but it didn't effect the fruit at all.

The cardboard should help to keep it contained.

I will have to keep my eye on them though because I don't see any runners yet and I might need to train them into pots as they cant very well root into the cardboard.

Cardboard Mulch and Slug Pellets

Yesterday was a dry day!
I took advantage of the weather to get outside and do a lot more weeding of the strawberry beds.
There are two beds,each about 3 feet X 5 feet.
Originally,I had 3 strawberry plants and they have propagated themselves over the years so now there must be around 100 plants or so.
DS is tidying his room and produced some cardboard boxes that were just what I need for mulching the beds once the weeds were reduced.
Hopefully the cardboard will help suppress any more weeds for a while (im hoping for all of the rest of the year).
In the spring, I will remove it if it is still pick up-able and dig out everything and then plant the best of the plants in the newly cleared beds.

The slugs seem prolific and have been nibbling on the new clover plants much to my disgust.
Pellets have been administered.
The Phacelia is now starting to show in the 3rd Green manure bed.

Magnesium deficiency is showing still in the potato leaves.
I watered them with Epsom salts several weeks ago and that did help but with all this rain I guess it was time for another dose.

Carrots,weeds and Strawberries

The Carrot bed is full but of what?
Many of the grass like seedlings actually might just be grass after all.
I weeded and weeded and now there are a few actual positive sightings of carrot tops but most of it looks like little grasses.
However on pulling one up,there is a distinctive carroty niff so I replanted it and have left well alone.

The strawberries are finished fruiting and I am hard at work weeding the grass,Nettles and creeping buttercup out .
The two beds are crowded but they are beginning to take up some semblance of a strawberry patch as opposed to a miniature jungle.
Many snail and ant eggs are uncovered along with their parents.

I have sown clover in two of the onion beds and phacelia in the other.
These are green manures to improve the soil.
The clover is already up .
Amongst the Strawberries, I found several vetch seed pods and collected a few as they are supposed to be useful also as green manure.


Last week I bought a berry picking tool.
It looks like a Dustpan but the bottom is a comb rather than solid.
To use it ,you have to sort of scoop at the berries which become caught in the comb and drop into the pan.
It is an ingenious contraption, simple and effective.
I remember Ray Mears featuring a similar tool in one of his episodes.
It has sped up the berry harvesting by about 90% as previously I could spend an hour an evening on just harvesting raspberries and red currants.

My poor Berries are very crowded with weeds and will get a proper clear out once they have finished fruiting.
The Cleavers,Rogue Blackberry brambles and Bear Bind are everywhere.

On the harvesting side...
We have had quite a few courgettes and a few French beans and even one or two runners today.
There aren't many peas but they are lovely when we have had any.

Today was spent in weeding  the strawbs and in hunting indoors for DS'  document folder in which he had put all his qualification details and then mislaid the whole lot.
I found it .
The rain has been persistent.
There is fruit on the tomatoes but I don't know if they will ripen with so little sunshine.

We cheered ourselves up with pork chops and chips for tea.
The chops were courtesy of Lidls who were selling them half price this week.
The green veg was all from the garden which is satisfying.

Long trips,Fish'n'chips,soggy drips

We traveled this week.
All the way to Scotland (nearly 600 miles) to see our daughter.
She had her graduation ceremony.
It was also the first time we have met her boyfriend.
He seems a nice young man, very polite and calm.

We ate at the pub for a treat.
Their fish and chips was nice but not the huge plateful you get down south.
The following day we tried a different pub.
This one took a whole hour to serve us and we had to reorder twice due to their having run out of various things. The eventual food was quite nice but it was so long in coming that the kitchen was closed before we could order dessert.

The return journey (by train) was long and a bit dull apart from the drunken revelers and the delays because of the floods which have been causing havoc apparently in the midlands .
We had almost no rain on the three days we were away an hadn't seen or heard any news or weather forecasts so we were quite surprised to hear about the delays.
Luckily,it was only an hour and a half longer to get to our destination than usual.


The garden is looking greener.
There are 4 new courgettes coming along.
Beans are reappearing on the French bean plants.
The Spinach is trying to bolt but I keep cutting off the flower heads as soon as they appear and so far the taste is still okay.

The Carrot bed is looking a bit more carroty and a bit less weedy.

I picked two punnets of ripe raspberries.

On Tuesday I made a rain pipe for the greenhouse.
I used an old rubber watering can hose minus the perforated part, as a hopper, then a piece of plastic tube for the down pipe and a little piece of copper pipe on the end of that to divert it into the bucket at the bottom.
There was a lid for this bucket so I cut a hole to take the piece of pipe.

It has about a 4" depth of water in there now.


Today I harvested the Japanese onions.
There are loads and they are big.
10 containers were chopped and frozen .
A big bag of onion tops was also frozen for use in stews.

Tomorrow if the weather allows, I must harvest the red onions and maybe the shallots.

The beds holding them will be green manured after I tidy them up with the Jalo.

Weeding with tweezers

Yes really!
The raised carrot bed has loads of little carrot seedlings in rows but also about a million weed seedlings.
I have spent about 6 hours on it so far.

We are going to be absent for a few days so I have rigged up a drip feeding affair to add to the capillary matting.
DS will be here but he isn't very good with remembering to water plants.
The drip feeder is actually just two redundant bread maker tins with sponge cloth for drip wicks.
They last a few days.

I have a smaller version over the greenhouse carrots which is a washing up liquid bottle and the same foam.

Make simple drip irrigation for your greenhouse

Cut the bottom off a plastic bottle.
Using the lid with a hole in or a squirty top, thread some foam rubber (washing up cloth) through to use as a wick.
Fill with water and suspend over the plants.
I have two wire shelves set up in a tent shape over the plants and the bottle is sitting in one of the holes.
You could tie it or wire it to hang from something.
It will drip slower as it empties.
Yesterday it was dripping at about once every 8 seconds and today when it is about half empty,it is dripping at around once every 30 seconds.

The bigger tin drippers are hanging from two pieces of pipe threaded through the handle.


The garden is doing well.
Onions are big and fat.
Toms are getting taller and most have flowers.
Courgettes are appearing on the plants.
Peas have pods.
Runner beans have scarlet flowers.
French beans have pods.
Spinach is  trying to bolt but I keep pinching out prospective flowers.
Brassicas are becoming taller and I have separated 16 plants of Kale and Broccoli and put them under cloches to keep the birds off.

The spuds were showing magnesium deficiency so have been watered with epsom salted water.
Runner beans have been soapy sprayed to remove aphids.

We have the usual cherries which look like most like Raniers variety than anything else.
The birds eat most of them as they are far too high up to reach.

Rasps are getting red and sweet.
Strawbs are nearing the end and have been abundant as usual.

We have had far more than the initial outlay in fruit over the years.
There must be pounds and pounds of the last two in the freezer .

I have bought several green manure seeds to sow after the spuds and onions are done.

In the later part of the year when the fruit is over, I will clear the area as it is becoming hard to keep under control and replant strawbs ,rasps etc.

Comfrey


I have 11 out of 12 comfrey plants showing!
The HDRA cuttings I bought some years ago were disappointing  but these new ones bought from ebay have thrived all apart from one.
I am happy though because I only paid for 10 and the offer was for a minimum of 10 cuttings.