Jul 27th, 2005
Week 20
Can you believe this weather? Metcheck has put out a Severe weather warning until the 28th July. Humph! Ah well I managed to get some weeding done last night. I picked some lettuce for the people I work with and noticed that the new batch of radish and spring onions are on their way too! This is me pulling up some of the red onions. We’ve got so many of them. Some are 10cm across I swear! Does anyone know the correct way to dry them or know how to plait them in the traditional (French) way? At the moment I have just tied them with string and hung them from the rafters in our out-building, but it doesn’t have the same ‘rustic’ charm I was hoping for - do you know what I mean? - After rummaging on the Internet I found this site that has some direction on the old-fashioned art of plaiting onions. I’ll be trying it at the weekend!
I had thought that my cucumber plants would come to nought - that they woud be just a mass of furry leaves forever. I inspected them only last week to see that the only actual cucumber on there was shrivelled and dying. But yesterday, while rummaging around in the cold frame to count how many aubergine flowers we had I found this little beauty hiding in the undergrowth. He was just chillin, happily disguised by the huge overflowing greeness of the rest of the plant. So I picked him (heartless) and ate him (ruthless) with a yummy lettuce and a scattering of chopped spring onion from the plot. The only thing missing now is a handful of cherry tomatoes and my evil salad plans are complete!
The Dahlia’s have started to flower - I’m so excited! I had planned to have the whole middle bed dedicated to flowers. I bought some cornflower seeds and some wild flower seeds and scattered them around in a random fashion. However, we went on holiday and when we came back the bindweed had reared it’s ugly head again (particularly in the bed where the flower seeds were). Also I wasn’t sure which sproutings were weed and which were flowers. So, I’m afraid the whole lot had to come up. But the good news is that the Dahlia’s stayed, they’re just blooming and when they’re out they’ll look luscious in their sexy red outfits. Makes a change from green!
I took this photo at the weekend - since then this little Courgette plant has pumped out a further 4 courgettes. We can’t keep up. I’ve tried giving them away at work (minor success) and I’ve tried making courgette and chocolate cake (minor disaster), but ultimately we still have too many. And to think that I had 13 courgette plants to begin with! They all died one by one. Some from over watering, some from sunburn, some from wind burn, some from just pure neglect. But thank heavens I neglected them because if I hadn’t we would be drowning in a sea of green, spongy vegetables by now, and mtp would be no more. Sniffle.
When I discovered that mtp housed what seemed like half the UK’s gooseberry bush allocation I was perturbed. What on earth would I do with all those tangy berries? Start a jam-making cottage industry, give them to charity, sell them on the intranet at work? Or, here’s a novel idea, just learn to cook with them. I decided on the latter and happily discovered an exciting new ‘combo’, one that I had never come across before: gooseberry and elderflower. Surely, great cooking is all about combos. Think about cheddar and apple, peanut butter and jelly, or my personal favourite strawberries and champagne. Every yin has it’s yang and elderflower is apparently gooseberry’s So I tried it, I made 
With all the sunshine we’ve been having lately mtp has put on a growing spurt. Compare this picture to Week 15 - crazy huh? At the moment we are mostly harvesting lettuce (all types) potatoes (and boy are they good), raspberries, gooseberries (of course), spinach, courgettes and radish. The peas have been got at by the crows so we might be lucky if we have a handful left of those. We’re waiting on the cherry tomatoes and we’re hopeful for the cucumbers and aubergine. Strawberries came to nothing (next year maybe?) and the red and black currants are doing their thing but we haven’t harvested them yet. The battle of the bindweed is ongoing. There have been sustained casualties (on both sides) but good will win over evil and the final confrontation is just around the corner. And that’s the latest week-by-week update.
Ryan just bought me a new iBook (he must really love me or something). Obviously the best thing about it is that it’s shiny and new, and the apple lights up when you open the lid, and it’s got wi-fi so I can post to mtp while sunbathing in the garden (or even up at the plot which I haven’t tried yet but must do sometime soon…) But the ‘other thing’ that’s really cool about it is that it’s running Tiger which comes with the latest version of Safari (stay with me) and in Safari you can create your own webpage which will pull in the RSS feed from any given blog. So…. I have created a bookmark called ‘Gardening Blogs’ and attached all my favourite blogs (see links list) to the bookmark. So that when I click on the link I see a page with the latest posts from all those sites ‘on one page’! I can even sort by date so that it only shows me posts from today. Brillant - and ultimately very lazy - even brillianter!
Ouch it was hot today. Too hot for digging that’s for sure. It was too hot for my aubergine plants stashed in the (not so) cold frame so I gave them a refreshing spray of cool water when I finally hauled my booty up to mtp at around 5pm. While I was spraying I noticed that they are flowering! This is the biggest of the flowers. The others are still thinking about producing their own flower. I like to think of this guy as the ring leader. He’s pretty much the cocky one of the bunch, wants all the attention, that kind of thing. Hopefully now that he’s proved his point, the others will follow suit soon enough and we could be looking at a healthy crop of aubergines (or eggplant as Ryan will have it). I love the way that the water sticks to the tiny hairs on the stem. It’s pretty, in a dark and mysterious kinda way.
I don’t want to gross anyone out but this is what I found a few days ago when I was investigating a small raised bump in the middle of the pathway up at mtp. We couldn’t work out what the strange protrusions were but when we scooped back the wood chips and rolled away the ‘weed suppressing fabric’ (ha!) this is what was found; The slugs were having a positive party down there, with their friends Comfrey and Couch. Hmph…I knew it was too good to be true. So… (and this is where organic lovers should cover their ears)…out came the Round-Up and bye-bye weeds. I sprayed the lot, removed (and dispatched) the slugs and carefully replaced the fabric and chips. I came, I saw, I annihilated, I went.
I counted the lettuce today and we have seventy-nine. Well actually seventy-seven after today because we ate two at a ‘4th of July’ bar-b-que. Some would say that’s too many (like my Dad) but I’m not so sure. They’re not all the same variety. Around 40 of them are Little Gem in varying degrees of growth, 20 are Pentard Red curly lettuce and the rest are Webb’s Wonder iceberg affairs. We like lettuce and if we find we don’t like it ‘that’ much then we know some other people who do.
