Archive for August, 2006

mtp
Aug 18th, 2006

Uchiki Kuri

Uchiki Kuri pumpkins The pumpkin plants have gone crazy (as it warned me on the packet). There are four plants; one butternut squash, one little red pumpkin (Uchiki Kuri) and two Futsu pumpkins (more on that later).
The little red one has about 7 fruits on it in varying stages of development. I did what the books told me and ’stopped’ the plants once they fill the space - by pinching out the growing tips (it’s difficult to find them all in the jungle of leaves though). I have been feeding them when I can (with seaweed extract). But we’ve been on holiday so in the dry spell that we had around two weeks ago I didn’t manage to water them at all! It didn’t seem to matter - they grew anyway and a few days ago I noticed that one of the bigger pumpkins had lost its shiny coat and had turned dull - so I picked it. Yum! we had pumpkin pasta and also baked the seeds with oil and salt as a snack. Well worth the wait!

mtp
Aug 9th, 2006

Onion Harvest

Onion Harvest

I just pulled these onions a few days ago and they are now drying out in my garden. I’m not sure how many white onions I have - around 30 I think. And a basketful of shallots too. There are probably another 20 red onions still in the ground up at mtp. Did anyone else have terrible trouble with weeds around their onions? I think I planted them too close to each other (they were about 7-8cm apart) because I couldn’t get my hoe in to weed around them and so they became choked with bind weed. David (my guru) came over about a month ago and said, “now’s the time you should be top-dressing onions with nitrogen but I wouldn’t bother with those, they’re so big already.” Then he walked off in a huff because my onions didn’t need any nitrogen - ho-hum! You’ve either got it or you haven’t (nitrogen that is). Last year I plaited them onto strings with varying success. This site shows you how to plait onions in pictures which is quite useful.