Oooh! Get me, growing Mini-Sweetcorn. I bought the seed as a bit of an afterthought really. I saw it for sale on a seed website and as I was buying some other things I threw it into the basket with a view to maybe having a go.
And this year I did! My normal sweetcorn came to nought (something ate the seedheads). But then, from nowhere, came the dark horse. The small, insignificant (in truth, half forgotten about) little seedlings from the Mini-Sweetcorn seeds started to romp. And boy did they grow. They ended up about a foot taller than my regular Sweetcorn.
In my mind I had expected some sort of miniature plant sporting miniature cobs. In reality, Mini-Sweetcorn turns out to be the same size as regular Sweetcorn with more cobs that are smaller but also longer and thinner than usual.
The difference comes when you open them up. Inside, you’ll find what looks like small, unpolinated corn. Infact this is Mini-Sweetcorn. Ready to eat and ever so slightly more buttery than the ones you buy in the shops. Coool.
There is a downside. The plants are, well, huge and I only managed to harvest two or possibly three cobs from each plant. That means a grand total of (drum roll please) 12 Mini-Sweetcorns. Yey!
Hang on…
So I dedicated a whole swathe of my tiny plot to growing err… 12 Mini-Sweetcorns. Right, okay. Well I’m glad I grew them at least once. Now I can say I’ve done it, I just won’t be doing it again.
I don’t know about you but I’ve had hardly any Tomatoes this year. Most of mine are still green and sitting on the bush in the rain – booh! The only success I’ve had with outdoor Tomatoes this year was with my clutch of teeny-tiny Tomatoes, my Sweet Pea Currants.
I lovingly raised them from even teenier seed and planted them out in the sunny corner, under my Peach tree. Once they were in they began to romp away, and just as Coopette said they soon became ‘vigorous and sprawling’.
So much so that I had to deploy the Pea sticks to keep the plants and what seemed like millions, (okay thousands) of fruits off the ground. Soon the little pea-sized Tomatoes were ripening. The teeny-tiny trusses had 14 maybe 16 fruits on each. The top ones ripened first, while the middle ones were orange and the smaller ones on the end were deep green moving to pale green – very pretty visually.
And the taste? Well, the name says it all, Sweet! And they certainly were. Too tiny to slice they are really more like Tomato candy – just pop them in your mouth one by one, no salad required.
I’d definitely recommend growing them. They seem to do fine as an outdoor crop here in the UK and even though I did feed them with Tomato feed (when I remembered) I’m sure that their flavour would still be very good without. You will need to plan in some support to tame the plants once they get to their mid-Summer craziness otherwise you’ll have a lot of very dirty, very small Tomatoes. And nobody wants that.
I’ve been harvesting my small round Carrots (I think the variety is Paris Market) over the last week or so. They have been a great success. I sowed them underneath my Apple espalier in a situation that is part shaded, by my tall Raspberry canes, and also quite dry since it’s right next to the wall.
It was really a shot in the dark since I didn’t know if the Carrots would grow well there. But I figured as they’re only small roots they wouldn’t need as much light or water as regular Carrots.
It paid off. All the Carrots I harvested are full sized and mega tasty. I’m really pleased and will certainly try the same thing next year.
My sister-in-law is sorting Cucumber, yellow Squash and Courgettes – now what to do with them all? Any recipes ideas for her?
Before she forces me to take some home :)
If you’re bringing in the Broadbean harvest right now you’ll probably have a lot of shelling to do. This is the technique I use when I have a lot of beans to get through in one go.
Harvest your Broadbeans before they get too big and mealy. Take the beans out of the shell and put them into a pan.
Bring them to the boil until they go nice and fat. The aim here is not to cook them but to expand the skin.
Then drain the beans and plunge them into a bowl of cold water. The skin will contract and go wrinkly. You should be able to pick each one out and shell it by popping the yummy green bit out with finger and thumb.
The faster you can shell them – the faster you can eat them, right?
Here are my smart new Lettuce varieties that I’m growing for the first time this year. Above is Reine de Glaces, an iceberg type, crispy sort with spiky leaves. Very fresh.
This one is called Really Red and is not quite big enough to cut yet as it needs to heart up a bit more. But when it does…
This one is my favourite, it’s called Flashy Butter Oak. What a great name? I particularly like the red flecks that look great against the one-colour Lettuces.
I also tried another new variety called Red Iceberg, but unfortunately all of the seedlings succumbed to damping off and keeled over. I’ve resowed in the open ground but the plants are still very small. But hopefully I’ll get to taste one this year.
I dug up my Shallots a few days ago and dried them out in the sun (before the rain came). They are now happily weathering the wet weather in the potting shed. If the sun comes out again I’ll pop them out to dry some more.
I planted them back in March from some saved Shallots from last season. I wasn’t sure that the bulbs would be okay since I’ve never saved Shallots before but hey… they worked out fine!
I like Shallots. They’re smaller and more usable for our small needs (maybe that will change when my two boys start consuming their own body weight in food everyday, but for now they are fine.)
They tend to be sweeter than Onions with a more sophisticated flavour and are great for caramalising.
And… I can’t help feeling just a little bit smug that the first stored harvest is in the shed!
Just… waiting for it to go to seed. Because you know it will, any day now.
My Spring Onions are almost ready to start pulling. They’ve done very well this year. Last year I had germination issues but this year has been completely different.
Spring Onions are a great crop for a small garden because they don’t need thinning and so you can get lot and lots of plants from a very small area of soil. My crop is in an area about 50cm by 20cm and there are plenty of onions there to pull one or two every day during the next few months.
I didn’t sow them successionally, just all at once back in Spring. And because as I harvest them the ones left in the ground will have more room, so the thinner ones will get bigger as I need them. It’s as if they were made for small gardens!
These little hands are trying to figure out how to open this peapod thing with the sweet, juicy Peas inside. Pulling the stalk bit doesn’t work.
Aha! The little hands have no idea how they did it but they managed to open it! And look what’s inside. Lots and lots and lots of them.
“Eat them as fast as you can before someone comes along to stop you,” they say, “because normally we’re not allowed to eat green things because they’re ‘not ready’. I’m sure it’s different with Peas but you can’t be 100% sure, so best to just shove them in, no?”
