While inspecting my three Pears dangling from my Pear trees I found these, nasty-looking, day-glow spots on some of the leaves. Yuk! Apparently it’s Pear rust and is a fungal disease that affects Pears and Junipers. Infact, the spores need a Juniper to over-winter on!
I don’t own a Juniper bush! One of my sneaky little neighbours must be harbouring one. Humph.
I need to snip off the infected leaves on my Pear trees and prune infected branches off the Juniper otherwise the problem will keep coming back. Do you think they would mind if I hopped over the fence at midnight and did a little free pruning? No, I thought not.
Tags: orange spot on Pear, Pear rust
I harvested my Shallots a couple of days ago. They had reached the stage where their leaves had flopped over and dried out and the bulbs were looking pretty big. So I took advantage of a sunny day and dug the whole harvest up.
I put them in a wooden tray to dry in the sun for a few days - with the precaution of the lid from my Victorian cloche over them. And today I rubbed off the dirt and put them in this old sieve ready for storage.
They like to have air circulating around them so anything with holes in is ideal. Sometimes I use old Orange bags, or netted shopping bags if I have a lot to store.
I’m pretty happy with the harvest. Last year I grew Longor Shallots which are more bullet shaped than these. This year I went for round ones (can’t remember the variety). Some are a little small but they make a good addition to my son, Jackson’s, meals since he won’t eat a lot of oniony flavours anyway.
I always feel a bit smug when I put away the first harvest of the season for storing. I’m always a bit sad when I see Lettuce go to seed, or a Cauliflower go over. All that effort and I just wasn’t quick enough to enjoy it. With Onions and Shallots it’s a different story - none of it goes to waste (assuming none of them rot) and it feels good to know that all my effort will be rewarded over the coming months.
Tags: Shallots
If you haven’t done it yet it’s time to start feeding your Tomatoes in order to give them that lovely deep Tomatoey taste. A high-potash feed is what you need and there are several options you can go for.
An off-the-shelf fertilizer like Tomorite, an organic Tomato fertilizer, Comfrey tea or you can even use seaweed fertilizer too.
I’m using Tomorite at the moment but I might give a more organic product a go, just to make me feel better. Either way your Tomatoes need a bit of extra help at this stage of their growth.
Tags: Tomato feed
One of my favourite Lettuces to grow is Tom Thumb. It’s a butterhead type with nice tight, bright green leaves and it tastes lovely with a good mustardy dressing. One of the reasons I like it so much, apart from the taste, is that it looks so neat in the garden!
Some of the Lettuces I grow are, to be honest, a bit floppy like Marvel of the Four Seasons, and a new one I tried this year, Drunken Woman (I don’t know why it’s called that either). And then your common or garden varieties like Oakleaf can get very big very quickly and take over the garden.
With Tom Thumb, they stay quite small (so you need to grow a lot of them) but they also stay where you planted them, in a neat row. I like that. At this time of year it’s my little piece of sanity in a garden gone mad.
Tags: Lettuce, Tom Thumb
I’ve been harvesting my New Potatoes for a few weeks now - later than last year I’m sure. But they still taste amazing! I didn’t get to grow my saved seed Potatoes that were given to me last year. Why? Because mice ate them! Can you believe it?
It makes me laugh that I wrote this post “How to Save Seed Potatoes” last September and then failed to actually save any. I saved the Potatoes over the winter in a sealed tin box, like a good little girl. Then in February I took them out to chit them in the potting shed. Little did I know that the mice were lying in wait thinking, ‘ooh she’s putting out some juicy snacks for us, let’s wait till she’s gone and eat the lot!’.
By the next day there was not a Potato in sight, nor a mouse. So much for purple Potatoes huh? Next year the cat lives in the potting shed while I chit my Potatoes. He doesn’t know it yet but I’m sure he’ll like it.
Tags: Kitty Cats, Mice, Potatoes
I had to pull my Elephant Garlic because it was trying to flower. I’ve showed it here next to some Carrots I pulled at the same time so you can see how big it is. They’re about 8 or 9cm across.
I must confess myself a bit disappointed with the Elephant Garlic. It’s not as big as I thought it would be and also doesn’t seem to have split into bulbs quite as nicely as you see in the photos. Oh well - it’s still edible, I’m sure.
Next year I might switch back to my usual Garlic. You get more heads for the garden space and in a tiny plot you gotta use the space wisely. Is anyone else growing Elephant Garlic? Did you have success?
Tags: elephant garlic, Garlic
It’s time to harvest the Blackcurrants. They’re so ripe I can actually smell them as I walk past the bush. I only have one Blackcurrant bush but it’s always dripping in berries so I always have more than enough.
I usually use the Sarah Raven method for harvesting Blackcurrants by cutting whole branches out with berries on them and picking them at my leisure. This solves two problems in one by pruning the old wood out and making it easier to pick the berries.
I didn’t prune all of the fruiting branches out because that would make the bush too small. I only pruned about a third of them out and next year I will prune the rest. Those branches will still fruit but just a little further up on the new wood.
I’ve made a few things in the past with my Blackcurrants:
This time I made Blackcurrant Cake from a recipe I found online. It was lovely, however next time I would put more sugar in as the Blackcurrants were still just a tad sharp.
Have fun with your Blackcurrants, if you have any, if you don’t then get some for next year :)
Tags: Blackcurrant, Blackcurrants
Once, way back when I had my allotment, I let one of my Leeks go to flower. Just to see what happened. The result was amazing. A beautiful, spherical, pom-pom that exploded from its papery case and attracted bees from miles around. So this year when I came back from holiday and found that the last clutch of my Leeks had already sprouted alien-esque flower heads I decided to let them flower.
It’s been a long wait. Each day brought the tiny, purple and white flowers closer to the surface. So close infact I could see them through the skin of the pods! But still they didn’t open. Then suddenly, pop!
Out they came.
And so, so beautiful they are. Each flower being made up of hundreds of tiny flowers to make this amazingly round ball of loveliness.
Even the bees love them, so everyone’s a winner.
Tags: Leek flowers
I can hardly believe I’m writing this but after years of trying to grow an edible Cauliflower I’ve actually gone and managed it. I’m in shock.
I harvested this Cauliflower a few days ago but there are another five or six of them in the ground. Before I went on holiday the plants were quite big and the middle leaves were starting to tighten. But there was no sign of a Cauliflower. When I came back from holiday (two weeks later) I had seven beautiful Cauliflowers, all in a row. I was amazed.
I have tried several different approaches in the past; liming the ground, netting the whole crop, using brassica collars. All to no avail. Every time, I ended up with something that was only fit for the compost pile.
The secret to my success this time must be that I sowed the seed last Autumn and over-wintered them in my coldframe. I then planted them out in early Spring and have been watering them like crazy during the last few dry months. I’ve also been feeding them with chicken manure pellets, once or twice since I planted them in the ground.
They seem to love it and have rewarded me with some beautiful curds. I made Cauliflower Cheese with the first one and all three of us virtually licked our plates it tasted so Cauliflowery. I’m always amazed how homegrown veg tastes are more intense than shop bought.
Next year I’ll be trying to repeat my success by sowing in Autumn again.
Tags: Cauliflower
How much time do you spend doing this in your garden? Not much I’ll wager. I reckon I spend less than 2% of my time in the garden relaxing. We as gardeners are doomed to toil. I can’t sit still for more than two minutes together. Chances are I will see a weed that needs pulling, or see a gap that needs filling, or remember those seeds that need sowing. Can you ever enjoy your garden like a non-gardener would?
Anyone have any tips for how to relax in your garden more? Does anyone manage it? Or are you all busy bees like me with a bench that’s ‘just for show’.
Tags: relaxing
