Mixed fortunes

Yesterday was the day we decided to harvest our potatoes and carrots.  We were pleasantly surprised with the potatoes as we weren’t expecting much due to the questionable placement of them and the fact the plants above ground looked in poor health.  We ended up with around 2Kg (give or take some dodgy looking ones!) of potatoes so not a massive haul but enough to make into a meal for us all  As usual the girls loved helping digging up the veg patch and finding out what yummy stuff we'd managed to grow.  We even had our youngest, Serenity, come and help mummy operate the fork!

Alas we come to some bad news.  The carrots were not in good shape when dug up.   A lot had been eaten by something (carrot fly?) and the rest were all tangled together with very stunted growth.  We decided to compost the lot as they looked in a bad way.  Lessons learnt for next years crop.

As the carrots and potatoes were the last of our veg in the patch work can commence on the re modeling of the veg patch to give us more growing space for next year!

The waiting game....

Not much to report, we recently went away and had nobody to water the plants for us so we made makeshift drip waterers (I know that’s not a word) out of milk cartons with pin holes in.  Lucky for us the plants we OK and have resumed their usual fine stature. 

The tomatoes are still being picked regularly and consumed quickly!  Blackberries are abundant so we have been freezing some for the winter.

Other than that we're waiting for the carrots and potatoes to be ready to harvest then, after that, the re modeling of the veg patch can begin!

Onion Harvest

Today we harvested our onions, which caused great excitement with Liliana and Mimi who, as usual, were very helpful. (Mimi even helped dig out some weeds once all the onions had been collected!) Unfortunately due to bugs and whatever else kills onions we ended up with 15 onions after having 27 growing at the height of onion virility!

Mimi takes gardening very seriously!

The onions were then washed, peeled, diced and put in the freezer ready for whatever Candice makes that involves onions.

Also today we got another glut of blackberries (again made ice cream) and some good looking chilis

Blackberrytastic!!

Today we harvested some of the wild blackberries which grow between the greenhouse and fence.  As it is quite a deadly job involving balancing one foot on a planter and the other astride a fence post I did it myself and have the cuts to prove it!

As you can see I got quite a few which were promptly made into blackberry ice cream.  The ice cream was then promptly eaten as a very refreshing pudding for lunch

Just in case you wonder how such a marvelous pudding is made:

• squash the blackberries through a sieve into a bowl
• add some castor sugar to taste (we like it quite tart)
• add some natural yogurt (ok, ok, so its not a proper ice cream)
• mix it up and put in an ice cream machine (or a tub in freezer technique)

Also this evening the pea plants that fell foul of slugs were cleared to the compost bin and the broad bean plants have been dug into the soil as I have been told the nitrogen is good for it.  Next Monday the girls will be pulling up the onion crop which should be pretty exciting!