I’m back with another garden update and this time I can finally report that we have been harvesting some veg! You may remember from my last garden blog post in June that we’d had some strawberries ripening – well now, we’ve potted-on the runners (making 24 new strawberry plants) and we’ve also got raspberries for the first time ever. The veggie patch is doing well too, so here’s an update on this month’s bumper harvest…
To begin with, the shallots that we planted last autumn are now fully grown and were ready to be taken out of the ground last weekend. We had a sunny couple of days so we laid them out in the sun to dry out the tops fully and now they’re in our outbuilding, along with the garlic bulbs that we planted last autumn and harvested earlier this month.
In fact, the courgettes are doing so well that we’re harvesting a couple every day. It wasn’t long before the whole salad drawer of my fridge was full of round and yellow courgettes and we couldn’t keep up with eating them all. So, now we’ve got bags and bags full of chopped courgettes that I’ve frozen, so they’re ready to enjoy over the winter.
The runner beans have done what I hoped they would and have completed covered the new trellis that we built to grow them up. This provides screening to block off the messier part of the garden where we pot-on our plants do our composting, but another unexpected bonus has appeared: I can harvest the runner beans from both sides of the trellis!
Last year, some runners grew through the fence and our neighbours were able to enjoy some beans for themselves, which was lovely, whereas this year I can access both sides of the trellis and harvest twice as much!
We tipped out a pot of potatoes this week and got a whole bowl of new potatoes – more than a kilogram in fact. I was so excited to see the potatoes tumbling out as I’ve never grown potatoes before and I couldn’t quite believe how many there were under the surface.
When I started writing this blog post, I didn’t quite realise how many crops have come to fruition but now that I’m rattling through them, I guess the garden has been doing rather well! Next up is the carrots; we thinned them last month and ate the thinnings but this month they are looking much larger.
We planted orange, purple and yellow carrots and have been pulling up a handful whenever we’re cooking a meal – and we always boil up twice as much as needed so that we can freeze half for later in the year.
If we’re friends on Instagram, you may have already spotted my pea harvest. We started by eating some mange tout earlier in the month but suddenly all the peas were ready at once. So we stripped out the pea plants and spent an enjoyable morning podding peas. We’ve now got what I can only describe as a sack of frozen peas and we’ve eat plenty fresh when we harvested them. This has left space in the veggie patch for us to plant something else, so watch this space…
Something that I’m really excited about is my beetroot harvest – we’ve only pulled up a few beets but it was wonderful to have roasted red and golden beetroot with our Sunday lunch this week. Watch out for those golden beets – they disguise themselves as roast potatoes on your plate!
I think that’s all for this month; the tomatoes are still doing their thing but haven’t ripened at all yet and the peppers have been potted-on but only have only just had tiny little green peppers start appearing. We’ve just sown our second batch of spinach and now I just need to decide what to do with the space left by the pea harvest. I’ll be back next month with another update. 🙂
