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September and October in Golightly Gardens

October 2nd, 2011 by Penny Golightly

It has been an interesting couple of weeks in the kitchen garden, mainly because we’ve had a bit of a heatwave which has had a positive effect on some of the plants.

For starters I was convinced there would be no aubergines, then this happened:

The big butternut squash ripened, but it somehow got bruised so I had to cut it down and cook the undamaged bit. There were lots of small fruits that never made it to the flowering stage, then the plant decided to throw out seven healthy looking buds – I knew there was no hope of them all ripening, one would be a miracle at this stage, so I nipped four of them out last month and hand pollinated the remaining three to see if anything grew.

The Japanese onion squash (red kuri) had the same problem of fruit buds going yellow and not opening, so only one pumpkin grew on each vine. I’ve cut them today and put them on a windowsill indoors to start the ripening process, where the skin thickens and the flavour sweetens.

Both buckets of beans were still flowering in late September, but I think we’ve had the last proper serving out of them now.

The courgettes are still going, although they’ve had a bit of downy mildew (more about this another time). I’m hoping we might get one more to grow into a marrow, but we’ll see.

The crookneck squash plants are doing well…

… so are the cucumbers, after some hand pollination to make up for their well-hidden female flowers and lack of male flowers.

The tomatoes are still a law unto themselves, so I’ve had to cut some of the fruit and put it in the sunniest spot of the garden to see if more of it will ripen. Unfortunately it does look like blight has set in to a couple of plants in the last three or four days, but our neighbours have had it for several weeks already so all things considered maybe we had a good run here compared to most.

I’ll be writing about autumn garden tasks and planting soon, and catching up with the windowsill kitchen garden too. Might have to do a short series about garden pests and diseases as well, if there’s time.

How’s your garden growing? Are you thinking ahead to next year yet?

Tags: British garden kitchen, grow your own herbs, grow your own veg, grow your own vegetables, growing vegetables cheaply, growing vegetables on a budget, hand pollinate vegetables, kitchen garden, mildew on courgettes, seasonal fruit and veg, vegetables in season
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Kitchen garden: October takedown

October 17th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

And now, more fabulous foodstuffs on a shoestring. The kitchen garden is amazingly still giving us a few plum tomatoes and a lot of green beans, although most years these would have been finished weeks ago.

The cherry tomatoes are finished, so I’ve cut them all down and composted them.

This year I’m trying out different seeds for ‘green manures’, to see whether they will partially or fully revive the compost in the planters, and stop weed growth and nutrient loss in the bare patches of ground. It’s a bit late to sow most types of these seeds after the unusually long growing season, but I have some ‘grazing peas’ which are OK to plant in October and November, so fingers crossed.

Canes have been pulled up and cleaned, small pots have been emptied, washed and rinsed out with scalding water, and dead leaves have been raked and swept up. But that doesn’t mean that the garden is shutting down for winter. Far from it…. The big brassicas are only just getting going. The white sprouting broccoli has started its growth spurt, and is already monstrously big like Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, (shown here with gigantic cat nearby for scale):

And the brussels sprouts should be ready for December. The stems have buttons on them already. Here they are before I took away the dead leaves and gave them a bit of mulch:

The mini-greenhouse is still giving us sweet peppers and chillies, but I’ll bring them back inside to the sunny warm windowsill at the end of the month. Then I’ll plant out my remaining dwarf kale and purple sprouting broccoli seedlings and give the greenhouse a good scrub out with detergent. I’m hoping I can keep a few herbs and hardy salads growing under cover though the colder months, but will write about that later.

Meanwhile, here’s what I brought in at lunchtime: chillies, green sweet pepper, tomatoes to ripen indoors, salad burnet, French beans, fennel, spring onions and radishes. Not bad for the middle of October.

Are you growing any herbs or vegetables at the moment? What have you been doing to get things ready for winter?

Tags: British seasonal food, grow your own herbs, grow your own veg, kitchen garden, windowsill kitchen garden
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Seasonal foods in August

August 11th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

Here’s an updated list of August seasonal foods. It can vary slightly from year to year because of variations in the weather, but the idea remains the same. You can usually buy cheaper ingredients more cheaply, and if there are gluts then you can also treat yourself to a little luxury for less.

With the more expensive ingredients you can often buy smaller amounts of things too, especially if you’re buying at market stalls or at a cheese counter. There’s nothing quite so nice as a sliver of good cheese, or a few fancy mushrooms or prawns or whatever. The stronger the flavour, the less of an ingredient you need.

Fruit: apricots, bilberries, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, currants (black, red, white), early apples, early damsons, figs, greengages, gooseberries, loganberries, peaches, plums, raspberries, strawberries and wild strawberries. Imported melons and nectarines.

Vegetables: aubergines, basil, beetroot, last few broad beans, broccoli and calabrese, carrots, celery, chard, chillies, chives, courgettes, cucumbers, fennel, globe artichokes, green beans (runner, dwarf and French), horseradish, kohlrabi, lamb’s lettuce, lettuce, mushrooms (ceps, chanterelles, field, oyster, porcini, puffball, shaggy ink cap), new potatoes, onions, peas, peppers, radishes, rocket, samphire, shallots, sorrel, spinach, spring onions, summer squash, sweetcorn, tarragon, tomatoes, turnips, watercress.

Fish and shellfish: black bream, brown and rainbow trout, brown crab, crayfish, Dover sole, haddock, herring, john dory, lobster, pilchards, pollack, prawns, red and grey mullet, salmon, sea bass, squid.

Meat, poultry and game: grouse from the 12^th, hare at its best.

Cheeses: Farmhouse Cheddar, British goats’ cheese. Chaource, Charolles, Valencay.

I think I’m going to be making a vegetable chilli next week, with home grown cayenne chillies, tomatoes, courgettes and whatever else is knocking around in the bottom of the fridge, plus an econo can of kidney beans and some strong cheddar on the top. If it keeps on raining I might also be making a sort-of shepherd’s pie, with carrots, onions and mushrooms, with some mustard mash on the top and greens on the side.

What are you going to cook?

Tags: British seasonal food, foods in season in August, grow your own herbs, grow your own salad, growing vegetables on a budget
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Kitchen garden update

July 24th, 2010 by Penny Golightly

Plenty of green growy things to keep you up to date with this no-space grow-your-own experiment. Throwing a few seeds around, hoping for the best, trying to remember things I’ve forgotten and learning something new almost every day.

There’s still a lot growing on the windowsills, including cherry (Garden Pearl) and plum tomatoes, sweet Genovese basil, baby leaf spinach, rocket and land cress. I was told that all the tomatoes would ripen at the same time with these varieties, but instead we’ve had plenty of fruits each week and there are still flowers here and there as well. That’s much better for a kitchen garden, as it’s better to try for a continuous supply of fresh produce rather than a glut that needs using up or preserving.

I think next year I’ll be less lazy with what I grow and have some cordon type toms, instead of the bushy types. Longer growing seasons and higher yields should make better use of the limited space, even if they aren’t the sort of plants you can chuck in a pot and forget about.

The windowsill is warm, sunny and pest free, which is handy for most plants. The garden has had lots of problems with beet leaf miners which have ruined most of the outdoor spinach, leaf beet and chard, but baby leaf spinach is just fine on the sill. The dwarf beans are happy here too, away from this year’s swarms of greenfly, and still flowering and making full sized french beans every few days.

The windowsill herbs here are mint and parsley, and they’re doing fine. No need to spend stupid amounts of money for very little at the supermarket…

Most of the pots had to be moved outside in the end. There’s almost no topsoil here, but they’re doing OK on the decking. Here we have different types of basil, lemon balm, marjoram, a cucumber plant, autumn sprouting calabrese, thyme and some toms with an incredible amount of fruit on them. There are some mixed wild flowers in there too, to get bees to pollinate the plants, and to attract hoverflies to eat garden pests.

I’m experimenting with some more unusual foodie flavours I’ve never grown before, including giant red mustard, sorrel, russian tarragon, salad burnet and golden purslane. To keep a regular supply of the things we eat the most, I’ve also been sowing a few seeds of parsley, radishes, stubby carrots, coriander and spring onions every couple of weeks in small pots. Very easy to throw together and it really keeps the grocery bills down because you don’t run out of your favourites.

This looks like a raised bed, but it’s just more knackered decking with the wood taken off the top and the rubble removed, plus some cheap compost chucked in. This monster below is white sprouting broccoli, and it’s basically the only thing that the cat hasn’t dug up (I suspect it secretly threatens to eat the cat when I’m not listening). Thanks to my be-clawed ‘little helper’, the almost-raised bed hasn’t been much of a success and the only way it’s going to work is if I plant things in it that are already pretty large. I’ve been growing a few things in modules in the mini-greenhouse so let’s see how the next batch of plants get on.

The front of the decking has an older cucumber plant with some salad leaves at the base, the non-stop courgette plant and some almost-ready salad potatoes. They have all done me proud and been very easy to grow with hardly any care needed.

The back of the decking is where I got a little over-confident, with some sweetcorn, a butternut squash plant and all kinds of beans growing up the trellis (which saved on buying canes). Take it from me, sweetcorn and Hunter squash are not ideal for most small gardens – they’re nutrient hungry and low yield, and thirsty. Don’t try this at home. But the seeds were free and if it all goes to plan they will probably be delicious. To get the best yield from sweetcorn you have to plant it in clumps rather than rows, there are 12 in this picture.

The sweetcorn variety is a new one that grows about 4 to 6 mini sweetcorn per plant, but if you miss the baby corn stage, unlike some others, it goes on to give you a couple of nice fat corn cobs per plant as well. Sounds too good to be true, and it is – to get the baby sweetcorn out you practically have to rip the plants to pieces so although they were tasty I am letting the rest of them become full sized cobs.

Hardly any beans so far - a late frost got half of the first lot and karate kitty got the second lot. Thanks kitty. The borlotto beans are the only variety outdoors to produce anything edible to date. Fingers crossed for the rest of them, which were a late sowing.

There are a few crappy old windowboxes left behind by the previous owners, and these are now filled with herbs, various salad leaves, beetroot, mini-cabbages, fennel, and a few other goodies. There are also some marigolds to cheer the place up and bring in the bees/scare off pests.

The hanging salad baskets have grown a lot of food from very little compost, including red and green salad bowl lettuce, herbs, radiccio, juicy spring onions, and Tom Thumb lettuces. This one also has edible flowers which allegedly double up as pest control (marigold and nasturtium) but I like the splash of colour as well.