A tiny harvest

The pots outside our one bedroom flat (which is without garden 😦 ) are flourishing with potato, courgette and tomato plants today (the few that survived the awful beginning of the summer we’ve had that is).

Tomatoes,squash, courgettes and some scraggly peppers and dwarfed aubergines- using every square inch makes plants flourish!!!

Tomatoes (which need some shoots pulling out)

Maris P’s in a pot!

Also, our allotment, despite not being tended for about 4 weeks has produced some lovely courgettes to join the couple from our pots: F1 Tristan, Black Beauty, F1 One Ball and F1 8 Ball.

Our first harvest for the year is a small bundle of these lovely fruits!

8 ball courgette! YUM!

What a handful!

A tiny harvest

We celebrated our crop, and the lovely (short-lived) weather, with a barbeque (or two) at the allotment…pure bliss!

Chopping onions for the veggie burgers

Our homemade BBQ- a shopping basket, some bricks and coals- with halloumi kebabs and Quorn best of british sausages- nom nom

Quorn burgers, Quorn sausages, frying onion in tin foil, and halloumi and veg kebabs!

Marshmallow anyone?

Despite the poor weather these few barbeques and relaxed times have made me feel very summery indeed. To make everyone else feel a little more summery and satisfied in their agricultural endeavours in the city, you may enjoy this farm and town paper animation set to Vashti Bunyan’s Diamond Day- what could be more summery?

By the way, we used the tiny harvest to make up the layers in a delicious vegetable lasagna, where instead of a layer of bechemal sauce I make a creamy layer of courgettes cooked  in garlic, herbs and cream cheese to place in between layers of quorn mince, passata and basil.

Colourful courgettes

YUM! Part of the tiny harvest cooked

Creamy courgettes in lasagna!

Finished lasagna, topped with ricotta and spinach, then gran padano and breadcrumbs for a twist

Sprouty ‘taters!

Arghh!

 

Look at these monsters I found at the back of the cupboard last weekend, and yes I did actually once intend to eat these potatoes at some points and yep, I did just totally forget about them-gross! My cupboard stock-rotation skills aren’t up to much it seems!  Here’s my foot (and pajama-ed leg (sorry about that)) in next to the sproutiest one for scale.

 

 

So I’ve never planted potatoes before so I looked on some forums online about this to see if these cupboard ‘head-starters’ were worth planting. The answer seemed to be ‘yes.’ I also found out that potatoes will pretty much grow out of any potato remnant with an eye on it, and people have even had successful potatoes grow out of peelings chucked in their compost patch.

 

Peel us and we will multiply!! Mwahaha!
(Image CCAL Dag Endresen)

 

It seems with these sprouties you can plant the potatoes with the sprouts lying down sideways or sticking up into the mound away from the potato, or you can knock the sprouts off if you’re worried they’re too big and will get damaged and they should grow again in the soil. If they poke out of the top they’ll soon green up. I went for lying down sideways as this seemed the most likely to be supported by the soil and not break. I put sprouties (with antlers intact) into pots about 1.5 feet deep x 1.5 feet wide. I laid 2 in each pot half filled with compost then added more compost to the top.

Here’s hoping they do OK. They’re growing in the same compost I had tomatoes in last year, and I’ve heard you shouldn’t of that but we didn’t have any blight last year so I’m risking it (MAVERICK!)

I’m so excited about my potatoes I had to listen to the potato song in anticipation-

Alot going on…

We don’t just eat a lot of veggies, we attempt to grow them too! Today was the first warm day down the allotment and there’s ‘alot’ going on (get it, allotment/alot…genius). The first blossoms are out on the damson and apple trees and the gooseberry and raspberry canes had fresh foliage. A sneaky pigeon or two were already picking their way about the place looking for any seedlings to munch on- stupid birds, we’re far too lazy to have planted anything yet!

The first signs of spring!

This year we’re planning on keeping the allotment nice and simple- we love tomatoes, courgettes, squash, corn, peppers and aubergines so we’re only planting those and flowers this year for the main crop. We also have fruit canes and trees, rhubarb, asparagus (hidden amongst the compost patch and brambles) and I’d like to get some herb planters going.

As tomatoes will take up the bulk of the room on the main plot and we LOVED growing different varieties last year, we’ve gone a bit mad and planted ten varieties of tomato:

–Super Marmande

–Auriga

–Ace

–Black Krim

–Sungold F1

-Mystery seeds (we dug out of a particularly tasty cherry tomato)

–Gardener’s Delight

–Roma VF

–Lucciolo F1

–Shirley F1

We got the seeds from seedparade, simplyseed and saved ourselves

We planted 8 seeds of each last week and they’ve all germinated YAY (see pic below), when we set up the greenhouse we’ll plant a few more methinks (at first I thought 70-80 plants would be enough, and then I remembered how much digging we’ve actually done on the allotment!)

Mini Tomato Guys!

The allotment, despite being so early in the season, has already given us some tasty treats today, in the form of a good bag of young rhubarb. I used some apples and a frozen punnet of berries from last year’s allotment crop to make a tasty crumble! THANKS PATCH!

Rhubarb and apple stewing with a punnet of frozen berries added!

Mmmm!

Finished crumble ready for the oven!