If you’ve ever wondered how much of a crop you can get by planting just two seed potatoes, there’s your answer.

Rich’s mum is staying this weekend, so I headed out into the garden to dig up some potatoes for tomorrow’s dinner, and the last few weeks of rain have certainly paid a dividend where this particular vegetable is concerned.

The first spuds we gathered a couple of weeks ago were much smaller than these, and we needed two plants-worth just to feed four of us one meal. This half bucket-ful is also the fruit of just two plants (and hence two original seed potatoes) and should feed us all for a week.

This is the first year we’ve planted potatoes in the plot rather than in bags and it’s a bit of an eye opener. The resulting spuds are much better than the ones we’ve had in previous years and what I’ve heard about them being good for breaking up your soil is proving to be true, too.

In the last few years, when we’ve given over most of the plot to carrots, beans, parsnips and broccoli the soil has been compacted and hard to work with. Digging up potatoes, on the other hand, is a dream, and it leaves the soil lovely and fine. It looks like you’ve spent a couple of hours going over it with a rake and hoe.

I’m quite tempted to do the same next year… and the good state of our soil right now has left me itching to start planting some winter crops before it all clumps down again.

Related posts:

1. Growing potatoes in bags
2. Chitting this year's potatoes
3. The potatoes have started

A rhubarb plant for £2 was too good an offer to pass up, don’t you think? We were passing by the gardening stall on the market (which at this time of year is always full of seedling plants for those who were too lazy or too late to start their own) when we spotted them tucked away in a corner.

Normally we’d pass by the seedlings without even a sideways glance, but something like a potted rhubarb is different. This is a plant that will grow year on year and provide us with more and more fruit the longer we leave it.

A bean plant, on the other hand, will be gone by the end of the season, and besides, it’s a bit late to be starting with seedlings just now.

We already have two rhubarbs, but one of them has never been happy. Twice now it’s grown a couple of shoots that have since disappeared, so I bought one to replace it and happily took it home on the bike.

They’re not difficult to plant, enjoying semi-shade and regularly watered soil. They also need to be kept out of reach of the chickens, despite being planted behind their coop, as the leaves are poisonous.

Digging up what I assumed to be its dead predecessor, though, I found some signs of life below the soil. The root itself had been hollowed out by woodlice, but the top of it was sprouting a little yellow leaf on a tiny, perfect stalk. Far too small to eat, but an amazing achievement when you consider it was growing in total darkness.

It would have been a shame to bin it, so I moved it to another position, reburied it (with the stalk above the ground) and gave it a good watering, then covered it with a plant pot to try and force some growth.

If it takes, we’ll have three productive rhubarb plants by this time next year, and with its propensity for spreading, it should only get better in the years to come.

The rhubarb shoot we thought was dead

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1. A surprise showing from the ‘dead’ rhubarb
2. We’ve planted some rhubarb
3. The rhubarb is shooting

Our redcurrant bush is quite a bashful little thing. All leaves and shadow, hiding the best it has to offer. Pull back some of that foliage, though, and look what you find – an enormous bunch of brilliant scarlet redcurrants.

Just as the strawberries are coming to an end and the raspberries are being a bit slow about getting going, these lovely little berries look set to bridge the gap.

Making our own plain yoghurt, as we do every week, means that our flavours aren’t determined by the whims of the supermarket producers, but whatever is in season in our garden. I rather like that.

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1. How to freeze fruit
2. I think our yoghurt has died
3. We try our hand at homemade yoghurt

Our beans have come on very quickly. I’m really quite impressed at how speedily they have found their way up the canes and wrapped themselves securely around the bamboo. Two of the plants are now so tall that they are straying off the top of the canes and blowing in the breeze.

More importantly, though, they’re also bearing fruit (or should that be ‘bearing vegetable’) and tonight we picked and ate the first seven beans off two of the plants.

They were delicious.

Now I know seven beans isn’t all that much, but I’m rather ashamed to say that it was better than this year’s entire cherry harvest. I re-sited the tree at the end of the winter and to be honest I think it’s just getting over the shock of its new surroundings. This looks like being all the cherries we’re going to get this year.

A lonely cherry

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1. Harvesting the beans
2. This year’s beans are in the ground
3. Broad beans

The strawberry patch is excelling itself. Every day there is another dozen or dozen and a half scarlet berries to pick – at least – which is more than enough between us with some homemade yoghurt. That tub above was the fruit of just one picking session.

In fact, there are so many we can’t eat them all. I’ve given a box to mum and we still have an enormous pile in the fridge.

Fortunately things seem to be calming down, just as the raspberries start to show promise. We had our first dozen last night, from one of the new plants, and they taste fantastic.

My only worry is the relative inaction of at least two thirds of the bushes. I did plant four different varieties to see us through the summer and autumn, which should all fruit at different times, but I would expect more than just leaves from the late fruiters by now. Some flowers and a show of intent would be good.

Are they set for a barren first year?

Our first raspberries of 2010

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1. Pruning the fruit bushes
2. Caring for the raspberries
3. The last tomatoes and raspberries

We are fighting a battle in the strawberry patch at the moment. Something is finding itself irresistibly drawn to the brilliant scarlet fruits that are growing in there right now, and it isn’t just us.

I don’t think it’s mice this year, although we did have mice in that part of the plot a couple of years ago. This year, though, the cat has taken to sunbathing there in the mornings, which I think would probably be enough to keep mice out of the way.

Instead I suspect wood lice as I have seen a fair few of themm around there. Whatever it is, though, they’re not welcome. I think they’ve had almost as many of them as we have, and when they taste this intense, who can blame them?

Spoiled strawberries

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1. Strawberries without the straw
2. Strawberries
3. They may still be green, but they’re strawberries

Wow. Our potatoes are going a little bit crazy. We’re just back from a week away when, obviously, we couldn’t touch the garden. Nature did its own gardening in our absence. Warm days and a fair dose of rain has done wonders for the garden.

The lawn is a jungle, the raspberry bushes are encroaching on the patio and the first of our strawberries are starting to turn red. Most impressive of all, though, are the potato plants. They were just little shooting leaves poking up through the plot when we left but now several are a foot tall and show no sign of slowing down.

We’re going to have to get ourselves some topsoil this weekend to top them up or else the first actual potatoes will start showing above the ground, and you don’t want that. If they see the light they start to go green and then you can’t eat them.

It looks like we’re in for a good crop this year, which is a relief. I had doubts about giving over most of the plot to just one crop but it looks like it may have paid off.

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1. Potato progress
2. Strawberries
3. This year’s potatoes are champions

This is good. In fact, this is exactly what self-sufficiency is all about. Three years ago now we bought half a dozen strawberry plants and put them in at one end of the plot.

They weren’t a great success, admittedly. From memory we only got 24 berries in total, which was disappointing at the time. Nonetheless we left them in the plot and they came back last year. The harvest was excellent, and we were eating the most juicy, tasty strawberries every, every night of the week for about a month. It was great.

Going out to check on the plants today I see that we could be in for the same this year, too. The plants are tall and strong and while half are covered in the bold white flowers that will eventually turn into fruit, the rest are already producing little green berries, complete with seeds and hairs.

A preview of what we have to look forward to in the next month or so. And the best thing about it is that this year they won’t cost us anything at all. We haven’t bought any plants, we’ll be harvesting rainwater to keep them moist, and we won’t pay a penny for our desserts for a month.

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1. Strawberries without the straw
2. Second-year strawberries
3. Strawberries

I can’t believe how quickly our potatoes are growing. They were wrinkled spuds less than a month ago, slowly growing shoots in the outhouse. Now look at them – they’re proper little plants.

At this rate I reckon we’re going to have to top them up within a week or they’ll start showing their tubers above the ground, and you don’t want that. If they see the light they go green and that makes them poisonous, so no good for eating. That’s why, every few weeks or so as the foliage gets taller, you top them up by piling up the topsoil around them.

There’s a definite bias towards the seed potatoes planted on the sunnier half of the plot, but even those that are growing in the shadow of the bushes at the back of the garden are starting to poke up above the top of the plot. With 31 plants on the go it looks like we could be in for a bumper harvest.

Related posts:

1. A late potato harvest
2. Returning home to find rampant potato growth
3. Growing potatoes in bags

Ssomething has eaten the tops of not one but two of our bean plants. It’s very irritating when we have spent so much time carefully nurturing them in the greenhouse to have them nibbled to pieces like that within a few days of being put out in the open.

They were the two tallest plants, so I’d be surprised if it was snails or slugs as I’d not expect them to hold their weight. On the off-chance that it is some new super-light variety, though, I’ve scattered that end of the plot with organic, pet-friendly slug pellets in the hope of warding them off.

What of the two that have been nibbled, though? Well, I’m hoping they’ll just grow a little slower than the others. Last year I managed to snap a bean plant when I was encouraging it around a bamboo cane and it did recover slowly.

Having two in that state could actually be a good thing as it means – in theory – that they’ll mature more slowly than the others, and could extend our season.

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1. Beans and canes
2. Recycling the end of the beans
3. This year’s beans are in the ground