We’re rapidly moving into spring. The trees are starting to bud, and there is blossom in the nature reserve next to the house. Even the cat grass has started to grow, and I’d largely thought that was a lost cause.

So this weekend we pulled on our boots and headed out to the plot to bring in the last of the carrots and sprouts, turn out another bag of potatoes and assess the cabbages and leeks.

We had an impressive haul. 600g of sprouts, 1.2kg of potatoes and 2.5kg of carrots. We even found a beetroot that had somehow slipped through the net when took them in last September, which despite the ice and frosts looks good enough to eat, so that added a further 60g to the total for 2007.

We left the leeks in the ground along with the cabbage, which is still a bit too leggy for my liking. We have more home produce to eat than we can cope with right now, so it looks like we’ll be blanching some of those sprouts and freezing them. We made the carrots into a big batch of carrot and coriander soup, along with six of the potatoes.

We were pleasantly surprised by the potatoes. They’ve been in their grow bags for almost nine months now, and we thought that they may have started to rot. Only one had gone bad, though, and the rest were all fine. They peeled easily, and the flesh inside was a wonderful paper white.

We couldn’t say the same for all of the carrots. Some were fine, but others had been nibbled in the ground and some had black bits. One of them looked distinctly furious at having been dug up.

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self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, vegetables

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