A very late harvest
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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The strawberries have been our big success story this summer. Surprising, really, as they have been a dead loss in years gone by.
May saw a slight fall in the number of eggs laid by our three hens. That was unexpected, but there are some possible explanations.
A flapjack in essence, this is very quick and easy to bake and uses store cupboard ingredients, so you can keep stocked up on everything you need and make a new batch whenever you want some.
The apricot tree is looking distinctly sorry for itself and now, with a gust of wind, it’s lost two of its only four fruits.
We had a very good demonstration of why it’s worth growing your own this week, even when vegetables are so cheap in the shops at the moment. Here it is.
