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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Our various salad crops are approaching readiness, and with 23 tomato plants of four different varieties to choose from we’re hoping for plenty to eat, and even more left over for another batch of chutney to see us through the winter.
An early morning picking session bagged us a bumper crop of beans, taking our total for the year so far well beyond what we produced in the whole of last summer, and it appears there are still more to come.
This is what the 15 jars of our finished apple jelly looked like. They’re much darker than crab apple jelly, which is a light pink. The rich red brown of this batch is most likely down to the variety of apple we picked.
Self sufficiency doesn’t all have to be about growing your own vegetables, keeping chickens in the garden or screwing a solar panel to your roof. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that make the biggest difference.
We had our first proper harvest at the weekend. Three types of beans: French, runner and broad. Not a huge amount of any variety, but enough to cook ourselves a three-bean risotto for dinner.
The elderflower champagne is too dangerous to keep in a cupboard. So far we’ve had 18 explosions, which come with such force that they are shredding the seals on our bottles. As such we’ve come to the conclusion - reluctantly - that it’s time to start again, from scratch.
February 26th, 2008 at 7:23 am
[...] pull off the remaining sprouts, and tip out one bag of the remaining potatoes. We reaped more rewards than we thought we would, with the haul of carrots being rather substantial (if not the best), the [...]