Merveilleux d'ail!

Mmmmmmm, look at all the garlic wonderfulness! We're off on our summer hols next Saturday so the garden received a lot of TLC this weekend. We tried to harvest as much as we could before we leave everything to fend for itself.

I would say the garlic has been pretty successful this year. To be honest they just got on with it, no fuss at all. We just duly watered and fed them and they've been no trouble at all. They could be a little bigger but for our first attempt we're pretty chuffed.

They've probably been ready to pull for a couple of weeks or so. They're ready when the leaves start to go yellow and dry, the same deal as the shallots and onions. We're going to let them dry out for a couple of weeks and they should be ready by the time we're back from our travels.

Prize Carrot

We pulled a good amount of baby carrots yesterday and wow, look at the size of this beauty! He's our biggest carrot to date! Not quite up to world record standards though.

Joe Atherton holds the record for the world longest carrot, a staggering 19 feet and 1.96 inches (5.841 metres), grown in 2007. Think we have a long way to go....

And fancy some carrot jazz? Check this fella out

Snack Attack

A couple of weeks back one half of the little gardeners was left sofa bound after an injection in the achilles tendon, nice! One lovely friend, Jenny, came over with a bounty of supplies which included a rather fetching plant from Greenwich Market labeled a 'snacker'.

A quick read of the label tells me it's a mini-cucumber plant, how brilliant! It had a few little baby ones on it already but my they grow quickly! Literally from a small cucumber, maybe the size of a childs little finger into what you see above in about 4 days (photographed next to a cherry tom so you can get the idea of scale). Quite impressive if you ask me!

So, Jenny, thank you very much, we had one for dinner this evening in our salad. I'm sure a little girl I know will be more than happy to devour a few so we'll save the next one for stinker!

Here's the website if you want to read a little more.

http://www.snacker.nl/2008/index_en.htm

Food Glorious Food

We had a bumper harvest last weekend and both lunch and dinner were supplied courtesy of our blooming garden. First on the list was some juicy tomatoes.

A whole kilo of the beauties! I know I keep posting pictures of tomatoes but we're incredibly proud of them, and come on, who wouldn't be! So lunch consisted of a generous handful of freshly picked tomatoes, some sliced buffalo mozzarella, freshly torn basil (also from our garden), balsamic vingear and a little seasoning. Otherwise known as an Italian Caprese salad. This is the recipe that got me hooked on tomatoes in the first place so only fitting to make this our first dish proper.
Yum, it was deelish, so much so I think we might have it again today. You can't beat it. It really is the bees knees of a salad. Hands up to the Italians for a job well done.

A few hours later, rumbling tummys, we kicked off dinner, we had a couple of beetroot that we'd pulled and wanted them to be the stars of the show.
What better way to cook beetroot than roasting. Nice and slowly, easy does it. So in goes, beets, shallots, new potatoes, garlic, rosemary and thyme, all from the garden.
Roasted for an hour and then some baby carrots from the garden right at the end for the last 20 minutes.
Doesn't look alot for the hour and a half work we put into it, but my goodness was it tasty. We put it all into a wrap with some greek yogurt mixed with a little parsley (which is our favourite dip at the moment) The beetroot was soooooooo sweet, the shallots all gooey and sweet and the potatoes divine with the rosemary and thyme. This was probably one of the best wraps I've ever had.

Roasted beetroot is the future.

Incy Wincy

I'm afraid this post doesn't have a picture to alleviate you from the visual banality of lines and lines of text, but for good reason I might add, you'll thank me for it, honestly you will.

Over the past 3 weeks we seemed to have had an influx of the eight-legged variety. It started off with each tomato plant harboring one, just little ones. I let them be for a while and now I've decided to start killing them all because I don't want to pick my tomatoes incase I have a spider crawl all over me! I've become quite a dab hand and squishing them with the snail picker which I might add must be the purchase of the century, multiple usage implement now.

So, the little ones by the tomatoes, yep, they've gone but the ones we're seeing in the garden now, they're very gradually, day by day getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're coming from our shed, the darkest, web ridden place on earth, it's the Greenwich equivalent of a 2000ft deep cave in Borneo, probably...

So these big ladeez have been hiding in the shed all year and now they've done their hair, put on some lippy and are out and about parading themsevles for Mr.Spider. I don't like it. I don't like it one little bit.

And isn't it strange that the bigger a spider gets, the more freaked out you are about squishing it, as though it's going to turn round and start reasoning with you about the merits of an arachnid killing spree. I can see it's point, it's not like it's going to solve the worlds problems, Isreal and Palestine are not suddenly going to become best friends because there's no spiders left in the world, it's a silly thought and one not worth pursuing in the slightest. But ah-ha, then again, there's nothing like a common goal to get the peace process going...

Actually, I'm abit of wimp, I'm just gonna leave it there and hope it goes away! Or maybe I'll just throw lots of little bits of dirt into it's web so it runs around after them all and dies of exhaustion. Now that would be evil. MwahahahahahahHAHAHAH!

Pah – Moth Balls!

Well, look at this chappie. It seems our Basil is the popular place to be! I found her minding her own business on the Basil in the kitchen. Not sure what sort she is, could be Brown Rustic (Rusina ferruginea) as seen on the quite brilliant UK Moth ID site.

http://ukmoths.org.uk/show.php?id=3163

It has weird little spikes all over it if you look closely. Anyway, she's not laying any eggs on my lovely basil for her offspring to chomp their way through! So off she went, into the garden.

Tomatoes – Again!

One half of the Little Gardeners has been out of action this weekend due to a cortisone injection into my achillies tendon, ouch! But I just about managed to get some shots of our sumptuous tomatoes today. The reds are coming along nicely and we now even have some yellow's that are ripe and ready to eat which is great news.

Down with the Beets

Look at our lovely beetroot! We've only just noticed that you can see the tops of them now! I know it sounds silly to say, wow I can see the top of my beetroot, I mean, not exactly exciting is it? But when I think back to when we first planted these, tiny little seeds, all those months ago, to think that it could be this big now is pretty exciting to me.

The strangest thing though... we have a stowaway beetroot, whose shacked up with the spring onions!
We have no idea how it got there! The only possibly explanation is that a seed blew from the packet when I was planting them, but the timeline seems off, it's a little behind the others but maybe that's just to do with the fact that it had to germinate outside whereas the other fellas had a nice warm windowsill in the kitchen.

I'm tempted to pull one and have a little baby beetroot in a salad tonight. But maybe a couple more weeks so they can plump up abit more.

Can't wait for borscht soup.