The Sweetest Things

My my my. I've never tasted carrots so sweet, so delicately flavoured, so perfumed, so peppery. Every little crunch an explosion of orangeness.

I can guarantee that I will definitely, absolutely, most wonderfully be growing carrots every year.

The Hungry Caterpillar

Well, would you look at this cheeky chappy. Low and behold our Basil has been munched again! All of our Basil is indoors to try and stop it continually being bombarded by our little crawly friends and somehow this little fella has stowed away on the tray and has been happily munching away night after night.

I first noticed that a couple of the leaves had been eaten and thought maybe it was a couple of ants, as at first there wasn't too much damage. Then Saturday morning I came downstairs and he'd literally taken the tops of about 12 plants!
Look at the poor things! So I had a little scout around and the hungry caterpillar was hiding right at the back (well technically he was anything but hungry after a night of feasting on our Basil!). He was duly popped out into the front garden where he can much what he likes, plenty of weeds and ivy out there. Although I doubt they taste as good as young fresh basil! Well I hope he enjoyed it while it lasted.

The Basil seem to be recovering and I can see a few little green shoots this morning so hopefully they'll be fine. If anyone is Basil muching round here it's going to be us!

The Potato Saga Continues....

We harvested most of our potatoes this weekend just passed. Not because we wanted to, ideally we would've left them until August time but out of our 12 or so plants not one of them looked even remotely healthy. Originally we were just going to dig up the one plant we had in a container to see what was going on...
This is what the foilage looked like. On first glance it just looks like he's been munched a little (well a lot really...) but all of our plants were displaying similar traits and seeing as this plant was nowhere near the main patch we were a little worried that maybe our seed potatoes had been harbouring some sort of disease so we investigated by pulling this fella and this is what we found.
Euw. What's that? Well we had a look in a few books and we think it's Potato Scab. We're not sure which type though, there's the Common Scab or the Powdery Scab. We think it might be Powdery Scab. Here's a more detailed shot.
Still edible though which is good as it just affect the skins, just need an extra bit of peeling. Bit of a shame as I was looking forward to making some potato wedges but nevermind. Anyway, on pulling this lot we were now thinking that maybe our whole patch was suffering from scab so we decided to pull some plants from the main patch. Now this patch had been decimated, I mean truly decimated, we thought maybe by snails but honestly I can't see how a few snails could possibly cause this much devistation... but maybe they can?
As this was our first year of growing we didn't really plant the potatoes in a way that made them very accessible (lesson learnt for next year). Ideally we wanted to pull the plants at the back but we couldn't get to them! So we had to go for a couple at the front first.

We didn't really hold out much hope as a lot of the stems had actually withered away. But the first couple of plants had a few potatoes, some of a fairly good size. Not quite bakers but a good roasty. And surprisngly no scab, which was good. But the problem we did have that as huge as these plants once were, at their peak nearly 5ft tall they only had maybe four or five potatoes each. Very odd. So we thought that seeing as most of these plants were not going to survive much longer then what the heck, let's pull the majority of them and leave the healthiest ones to hopefully crawl along to August when we can hopefully get some bakers off them.

So there you go. Our first year of potatoes. Not terribly successful. But then again, not a complete disaster.

This time next year.... watch this space.

Carlsberg don't make deformed radishes. But if they did...

Possibly the ugliest radish ever? Maybe? I would say definitely. I know as organic gardeners you'll get a few mis-shapen veges and there's n0thing wrong with them but I dunno.... this just seemed a little wierd to me, it had roots starting to grow out of the fruit body.

Sorry. We couldn't bring ourslelves to eat it.

If anyone else has some deformed vege pictures, send them over, would love to see them! There's gotta be some funny carrots out there somewhere...

Bumper Harvest!

Check this out. We had a huge harvest yesterday! What a great looking bunch. In no particular order we had: lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, french beans, spring onions, parsley, chives, shallots and potatoes. A small selection can be seen above. Those carrots, they may look small (give em a chance! they are the baby variety) but my word they pack some flavour, they were divine, some were flowery, almost perfumed, some had a hint of pepper not unlike a radish but I can safely say all formed some of the best carrots I've ever tasted and we've got a load more outside!

Yesterday was probably the biggest harvest so far and we were both really chuffed with everything we'd picked. This is the best bit of the year, when all your hard work starts to pay off.

Long may it continue!

Red Red Red!

Horrah! Look at these beauties! Remember we were having trouble remembering which colour tomatoes we'd planted in the hanging baskets, well I would say this is pretty much conclusive evidence! I think a salad is on the menu for lunch today!

Corainder Seeds

If you've been reading our blog you're realise we've had abit of a non-Coriander year this year. When I say non-Corainder, that's abit of a fib, not completely, I mean we do have some Coriander, just not really edible Corainder. Our plant was looking wonderfully healthy but still a little on the small side so we decided to leave it a couple of weeks so it could flesh out a little and wouldn't mind being munched by us so much and in that time it decided it would run to seed. Ho hum... well not as bad as it sounds becuase Coriander seeds can still be used in cooking, particularly in middle-eastern receipes, curries and the like. Super.

It seems we harvest the seeds when they're just starting to turn to brown, cut the stem at the base of the plant and hang upside down in a brown paper bag until the seeds have dried then you can just shake them off the plant.

So all is not lost.