Goodbye Little Garden!

Well, it's time to say goodbye to the little garden. We've had three very happy years here. Some more fruitful than others. It's time for the little gardeners to scale up and move to some bigger and (hopefully) better. In three weeks we'll be the proud owners of a slightly larger patch than what we have now – a whopping 100ft x 65ft garden! We are very excited :-)

Last weekend we harvested the remainder of our crops. The highlight of which was our parsnips. Look at these beauties! This was the first time we'd grown them and they were a breeze! I think we got about 10 all in all and they were all a really good size. We roasted them up with some of the beets and carrots for a delicious last meal from our patch.

Talking of beetroot – we had a bumper crop this year. I almost don't know what to do with it all! Beetroot chutney – check. Roasted beetroot – check. Pickled beetroot – check. Beetroot soup – check. Not sure what to do with the rest!

We got a huge batch of toms this year too. We went for Gardener's Delight which have well and truly lived up to their name. We have hundreds and hundreds! As we've only got three weeks left here we picked most of them including the green ones.

And of course there's only one thing to do with green tomatoes and that's chutney. I found a great recipe by Nigel Slater.

Green Tomato Chutney

• 900g tomatoes, mixed green and red
• 350g onions
• 90g raisins
• 250g light muscovado sugar
• 1 medium sized, hot red chilli
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp yellow mustard seeds
• 300ml white wine vinegar

Halve or quarter the tomatoes – depending on how big they are. Put the green tomaotes in with all the other ingredients. Bring to the boil and then simmer for around half an hour. Then add in the red tomatoes and simmer for another half hour. Simples. Pop into sterlised jars and I let it mature for a few weeks at least. If you make it now it'll make great Christmas presents – what more could you want than some home-made chutney to spice up that left over turkey on boxing day.

Going Underground

We've been watching the potato plants getting bigger and bigger but the world beneath was eternally hidden from us. Were they making nice little tubers and if so were they in good shape or had they provided a nice feast for the slugs and other little blighters?

We've got two sets of potatoes on the go our first earlies and our main crop. The main crop is Maris Piper and our first earlies are the Epicure variety.

Both sets have started budding. We're cutting off the buds from the main crop to hopefully encourage them to put all their effort into the tubers as they've still got some months to go till harvest. However we've let the earlies bud away as from what we've read these will be ready for harvesting once they flower anyway.

But of course we couldn't wait for those buds to open and decided to pull one of our grow bags out to see what we had. We're justifying this as a 'health check' to make sure everything underground was going as planned. So I started foraging around in the top soil to see if there was any sign then realised we were going to have to go deeper to find the fruits of our labour. So we pulled up three plants from one bag and the pic above is one of the results.

We got about 25 of these little fellas varying in size from slightly larger than the above to pea sized. Evidently they could easily have done with more time in the ground but they were out now and looking tasty.

And to give good thanks and a proper send off to this little crop we made a potato salad with some of our radishes and parsley.























Potato Salad with Radishes

• 20 new potatoes, large ones halved and all boiled for 15mins
• 4 or 5 radishes sliced thinly
• 3 or 4 spring onions chopped finely (not from the garden yet sadly, though they are growing)
• 3 table spoons of natural yoghurt
• Small bunch of fresh parsley chopped
• Juice of 1/2 a fresh lemon
• Salt and pepper to taste

Boil the taters and let them steam off and cool down to room temperature. Transfer them to a mixing bowl and spoon in the yoghurt, radishes and spring onion and most of the parsley. Mix this well with a broad plastic or wooden spoon and while doing so slowly squeeze in the lemon juice. Add salt and pepper to taste and give it a final mix in. Ideally it's best if you can then cover this and leave it in the fridge for an hour to let the flavours meld.

The result is a really fresh and tangy potato salad that tends not to be too heavy due to the yoghurt rather than mayonaisse, probably a bit more respectful of the wasteline too.

The potatoes themselves were full of flavour and had a lovely texture. We accompanied this with a little leaf salad from our radiccios and little gem lettuces and a few slices of butternut squash and some crumbled feta cheese (though goats cheese would have been preferable).

It was fantastic to eat our first proper meal from the garden, even if some of the ingredients were from our local grocers.

One thing to note though, when we pulled the taters up we noticed that the roots didn't go very deep inside the potato bag and so not as many taters as the bag and plant could produce. We think this is because we may have been watering them too regularly so the roots haven't had to dig down to search for water. So we've cut back the watering on all the potato plants now in the hope of letting them dig deeper and produce greater yeild.

See I said it was a health check really. Tasty one though!

The first harvest of the season

Radishes. Our first taste of grow-your-own. We've been growing the French Breakfast variety and finally we got to taste some of the fruits of our labour. To be honest, they've been pretty easy to grow, a few problems at the beginning with the ever present greenfly but they seemed to cope pretty well with them.

The French Breakfast are not as hot as the standard globe variety and I think when we grow them again we'll go for the globe version, don't get me wrong they were lovely but they could've done with abit more poke, if you get my drift.

We made a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe

Radish and Goats Cheese Raita

• 200g of fresh radishes
  
• 300ml of natural yoghurt
• 100 g of fresh soft goat's cheese
• 2tsp of chopped fresh mint

You just finely slice the radishes and mix everything together, as simple as that. It was nice, bit too cheesy for me, think we'll reduce the amount of goats cheese we put in next time.

But lets not dwell on that, I'd like to celebrate the fact that we've grown radishes, actually grown them, from tiny little seeds. Well, they did all the hard work, all we did was provide them with somewhere to grow. Thanks radishes, we did enjoy you, and we look forward to many more to follow!