Our Green and Pleasant Land

Just been out in the garden today to check on everything and it's looking beautifully healthy. Here's an update and some snapshots of our sumptuous back yard.

Herbs
First off, the herb garden. It's so green and lush, especially after the thunderstorm yesterday. The parsley is taking over a bit so we'll have to use some this week to keep him under control. And our coriander seems to be flowering and going all spindly, keep forgetting to look that up and see if that's normal.

Basil
As I said in a previous post, we've been having trouble with Basil. Nibbles by ants, and generally just being a bit pants in the Basil growing area. But, fingers crossed, this last batch seem to be doing OK. We've had them indoors for quite a while so they can establish themselves before they brace the outside world full of critters. We put them out yesterday in the sun but forgot to bring them in.... opps. But all is well in Basil land. They seem fine and all are intact. Got a couple of the purple variety too, just at the back of the photo there.

Potatoes
Now to the potatoes, quite literally a jungle. These are our main crop, Maris Piper. We didn't realise how tall they would grow, they must be about 4 ft by now. We've had some small problems, a few gusty days and the wind blew them right over, we were quite worried about them. But we bought some trellace and pinned them in and they seem to have recovered well and all looking wonderfully healthy. Really looking forward to those, August/September harvest.

TomatoesMmmmm. Look at these little beauties! Tomatoes. Can't wait for these. I must admit, I think we're going to have tomato overload, we have about 24 plants dotted around, we've even had to put some in a hanging basket in the front garden because we've run out of space! But the bees have been busy and doing us proud by pollinating away. I think we probably have about 50-60 tomatoes in various stages of growth at the moment and about 300 flowers across all the plants. Fingers crossed it's going to be a tomato fest.

Lettuce
We had a bit of a lettuce nightmare at the beginning of the season and the snails well and truly caught us out. I was getting really peeved actually, felt like we were fighting a losing battle. But, for some reason, unknown to us, we've got a batch of lettuce in at the moment which have been munch free.... tempting fate I know. But they are looking divine! And I reckon we could pick a few leaves off here... maybe for next weeks work lunchbox?

Beetroot
When I put these little fellas into the ground a local cat dug them up, but I managed to salvage them by repotting them and letting them re-establish themselves. Actually a good little trick that has seemed to work really well to keep the diggers away, we just snapped some cheap garden canes in half and dotted them around the plot. Worked a treat.

Dwarf French Beans
Last but not least, the beans. We sneakily picked a bean yesterday (we went on the finger rule, longer than your finger, then yeah, it's OK) and it was deeelish. I think when we cook these it's literally blanch for 30 seconds and that's it, or I did think diced up raw into a soup to add some crunch, could be nice in a pea and mint. Anyway, we've got five plants, all doing well (apart from a small blackfly infestation on a couple—don't worry, we have the ladybugs on the job) so looking forward to a nice little harvest from these fellas.

So that concludes our little update. I do enjoy the first inspection of the day. It's great to see everything with fresh eyes.

It's a Harvest Festival!

Wow. A beautiful sunny day, a nice glass of Rosé and a wonderful harvest. We got 2.5kg of earlies and our first bowl of homegrown strawberries.

The earlies are the Epicure variety and we can heartily recommend them, they have a delicate flavour, very white flesh and are nice and fluffy. We gently boiled them for about 8 minutes and then lightly fried them with some sage from the herb garden, served with a yogurt and chive dip. The sweet sweet strawberries, with a spoonful of creme fraiche and a dollop of honey. Deeeelish.

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!

Welcome

The Little Gardeners is our way of documenting our first forray into vegetable gardening.

Thanks to a move of house we finally have a garden for the first time in five years and boy are we excited!

The only experience of vegetable growing we've had before was five tomato plants on our windowsill last year that yielded the grand total of about six fruit in varying shades of green. So we're hoping to do slightly better this year!

At the new house we've got a small back garden which is a mixture of patio and corner and side beds. A full plan of the space and what we have planted where and sun/shade maps will be coming in a future post. We're learning as we go along and we hope that by sharing our ups and downs you can learn with us (and help when it goes horribly wrong!)

We'll also be keeping you updated on the other small folk we share our space with such as a pair of Goldfinches, a little mousey and the war against snails!

Thanks for visiting.

Tracy & Bryn