I think it’s time for a garden update, to be a bit less sweary than Joe Lycett’s Instagram garden updates. We’re going outside, as we often do on this blog, but we’re only going as far as the garden. I’ve become a keen veg grower in the last couple of years and I think it’s worth pointing out that there’s more to the great outdoors than hiking, climbing and adrenaline adventures.
I started early and I started enthusiastically. I had two windowsill propagators for Christmas. To tell the truth, cardboard eggboxes actually work better. But never mind. I got chills, peppers and two varieties of tomatoes in by about January. The peppers produced about two peppers so I had to plant a second batch. This is from seed, by the way. When they got big and bushy enough – or at least the tomatoes – I put them in bigger pots outside and then I sowed my root veg in planters outside somewhere around March. Orange carrots, rainbow carrots, parsnips, spring onions, leek and radishes, I think. Then there was the herb garden and later, the beans.
I know from last year that most of the root veg will grow quietly underground and take months to get anywhere. We were eating short fat sweet carrots by July last year, whereas I didn’t pull up the first carrots until late September this year. The radishes utterly failed – two batches! The beans produced wonderful amounts of leaves and were so bushy and perfect – and only produced one bean. Those two, my usual fail-safes, have made me feel quite like the garden failed this year.
On the other hand, we’ve had more tomatoes than we know what to do with, the onions have thrived and the chillis have done better than ever!
Last year’s onions didn’t really work. Dad likes to eat what I grow and he wanted to eat home-grown onions so he bought some onion sets this year. I’m inclined to see that as cheating – how to grow onions? By planting ready-made onions? But I have to admit that the sets grew into big, beautiful, juicy onions that I’m proud of. Or the white ones did, anyway. The red onions were another flat failure.
The carrots didn’t make such spectacular leaves as last year but when I pulled them up at the end of September, I found massive carrot-sized carrots, which I was very impressed with. I think the smaller ones are sweeter and they look more fun but I can’t deny that having real carrots is very gratifying. At time of writing, I haven’t harvested the rainbow carrots but I see no reason why they shouldn’t be doing fine. Or do I? The leeks did really well last year but have come to very little this year. I conclude that a raised planter is what does the magic. The spring onions, on the other hand, are fine and fat and so densely planted that I tore the leaves off the first three that I failed to harvest.
Last year, I took advice to thin out the tomatoes and inadvertently killed them. This year I didn’t touch them, other than to feed them sporadically and they went wild. I was very pleased with them! They’re hanging varieties so they didn’t shoot up to six feet tall this year; they stayed short and instead spread out until you couldn’t see which ones went in which pot. There are plum tomatoes and cherry tomatoes. The plums were tastier but the cherries did better and they really enjoyed the hot summer. Lesson learned: do not thin tomatoes.
But the chillis! I set them all out in a window box in the garden. Dad promptly decided that they’d never flourish like that and put half a dozen of them in their own big pots in the greenhouses. The outside, overcrowded ones produced flowers first and then finally grew a great handful of long thin red chillis. Some of the others – including the greenhouse ones, I admit, have produced green and purple bell peppers. Yes, purple. I’ve never seen purple peppers before but they seem to be just as valid as the colours you can buy in Tesco. We’ve had chillis and peppers before but they’ve never got big and they’re certainly never been vivid red. I’m very pleased with them!
The strawberries aren’t really my babies but they were very prolific early in the summer. Then the heatwave seems to have killed them. The raspberries, which are still a make-it-up-as-I-go-along, regrew from last year’s brown stems and then grew a whole new set of bright green stems. They’re still not big fruit producers but I’m just having fun with them. What else have I got? The passionfruit! I planted them indoors earlier in the year and then put them outside. They didn’t exactly flourish. I thought I was going to lose them, but two survived and then two got quite big. According to the seed packet, they’ll flower next summer, so fingers crossed. I mean, the ones that live semi-wild around town all come back year after year so I’m assuming they’ll be ok. And the cucamelons failed. I started them in the windowsill propagators in the greenhouse, but those things don’t drain – because windowsill – and so the baby plants drowned. So I’ll be doing them again in eggboxes next year.
That’s the fruit & veg. There’s also the herbs. Most of them came back to life this summer after sitting quietly outside all winter. The tarragon, which got a bit bent in a not-tall-enough greenhouse last year, has still not straightened up. The mint went wild. The chives bloomed. I planted red basil and sage this year and the sage did well. I took out last year’s failed parsley and failed at this year’s parsley too. The rosemary clings to life but has never really bloomed in the way some of the others have.
But there was something else. I was doing my Rebel Gardener badge and that meant there were particular things I had to grow. Three different flowering plants, three different fruit & veg, three from seed and three bulbs. Fruit & veg was no problem. But flowers? I don’t do flowers. So I went to Homebase and bought flowers. Pink-tipped cosmos, I think was one, and the other was some kind of wild flowers. I also had my 30 Days Wild flowers. Of course, some of my herbs flowered and I should have thought of counting them. Seeds were no problem – I’ve already said that using anything other than seeds is cheating. So my bulbs were two kinds of onion sets, white & red, and I also grew some flowers from seeds. I’m not 1000% sure what they were but I think they were begonias. Anyway, the picture on the packet was of something big and reddish-orange and beautiful. I didn’t have high hopes but eventually, all three flower bulbs popped up and by the summer, they’d become proper flowers, so I was very impressed. My cosmos did ok, although they could probably do with a bigger pot. The wildflowers shot up and collapsed equally quickly, as did my 30 Days Wild flowers. And yes, the red onions never got edible but they certainly grew up from what I’d planted so I’m counting that.
[see how much more enthusiastic I am about vegetables: I can’t find any pictures of the flowers.]
What about next year? New soil! Look more into food. Invest in another raised planter – things do well in the one I’ve got (see last year’s leeks and this year’s onions, compared to last year’s onions and this year’s leeks!). More eggboxes. More baby plants grown inside rather than in the greenhouse or outside. Start the tomatoes & chillis nice and early again, that one worked well.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I never saw myself become a keen gardener. Here I am very exciting because my onions and my carrots are downstairs in a stew right now. My chills are going in a curry next week. My tomatoes and my spring onions make lunches. Whatever’s failed, and it feels like a lot, what’s succeeded has done well and it’s so exciting to have fresh home-grown produce.
