new potatoes – Garden Gate Flowers

Too early or too hot?

Another hot, dry start to the summer, another discussion about climate change. At the end of term I sat through several showings of documentaries on climate change which alarmed and depressed me in equal measure. Alarming because the stats suggest we are going to global hell in a fossil-fuelled hand cart. Depressing to hear climate change deniers like Nigel Lawson and American news channels, led from the front by The Donald, for whom denying climate change suits their personal goals. Nor was my dark mood alleviated by the attitude of the year 9 geographers who were more interested in trying to wind me up than discovering how to save the planet.

However, back at home Mrs B is leading our efforts to preserve Planet Earth for our descendants as we use our Bags for Life, watch our home-produced solar power being stored in our battery and even revert to soap-on-a-rope to reduce our consumption of single use plastics. We can save the plantet….

Elsewhere, in the garden I have to cope with the change in crop behaviours as veg and flowers adapt (or not) to the latest hot dry spell. And this summer – like last year – it feels as if a lot of the vegetables are out of kilter. In the raised beds, only the early croppers did well such as garlic, onions, shallots and new potatoes, which thrived in the early summer warmth.

In contrast, the beans had all gone over by the time we returned from hols at the end of July, leaving us with knobbly Runners and Frenchies rather than the sweet tender pods we would normally harvest. Perhaps I made an error in trying to reduce the wastage of previous years by planting just a wigwam or two, instead of serried ranks of them. So when the purple beans got half way up the poles before stopping in their tracks, flowering and dying, I had no back up.

I have belatedly effected second plantings of lettuce and beans, but they have had a hard time of it with the slugs (and probably the dry weather). Today I planted them out, giving them the same choices that Mrs B always tells me they have: to live or to die. I suspect the latter will be the inevitable path for them.

Of course, it might not be climate change or global warming that is the problem at all. It might just be that I have simply not adhered to my father’s age old advice. He always told me that I planted my runner beans too early. So maybe it was just another case of “too early for runner beans”.

Garlic – showing the usual signs of rust

Drying garlic

First new potatoes

Potatoes and Broad beans (which had over-wintered)

Plaited garlic

The First Lift

img_20180612_081107072_hdr1 — Potatoes – Swift and early. But where have all the flowers gone?

These are the days of miracle and wonder, as Paul Simon once sang. The garden is starting to produce, and all the fastidious work sowing seeds, potting on, planting out, weeding, hoeing and slaughtering snails, begins to pay off.

One of the key moment is the lifting of the first root of New Potatoes. It is something that was treated with due pomp and ceremony by The Old Man and required the type of careful prodding and inspection one would normally expect only of a midwife. The Old Man would have counted the days since planting, checked the growing conditions and attempted to calculate the exact best day to start digging. But he traditionally only planted one type of potato (probably Wilja or Desiree), meaning that those dug in June were new potatoes, anything after that were main crop.

For my part, I am always seduced by the choice on offer at Pennard Plants Potato days so I buy various types for different end products. But every year I am unsure about when they are likely to be ready. The sages of the internet gardening fraternity say you need to start harvesting when the potatoes have stopped flowering, but this May / June has been so dry they seem to have barely blossomed. And this has been a very different this year for other reasons:

The potato patch (and veg patch) is only a few strides from my back door in the new property
Due to a lack of supply we had to go for Swift first earlies instead of the usually reliable Belle de Fontenay
In an even more radical break with normal procedures, earthing up has been done not with earth, but with grass clippings, thanks to reading an article by Alyce Fowler.

So the timing of when the first spuds would be ready was even more of a guessing game than normal. However, the three variables noted above were more likely to help rather than hinder. Point one makes it less time-consuming to check them, point two suggested that the they would be ready earlier (or else why give them a name synonymous with fast) and point three, after some initial misgivings, was the most beneficial of all. With the dry weather, I was able to simply lift a portion of grass clippings to expose the golden orbs that indicated the potatoes were ready.

And so we enjoyed our first potatoes of the season along with the first kale of the year too. The kale should have been ready much earlier, but it was a victim of unknown assailants – like the peas and salad. But, on the whole, there is enough greenery to suggest a good growing season beckons.

Snug under their blanket of grass clippings

The First Root – ready for prepping

One Month On

170614 (3) It’s been a month since I put finger to keyboard (or for some I know it would be thumbs to keyboard). It is an interesting comparison to see how stuff has panned out in the past 30 days.

A month ago it was raining, I was at the end of half term, looking forward to a mad month of end of term activities and report writing. Now the sun is shining and I am on holiday looking forward to weeks of no school and starting to reap the harvest from the springtime planting, potting on and general nurturing.

In June I was worried the garlic was going over and rotting. It was suffering rust (was it the rain?) and some did – but most are now drying nicely and have been joined by the shallots, spread out in the garage, away from the joists where the swallow fledglings sit and shit. The Old Man’s reaction to the harvesting of shallots was typical:

“It’s a bit early for shallots”.

“Try telling the shallots” I replied: “they’re falling over”.

It’s been a good year for them (early or not) and many are the size of decent onions. I wish I had planted more now.

Up the top of the garden, a month ago the pig pen was a tangled mess of three foot high weeds. I put my back into clearing a particularly fertile area of the pen (resulting in a trip to the osteopath) but I reckon it was worth the effort: the new squash patch is thriving on what I cleared and what the pigs left behind.

Early June the runner beans were just beginning to grasp the canes. Now they are over-topping them. The first beans are formed. The curly kale was being protected by boards – now the kale is big enough to stand by itself and the boards are protecting the cabbages, which suffered some mouse damage.

Mid-June saw the first Cosmos and sweet peas – ahead of the regular 10th July Sweet Pea Day. And veggies came on stream: courgettes, new potatoes, peas, mangetout and any amount of kale. And second plantings of lettuce leaves are in full swing when they were non-existent a month ago.

While the over-wintered chillies were originally small and red, they became large and yellow in June and have graduated to orange to proper sized red chillis now. And this year’s new chillis are starting to bud.

And….much to my relief and Mrs B’s delight…we have the first tomatoes.

(A bit early for tomatoes wouldn’t you say?)