Tag Archives: Shallot

Planting to the Music of Time

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Lonely as a Cloud

The rhythm of the seasons is changing its beat as summer segues into autumn.  In the past, it was a time of year I would associate with final harvests of the summer and then closing down for the winter.  I would clear the veg patch and cover it over to suppress weeds, allowing only space for Brussels, leeks and broccoli to battle the winter.  I would uproot the deceased annuals in the borders and tidy the beds to wait till the warm weather returned.  This year I have even managed to pick some mushrooms from a local field.

But these days I have started the autumnal season with a sense of anticipation for the spring.  Like a tight rope walker looking straight ahead rather than down in order to make it successfully to the other side, I am planting stuff for harvesting and flowering in the spring.  If I keep my eyes on the early summer of next year, perhaps I won’t even notice winter.

So over the past few weeks I have been nurturing and planting out my own self-grown flowers, like Honesty, Foxgloves, Lupins, and Echinacea, as well as Sweet Williams.  I have sown Nigella and Phaecellia in the new bed out front.  Instead of a fallow time, it is a season to plant and nurture.  And to sit back and see everything shoot and take root in the still warm autumn.

In the raised beds I have planted a Curly Kale, garlic, shallots and broad beans.  Broad Beans were something The Old Man never planted in the autumn as he claimed the flavour was not as good as spring planted.  But considering the disastrous crop of spring grown Broadies I had this year, any kind of broad beans in 2019 would be an improvement – whatever the flavour.  But, to improve my chances I have sown two types:  Aquadulce and The Sutton.  The first in the raised bed, the second (dwarf variety) in pots.

So now, with any luck, I will have the benefit of watching stuff growing – even in the dead of winter – which is what this whole gardening lark is about, isn’t it?

 

 

Picked these from the fields nearby
Foxgloves and Honesty in trays
Curly Kale
Broad Beans and Garlic either side of the rows of leeks n Khol Rabi

Potato Day 2017

Your Potato Day Experience Starts Here
Your Potato Day Experience Starts Here

Today was Potato Day in Castle Cary and once again Mrs B and I pottered along to Caryford Hall to grab our annual selection of little chitters.  It used to be in the Consti Club where we would enjoy the raffish charm of the old place but  Caryford Hall seems too clean and well-ordered to be hosting a bunch of mostly middle-aged and elderly gardeners rummaging through multi-coloured tubs of spuds.

Mrs B mentioned our plans to The Old Man this morning which set him off on an initial criticism of the event as somewhere that people went to buy some fancy-dan hoity-toity potatoes that would ultimately fail, and inferred that we would be doing the same. Mrs B (who handles situations with TOM with the cool detachment of a seasoned daughter-in-law) put him right on that score, informing him that we knew exactly what we were going to purchase, based on previous experience and detailed plans for the season ahead. He seemed  impressed with the answer and in an effort to offer advice, resorted to the tried and tested “Pink Fir Apples are delicious and I always found you can’t go far wrong with Wilja for an all round potato”.

It is for that very reason we have never planted Wilja since we took over the garden.

This year we planned a repeat performance of the plantings of recent years, with Cherie (1st Early), Belle De Fontenay (2nd Early), King Edwards (a high risk / high reward kind of spud), Sarpo Axona (Blight-resistant main crop) and Arran Victory (1st early:  our one vanity potato – historically and geographically significant to us). The plan back-fired slightly with no Cherie on offer, so we threw in another wild card chitter by taking some Swift instead. So maybe The OM was correct after all as we were suckered into buying random spuds on impulse.

Your Potato Journey Starts here
Stand in line – no queue jumping

Pennard Plants run a smooth Potato Event,  but swift is not the word to describe the method of selecting your chitters.  They were alphabetically arranged in plastic trugs with colour-coded labels for earlies or mains.  Everyone dutifully shuffled clockwise round the tables picking their spuds as they passed them.  Skipping ahead to go from C for Cherie to K for King Edwards was not recommended and it is amazing how tightly packed a line of septuagenarian gardeners can be.  If Stoke City had had a few of these yesterday to form a defensive wall, Wayne Rooney would still be waiting to break Bobby Charlton’s record.

Waiting to pick out a few scoops of shallots and onions, the gardeners in front of me took an age to make their own choices.  They approached the trugs in the same manner a major predator stalks it prey:  eyes fixed on the sets (in case they attempted a sudden escape?), moving with feline precision, but at a snail’s pace.  I was willing them to make their choice between Longor or Vigamor, to pounce, take a scoop and move on but I lost my nerve and upset the hunt by elbowing my way in to grab my prey and take my shallots triumphantly back to Mrs B.  Oh, the joy of sets.

Returning home with our booty, I was interrogated once more by TOM who asked what I had bought.  I started to list them but he interrupted to suggest that he assumed we had bought some Pink Fir Apple too?  “No” I said.  I felt mean to be denying garden space to one of The Old Man’s favourite spuds – but frankly they are a pain to clean and peel.

Or did I still feel some sort of residual duty to do as my father advises?

“No” is the resounding answer to that one.

 

An Awesome Wave of Veg

First Tomatoes
First Tomatoes

The garden is really hitting it straps now. With warm / hot sunshine and every day another jamspangler, it has been so easy to keep the weeds under control. The key has been keeping the veg and borders alive.

While prophylactic action against rabbits and caterpillars continues with sweeps of cabbages and brussels by gardener (result: several hundred eggs and 20 caterpillars destroyed) and hunting of vermin by dog (result: nil rabbits, nil moles, one hot and bothered dog) might ensure a good winter harvest, the real work is about the summer harvest that is getting into full swing.

And what a glut.  Sugar snap peas, mangetout, purple sprouting, broad beans and continued salad leaves are all bumper crops.  Yesterday we picked our first tomatoes and cucumber.  We even had our first two blueberries (bushes a 50th birthday present from the Ladies of the Lane last October) and our autumn bliss raspberries provide just enough for a daily summer cereal accompaniment. And today we picked our first handfuls of runner beans and french beans with plenty on the way.

In addition, the concerns voiced to me by Piers and Hazel about the number of courgettes that we might have to contend with are being realised, as all the plants look like they are coming well and truly into blossom with courgettes turning from small pencils to police truncheons almost overnight.  So we will shortly be entering the storage phase of the Smallway harvest season when I remember parents spending hours peeling, shelling, podding and slicing veg to be blanched in vats of boiling water to then be cooled, bagged and frozen.

Thundery Showers forecast...
Thundery Showers forecast…

But we are looking to be a little more creative with what we have and are thinking of making “ready meals” based on our excess produce.  So if anyone has a favourite courgette, runner bean or french bean recipe they would like to share with us we would love to see them.  Preferably with garlic and shallots included as I am not convinced I will be able to store my home-grown for too long.  But I did manage, after a little trial and error, to plait them reasonably effectively.  Even Verity seemed quite impressed which is high praise as she is still scarred by the memory of going to school with wonky pig tails after my ham-fisted efforts – not that anyone would too pleased to wear their hair like my shallots and garlic.

Fresh Produce

Ready for picking – runner beans

We are at the time of the year when I remember my parents would begin to repeat the mantra about fresh produce in the garden.  “The beans are ready for picking”, “plenty of courgettes” or “please help yourself to lettuces – or else they will go to waste”.

Waste – anathema to the generation brought up in wartime rationing and post-war depression.  Wasting good produce was deemed a cardinal sin in the garden.  All those delicious vegetables and we don’t seem to want to eat them.  Well, I am now in that happy position when some vegetables are coming to harvest time and the daily habit of picking them has started.  I say “some” because, frankly, this summer has been pretty crappy with the cold wet weather putting paid to many of the early veg like the peas (one bowlful from a row of plants).  But the runner beans are hitting their stride at the moment.

Harvesting runner beans is the equivalent of plate spinning: you check each row every day and try to pick every bean that is of the required size: not too skinny, but not too fat and stringy.  But somehow you always manage to miss a couple so next day you see a cucumber sized bean hanging in the green shade. If you left it another day, you feel it would pull the whole plant over, such is the apparent speed with which they grow.

So today I will be getting out there and trying to reap as many as I can.  And what will I do with all these beans?  Well, I will follow the parents’ example and start slicing, blanching and freezing as many of the blighters as I can.  Suddenly frozen veg in the winter seems a really worth while idea.  If it means they don’t go to waste.

Meanwhile, T.O.M. keeps informing me that the carrots in his patch are ready to pick.  I gladly took some last night – and they are delicious.  Carrots are right up there in terms of veg that truly taste so much better than shop bought.

Pull ’em, rinse ’em, steam ’em and eat ’em.  Stunningly delicious.

And in response to my pompous declarations to The Old Man that there are plenty of runners, he first of all said that he better make some runner bean chutney (what? from my beautiful fresh runners?) then, after we returned from our trip to the Olympics at the weekend, said he hadn’t realised there were any ready.

Now I know how he felt whenever I failed to heed his requests for me to pick my quota of produce.

What size omelette did you want?

Elsewhere, the hens continue to lay well, but who is laying what is a mystery as the three from the other day show: mummy egg, daddy egg and baby egg: double yoker, single yoker and, well, “could do better if she tried”.

The unpredictability of home harvests.

 

 

Shallots?

A final note on my previous post about labelling things.  I decided to lift the shallots, which I did under the supervision of T.O.M.  It was all going well, with him advising which were “banana” shallots and which the ordinary variety (pretty obvious really – no need for labels there) when I found one little clump which had not developed greatly.  We simultaneously realised that this was not a clump of underprivileged shallots, but was a garlic bulb.  How did that get there? I wondered.  Then remembered that all the shallots and garlic had been put in hurriedly at the start of the spring.  So, once agin, you need to be so careful to label things, you know.

Drying in the sun – spot the garlic