Summer is nearly over

The weather has been getting cooler, and we're forecast to have temperatures of 2c (just above freezing) tonight, so I think our garden won't be producing its summer goods for much longer.

Cucumbers are still arriving thick and fast, and we have more than we know what to do with. We've harvested 12.5kg of cucumber so far and there are lots more on the plants in various stages of development. Not bad at all for about three square feet of bed space! Of course they have totally overrun their trellis now and are sprawling into the neighbouring bok choy and all over the path, but that's not a huge problem.

Tomatoes didn't do well this year at all. It's only now that we're getting green ones appearing, and I really don't have much hope of those getting the chance to ripen before the first frost arrives. I've gathered a handful of Golden Nuggets, three Aunt Ruby's German Greens, three or four Better Boys, six Black Krim (none of which I got to taste - they were badly split after being overwatered by accident), four Juliets, and maybe a dozen Moneymakers. Oh, and one single Red Pear. The rest of them - Green Zebra, Black Tula, Sungold, Brandywine Red, Cherry Sweetie, and Baxter's Early Bush - haven't produced a single ripe tomato yet. In fact a couple of the plants never grew more than a foot tall! If it wasn't for the Early Girls we'd have had hardly any tomatoes at all this year.

I've done a ruthless clear-out of any tomato plants in the conservatory that don't have flowers on them, and the indoor Early Girls that are persistently producing tiny, tough-skinned fruit (could be a fertiliser issue but it's too late in the season now to fix it). I intend doing the same outdoors, and after that I'll take stock. I know that this year has been a bad one for tomato growers all over the country, so the poor harvest hasn't put me off trying. At least I got to try my first ever green tomato! I will definitely be growing Aunt Ruby's German Green again next year, as they were just delicious. I'll grow Better Boy again too.

We did have a good haul of peppers this year compared to last year. Even the outdoor ones are producing well, although they're still green and therefore quite bitter. Indoors we got a few chocolate peppers and a good crop of sweet banana peppers, so I'll be growing more of those indoors next year too. I didn't have much luck with ordinary capsicums indoors but that's possibly down to the size of their (teeny tiny) tubs. Will try larger ones next year.

Hmmm, what else went well? We were thrilled with the huge amount of sweetcorn we got from our 12 squares of corn plants. Lettuce grew well, and there's more bok choy than we need. Red onions did great (I've pulled about half of them and will pull the rest at the weekend, now that the tops have fallen over on them). We've got a great crop of gherkins on the go, and I'm still getting a handful of strawberries every couple of days.

My potatoes-in-bags experiment didn't work so well. I harvested the whole lot of them a couple of days ago, resulting in about 1.5kg of spuds not much larger than marbles. They didn't have much growing medium and were rather neglected as far as watering went, but I'm not sure whether that was the only problem or if the weather/location/seed potato choice also played a part. Will try again next year, but with larger containers and better watering.

Our pumpkin and butternut squash plants are only flowering now. Since the supermarkets are now full of pumpkins for sale at low prices, I have to assume that ours should have been ripe by this stage. Bah. The courgettes are way behind too - we just have one courgette between three plants so far, and it's not even fully grown yet.

That's enough for now. I'm going to tackle the garden at the weekend and give the whole thing a bit of a clean-up, then see what I should be planting for the winter. It's all good.

A glut of cucumbers

I went to tidy up the cucumbers today - our plants are twined through netting so in theory they grow vertically, but the plants often have other ideas - and found six huge cucumbers hiding underneath the leaves. I weighed them all after picking and those six came to 4134g between them. One beast alone weighs 1.1kg!
We've been sharing and trading with the neighbours, so in exchange for two of these I now have a head of cauliflower, a posy of sweet peas, and a couple of lemons, but that still leaves us with four huge cucumbers to eat before they go off. I think I'll have to find some more homes for them!

That's the cucumber trellis in the background of this photo. Haven't they grown wild? There are three plants there - two telegraph cucumbers and one other one whose type I have forgotten. I've never grown this before but based on this year's results I certainly will be growing them again. Now I just need to find a few recipes other than salad that use the stuff so we can actually enjoy it rather than giving it away!

A big cucumber

This is what you get when you grow your own veggies - non-standard shapes. They taste just as good as the straight ones!

A photographic garden update

The indoor tomatoes are growing really tall (and wilting in the heat despite the copious amounts of water they get):

There are little green peppers on several of the pepper plants - this one is a Chocolate Beauty which should turn brown when ripe:

The cucumbers are starting to produce fruit:

Green beans wind their way up the netting:

The sweetcorn has pollen on top and silks below:

The remaining broccoli has all been ripped up and fed to the chickens (they LOVE it) and we have a few empty-looking beds at the moment:

But never fear, there are things planted in most of those empty squares. Sorry-looking wind-battered peppers, tiny tomatoes, seeds for basil, carrots, and muk chow, seedlings for purple cabbage and purple sprouting broccoli, and also a couple of pumpkins and a butternut squash. It looks bare right now but I hope it'll fill out over coming weeks.

Got our first cucumber

I wasn't sure how to tell when cucumbers are ready to pick, since I've never picked one in my life before, but I looked online and apparently they're good to go when they're 20cm long. We had one that seemed big enough (photographed here with sunglasses for size reference) so I nabbed it off the plant. We haven't eaten it all yet but my husband and I both had a slice and it tasted great. I'm really excited about having more of these over the coming months.

I have been keeping track of our harvest totals (the cucumber was 210g, by the way) but the spreadsheet isn't on the computer that I'm writing with right now so I can't update you all. I'm sure that's terribly upsetting. Rest assured that we've been getting lots of strawberries (I made two more jars of jam today) and quite a few tomatoes too.

The size of many of the Early Girl tomatoes is a bit disappointing. They aren't much larger than cherry tomatoes and have quite a thick skin, so they're not very nice to eat in one mouthful. There are some larger ones which are very tasty when sliced, but I'm not sure what to do with the small ones. It seems wasteful to throw them away, but I don't particularly want to eat them and they're too small to skin for cooking.

There are large green tomatoes on the Black Krim and on the Better Boy, and some smaller ones on the Moneymaker (and those are pear shaped, which makes me wonder if it's a Moneymaker after all), so I'm impatiently awaiting a taste of those ones. The Early Girls are well worth it just to have tomatoes at the start of the season, but I want more than what they're offering right now.

The official gardening season begins

It is Labour Day weekend this weekend, traditionally the time that gardeners around New Zealand start to rev it up a gear. This time last year we were hit by an unexpected frost which did quite a lot of damage to our tender new tomato plants, but this year I've checked the forecast and I'm hoping that temperatures will stay above freezing for the next while. We do have frost cloth but it's difficult to get it over the fence where the tomatoes are being planted, so I'd love it if we didn't need to use any.

Today I planted out some cucumbers which have been basking in the warm temperatures of our conservatory for the last few weeks. I used a beautiful oak dibber which my father made for me (thanks Dad!) to poke holes for them - it was very handy and I'll definitely get a lot of use out of it this year and for years to come.

Check out the size of the broccoli in the background, too - it's huge! There is a very noticeable difference in size between the broccoli in this bed and the one on the other side of the garden. We did use different compost in some of the beds and I wish I'd taken a note of which was which, because I'm guessing that it was the critical factor, but really we're not sure.

Here's the cucumber up close. I love eating this so I hope our four little plants do well. We've just got to add some trellis netting to those green poles at the end of the bed, and in theory the cucumbers will vine up that rather than sprawling on the ground. It's a new technique to me, but the Square Foot Gardeners swear by it so I'll give it a go.