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.

The sweetcorn harvest

We picked most of the sweetcorn today. It's as ripe as it's going to get, and I don't want a repeat of last year where we left the cobs on the stalks for too long. They ended up dried-out and riddled with earwigs. Yuck.

From a patch that isn't much more than a square metre, we picked 2.5kg of sweetcorn - and that is what they weighed after we'd removed the husks and I'd chopped off any ends that hadn't pollinated properly. With such a small patch of corn there was a good chance that it wouldn't pollinate at all, so I was delighted with what we got. Sweetcorn in season costs next to nothing, but it's easy to grow at home and it's hard to beat the satisfaction of eating corn that we grew ourself.

There's still a bit left outside, but what we picked today is all in the freezer now, waiting to cheer us up in a pie or soup later in the year. I'm already looking forward to it!

Harvest totals

Harvest total update:
tomatoes: 3787g
strawberries: 4385g
carrots: 1430g
potatoes: 113g
raspberries: 41g
spring onions: 80g
cucumber: 3395g
sweetcorn: 989g
peppers: 184g

Total: 14,404g

This is not counting any of the sweetcorn cobs which are just waiting for me to go and pick them. I'll do that tomorrow, as they're going to go past their best. We don't need them to eat right now but I'll freeze them for when we do.

Harvest totals

Harvest total update:
tomatoes (all Early Girl so far): 2168g
strawberries: 4199g
carrots: 471g
potatoes: 113g
raspberries: 41g
spring onions: 80g
cucumber: 665g

That's almost eight kilos of produce so far, not counting the vast amount of broccoli that was eaten without being weighed. I'm happy.

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.

Christmas harvest

Despite the fact that some of the potato plants haven't even started flowering, I was determined to get a few baby potatoes to have with Christmas lunch today. After fossicking around in all the bags, I discovered two things:
1) there's not enough compost in there, and
2) there aren't many potatoes either.

However we did manage to get a handful of teeny tiny spuds, so hurrah for that! And some of them are an exciting purple colour. I look forward to seeing how they taste.

We also pulled some carrots and found some more ripe strawberries, as well as a couple more tomatoes.

Potatoes - 113g
Carrots - 221g
Tomatoes - 94g
Strawberries - 193g

The things that look like plums or dark pebbles are actually potatoes. They are so purple on the outside that they  look almost black, and on the inside they look like this:

I haven't cooked them yet so don't know if they retain the colour after cooking, but they certainly look great raw.

Harvest totals

I've belatedly realised that it'd be smart to keep track of the total amount of food we harvest from our vegetable garden. Of course it's way too late to tell how much lettuce and radish we got a few weeks back - those are long gone, and the replacement lettuces haven't grown big enough to eat yet. I should have been more organised with the succession planting so I didn't have this big gap.

Anyway, here is what I estimate we have harvested so far:
Strawberries - 1112g
Raspberries - 20g
Tomatoes (Early Girl) - 183g
Total:  1315g

I'll try to keep a more accurate total from now on, and do my best to keep track of the tomatoes per variety. I'm planting a wide variety this year but if something is noticeably better or more prolific than something else then I should tailor next year's planting to suit.

Salad for supper

I should have taken some photos, but all the food is in my tummy now. I had a garden salad with my dinner tonight - lettuce, baby silverbeet, and radishes. Covered with dressing, of course - who likes bare lettuce? Not me, anyway! Still, it was lovely to go out there with a scissors and come back with enough to fill my plate (and accompany my crumbed fish fillet). Can't wait till we have tomatoes in the garden, but that won't be for a good while so I'll enjoy the lettuce and radishes while we have them.