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!

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.

Mmmm, strawberries

The garden's going great. I just gathered a bowlful of strawberries for dessert:

There are lots more ripening on the plants outside.

 The broccoli is enormous, taking over the whole bed and dwarfing the poor little tomato plants in the back.

 

The silverbeet has grown completely out of control and I doubt it's fit for us to eat now - it's going to seed - but the chickens will enjoy the leaves.

 The sweetcorn and purple beans are getting there, slowly but surely.

And the onions and leeks are doing well too.

Even the spuds are coming along nicely in their plastic bags of compost (as are the weeds running rampant behind them).

We have had almost no weeding to do in the raised beds, which is fantastic - weeds only grow in the soil that we haven't yet levelled and covered with weed mat. The only problem so far is that the plants (broccoli and spinach) in one of the beds are not thriving, and some weird fungus has been growing in that soil. I think there was something funny about the compost we put in that one, but unfortunately I have no idea what it was. It's annoying, and honestly I am not terribly keen on eating anything that comes out of that bed because I'm not sure what it's growing in. Fortunately I do no not eat green leafy vegetables anyway so I don't have to worry about it right now!