Pre-winter planting cleanup

I haven't quite given up on my green tomatoes and peppers yet, but the garden was well overdue a clean-up so we gave it one this weekend.

Out came the gone-to-seed lettuce, the non-performing green beans, and the dead sweetcorn. The purple climbing beans were harvested, as were the butter beans, the carrots, and the potatoes. I haven't weighed any of the weekend's harvest yet but we took in several large tubs of food.

The cucumbers and strawberries are still producing, so they will stay where they are. And, as I said, I'm still holding onto hope for the tomatoes and peppers to turn red.

Freaky carrots

What do you get if you don't thin your carrots properly, and let them grow pressed right up against the side of the raised bed? Freaky carrots, that's what.

Front (for reference, that's a 12-inch ruler in the photo):

Back:

I know it's probably fine, but I really don't want to eat something that looks like this. Would you?

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!

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!

Chocolate Beauty peppers

Last year we had a dismal pepper (capsicum) harvest - we grew our plants outdoors, but they failed to thrive and only produced one measly pepper between the lot of them. So this year I split the risk and grew most indoors in the conservatory and a few outdoors in the garden. Surprisingly, both lots have been doing quite well, but the indoor ones definitely have the edge and today we got our first ripe ones.

These are Chocolate Beauty sweet peppers, which are a lovely chocolate brown when ripe. I've never even seen these before, let alone eaten them, but I couldn't resist trying them out. Aren't they a great colour?

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.