A Marrow Victory

That's mine, front centre, next to that very long courgette!

Under the umbrella of the Fenland Smallholders Club I run a Grow Your Own group. We meet up most months, taking turns to visit each others' smallholdings and all taking food along to share.

Each year we have a growing competition too and this year it had been decided we would have a go at marrows. This is not a vegetable I usually grow, instead tending to let my courgettes grow into false marrows before feeding them to the chickens - the Ixworth chicks have taken to making tunnels out of them.
I perused the seed catalogues over winter and opted for Long Green Marrow. I treated my seeds as if they were courgettes, but lost a couple of the plants along the way. In the end just two marrow plants survived and along with the courgettes I pretty much forgot about them until a couple of weeks ago when I happened to notice a rather fine specimen poking its head out from beneath the leaves.

Loading the marrow onto the car roof 😉

I turned up at the group today armed with my marrow and a tub of raspberry sorbet as the theme of the day was soft fruits. We always enjoy a bit of banter when it comes to the growing competition and last year it has to be said that I wapped everybody with my giant pumpkin, so I had a reputation to uphold.

Surely a courgette!

Steve's 'marrow' was already on display and it was certainly well endowed lengthwise, though a little lacking in the girth department. It also bore a striking resemblance to an oversized courgette! CONTROVERSIAL!

It then became clear that we hadn't actually decided the criteria by which the marrows were to be judged. We eventually went for weight and the weigh in was stressful with the first two coming in at just over 5kg. Mine was up next and I was overjoyed to hear that it came in at over 6kg. The rest of the marrows were clearly smaller, though a couple were very good lookers.

The prize? Gloating rights for the rest of the year.




The raspberry sorbet went down well too and was particularly well paired with a chocolate cake which somebody else had brought along.

Broad Beans Sleeping In A Blankety Bed...

August has been busy and at the same time not busy. Busy because there's been harvesting and weeding and mowing to be done, plus I've been trying to catch up on a few jobs like creosoting and mending chicken houses. Not busy because it's the holidays and I don't have to work every spare minute just to keep on top of things. It's been dry so the weeds and grass have slowed their growth. At the same time, some of the warm weather vegetable crops like the beans and squashes have really started to thrive. I've had the onions out drying too.

7th August 2016
Mowing today. It's so much easier if I can keep on top of it, but it still takes a good couple of hours.
Before I could mow I had to collect up the potatoes which had been laid out on the surface to dry before storage.

I was in a good mood today for Sue was due back from a little break in Italy. Apparently if she hadn't been there just at the right time this tower would have toppled over.

8th August 2016

Harvest.
Broad beans- time for all the broad beans to come out. The harvest is good but the plants are looking a real mess now.
I've grown them from saved beans for a couple of years now, Bunyard's Exhibition originally from a mixed pack of beans from Poundland! They've now given me three years of good harvests, so not bad value really. This year we got 6 large freezer bags full, once podded.
Unfortunately you used to get 30 beans for your £1 (plus some less useful dwarf and climbing beans and some peas). Now you only get 10.
Anyway, it's time for some new seed stock now, so I may change variety.
Climbing French beans
They've been a bit slow to get going this year, but we finally took a first small harvest of climbing French beans. The tastiest beans are the Cobras, but the seedlings were deformed this year and I almost abandoned them. In the end, I just threw the healthiest few plants into the ground and stuck a cane next to them. They are doing fine now and we'll probably get a decent harvest. Next year I'll invest in some new seed though.
I do like a waxy yellow French bean too and hunted high and low for a climbing variety. I eventually came across Kentucky Yellow Wax. Again, it's not been the most vigorous of plants but it has just started to crop. Hopefully the plants will thicken up and we'll get a bumper harvest by the end of the year.
Courgettes
The courgette crop used to be an officially classified threat to the human race! But last year I was struck by mosaic virus and courgettes are proving a real struggle to grow now. One of the forgotten principles of organic growing is to find the right variety for your conditions. Although more expensive, Courgette Defender has survived where others have failed and is now starting to give us a crop.
Sweetcorn Minipop
Sweetcorn Minipop, despite being grown just for its baby cobs, is a handsome and vigorous plant. Today we took the first harvest from the outdoor plants. 78 baby corn cobs. This variety has grown just as well outside as in the polytunnel, so next year I'll use the tunnel space for something else, probably more standard sweetcorn, which has been a little disappointing this year. I'm sure the cool weather hasn't helped, but even in the polytunnel the crop has been slim, though the cobs which have been produced are plump and delicious. Next year I'll have a change of variety though.

Pea trial not good
I find growing peas hardly worthwhile. Lots of effort protecting the crop and constructing a climbing frame for at best modest harvests. Add to that the destruction caused by pea moth larvae and I abandoned all peas apart from mangetout for a few years.
But this year I decided to grow an old traditional climbing pea in the hope that it would crop over a longer period. I purchased a pack of Champion Of England from RealSeeds.co.uk. They weren't cheap but would hopefully be worth the expense and I could save the seed from year to year. I sowed it at the back end of April to avoid the attentions of the Pea Moth.
So far so good. The plants germinated fairly well and started producing some very tasty peas. Up till this week I'd taken a few handfuls. It is important to keep harvesting peas so they keep producing, so today I expected to take my first significant harvest. How wrong I was! The plants had gone over already. All I could do was to leave the few pods there were to collect the seeds and have another go next year. What a disappointment.

9th August 2016

Our new neighbours had their hay baled today. It's good to see the hay not going to waste. They have a couple of rescue Dartmoor ponies which have not moved in yet. It will be nice to have some animals in the field.

Hay cut...

and baled.

As the baler chomped up and down the field, I chomped my way through the task of podding all the broad beans we harvested yesterday. If I see another broad bean!









It was a momentous day for the youngest batch of Ixworth chicks as they came outside for the first time. They'll go back into their cage with the electric broody overnight, but with the weather warm they hardly ever seek out the warmth it provides now.

The older chicks chilling out

Let there be light
For the past three months we've had no lights in the kitchen! Every time we turn them on they trip the switch. We have a good electrician, but he often needs several phone calls before pinning him down. So somehow we've just kept putting it off. We did call him a week ago, but our call has not been returned. We've finally trained ourselves not to switch on the light.
Anyway this morning we had a builder round to give us a quote for some other work. He gave us the number of a different electrician. At 5 this afternoon I came in from the garden to discover a very tall young man fixing the kitchen lights. He wasn't even stood on a chair. Even I can't reach the kitchen ceiling without climbing up on something.
We now have kitchen lights and it is amazing! The place is so bright. But we still hesitate before hitting the switch. We also now have a new electrician who has the decency to return our phone calls and doesn't make endless promises. 

It's harvest time already

Strange lights shine across the fields during the night and the distant rumble of engines and blades hums away into the early hours. Fields which the previous day swayed in the breeze suddenly have neat crew cuts with perfectly straight rows of straw creating giant geometric patterns.

Here on the veg patch harvest is well under way too. We've already had a bumper crop of tomatoes, a basket full every day for the last few weeks, as well as cucumbers dripping from the three plants in the polytunnel.

But now the outside crops are coming good too. I've picked my first runner beans and French beans. The first and second sowings of broad beans need picking as the beans inside those fleshy pods have now swelled enough to cause the pods to hang downwards.


Runner Bean Scarlet Emperor

French bean Cobra

Then, of course, there are the courgettes.
Yes, they're coming again in an inexorable march. The more you pick the more they come. I've even discovered my first accidental marrow already.

And finally the potatoes have done well this year, growing and swelling quickly. This is fortunate, for I've had to take the tops off all of them as blight has been both early and widespread this year. Sunshine and rain both in abundance does have its downside. I'm just hoping that most of the varieties have had enough time to swell and that the blight hasn't got down into too many of the tubers.





So in the middle of last week I roamed the veg patch gathering in some of the harvest. Here's a pictorial sequence, a bit like a children's book. In go the beans...in go the courgettes...in go the potatoes...until the basket was full.

Harvest is upon us

OK, we've already had the rhubarb and the asparagus. And most welcome they were too.

But for the last couple of weeks harvest has been well under way. In fact, some crops have come and gone already and the freezers are starting to groan.

It all started with the soft fruits. Punnet upon punnet of strawberries, enough to share a few with the guineafowl. It's been a good year for them.

Strawberries in preparation for freezing.

They lose their texture when frozen, but still make excellent jams and sauces.

The gooseberries weren't far behind. The Red Hinnomakis were the first to ripen and the most prolific. This variety is incredibly sweet. Close your eyes and you could be eating a grape.

Meanwhile some of the veg were responding to the warm weather. Turnips swelled nicely, both outside and in the polytunnel. The courgette plant in the polytunnel - I never meant to grow one in there, the labels must have got mixed up - started throwing out its offerings, closely followed by one of the more advanced plants outside. A night of heavy rain magically transformed skinny green fingers into fat, foot long giants.

Elsewhere in the polytunnel, hidden amongst the jungle of leaves, I came upon a wealth of French beans. I am growing the climbing variety Cobra in there and it is yielding a huge quantity of beans. Unlike some others which I've grown previously, Cobra's beans don't seem to get tough and stringy if you miss them by a couple of days.

The Borlottis and Pea Beans are producing pods too, but these will be saved for the beans rather than eating the pods.

And the potatoes have finally swelled. We've made a small dent in the Earlies, Arran Pilot and Red Duke of York, as well as starting on the Charlottes.  

I pick a little from each crop and suddenly
we have enough to more than fill our plates

Peas are ready too now. I have grown Sugar Snaps, Mangetout and normal peas. Unfortunately I seem to have a problem with the Pea Moth in my garden, which means that each pea in each pod has to be checked for the tiny caterpillars which burrow into individual peas. A complete pain, and it means that the Sugar Snaps, whose pods I would usually eat whole and raw, have become a bit useless. Still, the Mangetout are still OK as long as I catch them before the peas swell.



You can't get this freshness and crispness in the shops.



The broad beans have done exceptionally well this year. I wasn't intending on freezing any, but we've hardly even made a dent in the harvest and I don't want the beans inside to get too big and leathery.

 

But I've saved the best till last. For on the way to the chickens I get to pluck fresh raspberries every day. The varieties have got a bit mixed up now, but the tastiest are definitely the smallest ones, the most difficult to pick and definitely not the ones you would ever find in a shop. Imagine a ruby with exquisite taste. No. Imagine hundreds of rubies, then more and more every day, for the raspberries have been very fruitful this year.

Not every crop has fared so well this year. It's been a very poor year for dwarf beans and, as I've mentioned, the Sugar Snaps will be going to the chickens. But it looks as if we'll have plenty enough to keep us extravagantly supplied in delicious fresh food. And when that runs out there'll be a freezer full of produce and a pantry full of jams and preserves. If my planning goes right, there should still be some more hardy veg coming through the winter and there'll be a store of root crops in the ground or packed in boxes in a cool, dark place. Oh, and there'll be mountains of pumpkins too.

The greatest delight about all this is that we've put all our efforts into it and now we are reaping the rewards. And what a reward! For what you can buy in the shops just falls flat on its face, both for choice and most especially for freshness. The crunch of a carrot pulled straight from the ground, the juiciness of a strawberry ripened by the sun while still on the plant, the bite of a gooseberry teased from the prickly branch, the freshness of a peapod plucked straight from the plant, the earthiness of a potato fresh from the soil.  

All these things make our harvest special.

Three Sisters resurrected

Last year I attempted to cultivate The Three Sisters.

That's the system where you grow sweetcorn in small clumps, interspersed with squashes and pumpkins. Then you add the third "sister" - climbing beans, whose sole purpose is to feed the slugs and divert them away from the other crops... or so it seemed.

Well, that was last year.
As it was, the sweetcorn, squashes, courgettes and pumpkins did very well given copious amounts of rain.

This year is a very different year. So last week the three sisters were resurrected.

The sweetcorn is growing well now.
Time to sow the French beans.

I doubt the original growers of Three Sisters
surrounded their crops with electric fence
to protect it against rabbits.

Young sweetcorn plants, back on 27th May


The sweetcorn has been planted for well over a fortnight now. It always takes a knock back when it first goes into the ground outside and the weakest specimens don't make it.
After a tricky germination, where several complete trays just rotted away as they failed to spring into life in the cool conditions, I didn't really have any to spare. As it is a high proportion of plants have made it through and have begun to grow more strongly.

Various types of courgette, squash and pumpkin have now been transplanted out between them.

I decided to invest time erecting the electric rabbit fence around my lovingly nurtured plants. There is nothing as soul-destroying as the disappointment of finding your freshly planted crops nibbled or, worse still, uprooted and laying wilted on the surface of the soil.

And so to the third sister. While the cucurbits spread and shade the surface of the soil, the beans climb up the sweetcorn stalks, in the process capturing nitrogen and enriching the soil for next year.
I had some beans already sown, but they are about three times as tall as the corn and reaching rapidly for the skies. So I decided instead to sow fresh beans at the bases of the sweetcorn. I have plumped for French bean Blue Lake, a stringless variety which has performed well in our soil in the past.

And in honour of the Native American origins of the Three Sisters planting system, I have planted some wigwams of runner beans alongside!

But in all seriousness there are some very valid reasons for growing these crops in combination. Get the timing right and the plants aid each others' growth. They provide a good nutritional balance too.
There's some good information on this website:

http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/3sisters.html

One very useful hint I picked up from this site, so indirectly from the Native American Indians, is to use nature to time sowing and planting.
For early spring in the books is different across the whole country and from year to year. If you sowed seeds strictly by date this year, as I found out to my cost with the sweetcorn, they just sat in the cold conditions not realising it was time to sprout into life.
But if you sowed when, for instance, the cow parsley came into flower or the sowthistles started to grow, then nature would be your calendar...

Not that nature always gets it right.

Courgette wine - mark II

Sunday 7th October 2012
Two hours after getting home from Ireland.

Monday 8th October 2012

Tuesday 9th October 2012

Wednesday 10th October 2012
Cold air arrives

Autumn is now most definitely in the air, for today a notable chill arrived and the wind had a bite to it. It's probably really a sign that we are into the middle of Autumn, but I don't want to think about what that means - the ushering in of winter. Actually, winter is a beautiful time of year and we tend to hunker down and snuggle up in front of the fire. It's a time to reflect, to look forward and begin to put plans in action.

Anyway, with the change in seasons the courgettes have finally stopped showering us with their wonderful fruits, but it was very welcome while it lasted and we've got plenty preserved in the form of relishes, frozen griddled slices, fritters, bhajis and soups.
If you remember, we even stooped to trying to make courgette wine with 32lbs of courgettes which came out of the garden in a single day!

Well, that effort went disastrously wrong. Sue used a recipe off the internet which contained no yeast. We're pretty new to brewing our own alcolholic (ed. alcoholic, and no, I've not been at it already!) beverages, so presumed the yeast would come naturally, as it does when we make our cider. There were even questions on the website, unanswered, asking if there was really supposed to be no yeast.
Well, I think I can give the answer...that recipe needed yeast, for all we ended up with was a bucketful of mouldy, cabbagey water.

So, unperturbed, Sue used some of the last overgrown courgettes to have another go, this time following a different recipe (sorry, I don't know where she found it) which did include yeast. And this time, hallelujah, frothy yeast action!
 
I'm still holding judgement on the result and we have to wait a year to find out, but at least it looks more promising.

Next up, pumpkins!!!

Courgette wine it will have to be then!

Sue with a couple of oversize courgettes

 



Tuesday 18th September 2012

 

Wednesday 19th September 2012












Yesterday evening we went into the Lincolnshire Wolds to pick up 19 demijohns. That should tide us through for a while. At 4lbs of courgettes for 1 gallon of wine, the 32lbs that I picked today should use about 8 demijohns!

 

Yes, that's right. 32 lbs! To Sue's delight I presented her with another three baskets of courgettes in their various shapes and colours. Some ridiculously overgrown as a couple of downpours recently have brought on a fresh spate of logarhithmic growth!

The varieties of courgette which I have grown this year came from the Mr Fothergill's Courgettes and Summer Squashes Collection.

Black Beauty, Grisette de Provence, Di Nizza, Patty Pan, Golden Zucchini and Yellow Scallop.

The most prolific have been the Grisette de Provence, though they tend to grow fat and quickly reach a large size. However, the flesh stays firm and it's easy enough to scoop out the middle so that, even overgrown, they are great for stuffing like marrows. They've a good taste too. Similar are the Di Nizzas. A couple of these have attained the size of a medium pumpkin! The Black Beauties have cropped more modestly, but they are a very good looking courgette (though mine are not so dark, having a pleasing dappled, striped appearance.) The Golden Zucchinis (a pretty generic name for yellow courgettes) cropped very heavily early on and have a good, sweet taste along with a firm texture and a crunch to them. They are still cropping, but much more slowly now. Finally the Patty Pans have just started to produce fruits. They took me a bit by surprise so a few have reached the size of mini flying saucers! We'll see what the flesh is like in due course.

 

Some of the smaller pumpkins are ready now too. Fortunately these can stay on the plant much longer, as they just reach their full size then slowly ripen. But today I decided to pick a few of the dozens which are growing, just to see what they taste like and how ripe they are. Besides, they make a very colourful and exotic addition to the vegetable display in the Secret Shop.

 





Pumpkins and Squashes
are always fun to grow and harvest.



Ye secret shoppe.

 

The Potimarrons have grown and fruited profusely. They were the first to produce fruits and some have now ripened to a deep orangey red colour. They are a very convenient size for a meal for two and have a lovely, nutty taste.

The Jack-be-Little pumpkins were much slower to produce fruits, but each plant looks as if it will yield a hatful of fruits (and a big hat at that!).

 

Anyhow, back to that wine I was talking about. The recipe is at www.courgetterecipes.co.uk.



A modern kitchen, complete with laptop displaying recipe.

First, chop up lots of courgettes.

Then boil them in big pans.

Strain the juice into a very big bucket, along with other bits and pieces (see recipe)

As far as I remember, it stays about a week in the bucket then goes into demijohns, where it stays for about a year. By which time there will be plenty more courgettes to deal with!!