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Archive for vegetables

Starting the runner beans off indoors

May 21, 2015 at 5:55 pm · Filed under bed and breakfast, gardening, vegetable beds, vegetables ·Tagged gardening, runner beans, vegetable beds

Although we have a big garden we do not yet have a greenhouse or a polytunnel, they are on my wish list!! So when I sow my runner beans I always have to do it indoors. I save up all the cardboard inners from toilet and kitchen rolls, cut the kitchen roll inners into two to make the right size and fill them with grow bag compost. I place two runner bean seeds into each tube, add a little more compost and water. I then placed the tubes on our new kitchen window sills which place West so catch the afternoon/evening sun.

This is what they look like after 11 days growing on the window sills.

When the plants are about a foot tall I will put them outside into the ground. I plant the whole tube by each bean pole thus not disturbing the roots and giving the plants a fighting chance against the slugs that would have the growing tips off in an instant.

We have found this method to be very successful over the past few years, hence repeating it this year.

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A great haul of parsnips!

March 27, 2015 at 2:40 pm · Filed under gardening, vegetable beds, vegetables ·Tagged parnsips, vegetable beds

We have been digging over the vegetable beds, weeding them and preparing them for Spring sowings. Yesterday Neil tackled what he thought was some weeds and lo and behold he dug up a marvellous haul of parsnips.

It was quite a surprise as I had already dug up some parsnips a month or so earlier and thought that was all there was. I had grown these from seed but obviously not marked the place very well, so we had not realised there were more. We shall be eating parsnips with everything over the next few weeks. I do love roast parsnips, especially with a little cumin sprinkled over the top!!

I’m looking forward to peeling that large one on the top!!

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Wow what a whopper!!

July 30, 2014 at 8:22 pm · Filed under Pick Your Own, vegetables ·Tagged courgettes, marrow, zucchini

I have been letting some of our courgettes (zucchini) grow into marrows to cut up for food for the chooks. Today Neil picked this one which weighed 7lb 12 ozs, that’s as much as an average baby!!

I chop it up and then stew it up for a short while to soften it. Our chooks are well spoilt!

There are a couple more really large ones growing on the plants which I have left to grow into marrows. The others I either pick really small and we eat raw in salads, or normal size to cook up for ourselves. These plants really do keep on giving!!

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French beans outwit the deer

July 27, 2014 at 5:11 pm · Filed under gardening, vegetable beds, vegetables ·Tagged courgettes, french beans, marrows, runner beans, sweetcorn, zucchini

This year, as well as runner bean I planted a dedicated line of climbing French beans alongside bean poles. Unfortunately some deer got in and munched all the emerging shoots of the beans and stopped them from climbing up the bean poles. But Mother Nature is so clever! What did the French beans do? They produced all their beans really low down on the bit of plant that was still alive.

And some of the beans are really long, about 7 or 8 inches, much longer than you see in the supermarkets.

I think its pretty clever that all the bean pods have grown at the bottom! I thought our crop had been ruined, but not so!!

Also today I picked the first of our runner beans. They were similarly munched by the deer but managed to put out other shoots and still climb up the bean poles.

Our sweetcorn are coming on nicely too. I think it is all the lovely sunshine we have been having lately

I have also been picking the courgettes (zucchini) and let one or two of them grow really large into marrows to cut up for the chickens. It’s going to be a bumper year for all our crops this year.

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Growing our runner beans and an update on the veggie garden

June 6, 2014 at 11:14 am · Filed under Fruit, gardening, potatoes, Seeds, Summer fruit, vegetable beds, vegetables ·Tagged cabbages, growing vegetables, peas, runner beans, slugs and snails

We don’t have a greenhouse yet and we do suffer from slugs and snails here as we have had such a wet Winter, so I start off our runner beans indoors in the inside of loo roll tubes.

We end up with seeds growing on all the window ledges in the house.

After a couple of weeks they have started to sprout.

And when they are 8 to 12 inches tall I put them outside. By putting the whole tube into the ground it gives the beans some protection against the slugs and snails, and gives them a fighting chance.

I tie each little bean plant up to its bean cane so it doesn’t get blown around in the wind. This year as part of our “no dig” experiment we have laid newspapers down around the bean poles to deter the weeds.

After 10 days or so they are already climbing the bean poles, so a success. Just need to wait another month now before they produce some lovely beans for us.

Our other veggies are growing well too. Here are our peas climbing up their pea sticks.

And our cabbages growing in their shrouds to protect them from pigeons and cabbage white butterflies.

This year we spread grass clippings around the potatoes and onions as mulch and again to deter the weeds.

The sweet corn are still small, they need some more sunshine to boost their growth.

We shall have a bumper crop of strawberries this year

And the gooseberries are already forming on the bushes

We are also growing lettuce, tomatoes, courgettes, radish, chard, parsnips, carrots, turnips and purple sprouting broccoli so we should have lots of lovely veggies if everything grows OK.

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Loads of spuds!!

August 30, 2013 at 5:06 pm · Filed under B&B, bed and breakfast, potatoes, vegetables ·Tagged Aaron Pilot, cardboard, Desiree, food miles, Maris Piper, new potatoes, potato plants, spuds

We’ve had a really good crop of potatoes. For regular readers of my blog you will remember that we tried the no dig method of planting through cardboard to stop the weeds coming up. The potato plants grew up and we didn’t have to earth them up. So when the foliage died back we started harvesting them. Yesterday we dug up the rest. Firstly we pulled the cardboard away.

This exposed some potatoes near the surface which meant we did have a few with a little green on them unfortunately.

Then Neil dug up the rest.

Our first earlies were Aaron Pilots which were quite successful.

For maincrop we had planted Desiree and Maris Piper. I haven’t weighed them yet but I think we have a fair few pounds, enough to last us well into next year, so now we need to wash, dry, and store them in a hessian sack out of the light.