26 Aug 2012 - Our first ever Artichoke!

Here's today's crop - a hellava lot of garlic, some turnips, rainbow spinach, 4 raspberries, 2 plums and our first ever globe artichoke!

We nibbled on the raspberries while trying to work out what to do with the artichoke!

 Two bags of cut turnip for the freezer, one for soups, the other for steaming.

Unfortunately, it looks like we've missed out on using the middle leaves for a salad, but the outer ones look okay (to us beginners, anyway).









Mike sets to with cutting the tips off, and we just put it in the oven with some oil and the potatoes.

(We did find a really cool recipe, but it looked a bit much for our first attempt!)

....and not much left, it was great!

25 June 2012 - new growth

Pumpkin (possibly)

My brother very nicely got me some seeds for Christmas, I had planned to have a whole bed of my favourite pumpkins, but so far, all that's come up is the ornamental gourds!  Well, at least I've got something, but how do I get them to be ornamental?  I'm guessing I've got to get the seeds out, but you never see holes in the ones in posh shops.....Time to learn a new dark art!

ornamental gourds

I lost the label, so the plant in the root-trainer pot is possibly a pumpkin, marrow, melon or courgette!  You can see how well the roots grow in these pots (they split in half for easy access and reuse).

before....with weeds

after

Here's the "leaves" bed - at the front is brussel sprouts, then further back (in toilet rolls) is some cauliflower (plants & seeds), brocolli plants, amaranthus calaloo seeds, cos lettuce seeds and rainbow spinach plants.  Between the rows is leeks.
  

Purple brussel sprout

Turnips & Nasturtium

Corn & Jerusalem Artichokes

Globe Artichokes

We've got some fruit coming through - and plans to start making rhubarb wine!

Gooseberries

Cape Gooseberries

Redcurrants

Raspberries

Rhubarb v boot!

Plums

 

resident

relaxing after some hard work

6 June 2012 - fruits of labour

Today was mostly about mowing the grass because it was getting really long and our new toy arrived - 2 hours of mowing meant that I only had time totake photos of how everything else was going.

confirmed to be a plum tree!

The tree that we'd been keeping an eye on has now started showing signs of fruit - looks like we've got ourselves a plum tree after all!








 

 It's official, these are raspberry canes!

We've got lots of raspberries coming up, after trying to work out if they were currants when we only had bare canes to look at.










  

Cape Gooseberries surviving the outdoors!

The Cape Gooseberries have coped well with being outside, we've had a mixture of weather from very hot to very wet, but they're looking strong, and the slugs have stayed away, which is always nice!

plastic tree farm doing well!

The first 2 rows are Spaghetti Squash, which I planted straight out as seeds, but that was only last week, so early days yet. 

The back two rows are ornamental gourds which have been grown on the window sill, possibly a bit early to be going out, but they've got their own greenhouses.  I've extended the experiment to see if having lids on or off makes any difference.