Garden glut

I've taken a week off work to get stuck into my garden. At least, that was the plan. Instead I've found myself watching Food TV obsessively. Today I watched an American bloke make the most delicious-looking pork roast with an apple cider gravy and braised cabbage. I have apple cider! I have cabbage! That alone made it justifiable to watch, even though I hate pork more than anything except roast pumpkin and shellfish. Hmmm.
Luckily, I can also justify my newfound obsession for watching Food TV as research of the culinary kind. As it lurches towards the end of summer, my garden is producing a generous glut of produce. Since Good Friday I've harvested:
* 1kg of green tomatoes (to make green tomato & mint relish)
* 2.5kg of red tomatoes
* 2kg of rhubarb (the plant got so big it fell over)
* 5.7kg of courgettes (easily achieved as one marrow alone weighed in at 2.25kg)
* 1.25kg of cucumbers (my 'Diva' plant is now up to 54 cucumbers!)
* 200g of kohlrabi (my very first. I grated it to make coleslaw)
* 1kg of green capsicums
* 2kg of 'Supreme' beans (I'm pulling the plants out now though, they're exhausted)
* 6kg of potatoes (about 2000 tiny tubers - it's the worst crop I've ever had)
* 2kg of apples (to eat in crumbles and casseroles)
* 3.5kg of 'Marina di Chioggia' pumpkin (just the one off the vine)
Total: 27.15kg of fresh food. And that means I need to find at least 27 new recipes to eat it all!
On the planting front, I've put in rows of rocket, chinese cabbages, leeks, red bunching spring onions and two rows of cauliflowers, plus a hedge of 'Blueberry Muffin' blueberries, some lemon grass, a new kaffir lime (killed the first plant) and an ice cream bean tree. And as soon as I pull out the tomatoes out front, I'm going to put in a crop of 'Ilam Hardy' spuds to see if I have better luck leading into winter.

Self-seeded surprises....

In all my inner-city self-sufficiency endeavours, nothing is more satisfying than growing stuff from seed. The outdoor table on my deck is always home to a few seed trays jammed full of baby seedlings waiting to be upgraded to luxury accommodation in the potager. So, over Easter I'm going to rip out all my tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and pumpkins to free up a bit of space for the leeks, spring onions, parsnips and baby brassicas in my seed trays. I'm also going to sow broad beans, rocket salad and plant red onions in the potato patch. And I'm going to save the seeds from a few of my beans - some black-seeded runner beans, 'Borlotto Fire Tongue' beans and 'King of the Blues' climbing beans - to re-sow next summer.
What I won't be doing is sowing cabbages. I don't need to. Three weeks ago, my Dad came up and helped me rip out a whole heap of weeds from along the side boundary. He also spread out the huge pile of compost I'd made (well, actually I just piled it all up... nature did the rest) under the guava tree. (I need to organise a proper composting system, because at the moment all I do is dig stuff up, fling it into a vacant corner and wait for it to rot down.)
Anyway, since we pulled out all the cannas, ginger, woolly nightshade, wandering jew and arum lilies, a thick carpet of seedling weeds has germinated. It almost looks like a lush young lawn. So I went over to have a close look a couple of days ago and, blow me down, they're not weeds at all. I've got thousands of baby brassicas popping up everywhere. I guess the plants I pulled out at the beginning of summer and turfed under the pear tree must have set seed. I wonder if that old adage about "one year's seeding equals seven years weeding" applies to cabbages and cauliflowers? If so, I'll be making coleslaw until 2011...

Bring back the sun!

Well, the drought has well and truly broken at my place! There's water everywhere. And everywhere else, there are splodges of half-eaten, half-ripe figs hollowed out by devious waxeyes! It's amazing how quickly the garden can turn from desperately dehydrated to thoroughly soaked and soggy. My tomatoes are literally splitting out of their skins and the courgettes are all swelling up like giant sea slugs. And, having nursed them through two years of intensive care, my Lobelia aberdarica plants have shrivelled up and died. That means I've killed 15 of them in three years. Grrrrr!
I was hoping that summer was going to last right through until the end of May (ok, I know, it's a bit delusional but I remember that two years ago I was still picking tomatoes out of my front garden in early May), but now I'd settle for seeing blue sky again.
On the plus side, all this rain is plumping up my beans. I sowed a late crop of 'Borlotto Fire Tongue' and 'Supreme' beans in early January and they are in full production now. The 'Supreme' seeds were sent to me by a chap called Pat in Avondale and they are the most delicious green, stringless type. I'm also growing two types of runner beans - both were given to me by readers last spring - on a woven bamboo teepee in my side garden. One type has the standard orange flower; the other has white flowers.
I could eat beans every night and never get sick of them, which is just as well, because it looks like I just might be for a while yet...