Lamb Roast with Cabbage and (very small) Parsnips

Last night I had another great feed involving food harvested from the garden.

This is such a great payback of growing your own because food really does just taste so much nicer when you have grown it yourself, and have watched it first poke through the earth and then slowly develop until it is ready for eating.

This time it involved the cabbage, and a few VERY early parsnips, one pulled to check the development of the crop, and the other two pulled accidentally while weeding.

The Bearded Bastard selecting leaves for dinner

Lifting leaves ready for eating

A shot of the cabbage leaves mid-harvest

Reading for chopping

I have the habit of removing the tough central stalk

I decided to slice these leaves into strips, ready for the steamer (10 mins only required for these)

The (tiny tiny) parsnips, fresh out of the ground

The washed and trimmed parsnips. I cooked these for about 5 mins in the roasting tin with the potatoes and lamb joint.

DINNER!!! Cabbage bottom left (obviously) and parsnip peaking out between the yorkshire pud top right and the tatty.

Can I just say that, tiny as they were, those parsnips really REALLY packed a punch. So sweet and so tasty. I can't wait for the rest of the harvest to come in.

The cabbage was a slight disappointment, not quite as tasty as the rest of the food which I have grown. It was nice though.

Right, a slight bonus for you here. Last night myself and the girlfriend went round the outside tomatoes and chillis and counted up the current harvest (there are more flowers ready to become fruit) and I drew the following diagram, with counts of fruit per plant, and a total at the bottom.

Yes, 111 tomatoes are currently going well in the garden.

Another (final) interesting point to observe is the two plants with 27 and 9 fruits on them were both runt plants which I almost threw away and just at the last minute pushed into the earth in the herb garden. So, however small and runty your seedling may be, give it a chance. That runt is now the most productive of them all.

Cheers

Sweetcorn, Cabbage and Ripening Tomatoes

Another update update today, this time about the sweetcorn, cabbage and some more tomatoes.

The sweetcorn does look like it is coming on really well, to be fair, but I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is good or bad - I had expected some cobs to have developed by now.

A close up of the tip of one of my sweetcorn plants

The sweetcorn bed

The cabbage has come on very well, and is now ready for harvesting and eating. This weekend I will be planning a meal which will enable me to taste it, finally.

The sweetcorn bed; the wet weather has once again stalled my grass-cutting habit, which is frustrating.

I have also been very excited to notice, following my hopeful blog of the previous days, that the outside tomatoes appear to be starting to turn :)

A little bit of colour starting to show on some of the outside tomatoes.

However, while I was looking over the tomatoes I notices that some bug has managed to get a taste before me! How rude!

A couple of shots of the pre-munched tomato.

So, that is it for now. Be back soon I am sure.

Digging Onions and Eating A Tomato (plus other things)

This blog post could have been split into a couple of different updates, I reckon, but I've had a busy week and haven't been able to find the time to do a post every time I've wanted to.

However, that just means that you get to enjoy this post all the more, as it has been marinating in my mind all week.

So, the first update that I could have written involves further harvesting of onions. I also went to harvest the garlic but it isn't ready yet.

This is the garlic. It is not ready for harvesting, as you can see because there is still green growth above every bulb.

The onions, however, are obviously ready as you can see from the fact the growth above ground is dead.

The onions, and one batch of shallots that I pulled, are now drying on the mat in the Living Room. I have been eating my own onions regularly this week and they taste outstanding.

The parsnips are looking pretty good - I'm not sure when I'll know they are ready though.

Some of the cabbage is looking almost cabbage shaped too - this will be tasty when I get round to it, maybe some time this week will be time for my first home-grown-cabbage-meal.

The sweetcorn is still looking good too - I may have to stake out some of it as it's getting quite tall now.

So, that was the first blog post that I could have done. It was good, wasn't it.

And here comes the second (exceptionally geeky and excited) blog post. This one is called "Eating A Tomato"

So the tomato that was starting to turn red in my last blog post was knocked off accidentally about 20 minutes after I took the photograph but I put it on the windowsill for a day and it finished ripening off nicely after a day or so.

So the next day I took my prize and joy into the office and ate it.

Oh yeah!

Me looking proud with my first tomato.

Me about to bite down into my first tomato.

Can I just say that this tomato was the nicest tomato I've ever eaten. Seriously.

I now have another tomato very close to ripe, and LOADS more across the outside plants.

I spotted this little bee flitting around pollinating my tomato flowers :) so there will be a LOAD more coming soon.

Four more tomatoes growing a-pace on some of the outside plants, taking in a super dooper arty farty way.

Chillis growing very well on the downstairs inside plants, and there are a lot of other flowers on these plants, whereas the plant on the upstairs bedroom windowsill has no more flowers unfortunately.

More flowers on the chilli plants outside, which are just about surviving the onslaught from the massive slug infestation this country is suffering under.

So there you are, two blog posts in one, aren't you lucky, and lots and LOTS of pictures.

Cheers

A general status update

Once again I have been out in the garden today, it being the first day there's been any sun at all.

I cut the grass, took the little greenhouse things down for the year (they will probably next be used when I leave the country!) and cleared around generally.

So, without any further ado, here is my update.

The main potato bed. I have not harvested any yet. This looks like a massive failure to be fair. I will try and dig these out tomorrow and photograph it if possible.

The potatoes in the tyres are possibly slightly better, I'll be getting them out tomorrow too if possible.

Some rotten Shallots. These pulled out by accident and they look like they're rotting in the ground slightly; probably not that surprising considering how much rain we've had.

The Stuttgarter Giant Onions are still looking healthy though.

Sweetcorn growing well! I've been meaning to take photographs of this for a while. This is looking pretty good I'd have said.

Cabbage patch :) Some of these are improving quite well, some have been eaten completely by slugs

The apples on the little apple tree are amazing now. A couple have been lost to dropping off, but I am going to be picking and eating these over the next week or so.

The second batch of lettuce, coming through very well indeed. I can't wait to eat these.

I MAY have another blog later as I had plans to have Fajitas tonight with my beautiful lady, using onions, chillis and lettuce grown by myself, but the electrics in my kitchen have blown so we may have to put that off for another time.  I really hope the sparky can come and fix it today so we can do this though!

Anyway, enjoy, I'll be back soon (I have SO many chillis on their way, but no more tomatoes, in case you were wondering.)

Meandering around the garden

I do have some things that I need to do, which I will photograph and blog about, but for today, while the sun is shining (which does make such a change) I have just got a few random photographs of things I'm growing, both by choice, and in wilderness sections of the garden.

So, without further ado, here they are.

The forest of tomato plants inside; there are some peppers at the front, and three chilli plants in there too.

Shiny red apple on my lovely young Coxes Apple Tree

It's the Cabbage Patch, kids ;) little bit eaten, but still going strong

Slightly battered main bed potatoes, may need to harvest these soon..

Sweetcorn still growing well; though not as established as I hoped; may need to trim the overhanging trees back a bit.

On a walk around the garden, some beautiful flowers on a bush in the back garden. (Honesuckle - thanks @Clareyh) these are smelling absolutely incredible :)

Another beautiful flower. (A Briar Rose - again thanks @Clairyh)

The wilderness to the side of the main drive.

More beautiful flowers, this time on the other side of the drive.

Lilly plants on the pond

The wilderness by the pond; that big bush at the back is a massive blackberry bush and soon I will be able to start collecting fruit again.

The early blackberries... CANNOT wait!

Finally some strange looking flowers very low to the ground just in the wild area by the pond.

So there you have it, a few more photographs from around the garden.

I'm trying to buy myself a new camera (as these have all so far been taken on my camera phone) so hopefully the quality will improve once I manage to buy one at the price I want.

Coming up soon, I will be artificially inseminating my tomato plants. Oooh Errrr Missus!

Peace

Weeding the Cabbage (and behind the shed)

The weather today has finally cleared up enough to get out into the garden and do some much needed weeding. It is windy, but sunny.

I have weeded all the beds and have noticed that, because I have been so disciplined in taking out even the tiniest of weeds when I am weeding, there are almost no weeds around the onions, garlic, shallots and parsnips. The cabbage, however, has not really been properly weeded so the bed was quite overgrown.

I had also, if you remember, covered the cabbage with bird netting. This has caused my grass cutting endeavours to not be able to get close to the edge of the bed where the cabbage is growing.

I didn't take a picture before I pulled the netting back and uprooted most of the foot high grass that was encroaching, but the picture below gives some idea of just how overgrown it was (if you look to the back of the bed, where I haven't yet removed the netting.

Pre-weeded cabbage bed

The interesting lesson that I have just learned today is, that really long grass was hiding a LOAD of slugs and they have been eating all the cabbages (well not all, but a lot).

Anyway, I think the lesson is, when the cabbages are no longer seedlings and you don't need to worry about the bird, take the netting off because you will NOT ever be bothered to pull out all the pegs and remove the netting whenever you cut the grass. If you don't, you are providing a perfect slug habitat.

Anyway, that's my lesson for the day.

Most of the slugs were at the left of the bed; where there are fewest surviving cabbages :)

Having done a full weed of the garden (about 25 mins of my time) I then decided to attack the waste land behind the shed, where the stingers and those horrible weeds with juicy purpley/red stems and roots which you can never get out. They are the bane of my life in this garden.

Anyway, three wheel-barrows later, and a completely full green bin, went from this:

To this:

Not bad going I think.

I now have to wait another two weeks before the waste of space, thieving git, council deign to come again to take away the pathetically small green bin that they charge me an arm and a leg to remove (when they can be bothered, or when it isn't 6 inches too far onto my property).

*breathes*

I was totally exhausted after all this weeding, as a lot of it was carried out kneeling down, or bent underneath tree branches.

Sorry there are no pictures of tomato plants; nothing at all has changed since the last time (apart from about 4-6" growth on each plant).