Category: vegetables

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Experiments of the vegetable variety

This year has been full of experiments of the vegetable variety.

Tomatoes, red hot chillis, mild chillis, carrots, beetroot

It’s been the first year with the polycrub and growing in containers rather than beds. I started rather late in our short season, as the polycrub wasn’t built until the end of April. All of which meant that my expectations were set at a pretty low level for success.

And those expectations have largely been fulfilled ..

However, there have been a few pleasant surprises. Today I harvested my first cobs of sweetcorn. They’re small, it’s true, and there are only a few of them. But when I planted the corn seeds in May, followed by our largely sunless non-summer I really didn’t think that anything would come of them.

Sweetcorn – yay!

And yet here we are, eating sweetcorn from the croft with our supper. I’m a bit amazed that I’ve managed to produce something so seemingly exotic out of our cold, wet island.

I know that all growers are convinced that their produce is wonderful, but I’m a critical grower, honestly. Our tomatoes have been prolific but disappointing in taste this year and there are some plants, lovingly tended, that have not thrived or produced a harvest worthy of a repeat next year. However, this corn was absolutely delicious, an hour from plant to plate. Sweet and very succulent.

I stand in awe of the tolerance that some plants have for less than ideal environments. It gives me great hope for next years food production which will be in deep beds, fertilised with our own seaweed and croft compost.

A world apart in terms of taste!

Fifty seven degrees north. Who would have guessed!

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Feeding the local wildlife

It’s not all been perfect carrots and potatoes, y’know. Growing organically and without pesticides has been a challenge, and we’ve lost our fair share to the bugs and the deer. Mainly, it has to be said, to the damned deer.

Our hungry neighbours

Deer are not supposed to like garlic, onions, leeks or anything strongly scented. Ha. Ours obviously have exotic tastes. They’ve chomped through the green foliage of all three of these all summer.

Plant globe artichokes, those in the know said. The leaves are big and bristly and the deer don’t like the texture of anything bristly or prickly. Ha. They’ve been eating the yacon and artichokes too, biting out the lead shoots completely on many of our plants.

It’s also the closest bed to the common grazings on the hill , and as such the most tempting, I suspect. The rest are annoyingly close to the caravan.

The distant remains of the artichokes

Kale was always going to be a crop that we knew would potentially suffer from their grazing, although they did wait until it was of sufficient size to be worth nibbling. Thoughtful of them. Then they feasted.

Chomped kale

What the deer didn’t eat, the caterpillars and other bugs did.

This is a picture of one of my red cabbages from the raised beds. As you can see, the leaves are like lacework, having been nibbled by whatever passing insects or caterpillars we are harbouring. Companion planting helped a bit, but most of the garlic and other strongly scented plants that were supposed to deter passing devourers had been harvested long before these cabbages were, and then the fun started.

Bug salad bar

I am not despondent. I’m happy to lose some to wildlife, but am determined to find ways to minimise the damage and maximise our crops. Our soil is productive and good. I think that netting against insects for longer next year will help, as will deer fencing around the vegetable plots, if not the whole croft.

It’s a journey, and we’re learning.

On the whole this growing thing has been surprisingly successful for us, and next year with the benefit of the knowledge gained from our experimental year, more beds and the polytunnel in place, we’ll be even more productive.

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Carrots at last

I’ve been watching the posts of successful gardeners up here with envious eyes as they cropped fistfuls of carrots from their vegetable plots.

Carrots from the croft beds

I have been pulling the odd carrot here and there from my raised bed over the last month to see if there was anything much underneath the profusion of feathery green. I’ve prodded and pulled. To date, all to no avail. Up until this week all I’d found were a few pencil thin offerings.

Checking the beds a few days ago I noticed that some of the carrots were going to seed! Horrors. How could they go to seed on me without delivering as promised?

Armed with my fork I resolved to find edible carrots or else dig them all up and return the space to something more productive.

I’d sown two types from Real Seeds in the spring – the gloriously named Manchester Table carrot and the equally exotic yellow French heritage variety, Jaune D’obtuse. Surely one of them should have produced something by now.

I knew that I hadn’t thinned them very well. When the time came in early summer, something in me just baulked at pulling out young, healthy plants, and much as I understood that it was needed, I also suspected that my half-hearted attempts at thinning hadn’t been nearly rigorous enough. As such I was expecting skinny, weedy specimens at best.

My delight was complete when I delved into the forest of carrot rows and pulled up some good sized carrots.

Croft vegetables ready for roasting

We roasted the first of these today with beets, potatoes, onions and garlic, all grown by us. They were delicious.

It’s just a carrot. But it’s my very first homegrown one, and it tasted all the better for that.

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Summer eating

This is the season for eating from the croft, and the fresh produce is now coming in with abundance, even from the handful of small grow beds that we have. We are enjoying lettuce, kale, new potatoes, purple sprouting broccoli, chard, onions, peas and fresh herbs.

I’m being challenged to find new ways of serving this bounty, as we can’t store or freeze any produce this season.

This is whipped feta with roasted beetroot, toasted almonds, orange zest, chopped mint and parsley.

I was so excited to try our first baby beets from the croft that I made this dish up specifically to try them. It’s adapted from one that I found that uses goats cheese.

Scooped up with oat biscuits, it was a light nibble to eat before a main meal with friends, but would easily make a lunch on its own. This will become a summer staple, I think, and I’ve resolved to definitely grow more beetroots next year!

Young onions from the croft

Tonight, kale and purple sprouting broccoli from the croft were the central vegetables in our meal. They were lightly sautéed with garlic, sesame, spring onions, lime, a bit of leftover chicken, and noodles.

Uncle Bert’s kale

Lots of potatoes… cold potato salad, fried potatoes, garlic potatoes, mash here we come!

3kg potatoes dug up this morning
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Sudden Profusion

It’s all growing well in our raised bed experiment. Except the leeks, which are spindly little pencils so far.

I will be patient.

I’m mainly delighted and surprised by the profusion. It seems to have come all of a sudden. We’re cropping lettuces, potatoes, kale, sorrel, purple sprouting brocolli, chives, parsley, dill, mint, and rocket.

The beets, shallots and onions look nearly ready. The garlic is coming along, and the mammoth red cabbage leaves are starting to turn in. The parsnips are growing, as are the carrots.

It’s the rain, long hours of daylight and mild temperatures. Suddenly everything is leaping up as if wanting to make up for the slow, cold start of our late spring.

First crop of potatoes
Kale, beetroots, red-veined sorrel, onions
Peas
Parsnips
Endive and carrots
Uncle Bert’s kale
Purple sprouting broccoli

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Salad days

Another significant milestone. Our first salad from the croft!

For you rampant food producers out there with your polytunnels, greenhouses and fertile growing beds this is going to seem a bit of a damp squib, but we’ve just cropped our first bowl of salad from the croft and I’m doing my happy dance!

Salad leaves

It’s a mix of endive, red lettuce, red veined sorrel, Uncle Bert’s kale, mint and beetroot leaves. All grown organically outdoors from seed here on the croft.

Other things are growing too in these long, light filled days of summer. I can see a few purple heads of sprouting broccoli emerging, and the potatoes will be ready in the next few weeks.

Parsley grown from seed

The leeks have been a big fail – they’re still tiny and very slow growing. Kales, cabbage, garlic, beetroot, potatoes, herbs, and salad leaves have all grown well. The carrots and parsnips are small yet but time will tell. The globe artichokes are tiny plants, a few leaves apiece, but they seem to be surviving. I’m hoping that they’ll muscle-up and come into their own next year. The berry bushes are establishing. The borage and comfrey are flowering.

Wonderful comfrey

I’m just relieved that it hasn’t all been some monstrous failure. We’ve had one meal from the croft at least!

The key learning so far is exposure. We knew it, but just didn’t have the time to do it. We need to get windbreaks up and hedging in this autumn before the main growing season next year.

Small milestones on our journey. Forgive a woman’s unseemly crowing.

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Blue Growing update

The seed sowing chaos of the caravan spare room has been taken in hand and professionalised!

We now have durable shelving with UVA grow-light strips attached to the underside of each shelf. I’m feeling very happy.

The days of my rickety cardboard box tray balancing act are over. I think that husband realised that he was in danger of having the next seed tray balanced on him if I ran out of space… 😊

We now have pak choi, Sutherland kale, leeks, onions, borage, calendula, rocket, mustard leaves, coriander, parsley, mint, lettuce, salad burnet, nasturtiums, garlic and shallots underway. All glowing eerily blue under their UVA lights.

Today I will be sowing borlotti beans in pots in the probably vain hope that I can get them to maturity on the croft despite the wind. This one is a bit of a stretch, but it’s worth a try..

The directly sown plants, such as carrots, parsnips and yacon roots will all be in May. Same for the potatoes.

The garlic, shallots, babbington leeks and onions have already been planted out into the beds, and we covered them in enviromesh yesterday for a bit of protection.

I can already see that my three initial raised beds won’t be enough, even with separate big pots for the herbs, so we will be building a long no-dig bed directly onto the croft for the rhubarb and berries. We will put in more raised beds next year after we’ve finished the house.

Next up it will be windbreak hedging…

This will be an interesting year – let’s see what grows.

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Eerie Blue Light

The days are getting longer. Although we are still in the clutch of a cold winter here on the croft, with snow still on the hills and an icy wind, my thoughts have increasingly moved to garden planning as our daylight hours have lengthened.

I’ve started some seeds off in the little bedroom in the caravan. We have no greenhouse, cold frames or polytunnel yet, so needs must.

It’s a bit of a make-do affair with a propagator heat pad, some cardboard boxes, seed trays, old yoghurt pots that I’ve been saving since we moved here, and one of those whizzy octopus UV grow lights to help start things off.

Everything is bathed in an eerie blue light from its flexible metal arms. It’s like something from the X Files… I go in a few times each day to check on things and can’t resist adjusting it.

Lord only knows what the neighbours must think when they see the strange, neon blue light glowing through the thin curtains at dusk…

I’m starting small. More will follow in March and April, which is a much more sensible time to start new plants here.

I’ve started garlic, onions (although the recommended local wisdom is to grow from sets rather than seed, which I only discovered after I’d bought them), leeks, parsley, beets and rocket. Seed potatoes are on their way in the next week ready for chitting.

I know it’s early, but it’s such a short season that it makes sense (to me at least) to have plants ready to be planted out in May, and they’ll need a full month of hardening off, I suspect.

The garlic has leaped into action almost immediately. I’m growing a rose and a white skinned garlic, both hardy varieties, and both a bit of an experiment, although local growers report that they generally grow well here.

I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for old glass windows or sheets of polycarbonate on the local ads to make cold frames, but they’re scarcer than hens teeth at this time of the year, so we may need to buy materials new and create our own.

And so it begins.

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Seedily Yours

I may be getting ahead of myself a bit here, as we don’t have any vegetable beds dug yet, but I couldn’t resist buying a few seeds to start things off next spring.

I had to do it. I was starting to get worried about reports that the pandemic was causing seed companies to run out, and that there wouldn’t be any left if I ordered too late. So over a cup of tea and a few rainy afternoons I pulled together a seed order, and they arrived last week.

It’s such a lovely feeling when the post arrives and you open the parcel. The fat little paper seed packets fall out, sparklingly full of promise!

Many of these things need a few years to establish before they can be cropped, so it made sense to start next year even if we are busy with the house build.

I just need to find a few days in the Spring to get my husband to help build windbreaks, plant protective hedging, make a couple of raised beds and get the soil prepared. I’ve worked out the most sheltered spot for the raised beds and a planting plan.

Most of these seeds aren’t sown directly into the soil until April/May or even later, so there is time.

I’m also looking at cold frames for a bit of protection for some of the young plants, although wherever possible I will plant into the beds directly. I don’t have a greenhouse or polytunnel yet and there will be no room in the caravan for lots of trays of seedlings.

I’m going to try to grow beetroot, onions, carrots, kale, salad leaves, cabbage, potatoes, rainbow chard, and winter squash (I know this one might be a challenge, but it’s worth a try). I also want to have a berry bed, and grow rhubarb, so am looking for varieties and crowns that will work well in our extreme climate.

I’m going to start with just a few berry bushes and vegetables and increase the variety next year once the house is finished and we can start to spend more time on the croft itself. It’s going to be a busy year of experimentation, working out what grows well here.

Once we start growing things I think the process of rooting ourselves to this land will finally have begun properly.

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The Quiche Chronicles

As summer moves on and the temperature in this warm and stuffy London house rises, we throw open all the windows each day to try and get some fresh air.

The traffic levels in this city sadly seem to have returned to normal, so it’s a moot point how “fresh” it actually is. At least it’s not long to go now until we have all the fresh air that we could possibly want on the breezy Isle of Skye..😊

At this time of year we also move on to lighter foods, and I’ve unexpectedly found something that all family members will eat without exception – quiche.

Every weekend for the last three weeks I’ve made one. They have to be vegetarian, but they’re all the better for that, to be honest. It keeps me creative!

We started with an asparagus quiche shown above, then moved on last week to a courgette, pea and fresh coriander one, and finally this week to sweet potato, spinach and pine nut. Except I forgot the pine nuts.

These have reminded me how, with a bit of time and effort we can make a meal from very little – a few eggs, herbs and a couple of vegetables. One day soon I hope that I’ll be making these with our own eggs and at least some of our own produce.

As the season moves on and the tomatoes start to ripen and actually taste of something, I’ll be slow roasting a tray of them next week to make a roasted tomato tart too.

On the croft front, we’ve sourced a static which will become our home for the next nine months and are making arrangements to have it moved and hooked up in September whilst the build slowly progresses.

It’s all started moving and is becoming very real now….