Tag: growing veg

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Potato Musings

We planted early seed potatoes in March in one of the hugelkultur beds on the croft as part of our “what will grow here” experiment. We’d managed to get the seed potatoes from a fellow crofter, two varieties that he’d recommended called Orla and Nicola, which I promptly mixed up… 🙄

Potatoes in the bed on the right

There were several times that I thought absolutely nothing would come of them.

I watched as the months rolled around and they grew, but very, very slowly. It was a very cold start to the season and I wondered if I’d stunted them completely, never to recover. They didn’t flower, and they didn’t seem to get any bigger.

As we moved into August and we started harvesting lettuces, onions, kale and garlic, the green tops of the potato plants looked no bigger than they had in April, and I started to feel that the experiment had failed.

Husband dug them up on a misty, midgy morning this weekend. I’d decided that we really needed the space for something else to have its chance, and my expectations were low, if zero, to be honest.

When he came in with a couple of bucketfuls of good potatoes I was pleasantly surprised.

It wasn’t a massive haul compared to the harvest that we’d got from the red-skinned potatoes, but it was more than I’d imagined that they’d provide.

Either Orla or Nicola..

I washed them off and checked them over. Very little slug damage, and only a few green ones, and that because I hadn’t earthed them up. It was a decent crop of good, solid unblemished potatoes.

Washed and drying

We will store these in hessian bags in the caravan and eat them over the coming months.

Considering our experience with the reds that we harvested last month and these varieties, I think that potatoes do grow well here, despite the cold springs, so I’m planning to grow a full raised bed of them next year.

They’re such hassle-free plants to grow, and it’s true what they say, that the flavour of home grown potatoes is far superior to shop bought ones.

Lovely little nuggets of potato deliciousness. Nature keeps surprising me.

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Blackcurrants and Beetroot

The food preserving gene is kicking in strongly now that August has rolled around and the croft produce is starting to come in.

I neither have freezer nor room to store jars of produce yet, but the inner ancestor is urging me to start putting up food for winter.

I am trying my best to resist. Even though there is little more satisfying on a cool, cloudy summers day than preserving jars of loveliness to enjoy over the winter.

This week with my veg bag I scored a punnet of local blackcurrants. I am growing these in the fruit bed on the croft, but the bushes are still only inches tall and too young to produce anything yet.

Blackcurrant coulis

As they’re as tart as they come without the addition of something sweet they’re best cooked. So I weakened, and made a simple blackcurrant coulis, filling a couple of small jars with it. I reassure myself that surely we have room for these…

Drizzled onto breakfast muesli

These will live in the fridge and be used drizzled on pancakes, porridge, meringues or venison over the coming month or so. They won’t last as long as a jam, but that’s OK because we will use them more widely and often than we would a jam anyway.

Beets ready for pickling

I also grew a few rows of beetroot which are starting to reach maturity. A mixture of Touchstone Gold and Pablo. I picked a few earlier this week to make into a jar of pickled beetroot, or maybe a roast beetroot relish.

Note to self: must grow more beetroot next year.

I love the process of making something delicious from things you started from seed some months ago. So satisfying. Growing is wonderful..

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Grasses Galore

We’ve had a warm, breezy day on the croft today. Twenty-two degrees and a clear blue sky. It made our outdoor tasks today so much easier with the wind keeping the midges at bay.

Grass in the breeze

The grass has grown so much over the last few months that the paths that husband had scythed in the spring had nearly disappeared.

This was making trips to the raised beds and the compost heap a daily waist-high challenge.

I wouldn’t normally worry about wading through long grass, but I’m super cautious about picking up ticks and horsefly bites at the moment, and didn’t want to have to start walking about swathed in protective netting like some sort of veiled ninja..

So husband spent a few hours yesterday and today scything swathes through the grass and collecting it up for compost. The breeze helped what was a long, sticky endeavour.

Pathway emerging

Some folk like to cut their grass neatly and very regularly. We have chosen to leave ours wild, and to see what comes up. We prefer it that way, and nature seems to agree.

We’ve found orchids, clover and wild flowers in abundance, and there are certainly plenty of moths, bees, butterflies and insects. Husband has even had to rescue a few small frogs from the path of his scythe…we want to encourage them as much as we can. Natural slug protection!

Once we have an agricultural shed to store equipment in we will need to look at other ways to manage this, though. Even with trees, six acres is too much to manage by hand with a scythe. It’s a fine line between managed meadow and bracken and bramble patches overtaking the land.

We’re thinking at least one annual cut after the summer is over to help seed and keep the rushes down.

For now we’ll enjoy the grasses and the wild flowers from our small, scythed tunnels through the abundance.

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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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Hot, hot, hot

The weather here on the island has been very hot over the past week. The caravan has suddenly transformed from fridge to oven..

The temperature gauge inside recorded 26 degrees centigrade yesterday, and that’s uncomfortably warm for us. Especially when opening windows to try and catch a breeze results in swarms of midges coming in off the croft…reminder to self, we must get some midge netting fitted to the windows.

The seedlings however are loving it. Uncle Bert’s Kale is growing madly, the potato plants are all greening up nicely and I have my first bean on my borlotti bean plant!

It was too hot to cook indoors yesterday and we were too tired to summon up a BBQ, so we headed down to Camuscross early to try and get a table for a cold drink and some supper. It’s so good to be able to do that again now that lockdown has eased.

There are worse places to be on a hot June evening… This time last year we were in London… I know where I’d rather be.

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Arctic conditions at 57 degrees north

It’s been a very cold spring so far.

We continue to have frosty mornings and very cold nights, so it’s not been advisable to put out any tender plants without serious fleecing.

My “plant room” in the caravan is still full, and although I’ve planted out a few purple spouting broccoli and beetroot plants, some cabbage, kale, and some sorrel, everything else is under wraps for a bit longer. I’ve direct sown carrots and parsnips into the beds but nothing has germinated yet…. I don’t blame it.

It did give us the opportunity to make another hugelkutur bed with cut reeds as the base, as I’ve estimated that I’ve still grown too much to fit into our prepared growing space. Always a learning, eh?

Everything is heavily mulched with woodchip to try and minimise soil runoff. We’ve almost gotten through a few tonne bags of that already, and I’ve still got the paths around the beds to lay..

Small beginnings. And many learnings.

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Lambing snows

The islanders call late snows in April Lambing Snows. They’re usually the last gasp of winter and come suddenly, just when the lambs are being born in the fields.

We went from bright, warm days to plummeting temperatures within 24 hours. The wind veered suddenly to the North and before we knew it, there were snow blizzards upon us, sweeping rapidly down the Sound in ominous curtains of grey.

Luckily the only thing in the outdoor raised beds were garlic, onions and perpetual leeks. Listening to local advice I’d held off planting out anything tender, and don’t plan to until May. It seems that this advice was very sound!

Temperatures fell to minus 5 degrees centigrade overnight, and barely struggled to hit 2 degrees during the day. The wind was bitingly cold.

Nothing for it but to hunker down indoors..

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The Mandrake Babies

There’s something so intriguing and otherworldly about growing beans.

Best friend in France sent me a pack of organic borlotti beans, (not from France, from a UK seed company) and I popped some into seed compost five days ago in the growing room in the caravan, not hoping for much, to be honest.

They germinated within two days, splitting the soil and unfurling huge, robust stems. It was seriously like watching a triffid grow. I could almost see them get bigger by the hour.

After four days all of them had leaves. They’re sitting there now, waving their stems about, looking a bit menacing… 😊

I think I’ve hatched mandrake babies by mistake. Someone get me some ear defenders..