We have now spent the first few months in our new house and as I brought some plants with me, we have had some veg to pick from the garden. We have got more runner beans than we can eat and so have been giving them away and also have 2kg in the freezer. Next week I am going to be making chutney with the excess veg from the garden.
I have pulled up the tomatoes and dwarf french beans and the space has been filled with purple and white sprouting and cabbages that will hopefuly be ready some time around Christmas.
For some reason the sweetcorn did not do so well this year and i have not had many ripe tomatoes, mainly due to the late planting and the fact that none o them were under glass. I had two different cucumber plants. One got eaten by slugs soon after it was planted but the other survived the onslaught and has produced many large and tasty cucumbers.
The same happened with the two pumpkin plants, one got eaten and the other survived and has one large pumpkin on it. I have given two loads of leaves and stalks to a girl from Malawi who says they are a prized vegtable. She peels the spikey bits off the stalks, chops them up with the leaves and cooks them up with onions, tomatoes and groundnut flour. Next year we are going to try the recipe and may be she won’t get so many leaves!
The patch that I planted all the squashes in definatly needs a lot of soil improvement over the next few years as my butternut squashes are not much bigger than my fist!