Fresh November veggies.

This post now seems to be mocking me! Last Hurrah? Back in September? Pah! A quick 15 mins in the garden today produced more than enough veggies for tonight's dinner, which seems amazing to me as a novice winter gardener.

I harvested a large pile of Swiss Chard which has perked up immensely since September. I seem to remember at the time we had a prolonged dry spell which caused the powdery mildew to attack everything in sight. The near constant rain ever since has produced lots of lovely, strikingly verdant new leaves. I also dug up a large bowl of Jerusalem artichokes - the first of the crop and just a tiny fraction of what remains in the ground (the photo is of wizened artichoke stems against a winter sky). The Chard I'll steam and serve buttered with garlic and the artichokes will be tossed in seasoned flour and shallow fried til gorgeously, crispy, nutty brown.

The November radishes and salad are also vying for harvesting attention and the pak choi/tatsoi could do with thinning a bit. (Thinning! In November!) I do have to admit defeat with the butternut squash though, it's a huge plant, stretching halfway down the front garden and it made lots of flowers but none pollinated and we didn't get any fruit.

I'm quite proud of the amount of produce we get from our tiny garden. When planning next year's crops I'm going to give serious thought to maximising yields in relation to space used, more of which anon. Now I just need the pesky chickens to start laying again ......

Micro Harvest

In a small garden, you have to make the most of every opportunity and squeeze the highest possible value out of every crop. This weekend I've thinned the Rainbow chard (which, incidentally, is all yellow which is rather odd as it's usually a mixture of red, orange and yellow) and the basil seedlings (pictured). Instead of throwing the thinnings away I've kept them.

Young chard is nice either raw in salad or cooked where it collapses in a similar fashion to spinach. The diminutive basil leaves can be used in exactly the same way as the fully grown variety although their size makes them particularly suitable for salads. If the weather improves tomorrow I may go out and see if I can find any wild greens to augment my salad.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night .....

Well, to be truthful it's not actually singing in the dead of night, thank the Lord. If it were I think I'd have to hunt it down and throttle it. Given what it's doing to my front garden, that would be the final straw.

This year, in a bid to increase my available growing space I'm expanding operations in the front garden. Last year I had 2 half barrels full of rainbow chard, this year I've added in a frame for the borlotti beans to grow up and I've also dug out a small bed in the centre of the lawn and planted it with bee friendly flowers (seeds courtesy of Blue Peter) and those pea seeds I mentioned in the previous post as a cut and come again crop.

There are 2 rather large spanners in the works though. The literally large tree next door which casts a huge shadow over almost all of the garden and the more diminutive female blackbird who nests in it.

According to conventional wisdom leafy crops tend to be attacked by slugs and caterpillars while birds stick to scoffing all the fruit. So when holes began to appear in the swiss chard I checked for caterpillars and sprinkled organic slug pellets. When that didn't work I switched to normal slug pellets. Half a barrel of chard had gone before I caught a glimpse of the culprit from the living room window, a very relaxed, chubby looking Mrs Blackbird strolling through my carefully tended crop, munching on the leaves at will.

As a result of these twin pests, the garden looks eccentric to say the least. The bean frame and half barrels are squashed up into a small space near the house which gets the most sun throughout the day and everything is festooned in netting, heaven knows what the neighbours make of it (especially now they've seen me sneaking around photographing my watering can at 8am.). Anyway, must go and Google 'life span of blackbird', this is the second season we've laid on a blackbird buffet, it can't go on much longer can it??