Passata

I collected 3kg of tomatoes the other day to make some passata, (tomato sauce). It's a combination of all the tomatoes I've grown, Roma, Mortgage Lifter, Sweet Bite and Grosse Lisse. My poor tomato plants have just about had it. I really did cram too many into the beds. Never mind.
I kept the passata very simple, I can add other ingredients when I use it depending on that use. Here it is

3kg tomatoes
15 peeled and roughly chopped garlic cloves
1 tbs salt
1 tbs ground black pepper
2 tbs sugar

All ingredients in one big pot and cooked for adbout 25mins. I cooled it down then passed it through a food mill. Back into the pot and reduced until thickened slightly. I ended up with about 1.2 litres of passata which I divided up then froze for use during winter.



Christmas Corn

I've started picking the corn and despite my fears so far the cobs are all fully filled. They're a bit smaller than I'm used to but still a good size. The picking time for these only lasts a few days so I'll have to freeze some and give plenty away. The sweetness of corn just doesn't last in the fridge so I'll be pigging out.
The secret to growing sweet corn? Plenty of food and plenty of water. Once they have reached just under a meter tall they could live happily in a swamp. Also at this time mulch up high around the stalks with straw and manure and they'll send out more roots into this rich mix.

Merry Christmas!



Eggplant overload

I was right, I'm a bit overloaded with eggplant. My neighbours and friends are the benefactors which is cool, and part of why I grow veggies. It's also the nature of growing in the backyard patch, a feast and famine thing. I might try to pickle some if I get the time.



Monsters in the patch

Every now and then I'll miss one of the zucchinis and they turn into monsters like this one. It seems such a waste to chuck these out but with the pithy centres they make pretty ordinary eating. There are some recipes where you dig out the pithy seeds and stuff them with savory mince or sausage meat. Maybe I'll try it with this one. That's a 400g tin of tomatoes next to it to give the scale of the thing. I might let one of them go at the end of the season to see how big it will get.



Eggplant

I've started picking the Lebanese Eggplants. I planted out a punnet of six of these, way too many, and given the number of small fruit on the plants I might be overwhelmed soon. Though it's fun to grow big black eggplant these are much better for a small garden.



All Season vs Chantenay

Well here's the two of them together. The stumpy one is the Chantenay and the other one isn't. I mentioned before the Chantenay are ones of Peter, "The Man", Cundall's favourites. As for taste, I've just had these two for dinner and the Chantenay are definately sweeter. I'll grow these again. Not sure I'd bother with the All Season in winter, they take forever to grow. I'll try other varieties in late summer to grow through autumn and then again next spring.



Many Nuggets

The golden nugget pumpkins are growing well, but are a bit varying on how many fruit they have. This one, obviously, has plenty while the one next to it has only two. I don't know why this is. Also, they seem to have stopped producing female flowers. I've never grown these before but so far so good, apart form the uneven fruit production. These are the same pumpkins shown in the Pumpkin Fruit post so you can see how much they've come along in the last two weeks.



Tommys

The tomato picking is picking up pace with the Mortgage Lifters stating to ripen. They're a great tasting tomato, with more of a ruby colour than the normal tomatoe red. I'm having a problem with leaves dying back on these plus one of the romas. I've had this happen late in the season, which I think is a normal part of the plant's cycle, but not in spring. There doesn't seem to be any mites around, but we've had such a hot spring this year, with days varying from mid thirties back down to high twenties, so maybe that's to blame. I've also been a bit ambitious with the plant numbers and they're badly overcrowded.

Mortgage Lifter

My suffering Roma

Todays picks



Harvesting

I'm still picking carrots and beetroot along with the zucchini. Here's some of them in a poorly plated, and poorly photographed, meal of roast carrot and beetroot with zucchini fritters. I'm still trying to perfect the zucchini fritters, luckily I'm not short of zucchinis to practice on.



Flowering Corn

The sweet corn has produced it's male flowers and the silks of the female flowers. It's the females that become the cobs. Each silky hair is attached to what, with good pollination, a kernal. It's been really windy lately in this hottest spring on record. This can some times lead to poor pollination, as the pollen blows away from the crop, and subsequently the cobs aren't fully filled with kernals. I've planted in a block of four plants x three plants so hopefully this will help.



Butternut Cross Pollination?

I mentioned a post ago that the butternuts had only produced female flowers. Since then some males have opened and i've hand pollinated some of the females. The wierd thing is a few of the fruit that I expected to drop off are still there and growing nicely. I've done a bit of research and it seems that butternuts, zucchini's and Goldn Nuggets are part of the same species of curcurbits and will cross pollinate. As usual there's a bit contradictory info on the web but most seem to agree that this can happen. Apparently the fruit wont be affected in the first year but will probably produce mutants from any seed saved.

The two together shown below are about 100mm long and the bigger single is about 150mm long. They would have dropped off by now if they hadn't been pollinated by something. Unless I missed a male flower, but I don't think so, pumpkin flowers are pretty hard to miss.



Special Guest

Last Sunday Helena from The Colour H came around for beer o'clock and took a few pics of the garden. Here's a quick sample.



Pumpkin Fruit

The Golden Nugget bush pumpkins have set fruit with some help from hand pollination by me. They may have been pollinated anyway but those bees just can't be trusted.

Meanhwile the Butternuts are climbing nicely. Only female flowers at the moment so I'm feeling a bit impatient as usual.



Zucchini Rush

After starting with just a few female flowers showing the zucchinis are now fruiting. I've been going out in the mornings and hand pollinating with a small paint brush just to help the bees along. The fruit grow so quickly that I've started giving them away already.



First Fruit

I'm starting to eat the fruits of my labours witht the first of the tomatoes being picked. It's just a few here and there at the monemt but there's plenty of fruit on the vines.  My Roma's below, in front of the taller Mortgage Lifters are so dense that it's hard to see the fruit. I'll plant them further apart next year.

The Sweet Bite are also starting to ripen too. Only a handful so far but plenty to come.

Snail

I knew the pests would eventually start to raid my garden and I found the first snail the other day as shown in this dramatic re-enactment.



Transformed

I thought I'd post a few photos showing the progression from the sad lawn to happy veggies.
I couldn't have hoped for it to have gone any better.

19th of March 2010

1st of April 2010

7th of November 2010



Golden Nuggets

The Golden Nugget pumpkins have gone a bit berserk in the last couple of weeks. They all have small flower buds so in a couple of weeks the bees can do their business.

The Three Sisters

Today I planted some Bule Lake climbing bean seeds amongst the corn. This is part of a native american indian companion planting combination known as the three sisters. The sisters are corn, beans and squash. The idea is that the corn provides support for the beans, the squash, in my case butternut pumpkins, shade the soil keeping in moisture and smothering weeds. Even though my butternuts are going to be growing vertically I'll let some tendrils creep amongst the corn. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the next crop. They are also a good nutritional combination. I've never tried this before and as a big fan of companion planting it will be interesting to see how it works out. Not much to see at this stage apart from the corn but i'll keep up to date as things progress.



Zucchini

I'd forgotten how fast veggies grow at this time of year. If you look back to the Mid Spring post you'll see how far things have come on in a couple of weeks. The zucchinis have produced their first flowers. Unfortunately they are all female so they haven't been fertilized. This is a bit odd as usually the males open first. There are some males about to open so hopefully I'll have some zucchinis soon.



Cavelo Death

The Cavelo Nero has come to the end of it's life and is dieing a failry undignified death. It has been completely savaged by cabbage moth caterpillers. I was going to pull them out and dump them in the compost, but I've noticed that they are always surrounded but wasps, hoverflies and ladybugs and the rest of the garden remains pretty much unscathed. They can stay there now as sacrificial plants while bringing in those other beneficial insects.



Garlic

I've had some garlic in pots since April and I pulled them up today. These have been grown for a few generations now from a head of purple garlic I bought from a local fresh veg market. I think this season has been the best yet. Maybe I've finally got the soil mix and ph correct. The method used was to fill most of the pot with a combination of potting mix, compost and old sheep poo. The top 80mm or so is just filled with potting mix and a handful of dolomite lime. If you have compost or poo touching the bulbs as they develop there's a good chance that rot will set in.
If I leave the stalks attached to the bulbs and they will keep fresh until I'm ready to plant at the beginning of April next year and behond. This abilty to store for so long makes garlic a must for the back garden veggie patch. I might find a place in the garden next year rather than in pots.



The Last Beans

The broad beans gave up their last pods this week and today I cut them down, covered the stalks in chook poo and straw the same as I did witht the peas. I think these did pretty well, and were delicious, so they will definatley be going in next year. I might plant them a bit later, end of June/early July, with the plants a bit further apart in an attmpt to increase the crop.



Mid Spring

In the last week everything has started to boom. The bed below, the lower leg of the E shaped bed, has the Mortgage Lifter and Roma tomatoes. The Mortgage Lifters to the left are about 600mm high with stems as thick as my thumb. If they keep going like this they may well be monsters as advertised.

The marigolds are there for a couple of reasons. They attract bees and wasps as well as, apparently, protecting against root nematodes in tomatoes. They look good too. There's plenty of basil amongst the tomatoes, a good companion plant plus you can never have too much basil in your life. The bed below, bed three, has the Sweet Bite and Grosse Lisse tomatoes along with the eggplants. This was the bed full of green manure during winter. That gold/green patch to the left is Golden Oregano. Maybe not quite as flavoursome as the standard oregano but worth growing for looks alone.

Below are the zucchinis. They're in the middle part of the E which is in the no-dig section. In the last few days their roots seem to have escaped the little pockets of soil and are into the composted manure/straw layers. They are growing like crazy now. The small things in the middle of the four zucchinis are cos lettuce. These grow quickly enough to utilise this space before they are overwhelmed.

Next are the Golden Nugget pumpkins these are in bed two, where I grew some green manure during winter. They are coming along fine as well and are just showing their first little flower buds.