Thinnings from the onion patch, complete with volunteer potatoes, curing in the sun for a dayI took Monday off to enjoy a day in the garden! There were a number of jobs that I felt I needed to catch up on, and hadn't been getting around to while surrounded by people. I had a whole pile of time on my flexi-time at work, and decided to put it to good use. I even had a happy hour's weaving for the first time all year, when it was too hot to work outside in the middle of the day.
1. Plant Something -
- Sowed spring onion seeds.
- Repotted all of the tomato, chilli and okra plants that needed to go into bigger pots or growbags
- Repotted several of the other potted plants
- Turned in the barley chaff and manured that bed, in preparation for it to become a permanent artichoke bed.
- spinach
- broad beans (4 kg)
- onions (see picture above)
- potatoes
- lettuce and salad greens
- baby carrots
- lots and lots and lots of herbs
- lots of courgettes
- beetroot
- chillies
- turnips
- eggs
- the very last of the garlic
- runner beans
- French beans
- cucumbers from a neighbour
- orange cherry tomatoes
- the first red sweet pepper
- small yellow wild plums
- the very first blackberries, as a mid-morning snack
- Cured onions and potatoes for storage
- Froze several kilograms of broad beans
- The usual things
- Nothing this week
- The usual
- Broad beans in a rich tomato sauce for a light supper and later for a mezze supper
- Caramelised courgette salad: delicious!
- Intensely courgettey pasta sauce (recipe to come)
- Smashed and roasted new potatoes
- Lots of salad with greens, baby carrots, radish and beetroot
- Used the preserved mini olives from last year's crop on our tree (and I do mean mini in some cases, see below) to make an olive bread with chopped fresh garlic, chopped herbs and a wonderful oak-smoked, malted wholewheat flour. We ate it two evenings in a row: the first, with stuffed portobello mushrooms and several salads; the second night as part of a mezze supper. It got rave reviews.
8. What I bought:
Avocadoes, stone fruit and portobello mushrooms.
2 comments:
You have an olive tree??? I'm officially envious. Did you sow your onion seed directly to the ground, or in flats? I really need to do this too. So hard to be motivated though, in our heat.
I do have an olive tree! I picked it up for less than £10 on sale a few years ago. It's not very large - a 1-metre standard - but it provides plentiful tiny olives every second year. I've had a lot of people tell me that olives trees aren't frost hardy and that you can't brong olives to ripeness in the UK, but no-one seems to have told my tree, which withstood frosts of -10C last winter and is currently covered in literally hundreds of baby olives.
I've only planted spring onion seeds so far; I'll wait for another month or so before sowing proper onions to overwinter. I sow directly into the ground as I seem to have more success that way than using flats. I'll make a shallow drill, sow seed into that, and cover that finely with a moist compost.
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