Growing veggies
 

This year Sou and I grew some veggies out in our tiny little back garden. When I say 'garden' I mean it in the English sense, which is to say our back 'yard' for the North Americans ;)

They were all grown in pots and mostly it dwarf green beans, tomatoes:tomatod:, bell peppers :pepper: and chili peppers:jalapeno:. We managed to get about 20 meals from the 10 bean plants (we put them in stirfrys). Quite a few tomatoes even though it was a shite year for tomatoes in the UK. Those were mostly eaten by Sou and the girls as snacks since they were cherry tomatoes. There was loads and loads of chili peppers, most of which I have frozen. I eat them with the stirfrys, cooking them with my chicken. Finally the bell peppers, again the weather was shite this year so only a few rippened to red. The rest were all green, but not too bitter. We've had about 10 meals from them as well. Here are the last of the green peppers (there was probably about 5 times that altogether) and a pic of the rest of the chilis. The chili plant is a Bolivian Chili Plant, which means it poduces a variety of colours all on the same plant ranging from deep red to orange to yellow and even DEEP purple. They are spicey little buggers too! :D

Oops, Sou just reminded me that we also grew some Alpine Strawberries :strawberry:. They are really, really small and very sweet. There just weren't enough to do much with them, but we snacked on them and Sou added them to a fruit salad once.

Re: Growing veggies
 

Oh my gosh, how totally gorgeous the Bolivian chilis are! They look like a bowl of candy, so happy and colorful. :wriggle:

I'm fascinated that you got 'maters in pots. They were all cherry tomatoes? When did you plant them? How much sun did they get?

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Ya, they look great! The plant looks lovely with all the different colours on it at once. And they have a really nice flavour too and nice and spicey.

They are in fairly big pot, about 3 gallons I think. We planted them about March, but our seedlings failed. About 4 weeks later we managed to get a bunch of free plants from some kind people on Freecycle. Two of the plants were HUGE already and they were NOT cherry tomatoes, they were a Tiger variety (the fruit has stripes! :cool:) and one that grew small orange tomatoes that Sou says tasted very sweet. The guy who gave them to us planted them in January in his greenhouse. The rest of them were small plants and we grew them fairly large but only got green tomatoes off of them. We also had terrible trouble with blight, again the weather... too much rain!

The best producer was a cherry tomato tumbler plant. We got loads of little deep red tomatoes off that one. They got sun for quite a lot of the day when it actually came out. This year was terrible for rain though and they didn't do as well as they could have. If we had grown some the year before, they would have had incredible weather. But last year we only had one tomato and one chili plant.

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I've had some delicious striped tomatoes, and I had an heirloom once that was a golden orange and almost completely seedless. It was solid tomato all the way through. Man, that was good.

Damn shame about the rain situation. This year would have been a great one for me to grow tomatoes because it was beating sunlight pretty much every day for months. Unfortunately, my wee porch (which no way could accommodate a 3 gallon pot, nevermind several) isn't well situated, sunwise.

So what are your plans for next year, then? Any herbs, maybe?

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Oh come one, surely you can fit at least ONE plant out there :wink:

And a 3 gallon pot isn't all that big really.

Believe it or not we actually had something like 80 plants this year. We had 10 bean plants, about 7-8 bell pepper plants, 3 chili plants, 5-6 strawberry planters, 3 large tomato plants and the rest were the tomato plants that caught blight and didn't produce much of anything.

I think next year I would want to have less total plants. Basically, I would just cut out most of the tomato plants. 10 bean, 10 bell pepper, 3 chili, 4-6 strawberry plants and just maybe 4 or 5 large tomato plants. If the sun comes out more, that should produce plenty of action for us :)

But Sou is a little plant crazy sometimes :D She would probably want at least twice the tomato plants.

And then you never know what new things she will want to try this year :twitch:

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Actually, we probably would have had even more peppers and tomatoes if we had found out about copper tape earlier! You can buy this copper tape that goes around the bottom of your pots and it TOTALLY stops slugs from eating your plants.

Over here the slugs are killer, I mean KILLER. They're HUGE and there are tons of them. Sou is too nice to kill them with slug pellets, so we needed a friendly solution.

They really were devastating our plants before the copper tape. And the little buggers don't just eat a pepper/tomato and move on.. NO they take a little nibble out of every one on the plant! Reminds me of the cartoon Rocket Robin Hood, the opening sequence had Friar Tuck taking a bite from a piece of food, chucking it over his head and biting into the next repeatedly.

Rocket Robin Hood

Edit: Hmmm, I guess it wasn't in the opening credits. It does show a little of it in the video here though, at about 36 seconds into it.

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Those are some great looking vegetables, slim. I agree that the Bolivian chilis are beautiful. I've never seen any chilis like those.

I would've eaten all the cherry tomatoes, too. Although there's a great recipe here for a penne dish that uses a lot of 'em.

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We grew some tomatoes in a pot on our balcony this summer. They did well even though it was a rather wet summer so a large amount didn't fully ripen. We still got a lot of tomatoes.

We also grew some herbs on the windowsill, and some bell peppers in the "flower box" outside our window. The pepper plant is inside now and has re-flowered and is producing peppers again.

Re: Growing veggies
 

We have our front "garden" turned into an actual garden with raised beds. This year we had tomatoes (a couple of kinds), basil, (Thai and "regular"), and beans- green, string, and these other ones I don't know the name if, but which are shaped like large lima beans and are mottled purple/pink. We also have lettuces of a couple of kinds.

I wish we could do the same in the back yard.

This:
Powell's Books - Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community by H C Flores
Is a very good book.

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I forgot about this question. We did grow some herbs as well, but we're so damn lazy we never really harvested anything from them. And the slugs were totally devastating them too. I think I used some of the dill once, but that was it. We grew dill, rosemary, basil and chives. Next year I will work harder at picking them as they grow and see if we can use them in various yummy ways.

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I have to say that I don't really like tomatoes much, but that dish looks yummy. Sou and one of the girls like to just eat the tomatoes like grapes, but I can't do it. Still, I don't mind them on pizzas and that penne dish ... :hungry:

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I eat them like grapes too, which is why I've only made that recipe once. I know if I bought tomatoes for that purpose, I'd probably just eat them all.

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Oh, I've got 6 out there, but only one (gigantic Italian parsley) is in a large pot. There's just no more space to be had that gets any kind of half-way steady sunlight.

Holy shite. That's frikkin' crazy! Not that I don't understand the impulse. If I had the space I would love to grow pretty much all my fresh food. It's addictive, being able to just step outside and snag whatever you need for dinner. I can identify with Sou's brand of plant crazy.

I didn't harvest my herbs right the first year either. Except for the chives. I swear I used them in everything the whole summer. The plant looks so cute all trimmed and Bart Simpson-like. :aww:

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They really can produce (hehe get it, produce) can't they? We had loads of green tomatoes from the blighty plants, but we didn't use them in time. Sou was going to make some green tomato chutney, but she didn't get around to it. If they had ripened we would have had more tomatoes than you can shake a stick at!

Hey, nice one on the pepper plant flowering again. Twice the fun :D

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Thanks for the link, that book does look good. Could be a possible Christmas present for someone I know :giggle:

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Ok, so most of these are actually fruit, but this is the thread I found, so this is the thread I'm using :lolfruits:

We have some nice fruit coming along right now, the strawberries are looking very, very good again:
Attachment 10252

The raspberries are looking much, much better than last year and we have a cage for them to put up soon so the birds don't steal them all again:
Attachment 10254Attachment 10255

We have 2 small apple trees that are looking good again, here is one of them:
Attachment 10256

Here is an actual vegetable, the pumpkin plants are looking good even though they only just went in the ground:
Attachment 10253

Finally, this post isn't all about bragging :pleased:
I have a question about out pear tree. This is the first year it has really produced, probably because it is the first year we trimmed it back in the fall. It has loads and loads of pears, but is it too much? Should we be thinning the number of pears? Should we have already thinned them? Anyone know?
Attachment 10257Attachment 10258

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I haven't taken any pics yet but this year we are growing jalapenos, cayennes, tiny pickling cucumbers (oh god the pickles are going to be so good), roma tomatoes, bell peppers, garlic, chives and kale. For some reason the cayennes aren't growing worth a shit this year, but everything else is.

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It's zucchini bonanza time in my dad's garden right now. Also he pulled the garlic a couple of weeks ago and it looks amazing. It'll be another two, three weeks before it's dried and ready to eat.

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I vote no on thinning pears. From what I remember, they do make an absurd amount of fruit per tree. They bear loads and loads of fruit. I can't say if they would get less but bigger fruit if you did thin them, though. You could probably experiment on individual branches to find out.

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Awesome! We're actually going to pull the first row of garlic on tuesday and start hanging it up to dry. It should be ready to eat by the end of september.

First thing I'm going to do is make a reduction with balsamic vinegar and about six cloves and crush that shit into a fine paste, smear it all over a nice baguette with butter and a little bit of sea salt and have the best god damned garlic bread ever. Six weeks.

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The garlic has been harvested! :garlic::garlic::garlic:

This is about half of what we got:
Attachment 10290

Sou minced the first half added oil to it and popped it into the freezer in tupperware tubs. The oil doesn't quite freeze and you can just take out a tablespoon (or more!) whenever it's needed for a stir fry, garlic bread, roasties, whatever :hungry:

We're going to use some of this half for garlic butter.

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That is a thing of beauty. You don't dry it at all?

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We would have dried some, but we bought a pretty massive bag of garlic granules from the Chinese supermarket in the spring and we have ludicrous amounts left :garlic: :rich:

They are big chunky dried granules, not the tiny-almost-powder ones and apparently you can give them to chickens :themoreyouknow: So we will probably do that with the ones we have and next year we'll dehydrate a bunch of the garlic we harvest.

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Oh, I didn't mean dehydrate. I meant hang the heads in a cool, dry place for a few weeks after harvest to cure. My dad does it for 4 weeks.

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They were drying for about 2 weeks I suppose, not more than that though. Are you supposed to cure them? What is the benefit? Enquiring minds need to know :chemstudy:

Also, the pumpkins are going crazy!
Attachment 10291

They were planted in a 3' x 6' bed and they've taken over 3 times that space now. So far we have 9 that are definitely pollinated. Most are still smooth and yellow:
Attachment 10292

However the very first ones are turning orange and developing ridges.
Attachment 10293

Hard to see the sizes but the orange one is about the size of a soccer ball.