Slow Progress in the Veg Garden

I'm not going to rabbit on about the attrocious weather we have been having - only to say that I am grateful that it rained whilst we were on holiday - as I was worried that if we had a heatwave whilst we were away the veg garden would have suffered.  As it is, all I have to contend with is the amount of weeds that have sprung up, but even that is not as bad as I thought it would be.


Last years' Parsnip being kept for seed

 My first picture is of the Parsnip that I left to go to seed - it now stands at least 7 feet high and looks pretty magnificent.



Alliums

 "Kitchen garden gods" said Juvenal, the Roman satirist, about the pungent family of onions.

Allium flowers, Onions, Leeks and last years' leeks gone to seed.  The onion patch is the weediest in the garden at the moment.

Legumes

Early visitors to Troy, where Heinrich Schliemann excavated Priam's fabled palace, were said to have been fed on peas from the great king's larder.  One huge storage jar contained more than 400lb., which had remained perfectly preserved for 3,000 years.

Peas, Runner Beans, Broad Beans and container Peas.
These have all thrived in the wet weather - the runner beans were attacked by slugs when I first planted them out, one or two plants took a big hit from them, but they are starting to fight back.  I think the excess of rain has started to make the leaves turn a little yellow.

Brassicas

Calabrese and Broccoli - the names are Italian, but it is likely that these vegetables arrived from the eastern Mediterranean during the 17th century.  Philip Miller, who wrote one of the first gardening dictionaries in England in 1742, called broccoli 'Italian asparagus'; if you eat the first of the crop with some hollandaise sauce on the side, it is hard to decide which is the more ambrosial.

The brassicas are beginning to put on some growth and the pests don't seem to have bothered them too much - I did net them all before I went away as a precaution, but the slugs and snails seem to have left them alone in favour of the softer leaves of the spinach.

Roots

Modern carrots are all descended from purple and yellow types that came into Europe from Arabia in the 14th century.  Selection by 17th century Dutch growers produced the forerunners of the varieties that we grow today.

Progress on the parsnips, carrots, celery and beetroot is slow but sure - thankfully I still have full rows with no wind or rain damage.

Miscellany

Courgettes are Zucchini under a different name and they have the frightening capacity to metamorphose into marrows if you go on holiday at the wrong time. 

The squashes and courgettes seem to have stopped growing - they definitely need some warmer weather to accelerate their growth.  The spinach is surviving slug attacks, as you can see the leaves are a little holey - but I am not too worried yet as they are pretty hardy.

Lettuce

John Parkinson, the 17th century grand-daddy of all garden writers, recommended lettuce for "Monkes, Nunnes and the like of people ... to keep them chase"  Poor Nunnes:  lettuce on its own is not much of a diet.  Like pastry, it is a background for livelier ingredients such as walnut oil, olives, hard-boiled eggs and anchovies or bacon and blue cheese.

Surprisingly, as you can see from the picture my lettuce have survived relatively unscathed.  I have it growing in the ground and in containers, far more than I can actually use, it has burgeoned during this wet spell and hardly any sign of slug damage.  Hooray!

I will leave the rest of the crops for another post as this one is already rather lengthy - needless to say,  progress is slow but gradually getting there.

Greenhouse strawberries

(All quotes are from Anna Pavords' The New Kitchen Garden)