Loading ...As I am sure you can imagine if you read the Purple Death Day post there has been quite a bit of tidy up work required in our garden. It is by no means finished but we have been able to do a little rescuing.
Now it hasn’t been the harvest that we expected but at this point we are very grateful for everything and anything we get from the garden.
We were able to rescue quite a good pile of leeks, they had been a little nibbled in places but not really ravaged like the celery they were inter-planted with, I think we were just very lucky they weren’t trampled. It does seem that neither sheep nor pigs have a taste for the Allium family, as the onions had been mostly left alone as well. Although some of them had been pulled up in what looks like nothing more than wilful vandalism!
We dug up our potato crop this weekend and are quite pleased with the results. We had planted Yukon Gold, Russett Burbank & Norlands all of which were planted from seed potatoes that were the leftovers of last years harvest. We also had bought a box of blue seed potatoes just because!
We discovered that the blue potatoes are actually rather difficult to find in our clumpy clay soil as they are so dark that you have to break up every mud clump just in case it is really a potato in disguise!
They also left us four cabbages, or at least some of the cabbages, I am thinking though that this was likely just because gnawing on the heads was too much effort!
The pumpkin / melon patch had been left completely undisturbed but sadly had struggled with our weird summer, and out of a 40ft×12ft patch we had these six pumpkins! Oh well it’s better than nothing, eh?
We do still have some digging to do, there are two patches of parsnips to be dug up, and we realised yesterday that not all of the inter-cropped with leeks rows were celery, one was celeriac. So we will have to have a dig and see what we find. We don’t have huge hopes for either though as our soil is not great for root vegetables. We shall see.
Check out Greely Sand and Gravel and get a load of Top Dressing soil to mix into your gardens. It’s a mix of Top Soil and Mushroom Compost. That’s what I mixed into my garden and I had huge success from pretty well everything I planted including about 10 fair sized pumpkins from just 6 plants.
Comment by Daniel — October 7, 2009 @ 8:34 am