Weekend update, 7-8 April

It's been 5 weeks since my last post and I confess I feel a little bit guilty. I've jotted down notes for at least six different topics, but I never seem to make the time to sit down and turn them into cohesive paragraphs. At the very least, I have been hard at work during those 5 weeks, developing a new gluten-free bread recipe, mending a bunch of old clothes, spending a week volunteering at Coed Talylan near Llangadog, and most recently, getting the vegetable patch up and running.

This time last year, our conservatory was full of seedlings ready to plant out, but with the possibility of snow as late as two weeks ago, everything is a bit behind schedule. Looking around this week though, Spring is most definitely here, and so this weekend was all about the garden.

With the sudden increase in temperature, all our brassicas decided to start bolting, so the first thing to do was to cut off all of the flower stalks in an attempt to slow down the process, and to make a stir-fry from the greens and any radishes and daikons that looked large enough to harvest. While volunteering at Coed Talylan we shared communal meals with a couple of vegans, and while the food was all quite good, we might have splurged on some very meat-heavy meals when we got home. Consequently, a simple dish of cooked radishes and greens over sticky short-grain rice was just what we needed. We fried up some garlic in peanut oil with a little dash of sesame oil for flavor, added the greens, then seasoned them with a mixture of oyster sauce, mirin, soy sauce, and just a tiny bit of sriracha, with just enough cornstarch to thicken it.

Thus fortified, I turned my attention back to the garden. Taking the bolting brassicas as a sign that the bed was getting too warm, we removed the fleece covering our brassica bed and replaced it with bird netting instead.

Peeking under the cover of the other bed, we found that our over-wintering veggies were growing vigorously, but that the greens were showing signs of rust, probably from over-crowding. We hadn't been harvesting much in the way of greens over the winter, so this is not entirely surprising. I spent an hour or so trimming everything rather aggressively, discarding any leaves with orange spots and keeping only the most perfect ones for eating. Even so, almost 300 grams of spinach and chard went into the fridge.

Next, I turned my attention to the celery. Last year, as an experiment, instead of cutting off the entire celery plant at ground level, we cut off all the stalks, leaving an inch or two at the base to see if it would re-grow. Sure enough, we now have some very vigorous, bushy celery plants. However, we also have a very large population of slugs who like to take shelter in the spaces between the stalks. They love to eat their way up the centers of the stalks, leaving them hollow, at which point woodlice move into the hollow centers. Last year, we only harvested at most one or two stalks that were completely intact. We still ate them, trimming away the worst bits and checking everything very thoroughly for stowaways before cooking, but it would be awfully nice to get some slug-free celery this year.

So I armed myself with Slugbane (my favorite pair of garden clippers) and set about cutting away all the old, dead growth and murdering any slugs that I could find. And there were many. Oh, so many.

In the midst of this massacre, I pulled away all the outermost stalks until I reached young, healthy growth and set aside any stalks that looked salvageable. Between the radish greens, spinach, chard, and celery, we got more than a kilo of food from out garden this weekend, making it our largest harvest so far this year, all thanks to last year's planting.

Having dealt with the established vegetables, I then turned my attention to the conservatory. During the previous few weeks, we'd made a slow start on sowing seeds in soil blocks. The peas, claytonia, and herb cuttings were established enough to go out into a cold frame, the field beans got transplanted out into the ground, and some parsley that had over-wintered in a window box indoors went out into the herb garden. All of this freed up space to start some more seeds indoors.

I harvested a tray of castings from the worm bin, some of which went into a batch of potting soil, and some of which went to feed the celery. I would have fed the worms with some of the finished compost from our compost roller, except that it doesn't seem to be breaking down at all! Grrrr!

I suspect that part of the problem is that we only have the one tumbler, so anything that does break down just gets mixed up with the new kitchen scraps. I wish we had more space for a second pile/tumbler so we could fill a second container while letting the first one break down.

After playing a bit of Tetris with our soil blocks, there was still a little bit of room to use the aforementioned potting soil to pot up the tomato seedlings that had volunteered in various other pots (I swear, tomato seeds can teleport). While potting up one that had volunteered in the pot of a wild hop plant that I thought long dead, I spotted this tiny shoot just peeking through the dirt!

It was only when I looked more closely at this photo that I
spotted the second shoot just poking out above the first!

Finally, I teased apart the basil plants from a particularly vigorous-looking pot that I picked up from the produce section of Lidl last week. From one 2.5 inch pot that cost me all of £1, I got 19 separate plants! Poor, crowded things. Three days later, they seem to have weathered the trauma of separation pretty well.

Just a few of the 19 basil plants that came out of one 2.5" pot.

My final achievement for the weekend was a bit of weeding. I pulled up a few dandelions, whose tops became a salad and whose roots are being made into a vodka tincture. Some healthy-looking nettles are now drying on top of the toaster oven to replenish our supply of nettle tea.

And somewhere in the midst of all that, I found the energy to make waffles. No wonder I'm tired this week.

And they both ate waffles and lived happily ever after.