Quillquiña

I love Mexican food, the eating and the cooking of it and I thought it was about time I started to grow my own ingredients.  As we don't have a greenhouse, putting chillies out of the question, I settled on growing a South American herb called quillquiña.  It has a sharp, earthy citrus taste and used a bit like coriander in salsas although two or three leaves seem to be enough.   I started them off indoors in the spring

and finally decided now summer is here it is about time I placed them into the herb patch.  They should grow to be around 3 feet tall.

And my herbs really need a good long drink.  Time to see if there is any easy Inca or Aztec rain dances in honour of my new Latino import.

Waiting Around in the Sunshine

After a wonderful week on holiday it was about time we returned to some gardening!  There were the typical amount of weeds that needed sorting and hoeing out but after that there is only a lot to admire. A huge weed patch had grown at the same place the sweet williams should have grown.  Rather than wait and the weeds grow too strong I hoed the whole area so they will have to wait for next year.

 We are still at the waiting stage there are a lot of things going on but very little to harvest.  We came home to find that the little gems had bolted so have only had tiny harvest of lettuce so far.  The strawberry plants have not produced anywhere near as much fruit as last year however they were moved out of containers this spring. The only ones I have tasted tasted odd, almost musty so they went into a glass of pimm's.  I'm hoping these ones will taste better:

The tomatoes have finally recovered from their trauma of being left in their pots a bit too long.

 At one stage I thought I would be blogging about how badly they have done and it looked like there would be no tomatoes to enjoy this year.  Now I can see the first signs of flowers and the plants remain a lush green.  Al pointed out a tiny greenfly in the photo but I don't think it's anything to worry about. I spray the tomatoes with dilute washing up liquid which seems to help because I never seem able to attract ladybirds.

All the beans and peas have started flower, I have to confess that most of the varieties we are growing this year were bought because the seeds were reasonable rather than majestic looking blooms.   I'm glad I can see flowers because I was beginning to panic I'd left them too late to be able to enjoy a lengthy harvest but it's clear now that this will not be the case.

Do you remember me posting about how we cheated and bought plants after the late frosts?  Well the first courgette plant is beginning to show a tiny courgette which will hopefully be ready to eat soon. I always have a knack for forgetting to pick the flowers for stuffing until they are too open to stuff.  My favourite time is when they are ready with the tomatoes so they can be made into a light sauce or ratatouille.  This year it will be even sweeter if the red onions are ready at the same time.  

Friday Photo: Potatoes

Friday Photo: Tricolore Salad

 Made with home grown spinach and basil.
If only our tomatoes were this ready!

One-ish year on

Looking few my photos I came to realise how much of the garden we've already managed to transform.  As I've posted about before, the biggest problem the great veggie adventure has faced is the fact that the garden has been so abandoned.  The last date anyone really did anything (before us) is about 2001 and we only started last year.  There is a huge amount of work that still needs to be done in order to achieve a finished garden.  In order to actually get some garden we started on digging out the veg patch last spring and managed this:

To the side is a row of what we guess was once a flower bed because this spring we had the most impressive weeds in the form of some very tradtional English bluebells.

                          

There were a few signs of its former life still left when we started the veggie adventure.  There was also an overgrown rose bush which had started to trail across the rickety wooden fence.  It was so bad we started to wonder if it should be like that or not.  Early on the rose had a brutal chop and has flourished ever since; seems it was focused on growing and not flowering.  This year we have taken the same approach to the hawthorn that was left to grow wild in the hope that it will too bush out and not grow out.  In place of weeds we slowly started to plant, first the herb garden went in and then the courgettes followed.

With all that work to do we left the garden as it was for the summer focusing on growing and harvesting our own veg with varying levels of success.  Never keep peas in grow bags for a start!  In the late summer we had the helping hand of some farm/industrial weed killer killing off a lot of the weeds that had taken hold of the top area of the garden.   Leaving us to manually manage the bottom nearest to us, where the coldstore and shed presently live.  The weed killer worked, even killing off the dandelion roots (!) and with hard work in the autumn we have managed to get to the workable plot we have today.  Twice the size of the orginal plot with double the veg growing.  Who knows what I will be posting next year?

Newsflash!

The grobox is actually growing something!

I had a quick peek about on coming home from work last night and noticed that there are a few green shoots coming out from the right area.  They look like a variety of bean but I cannot tell so well nor remember what seeds were in the box.  I had unfairly written it off as an experiment that wasn't going to work so I'm pleased that something is happening.

Friday Photo: Blackcurrants-in-waiting

Sorry it's a bit late!