Month: December 2010
Heirloom tomatoes
At this time of year, the tomato crop is in full swing, and the great thing about planting heirloom tomatoes is the variety. At any given point, our fruit bowl is full of ripening tomatoes, red and yellow, small and large. We pluck them off the plants as soon as they start to colour up, to reduce the crop losses to caterpillars. It doesn’t take long for them to ripen properly, and then into our cooking…
In addition to eating them fresh, we’ve also been storing them for future use, via bottles of:
- roast tomato passata
- tomato ketchup
- cherry tomato & onion relish
Echinacea
Our Echinacea plant has finally flowered. We planted 3 seedlings about 12 months ago, so it’s sure taken its time (admittedly that’s probably because we planted it at the wrong time of year).
Although it’s in our edible garden, I don’t think there’s much we can do with it. Besides, I heard this week on Sunrise that new evidence shows Echinacea does nothing to lessen the symptoms of a cold anyway. No matter though, the flowers are beautiful 🙂
Making apple juice
Thanks to Michael Mobbs, I’ve stumbled across a great set of instructions on how to make apple juice from fresh apples. There’s even a beautiful photo gallery to accompany the article. Highly recommended.
(Once our food forest is productive, we’re hoping for an avalanche of apples that we’ll make juice from, cook with, and make cider and vinegar. At least that’s the plan, it’s a few years off yet!)
Tree planting map for the food forest
For your interest, and to help us keep track of things, this is what we’ve planted so far in the food forest:
- Fuji apple
- Cox’s Orange Pippin apple
- Granny Smith apple
- Sommerset Red Streak apple
- Golden Delicious apple
- Jonathon apple
- Kingston Black apple
- Sugar Loaf Pippin apple
- Maiden’s Blush apple
- cumquat
- Meyer lemon
- dwarf Kaffir lime
- Wurtz avocado
- dwarf Washington Navel orange
Not a bad collection to get us started! I’ll keep this page up to date, as we fight back the weeds and fill in the gaps…
Update on our food forest
About six months ago, I cleared a overgrown mass of privet in the convent’s land behind our house to create a new food forest. Apple trees were ordered and planted, along with a bunch of other fruit trees.
This quickly became the first round of a multi-year war against weeds. With the warm, wet weather, the privet was immediately replaced by half a dozen varieties of invasive weeds, which are now several metres high.
Starting at the near end, I’ve been countering this by laying down newspaper, and piles of mulch (kindly donated by a local tree trimming company). A variety of plants have been established as part of the ‘apple tree guild’:
- comfrey
- lavender
- rosemary
- sage
- oregano
I’ve also been planting a number of dominant vegetables to act as ground cover:
- multiple types of pumpkin (normal and heirloom varieties)
- watermelons
- rockmelons
- cucumbers
It’s clear that this will take some time, years most likely. Still, it’s a good weekend project…
The big surprise has been the hundreds of cherry tomato plants that have come up amongst the weeds. We’re not sure whether these came from the neighbours chucking tomatoes over their back fence, or from seeds being dropped by birds.
We’re not complaining either way, as we’ve already harvested 2-3kg of cherry tomatoes for ‘free’, having done nothing but watch the plants grow. There’s probably 10-20kg of tomatoes yet to grow and ripen, if we can find the time to pick them…
PS. in the end, the food forest is likely to become a ‘convent garden’ rather than a community garden. I’ll be the ‘head convent gardener’, with a produce-sharing arrangement in place. A good win-win outcome! 🙂
A jungle of tomatoes
The wet spring (the wettest on record) has been miserable for us humans, but the garden has been loving it. Plants that did well last year have gone crazy this year, beyond all reasonable expectation.
This includes:
- Tomato plants (both bush-type and climbing-type) that have gone wild, taking over everything.
- Beans and snowpeas producing vigorously.
- Celery sprouting everywhere, after I let a single plant go to seed last year.
- Sweetcorn that’s higher that us.
- Cucumber plants starting to get out of control.
Now we’ve just got to stop it all getting eaten by caterpillars, and keep on top of our harvesting and eating …
Lewisham House and Farm 