Category: Vegetables

potato blight

A potato blight warning is in effect so here’s what to do

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Met Eireann has issued a potato blight warning for the entire country this week and I’m currently freaking the hell out about what’s going to happen to my poor spuds.

A few people have asked me today what to do to protect their spuds when there a blight warning in effect so here’s my esteemed advice: fucking set everything on fire and run away screaming.

Seriously. We’re all screwed.

However, if you are one of the weirdos who has decided not to completely overreact (ie, me) and just hope for the best, I figured I’d tell you a little bit about blight and how to deal with it if your spuds get the potato plant equivalent of the ebola virus.

First things first, what the hell is blight? 

Have you only ever heard of potato blight in school when learning about the famine? Well, we all know that blight caused the worst famine in Europe when it destroyed all of our potato crops here in Ireland between 1845-1852. Which was not helped at all by the bastard Brits who stole all our other crops and hoofed all the Irish out of their gaffs and into workhouses and coffin ships, and caused the deaths of over a million people. Not that I’m bitter about the genocide of my people or anything.

Anyway look, I’ve written at length about the famine on the blog before so I won’t go into it here. Even though I’d love nothing more than a nice old bitch about the English (sorry if you’re English, I know it’s not your fault….kind of)

But blight is a problem that still plagues us here in Ireland, mostly because of our weather. Potato blight is caused by an airborne fungus called Phytophthora Infestans. Catchy name right? It spreads rapidly through the air during periods of warm, humid weather. Wind carries the fungal spores from plant to plant and rain can soak the spores into your soil and cause them to spread.So, while the rest of Ireland is currently basking in the glorious 25 degree heat we’ve been having the past week, food growers all over the country are having bleedin’ panic attacks because heat, rain and sunshine is pretty much peak blight weather.

SAKE.

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The hot weather can eff right off now thanks

Does it just affect potatoes?

Nope. Yay. Phytophthora infestans can infect any plants from the solanaceae family (which is also known as the nightshade family). So blight can also infect tomatoes, aubergines and peppers too.

Fanfuckingtastic.

And if you’re for some mad reason growing tobacco, it’ll affect that too.

Also, call me.

What are the symptoms?

Right, here’s how to tell if your spuds have blight. It’s really important to keep a close eye on them over the next week for these tell tale signs.

Leaves: The leaves on your plants will begin to develop brown patches. Kind of like freckles, which may be only gorgeous on people like myself, but spell disaster for your spuds. The brown patches will also get yellow patches spreading from them.

Tubers: The potato tubers will develop really dark patches within a few days and the inside of your potato will turn into a (no better way to say this) fucking disgusting slimy blob of rotting flesh. Gorgeous. They will be the most disgusting thing you have ever smelled in your life. Yes, even worse than that one dude you know who never showers. My advice: wear a gas mask.

Can you prevent it?

In a nutshell, no. Sorry.

Well ok, there are some things you can do to lessen your chances of getting blight. You can of course, spray your crops with a blight preventative treatment but you all know how I feel about using chemicals in the garden.

So no, I do not spray my spuds. Which is probably why I always bloody get blight. Always. I’m cursed. It’s probably an Irish thing.

Otherwise, and I’d recommend this, you can plant a variety of potato that has a high blight resistance. There are loads of varieties of spud that have blight resistance and while it will not prevent blight, planting one of the blight resistant varieties will at least stave off the blight for longer (is the word blight beginning to lose all meaning for you yet?). Sarpo Mira and Coleen are both really tasty spuds with high blight resistance so they’re worth trying.

But what if it’s too late for all that? What do I do if my spuds do get blight?

As I said, just bleedin’ set them alight and run.

Or, if you’re a more balanced human being than myself and see signs of blight on your leaves, you can cut down the foliage of your spuds to the ground. This will prevent the blight from travelling to the tubers. Just make sure to get rid of the leaves and whatever you do, don’t put them in your compost because then you’ll just have compost that is full of blight and you’ll get it again next year.

Leave the tubers in the ground for about two or three weeks, then you can lift them. They’ll be tiny spuds but at least they’ll be spuds and not just mushy piles of rank slime.

I took a break from growing potatoes last year because I’d been plagued with blight for two years running and my heart was broke with it. I thought I’d grow them again this year because I just missed them so damn much. But now I’m in a state of panic. Not that I’m melodramatic or anything…potato blight

If you do keep getting blight, it helps to take a break from growing potatoes. The recommended gap is three years but, well, fuck that noise. Growing potatoes is just too much fun to take that long of a break from. I really missed them last year.

You could try growing them in grow bags at home or something instead if you don’t want to take a break, sometimes simply moving the problem can help.

Sadly, this summer, it seems like we’re all in trouble either way though. potato blight

So, just keep an eye on your children potatoes and hope for the best.

And there’s always the burn it all to the ground option if everything else fails. Sorted.

I dig therefore I am

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There’s a fresher air in Dublin this week as late summer breezes by and autumn blows in. My summer of discontent has been and gone and much like the changing of the seasons, my life has shifted in to a brand new phase.

It’s been an arduous summer here at Fiona Grows Food, plagued with health issues and some upheavals in my personal life, my garden has taken a back seat to the pursuit of health and happiness.

At times, the garden hasn’t been quite as productive as I’d have liked and I’ve spent a significant amount of time lately attempting to juggle the real world with my dream world. The dream world in this case being the ability to garden and write for a living.

Dream office alert!

Now that autumn is upon us, I am in the heart of harvest season and I’m left to take stock of the summer that has passed and think about what has and hasn’t worked for me in the garden.

The past few days I’ve been thinking about the nature of the changing seasons and the cycles of our lives. Thinking of how our gardens can reflect everything else in our world and how that reflection can guide us to where we are meant to be.

Now, before you wonder what the hell has happened to mad, hilarious Fiona and begin to panic at the thought that I might have become a bit of a poetic, philosophical bore, bare with me. This is an absolute cracker of a realisation I have to share with you! Then I promise I’ll get back to my usual slapstick gardening humour.

I do still have my funny moments to be fair…caught someone in a quite compromising parsnip position the other day…

Over the past few years, I’ve been juggling some hefty commitments, including a 50 hour a week thankless job, a blog, freelance writing commitments, food growing workshops and of course, a pretty large veggie garden.

Of all these things, the one that has taken up the majority of my time has been my job. Not that I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, I have enjoyed my work the past few years and am grateful for the amazing opportunities that it has afforded me. However, it just wasn’t right for me anymore.

I no longer had time to write or to dig, I had no space to blossom.

Plants and people are not so different really and this is the overarching point of my preposterous poetic preamble; if we treat ourselves and our lives the way we treat our plants, we’ll be all the better for it.

Think about it.

If you are a gardener yourself, you’ll know that when a plant is wilting, diseased or dying, it’s not the plant that is at fault, the problem is the environment.

This is why we grow some plants in polytunnels instead of outside

If a plant is parched, we water it, if it’s starved, we give it light, if it’s struggling we support it.

Put simply: if your plants are not thriving, you change their environment.

When a plant doesn’t perform well, we don’t scream at it, admonish it or bully it into submission (except for weeds, I’ve been know to scream at weeds on occasion). We take note of what has caused the problem and take steps to avoid the issue in future.

We repot it. Change the way we water it. Bring it in indoors. Give it less sun or more. We plant it in a different environment, we adjust our care in line with its needs, we try something new in the (sometimes vain) hope that next time, the plant will thrive.

If all that fails, we simply try again.

As gardeners, we are care givers, we are bound to the many lives we have become responsible for. We are held to account by our plants, and rewarded by our dedication and diligence.

We measure our successes in harvests and seeds, the more we put in, the more we are rewarded and we are guided by a tangible desire to do what is best, not only for our plants but for ourselves too.

In fact, based on these findings, I think it’s time for another one of my Fiona Grows Food Mathematical Discoveries of the Century.

Where:

A=hard work

B=desire for success

C=time spent in the garden

D=plant knowledge

Y=Tomatoes

Then:

I haven’t used any square roots here as the roots I work with are far too organic in structure for me to quantify in a single equation.

Mind Blown.

*patiently awaits phone call from Nobel prize committee* (there’s a Nobel prize for best off the cuff blog thesis right? Right?)

Now that we’ve had a small scientific segue, back to my original point.

In essence, plants that are stressed need a change of environment and in that regard, the same can be said for people.

If a person is wilting, hungry for more, struggling to grow or needs more space for their roots to spread, the fault is not with that person, but with their environment.

That is exactly what has happened to me this year. The garden has suffered and the blog has suffered. My days were spent in a toxic environment and no matter what I did, I was wilting.

So I’ve taken a leaf (trolololol) out of my book of gardening experience and I’ve decided to change my environment. In a decision that took forever to make and yet only took seconds to finally come to, I’ve left behind my old job and found something far more suited to me.

There’s a very well known saying about money and I’m sure you know exactly which one I mean. The only thing is, most of us get it horribly wrong.

The old adage doesn’t go “money is the root of all evil”. Well it does, but everyone leaves out the most important part, the beginning.

It’s from the bible. The correct quote is in fact “The love of money is the root of all evil”. 1 Timothy 6:10

It’s getting biblical up in here lads (and yes I have in fact read the bible but that’s a topic for another day).

If we break this quote down in its purest grammatical terms (nerd alert) it’s not the noun that is creating the negative outcome, but the verb. It’s the doing. Actions are always undertaken with some level of intent (and yes I believe that love is an action and not just a feeling), and to all intents and purposes, having money doesn’t cause evil, the relentless pursuit of having nothing but money does.

Officially changing my name to Fiona Descartes Kelly. Has a nice ring to it.

Money definitely cant buy happiness, but in a garden you can grow it.

As such, I’ve decided my health and the pursuit of my own happiness and well being is far more important than the pursuit of money, so I’ve struck out and decided to try something new in the hopes that I will have more time to write, more time to garden and to tend to my needs and the needs of my plants.

I have landed myself an amazing freelance content writing role with the super sound team at buzz.ie and I have some very exciting plans for Fiona Grows Food and of course for my garden.

I am in a far healthier environment for my needs now.

All that being said, my allotment has been thriving this year despite the diminished time I’ve spent there the past few weeks.

It helps that the plot is well established now and no matter what, I always have my perennials to enjoy. I did put a lot of work in earlier in the year and it really shows when late summer and early autumn arrive.

I’ve been harvesting mountains of tomatoes, courgettes, raspberries, beetroot and cucumbers and I’m just about to head around to the garden to finally pick some sweetcorn.

I’m excited about the future, I’m excited to grow and I’m excited to spend more time getting down and dirty in my favourite place in the world.

I am warning you though, you’ll be subjected to a lot more of my insane takes on gardening now that I have more time to write about it.

 

You think you’ve seen it all….bikinis in the polytunnel, bare arsed gardening, falling into ponds…but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

 

I’m only getting started.

Citizen Kale

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Ahem. Testing. Testing. *taps microphone*….if there is anybody out there, Fiona is back. Repeat, Fiona is back. Return of the craic.

I know my lovely readers will have been wailing, keening, sweating and puking with severe Fiona withdrawal symptoms of late. I know you have all been sitting at home, wondering where I’ve been; spending your long, empty days and sleepless nights, bereft of my gardening wisdom and wit. I know it has been a long time since I last made you laugh, cry, cringe, roll your eyes, or regale you with tales of my underwear, and for all of those things I am truly sorry. It is the ultimate cruelty to suck you in and then leave you hanging, waiting for just a little hit. I am the world’s top garden blog dealer, El Crapo strikes again.

You see, I am now very famous and important, and as such, I have been too busy being famous and important to spend my time writing for plebs on the internet (this fame is going to my head slightly I think, I still love you all). It hasn’t been easy. I’ve had the traumatic experience of being dragged kicking and screaming to a number of fabulous gardening, food and music festivals in order to talk about food growing and party the night away in forests. It’s been a real struggle as you can imagine.

I’ve given myself repetitive strain injury in my right hand from signing millions of autographs after being featured in an ad campaign for Electric Ireland. My face is sore from smiling for thousands of photographs and my feet are in pain from the horror of dancing the night away in my polka dot wellies at a music festival.

In addition to these very difficult changes in my life, I’ve also been ardently busy on the plot. Take today for example, I had to trek the whole two minutes to get to my allotment, make a latté with the community room’s coffee machine, eat a handful of fresh raspberries, put on my shorts, play some pink floyd, whip out my laptop and sit in the sunshine beside my horrible wildflower patch while I wrote a blog post. I mean, I’m not even sure how I manage to pull myself out of bed in the mornings anymore.

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My disgusting wildflower patch

I’ve even become quite accustomed to having my very own make-up artist, director and crew of photographers and cameramen at the allotment. Well, it happened once. But that was enough to turn me into Dublin’s Digging Diva, I’m all but short of demanding handsome men fan me with palm leaves while I tend to my garden and half expect adoring fans to throw rose petals at me when I walk down the street.

It was a pretty amazing – if not unnerving – experience to have 21 people crammed onto my allotment while I stood in my polytunnel talking about planting spuds. The day of the recording was way back in February, in the depths of the worst spring I’ve ever experienced in my garden and the allotment was an absolute state! Cue much embarrassment on my part, and attempting to explain that gardens in winter are the least glamorous places on the planet.

I mean, I know I am a fan of looking gorgeous in the garden but never before have I worn that much lipstick outdoors. Or indoors for that matter. There was a photoshoot which involved two hours of stroking my rhubarb and looking lovingly at my kale while staring off “into the distance”. The “distance” in question was actually a poor photographer’s face. Picture this: me, bent over my kale, seductively running my fingers through kale leaves, eerie smile plastered on my face while being told to stare into the eyes of a complete stranger. “Look into his eyes Fiona, get your hands in deeper”.

Awkward.

There were hours spent in an attempt to look good while gardening; trowel twerking, hip-wiggle digging, whimsical wheelbarrowing, fastidious fake scrolling on my laptop. I put my hat on. I took it off. I put my hat back on again. I changed my wellies. I changed my coat. I took my hat off again. The film crew descended on my house for an hour where I recorded a series of voiceovers which I absolutely nailed. I was proud as punch of this fact until I realised I was chuffed with myself for simply managing to read things from a page out loud into a microphone. I stabbed myself twice in the eye with the spoon in my cup of tea. More scrolling. Rocked back around to the allotment for lunch, where the lovely crew had gotten in a caterer and we stuffed our faces full of fancy sandwiches, soup and cakes. It really is so challenging being a celebrity. Back to the plot for more filming. Roped my fellow allotment pal, Domo to be on camera with me, we had a twenty minute long fake conversation about fake potatoes. I put my hat back on. I tried not to flash everyone while changing outfits in my shed; the ultimate celebrity gardener green room. All in all, the day was long, exhausting, adventurous and awkward and I loved every second of it. I am now awaiting a phone call from the academy about my well deserved oscar nomination.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBPR760-1Yo&w=560&h=315]

In fact, I’m considering crowdfunding a new movie venture. Fiona Kelly stars in Citizen Kale. The greatest movie ever made. About Kale. Oscar is in the bag!

I have also spent quite a lot of time on stage of late. I was kindly invited back to the GIY Food Matters tent at Bloom in the Park this year where the brave gang at GIY let me loose with a microphone on some poor, unsuspecting festival goers for five days straight. It was one of the best weeks of my life. Mostly, it entailed me brandishing a microphone like a weapon of mass destruction, making terrible gardening jokes and talking filth, being attacked by a wasp in front of an audience and attempting to stay calm, being asked an incredibly challenging question by my Mam in front of an audience and having to admit she knows more than I do and meeting some incredible people and learning more about food growing than I have in five years. There was also a Thursday afternoon thunderstorm during which we all played air guitar on stage to AC/DC. Life goals now complete. Over the five days, I  got to tour the show gardens, make new friends, eat incredible food and soak up the sunshine. It’s hard being me.

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I also had the amazing opportunity to be a part of the wonderful Bloom Fringe Festival but I have a separate blog post coming up about that, and last weekend, I spent a life changing few days at Body & Soul Festival with GIY which I also have a lot to write about so watch out for those over the next few days.

I will say this though, there was a kale ice pop. It was disgusting.

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Sorry Kale, I want a divorce

In the garden itself, it has been a rollercoster in recent weeks. Everything is growing really well for the most part, especially the weeds! I’ve spent three days this week simply pulling up weeds.

Three entire days.

There are still lots of weeds.

As many of you know, a few weeks ago, I experienced something I’ve always dreaded. My allotment was vandalised. I arrived at the plot to find major damage to my shed, polytunnel and raised beds. Most of the plants I had spent all springtime establishing were killed and I lost pretty much everything in the polytunnel. It was disheartening to say the least. It set me back quite a few weeks, but, in an amazing turn of events, my fellow plot holders all banded together, replaced the plastic on my tunnel and gifted me with dozens of plants including tomatoes, courgettes, funkiness (that was supposed to be pumpkins but it’s such a good typo I have to leave it as is) and even some cape gooseberries. Today, my poytunnel is looking better than it has ever looked before. The kindness and generosity of gardeners, has once again, humbled me to my core.

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Step in to my office

My Dad has been an absolute lifesaver throughout the past few weeks, planting, watering and caring for the polytunnel while I had a little meltdown. So, to Daddy Grows Food, the Monster in the Corner himself, I love you and thank you for always having my back.

My raised beds are now full of sweetcorn, peas, beans, kale, cabbages, leeks, pumpkins, spinach, chard, salads and one lone carrot. Yes, my carrots failed miserably and now I have one carrot that I am treating like royalty. I sing to it, talk to it, water it, coax it to grow. I don’t stroke it though, I learned a valuable lesson from the great kale fondling of 2017.

My garden is thriving like never before and it continues to amaze me every single day.

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Except for the weeds. They can f*ck right off.

You can check out recordings of the panel discussions on the GIY soundcloud page, including this recording of a panel discussion I participated in with some amazing people about the healing garden. Mostly I made terrible jokes about beetroot because that is just what I do.

 

Currently accepting applications for the role of Fiona’s allotment make-up artist. I can only pay you a salary of cabbages but you’ll get to touch my lips a lot so you’ll be the real winner. 

Plants Bants: How to Grow Parsnips

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Parsnips are a great divider of opinion, you either love them or you hate them, there is no in between. I happen to adore parsnips, they’re one of my favourite vegetables, especially when roasted with honey and fresh sage.

Parsnips are the vegetable that converted me from a vegetable hater to a vegetable grower so they’ll always have a special place in my heart. I know, that’s a pretty sweeping statement but it’s true. Home grown parsnips are the reason I decided to grow my own food. A number of years ago, my Dad brought home some parsnips from his allotment and I was hooked. They smell and taste nothing like the parsnips from a supermarket and they are my favourite thing to eat in winter, particularly on Christmas day.

I’ve only grown parsnips twice at the plot, mostly because there is a master parsnip grower in my family and I can’t even begin to compete with him and also as there are only so many parsnips that two people can eat (my mother falls firmly into the anti-parsnip brigade).

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Daddy Grows Food’s amazing parsnips in autumn.

Parsnips are the diva of the vegetable garden in that they are stubborn but sweet and absolutely gorgeous. They take about as long to germinate as a good idea for your first novel. Parsnips also require a very long growing season and will take up space in your garden for the guts of a year.

However, parsnips are the crowning glory of the root vegetable family, rich in flavour and a lovely crop to harvest when there is little else growing in winter.

Sowing Parsnips

Seeds

The first hurdle to get over when planting parsnips is to make sure you have good, fresh seeds. Parsnips are notoriously fussy and do not store well, you need to buy new seeds each year. If you try to use seeds that are two years old, you’ve already given yourself an impossible mountain to climb. Don’t set yourself up for failure.

When to plant

As I mentioned before, parsnips need a long growing season but this does not mean planting as early in the year as you like. I’ve seen people sow their parsnips in January and then wonder why they don’t do well. Parsnip seedlings really don’t like cold, wet soil. In fact, they need to be planted in soil that is about 10 degrees so hold off on sowing your seeds until your soil temperatures have risen in Spring.

The ARSE-nip test

There is a great way to test this if you don’t have a thermometer; I call it Fiona’s ARSE-nip test. Basically it is as follows: if your soil is warm enough for you to sit on in your bare arse then it’s warm enough for your parsnips. If you can indeed sit on your soil bare arsed without screaming bloody murder, it’s probably February/March and a good time to sow your seeds.

Gas crack craic altogether.

Soil

Parsnips grow pretty deep so you’ll need well worked, fertile soil with good drainage, avoid using manure as this can cause your parsnips to fork. You’ll need to spend quite a bit of time working your soil to a fine tilth before sowing parsnip seeds.

Plant your parsnips on a day with little wind as parsnip seeds are minuscule and likely to blow away if a strong breeze hits. I once lost an entire packet of seeds in this manner and in the process, created some very interesting new swear word combinations.

Direct sow your seeds in rows about 30cm apart and thin them out once the seedlings have established. The more space you give each plant, the larger it will grown. Bear in mind that they can take up to three weeks to germinate so don’t panic if there’s no activity for a while.

Caring for Parsnips

As I said earlier, parsnips are divas to get started but once you do, they are pretty hardy plants. They require little care, except for some gentle hand weeding and perhaps some serenading. Take care not to damage the roots while weeding. Once parsnips have established, they have quite full, leafy foliage which is very similar to the foliage of celery. This creates a lot of ground cover so they need less weeding once they get larger.

Parsnips do need quite a bit of water and the soil they are in should not be permitted to get too dry. Water parsnips regularly and make sure there is plenty of organic matter in the soil to retain moisture.

Pests and diseases 

Parsnips can be susceptible to a form of rot known as parsnip canker which appears as a rust coloured rot at the top of the plant and causes severe damage to the root of the plant, it’s mostly caused by drought and poor soil conditions.

Harvesting

Parsnips are ready for harvesting when the foliage begins to die back in autumn. However, they taste far better after they’ve been hit with the first frost of winter as the cold turns the starch in parsnip into sugars, giving them their distinctive sweet flavour. For this reason, it’s is ideal to actually store your parsnips in the ground until you are going to use them.

Recommended Varieties: Gladiator, Javelin, White Gem

Pro tip: if you are intending to perform the ARSE-nip test, you could use it as part of your New Year’s exercise regime. Remove underpants, (wellies optional), stand beside your intended planting site and perform twenty squats, touching your bum on the soil with each squat. For an added work out, hold a pot of compost in each hand. You might get some strange looks but you’ll have perfect parsnips and a gloriously toned bottom.

Peachy.

 

A Super Natural Halloween

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Halloween is a scary time of year. Everywhere you look there are horror movies, monsters, ghosts, vampires and zombies. But perhaps the scariest thing about Halloween is that nobody really seems to know what it’s about anymore.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I adore Halloween, it’s one of my favourite times of the year. The golds and reds, the snap of bonfires and fizzle of fireworks, the smell of winter in the air that carries tremendous nostalgia and happy childhood memories. As I’ve gotten older, though it has lost it’s charm.  Grown adults dressed like slutty bathtubs. Kids wearing costumes that cost a weeks wages and complaining when you give them an apple with their sweets. Gone are the days of wearing a black bag or a sheet with holes poked in them and standing by the bonfire eating monkey nuts and toffee apples. Now, it’s a greedy, vainglorious free-for-all that is a stark reminder of just how far we have come from our cultural connections to our food. So, what I’ve decided to do this year, is to have a more traditional Halloween, to bake and cook lots of Halloween food and to harvest all my crops that need to be stored. You can keep your ghouls and give me gourds, for the best thing about this time of year is undoubtedly the food.

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OH MY GOURD!

Halloween is a Celtic pagan festival, celebrating fire and food and the end of the growing year. All Hallows Eve itself was also believed to be the night when the spirits of the dead return home, and I like to think this is actually less spooky and more of a chance to remember the souls of loved ones lost and move into a new year with our demons laid to rest.

In Ireland, Samhain (which means summers end), was the time of year when crops were harvested and gathered for storage through winter, as such, Halloween is essentially, the most widespread harvest festival in the world.

The best food from the garden is in season at this time of year, kale, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, turnips, celery, swedes, pumpkins, squashes. This is all the hearty food, the larder food that will keep you warm in the lean winter months, no wonder our ancestors made such a big deal of it!

Apples are my favourite thing about Halloween. Because they are in season, it’s easier to source locally grown, Irish varieties of apples. They don’t have waxy skin, they’re not too hard, bitter or bland. They haven’t been flown thousands of miles wrapped in plastic and covered in preservatives. Irish apples in October are sweet but tart, a little soft and a little crunchy, with the most beautiful flavour that to me is the epitome of halloween. I always loved finding apples in my swag bag on Halloween, they were nicer then the sweets, the crisps or monkey nuts, apples were my favourite halloween treat and still are.

I happen to be lucky enough to have parents who grow apples. They have two apple trees in their back garden. One grows in an area they’ve dubbed the “Apple Yard”, a square yard bed with a heritage Irish apple tree and loads of lovely herbs growing around it’s base.

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The Apples from the Apple Yard in all their Autumn glory

They also established the Apple Bay in the walled garden where they have their allotment. A beautiful orchard where they have a wide variety of different heritage Irish apple trees growing.

I have a bit of a halloween ghost story for you. The Apple Bay has a poltergeist. Seriously. In recent months, my folks have visited on many occasions, only to find disturbances in the orchard. Four trees have been recklessly cut down. A rose bush has been damaged beyond repair. Spring bulbs have been uprooted. The pathways have been blocked by mountains of muck. I’ve decided that since no real gardener would engage in behaviour that damages a lovely little orchard; I’ve come to the conclusion that while the Apple Bay is most certainly beautiful, it is also most definitely haunted. Spooky. However, despite the ghost, the apple bay remains a beautiful addition to their walled garden and I’m very excited to taste some of the supernatural apples from it this year.

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The haunted orchard

November is the perfect time to plant apple trees and I have a new project for the plot in mind so I’ll keep you all updated on my apple planting adventures next month.

Bobbing for apples is a Halloween tradition that we always played in my house growing up.  Traditionally, the first person to succeed in bobbling for an apple would be the first to be married and if the apple was placed under your pillow, you would dream of your future lover. This is a very promising prospect for me, so this Halloween I fully intend to fill my bathtub with as many (local) apples as humanly possible in order to increase my romantic chances.

In fact, come to think of it, much of the traditional Irish Halloween fare contains elements of romance or good luck so I propose we begin to view Halloween as less scary and more lovely.

Colcannon is something I’ve mentioned on the blog before. Mashed potatoes, onions and curly kale, this dish for me is the epitome of Halloween food. My mam made it every single year on halloween and to this day, it’s one of my favourite things in the world to eat. With potatoes and kale very much in season and a kitchen full of dried onions from the garden, it’s the perfect celebratory harvest dish. Colcannon also contains a super special ingredient that makes it second to none: money. Yum. My kale season is in full swing at the moment, with three varieties and fifteen plants, I’m sure I’ll have enough kale to feed a small army this Halloween.

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A bouquet of kale. (A bou-kale)

Barmbrack also contains gold in the form of a ring. This fruit cake has a gold band baked into it and whoever gets the ring will find their true love in the upcoming year. I’m seeing a trend here lads.

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My teeny-tiny pumpkin patch

Pumpkins are of course, the ultimate Halloween food, with carved pumpkins being the  main halloween decoration in most homes. Pumpkin carving has its origins in Ireland too, except instead of carving pumpkins, our ancestors used turnips, which is truly terrifying.

 Plus, turnips don’t really make a good pie, though fresh milan purple top turnips from the garden are absolutely delicious! I’m going to pop up a post tomorrow about how to grow pumpkins for next halloween so keep an eye out. Though perhaps I may not be the best person for that job. This is my first year growing pumpkins in the garden. I only grew one plant though and while it was meant to be a giant variety of pumpkin, my little pumpkins are very small. Football sized at best.

 

Halloween is the perfect time of year to begin to store your veggies through the winter season. I recently wrote an article in the autumn edition of GIY’s Grow magazine on how to store your veggies for winter so get your hands on a copy if you want some tips on different ways to manage your harvests.

In an effort to really celebrate Halloween food this this year, I propose this: take a step back from the commercial side of the holiday, eat really good food, celebrate your harvest. Take a moment to remember that growing food and harvesting it is a huge part of our cultural heritage and we should celebrate in style. Forget the sweets, crisps, jellies and candy. Eat apples. Eat Kale. Eat pumpkins. Have yourself a super natural Halloween.

I for one, am going to eat lots of barmbrack, colcannon and bob for apples in an effort to increase my chances of marriage and if I still haven’t met my filthy partner in crime by next year, that’ll be the true horror story.

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Plants Bants: How To Grow Overwintering Garlic

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Hello lovely people. It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote anything on here, you might remember I wrote a little post about garden remedies for colds and flu? Well, rather ironically, I ended up with such a bad flu that – depsite all my lovely herbal remedies – morphed into a rather horrible chest infection that had me rather unwell for the past month. I’m happy to say that I’m now on the mend so, I’d like to jump straight back in to this as winter is just about upon us and I’ve had a few requests and enquiries about what plants are good to grow overwinter (quite a few, it turns out). Since I mentioned garlic quite a lot in the post about my plague,  I figured it would be a good place to start.

Garlic is a great all-rounder plant, it’s very easy to grow, packed full of flavour, deters pests in your garden and has antibacterial properties. Most importantly though, and arguably the best reason to grow it, garlic has been proven to ward off vampires and evil spirits, which is pretty nifty at this time of year. There’s nothing worse than spending a day harvesting pumpkins in the garden, only to have it ruined by some pale, moody fella showing up to suck your blood. Gawwwwd.

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Do you have a problem with Vampires? Do you often find yourself searching for vampire deterrents in a panic? Well look no further! My tried and tested methods of garlic cultivation will ensure you won’t find yourself with two holes in your neck and a body drained of blood. Call Fiona today for your free six month trial.

Garlic is a hardy plant that can be planted in February or October, depending on the variety. I like to plant mine in October as it’s always nice to have overwintering crops in the vegetable garden rather than empty space.

Garlic Necks

Much like a vampire, it’s good to know what kind of neck you’re dealing with before you take the plunge. The type of neck really determines the manner in which you will treat your victim crop.

Soft Neck Garlic: Soft neck garlic is the type of garlic you find in most shops. It stores very well and is usually strong in flavour. Soft neck is the more commonly grown type of garlic here in Europe. This may be because soft neck garlic is easier to plait and hang over doors or wear around the neck; and given that we are statistically more prone to vampires than other parts of the world, growing soft neck garlic just makes sense. You know, in a vampire slayer kind of way. On that note actually, I wonder if Buffy considered going into gardening after the hell mouth collapsed? It’s very therapeutic.

Hard Neck Garlic: Hard neck garlic is more similar to wild garlic, it has a richer taste but it doesn’t store as well as the soft neck varieties. Hard neck garlic is more prone to bolting.

Elephant Garlic: Elephant garlic is a bit of a shapeshifter. It looks like garlic, and tastes like garlic but it is actually more closely related to leeks. Wizardry. Elephant garlic has a milder flavour than other garlic varieties.

Where to buy Garlic

Please, please, please do not just buy garlic from your local supermarket to grow in your garden. This garlic is not suited to growing as it’s most likely mass produced and shipped from the other side of the world. If you’re in Ireland, you get lovely garlic bulbs at the moment from Quickcrop or Mr Middleton.

Recommended Garlic Varieties

Marco, Solent Wight, Elephant, Germidour

Planting Garlic

Garlic is a hardy plant that needs a cold snap in order for the bulb to split into cloves, this is why October is a good month to plant it. If garlic plants don’t get a cold snap, they will bulk up but they won’t split properly. When planted this time of year, your plants will have established before the first hard frosts hit in mid to late November.

Garlic is planted by splitting a bulb into cloves. Each planted clove of garlic will produce a full bulb. Space your garlic rows about 30cm apart and space each clove at 20cm. When you plant your cloves, leave the tips just showing above the soil.

I usually place netting over my garlic for the first few weeks until they establish, just incase some pesky birds peck them out of the soil. Watch out for crows, they are known associates of vampires and will endeavour to uproot your garlic when they can.

Garlic doesn’t really like fresh manure or over-fertilisation, so it’s a great crop to grow where you’ve had a hungry crop growing before. Plant garlic where you’ve had your beans or cabbages. Make sure you plant garlic in soil with good drainage to prevent rot. Water your garlic gently after planting.

Caring for Garlic

Like onions, garlic doesn’t like weed competition and mother nature decided to play a hilarious joke on us gardeners by giving garlic little or no ground cover from its foliage, providing the weeds beneath with lots of light to grow. Keep your garlic well weeded in the first few weeks but be careful not to uproot your cloves. Hulk hands are not advised at this juncture.

Garlic only really bolts in hot, dry weather, which is quite likely to happen in winter. Garlic doesn’t require too much water, but make sure the soil doesn’t get too dry.

Harvesting Garlic

Garlic planted in October will be ready to harvest the following June. Garlic behaves just like onions so it will tell you when it’s ready to be harvested, the leaves will turn yellow and flop over. I usually fold over the leaves when they begin to dry. To harvest your garlic, just loosen the soil around the bulb and gently pull the bulbs out of the ground. Let your garlic dry out before storing and don’t forget to hang a bulb over your door to keep the vampires at bay.

Should you encounter a vampire in your home or garden, garlic is one of the best deterrents around, however, I would suggest you also have some holy water and a few wooden stakes to hand. should the need arise. 

The Sudden Season

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There is one week every year, when the summer swiftly shifts gear into autumn. Sunshine takes a backseat to rain, elongated nights overtake the days and while the indicators have been signalling the end of summer for weeks, the seasons change lane in a matter of days. This is no three-point manouvre, no gentle tapping of the brakes, here in Ireland the summer comes screeching to a halt. Here, autumn is the sudden season.

The last yields of summer begin to wither away and as autumn wraps itself around the garden, the industrious gardener goes into overdrive preparing the plot for winter.

The past week has been that week in my garden. The sudden week. The mornings are cold, the evenings are dark and the garden is looking a little worse for wear. I’m clinging to the clutches of summer where I can, but it is decidedly autumnal on the plot. My once glorious rhubarb foliage is turning to brown sludge, the potato bed lies empty and it seems that every single one of my lettuces bolted at once, perhaps very apt considering the athletic year that’s in it. Ladies and Gentlemen, the gold medal in the 100m lettuce race goes to…………Insane Bolts

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Insane Bolts takes to the podium to collect his medal

My summer crops are completely written off; gone are the days of french beans, spring onions, radishes and rocket. R.I.Peas.

Perhaps it is appropriate that the sudden season has arrived on the eve of the equinox – and no matter how many polls my lovely pals over at GIY hold on their twitter about when autumn truly begins – as of tomorrow, there can be no denying that summer has driven off into the September sunsets and we are now facing into the long road to spring 2017.

img_3657Not all is lost however, harvest season is still in full throttle. I’m still picking a stupid amount of tomatoes, I have three large beds still packed full of veggies for autumn and I’ve begun my winter planting in earnest.

 

September is the time of year that separates the fair weather gardeners from the dedicated, year-round gardeners. During the summer, it is easy to spend time on the plot. There’s little rain or wind to contend with and everything looks green, lush and buzzing with life. It’s easy to put on shorts and t-shirts, a trust pair of old runners, crack open a beer, light the bbq and float around the garden at an easy going pace. In autumn and winter though, visiting the plot becomes more of a chore. It requires weather forecast checks, wellies, rain coats, thermal vests, fingerless gloves, fluffy socks and hats. Never scarves though, scarves are a hazard in the garden, all those trailing edges getting caught in gates/doors, I have learned the hard way more than once, not to wear a scarf in the garden.

Gardening in Autumn requires more effort, but the rewards are far more sweet. I adore the dull, quiet, rainy days on the plot, when there’s not a soul around and the plants are laden with rain. I love the smell of the rain, I love how malleable the soil is, I enjoy the sodden solitude of a day on the plot in September. It is eerie, empty, ethereal.

While autumn has parked itself in Dublin for a while, and I begin I root out my trusty fleeces and boots and the holy grail that is thick, black tights, I am busier than ever. The garden needs a serious tidy, there is digging and weeding and raking and composting. There is seed collecting, harvesting, pot cleaning and seed sorting. There is planting, planting and more planting. Despite the fact that summer is over, there are still a lot of crops to grow overwinter and while in previous years, I have often taken a break from the allotment for a month or two, this year I am growing plenty of over wintering vegetables in my garden. I have been planting potatoes for Christmas, spring cabbages, purple sprouting broccoli, mustard and oriental salads and have onions, garlic and broad beans all lined up to plant in the coming weeks. The onset of winter doesn’t mean a barren plot, it means a busier plot, that needs a hard working and dedicated gardener, and those why shy away from the vegetable garden now, suffer the consequences the following spring.

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My Christmas spuds growing strong in September

With the sudden arrival of autumn in the garden, I too am shifting gear, I’ll be spending less time on the plot in the evenings as it will be too dark to visit by the time I finish work. My gardening exploits will be confined to the weekends and I’ll be spending more quality time with cups of tea, duvets and my laptop.

I’m under a promise to the droves of people who voted on my winter-veggie twitter poll (by droves I mean four people, whoever you may be, you four voters mean more to me than ten thousand) to write about how to grow spring cabbages, so that’ll be hitting your screens sometime tomorrow.

September also brings with it some exciting prospects for me. I won a silver award for my blog at the Irish Blog Awards for most innovative blog which is a shock, an honour and privilege and I continue to be amazed that my little gardening blog has had a big impact this year. I know a lot of my readers voted so I’d like to thank you for your support, not just with the votes, but for continuing to read, comment, share and support my silly little gardening adventures. As much as the garden has grounded me in recent years, nothing humbles me more than the kindness of my gardening community, both at the allotments and online. I fully intend to display just how humble I am by introducing myself from here on in as “Fiona Kelly, award winning blogger”.

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I also wrote another article for GIY’s GROW magazine on managing your autumn harvests, making jam and my forthcoming number one Christmas Album. I feel privileged to be asked again to contribute to such a wonderful publication. There’s also a pretty awesome masterclass in there on brewing your own cider and wine, which, let’s face it, is something we can all dig. If you’d like to get a copy of GROW, you can visit www.giyinternational.org

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I also have some other major gardening news coming soon. Life continues to reward me, but the greatest reward still, is the garden itself and as for the garden, it may be autumn but I love her more than ever. I think it’s getting serious now.

You can get me on twitter for more polls, veggie puns and musings about why in god’s name the garlic sauce you get with pizza is better than any other garlic sauce known to man. I’m also on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat as fionagrowsfood if you haven’t had your fill here. FionaGrowsWorldwideEmpire.

Thanks again for all the good vibes. I love you all as much as I love kicking wildly through piles of autumn leaves. 

 

 

Fiona Cooks Food: Courgette & Tomato Soup

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I’ve had a few requests lately for recipes. I have at times shared a recipe or two but I’ve decided to share a recipe a week on the blog in an effort to improve my cooking skills. 

Now, I’m not the best cook in the world (Fiona Burns Food) but I’ve really had to get creative in the kitchen this year as I’ve had so many veggies from the garden. When you grow your own food, it’s just as important to spend time in the kitchen as it is in the garden as it’s pretty redundant to grow vegetables and simply just look at them. 

I am a pretty dab hand at baking as I worked in a bakery for a couple of years (I am the queen of making pastry) so I’ll probably be sharing lots of sweet treats and bread recipes, but this week, I wanted to share a souper summery soup recipe for using up your gluts of courgettes and tomatoes.

This soup is really easy to make and it’s the perfect dish for turning summer vegetables into a warm meal that you can bring to the garden in a flask for a pick me up. Soup is a great way to use up a vegetable glut and can be frozen for up to two months. 

Courgette “Gold Rush”

 

Fiona’s Souper Summer Soup

Ingredients:
600g Courgettes 

600g Tomatoes 

2 Onions

1 Garlic clove

2 Celery Stalks

25g Butter

1 tbsp flour

1 tsp tumeric

1 handful of fresh sage leaves

450ml vegetable stock

Method: 

  • Crush the garlic clove and chop your celery, onions, courgettes and tomatoes. Do not do what I did and accidentally forget to do your prep and find yourself frantically chopping tomatoes while also trying to stir your soup. Stress soup! 
  • Melt butter in a large saucepan and add the onions, garlic and celery and cook for five minutes. 
  • Add chopped courgette and cook on a low heat for ten minutes. This is around the time when your kitchen begins to smell like heaven. Avoid getting your drool in the pot, spit soup hasn’t really taken off as a thing yet.
  • When the courgette has softened, add your chopped tomatoes, flour and sage and stir constantly for five minutes. Do not wander off for five minutes to watch the Great British Bake Off/check the immersion is off/sweep the floor. Do not sweep soup. Valuable life lesson.
  • Pour in the vegetable stock and bay leaf and a teaspoon of turmeric and allow to simmer for 30 minutes.
  • Use a hand blender or food processor to blend your soup.
  • Top with soft goats cheese (optional, I adore goats cheese, be still my bleating heart) and serve. 
  • Pat self on back, eat soup, make lots of appreciative noises, slurp to your heart’s content, then look around at the mess in your kitchen and weep. 


Easy peasy soupy squeezy. Next week I’ll share my lovely minty courgette fritter recipe which I’ve been eating for lunch pretty much every day. Oink. 


Green Manure: Why You Should Grow These Crops In Your Vegetable Garden

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One of my biggest pet peeves in the garden happens right around this time of year when I’ve harvested an entire bed of crops and then it lies empty until the following spring. There’s nothing that annoys me more than an empty bed. Forever alone. Sob. While there are plenty of crops to plant over winter (more on that later),when you have a large vegetable plot, it is inevitable that some of the space in your garden will be unused at different times throughout the year. This is where planting green manure is a godsend for the industrious gardener. 

What exactly is green manure? Nope, it’s not as you might imagine, the product of a pony who’s had too much Thai curry (I’ll let that lovely image sink in for a moment); green manures are quick growing plants to sow in your garden where you have free space in between crops so as not to leave your soil bare. They are then dug back into the soil in as nutrient rich organic matter. Green manures also suppress weed growth in your idle vegetable beds and some varieties even fix nitrogen in your soil. Nifty! 

Green manures prevent the very upsetting but necessary task of covering up your veggie beds with black plastic or mulch over the winter months and look a lot more appealing than sheets of black plastic or beds full of weeds. 

This week, I harvested my onions and potatoes which leaves two of my beds empty until I plant something else in them. The soil in the onion bed isn’t in the best condition after a pretty bad year for onion production so it needs some love. I don’t want to plant my spring cabbages or overwintering onions in that bed as it doesn’t fit in with my carefully planned crop rotation. 

Rather than see this bed lying unused for the next five months, I intend to plant this bed with some green manure. There are plenty of different varieties of green manures and some are an attractive addition to the garden. In my recently harvested onion bed, I’ve decided to grow mustard as a green manure. Mustard is an excellent grower and can be planted between March and September which makes it the ideal for a vegetable bed that is lying idle in August. As a member of the brassica family however, it’s not the best one to use in a bed where brassicas will grow in the following cycle. I’ll let the mustard grow until mid-October then dig it into the top of the soil.

I’ve grown mustard and red clover as green manures before and found it a great way to use my empty raised beds that would otherwise be unproductive.

Benefits of Growing Green Manure

Fertilising

Green manures grow for about two to three months and are then dug back into the soil. This organic matter is absolute gold in a vegetable garden and means you don’t need to use as much of your precious home made compost and is another valuable way to fertilise your soil without resorting to chemical fertilisers (aka pure poison).

Weed Suppressant

Green manures prevent weeds from taking over a patch of soil. I’ve often found that even during the winter months, the weeds keep growing and I have to weed a lot in early spring before planting. Growing a green manure provides ground cover and prevents the dreaded weeds from taking over your beds between crops.

This is what happens when you dont cover up your beds properly. Bad Fiona!


Food for Pollinators 

If you’re a wildlife fanatic like myself and want to have a bee friendly garden, some green manures like clover provide much needed nectar for bees and other pollinators. I’d urge you to plant some clover during the summer if you have an empty bed. We need to do every little thing we can do to help our bees. Added benefit: clover is beautiful and reminiscent of childhood days spent picking it and sucking on the sweet stems  below the flower (yes, I did that, I was one of those kids).


Soil Improvement

Green manures improve the quality of  your soil which is of huge assistance when you’ve had a bad year and your soil is in poor condition. Planting a green manure helps to aerate soil which means far less back breaking digging the following spring. 

Nutrient Fixing

During autumn and winter, rain can wash the nutrients away from the top layers of your soil, which is why we cover our vegetables beds up during winter. A green manure will inject more nutrients into your soil and prevent those vital nutrients already there from washing away.Green manures from the legume family help to “fix” nitrogen in the soil during summer, meaning they take in nitrogen from the air and store it in their roots (further proof that plants are amazing).

Sowing Green Manure

Sow green manure direct where it is to grow. I find it best just to broadcast sow the seeds as opposed to sowing in rows as this cover more ground and provides better weed suppressant. Rake the seeds into the soil and water. The seeds usually germinate very quickly.

Digging In Green Manure
After three months of growth, dig your green manure into your soil while it is still alive and green (it kind of defeats the purpose to let it wither and die). Let the soil rest for about two weeks before planting anything as the green matter can make it difficult for seeds to germinate. 

Popular Green Manures

Mustard: Sow March-September. 

Grazing Rye: Sow September-November. A good choice for an overwinter green manure.

Red Clover:  Sow March-August. This attractive plant is great for pollinators

Buckwheat: Sow April – August. Grows well in poor soil.

Field Beans: Sow September-November. Another great over wintering green manure and as a member of the legume family is high in nitrogen.
Let me know how you do get on if you plant some green manure. Try tasting the clover too, it won’t kill you.

I don’t think I’ll be ordering Thai food for a while though….

Plants Bants: How NOT To Grow Courgettes 

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Last week, I wrote about how to grow your own strawberries and I received a few requests from readers to feature a post on growing courgettes. Courgettes are one of the staples of a vegetable garden, they are prolific croppers and supposedly very easy to grow. 

I had a brief embarrassing moment a couple of weeks ago. I was at the FoodMatters tent at Bloom festival, giving advice on how to grow vegetables in containers, when an audience member asked me about growing courgettes. I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret of mine: I’ve had an absolute disaster of a time attempting to grow courgettes every year. Cue me, standing in front of an audience with a microphone, having to admit that I have in fact killed every courgette plant I’ve tried to grow. 

WANTED Notorious Courgette-Killer-Kelly, for crimes against gardening. So scary you might just wet your plants


In fact, this is the first year I have been successful in my pursuit of these elusive veggies which every other gardener seems to grow with ease. So, in this week’s plants bants, I’m going to talk about how NOT to grow courgettes as I’m pretty sure I’ve done every single thing wrong that you can do and as such, am an expert courgette killer.

Courgettes, also known as Zucchini are prolific growers, producing two or three courgettes per week in the height of growing season. They grow very well in warm climates which is why we often associate them with Mediterranean dishes. Courgettes in fact, originated in Mexico so they need a warm, sheltered spot in order to thrive.

Sowing Courgettes

Courgettes are best started indoors and moved to their final growing spot in June when the chance of frost has passed. Plant one seed about half an inch deep in 7cm pots. The pot size really does matter here as courgettes use up the nutrients in the soil very quickly so don’t plant them in seed modules. Keep the soil moist but don’t over water your courgettes while they are germinating. Keep the pots on a warm windowsill or in a greenhouse/polytunnel. Courgettes germinate very quickly in the right temperature, in fact, mine germinated in three days this year and within a week they were pretty large already. 


Fiona’s crimes against courgettes part one: Not potting on

Because courgettes grow so quickly, they’ll use up the nutrients in these pots in about three weeks so they need to be potted on. This was my big mistake in year one, I had no idea they would grow so large so quickly and left them in the small pots for about 6 weeks, causing the plants to become too large for the pots and the stems to snap. Heart. Broken. 
You’ll need to transfer your courgettes to larger pots. 

Courgettes get too big for their boots (roots?) and need more space to grow. Much like my efforts to squash myself into skinny jeans in winter, there’s no point in squashing your courgettes into tiny pots that don’t fit them anymore. Nobody wants muffin-top plants, and seeing that there’s no weight watchers or slimming world for plants, simply go large or go home. Use a good quality organic, nutrient rich compost and keep your courgettes well watered. Keep the plants indoors until all chances of frosts have passed. Young courgette plants hate frost. This leads me to my next sin…

Fiona’s crimes against courgettes part two: Not hardening off

My second attempt at growing courgettes was going really well. I had potted them on, kept them well watered and the plants were huge. I had decided to grow them outdoors, courgettes do well outside in our climate as long as they are not planted out in cold weather and the plants are hardened off. Hardening off plants that have been grown indoors is essential if you are transferring them outside.

I eagerly planted out my courgettes on a warm summers day and within three days, the weather turned colder, my courgettes went into shock at the temperature change and simply withered away and died. Devastated.

Check out my guide to hardening off your seedlings here.

Fiona’s crimes against courgettes part three: Not watering regularly

Once established in the ground, courgettes need plenty of water. Two years ago, I was having major success with my courgettes. I had potted them on, hardened them off, planted them out all with success, everything was going swimmingly, until I broke my foot. I was unable to visit my plot regularly, meaning I was unable to water my plot regularly and my beautiful courgettes once again died. Water your courgettes every day, but water the base of the plants to direct the water to the roots. Under watering courgettes will prevent them from bulking up. 

Pro tip:  It helps to avoid smashing your bare foot off a door frame.

Fiona’s crimes against courgettes part four: Not spacing them out

Courgettes grow very large with a huge leaf spread so need lots of space between plants. Leave about a metre between each plant, this might look a bit ridiculous when they are small plants but trust me, they will take over this space in no time. Their large leaf spread also creates a haven for slugs, which brings me to…

Fiona’s crimes against courgettes part five: Not protecting my plants

Last year, I decided to double my chances of success by planting courgettes both outdoors and in the polytunnel. Clever Fiona. Alas, I never foresaw the complete destruction of the polytunnel courgettes by slugs. It is essential to go on regular slug patrol and take whatever steps you can to keep them from your plants, beer traps, coffee grounds, crushed egg shells, whatever it takes.

The great courgette slug demolition was the moment I decided I might have to hang up my trowel. I’d been told that courgettes where the easiest thing in the world to grow and three years on the trot I’d murdered mine from lack of knowledge or proper care.

This year, all has changed. My courgettes are thriving in the polytunnel. I’m keeping them well watered, protecting them from slugs using coffee grounds (more on that in a later post) and singing to them regularly, it can’t hurt right?

I have of these monsters in the polytunnel


Courgette Crop Care and Tips

Because of our temperate climate, we often have to give courgettes a helping hand when growing outdoors. If you have the time, make yourself a hot bed for your courgettes. Prepare the bed in spring, dig about a spades depth into the bed. Fill the hole up with well rotted manure and cover with compost. The manure heats up the soil creating a hot bed for your plants and also provides the fertile-rich soil that courgettes love.

Protect your courgettes in colder climates with a cloche or plastic sheeting.

Courgettes are hungry plants so will benefit from mulching. Please, I implore you as always NOT to use a chemical fertiliser. Use seaweed, comfrey, nettle feed, ANYTHING but a chemical based fertiliser! 

Harvesting 

Plants should produce two or three courgettes a week in good conditions. Harvest the courgettes when they are still small as this is when they taste best. You can of course leave the courgettes to grow into huge marrows but they taste awful and as much as its great fun to grow giant marrows, it’s a bit pointless growing inedible food in my humble opinion.

Did you know? You can eat courgette flowers. They are delicious stuffed with cous cous or cheese and tossed in a light batter and fried. Bliss.

If you’ve any tips for me on growing courgettes, let me know, I need all the help I can get so I don’t end up incarcerated for a courgette serial-killing spree.