Apple Harvest

I know, I know, you were expecting a post on upcycling a bed into a raised bed this weekend.  I have actually finished that project now and it looks great, but I've been so poorly with tonsilitis that I've not had a chance to write it up yet. I'll try to get that written up this week ready for you to have a go next weekend if you want to.

In the meantime thought I'd pop my head round the door and show you our latest harvests.

After the hackening our tomatoes have started to ripen. I managed to catch a picture of some of them before they were devoured by my children. People keep asking me if they taste better than supermarket ones but I couldn't tell you because the children haven't let me have one yet!

As you can see, some of them are still green and on the vine.  That's because I accidentally broke that vine when trying to reach a ripe tomato.  I've put it in the basket with some ripe ones to ripen on the windowsill. In the next couple of days, before the frosts arrive, I'll be cutting all of the vines and hanging them in the window to ripen. Those that don't ripen will be made into green tomato chutney. I've never tried to do that before so if I end up making some I'll talk you through the process.

Our main harvest today was apples.

It's hard to believe all of those apples came from one dwarf tree! I'll be saving the best to try and store for the children's packed lunches, but will be making most into apple pies, apple sauce, and pectin for jams  and jellies (if I can work out how to store it, since we have no plums this year to make into jam). I really want an apple press! Pressed apple juice is my favourite, and cider one of few alcoholic drinks I actually like.

The tree looks relieved to have given up her fruit, she was so laden down her top branches were almost touching the floor. 

I've left a few of the more manky looking apples at the base of the tree to rot down over winter and feed the insects (so therefore the birds) and the soil, and after picking them all I gave the tree the same organic feed to give to the tomatoes, mixed with rain water. That's not a gardening tip - it's really more of a witch thing to want to thank the garden after harvest - but I've always given my trees a feed or a mulch after they've given me fruit, and they've always seemed grateful for it. Just remember if you're mulching a tree - whether that's with cut grass, bark mulch, leaf mold, or manure - not to let the mulch touch the trunk/stem itself.  It'll make the trunk soggy and that could lead to disease or damage. Leave the trunk a little room to breathe, the worms will take the mulch down into the soil for you to release the nutrients around the roots. 

Now is also a good time to check your fruit trees for any signs of damage (when the tree is heavy  with fruit and it's windy you can end up with split or snapped branches) and tend to it now before winter sets in.

It's new moon here (or close enough for my purposes) so I'm going to try planting some peas to see if they'll overwinter. I'm doubtful but I've read up on it and the variety 'Meteor' is supposed to be very hardy, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Happy growing!

In The Beginning...

The Kitchen Witch's Garden

Most of the people reading this blog will have come over from twitter, where my kitchen garden journey began under the hashtag #VsBoringGardenTweets. Those folk will have to forgive me for going over old ground here while I catch you all up with the story so far.

I moved to my current home about 10 years ago. Before this place we lived in a tiny flat with a shared garden we weren't allowed to cultivate, so when we were given a small front yard and medium sized back garden we were really excited. Ha!

We planted three "dwarf" fruit trees (more on those later) out back, then focused on trying to make the front garden neater. I had visions of restoring what had obviously once been a beautiful cottage garden. My dreams were quickly swallowed by bindweed, brambles, and ground elder. In the end I rescued what I could (a few of the giant daisies and the fuchsia) and plonked them in the back garden, then ripped up what was left, covered it in weed suppressing material and topped it with gravel. I was gutted - I try hard to work with Mother Nature rather than against her, and a sea of stone chips isn't exactly environmentally friendly. It felt like a huge fail, and that my dream of wandering through my kitchen garden, deciding what was for tea based on what was ripe, was destined to stay just that-a dream.

Disgruntled, disenchanted, and more than a little daunted, I ignored the back garden completely. For about a decade.

You know what happens when you ignore a garden for 10 years? Mother Nature gets to work.

The pic above shows about a quarter of the garden before I started working on it, but the photo doesn't really do it justice. The brambles were taller than me (I'm 5'3") and as thick as my wrist. I had no money, no skills or expertise, and no tools to speak of.

The advantage to starting with an absolute mess though, is that whatever you do, you can't really make things worse. Armed with some kitchen scissors, a small hacksaw, and a lot of determination, I went in. A full-on smallholding wasn't going to create itself (and a fully self sufficient one is likely not possible on the little land I have) but I could make a start.

I didn't know I was going to be blogging our journey to a kitchen garden when I started, so unfortunately I didn't take many pictures of the clearing out process.

I chopped everything to the ground with my trusty kitchen scissors and an elderly hacksaw. It won't lie and say it was easy, it was horrendous. A few days in though, I was lent an electric hedge trimmer. That made the process much quicker and, despite having a budget of basically nothing, I decided that was an investment worth making, so I bought one of my own. That made the whole process much easier and quicker and, despite having cut myself to ribbons on brambles and not having a single speck of my body that wasn't covered in nettle rash, I managed to get most of the brambles, ivy, nettles, and bindweed cut to ground level. I felt like a superhero, and my garden felt huge.

I had no idea what to do next, so I appealed to twitter to give me no-budget garden tips. Turns out, the gardening community are absolutely adorable and love nothing more than helping a clueless novice like me get growing.

I was inundated with advice, and given some seeds, gloves and even some gardening tools. Definitely easier than trying to dig with a tablespoon and prune with kitchen scissors.

My shed is currently full of old junk that I couldn't take to the tip, so I decided to reuse what I could, both to save money, and as an attempt to make less of an impact on the natural world. I didn't take pics of the process (although I'll try to make you a step by step guide for a future post) but I turned a couple of broken drawers and old bookshelves into raised beds/planters, and turned my youngest's old cot into a pea trellis.

When I was done clearing and building some beds, it looked something like this:

Hard to believe it's the same section of garden, isn't it?

The path was already there (which was news to me), but the rest if it was built by me, over the course of a couple of weeks.  In the top left of the picture, you can see the base of the cot leaning against the house. I dug the bottom of it in to stabilise it and that will (hopefully!) be the trellis for my jasmine plants to climb up.

Below that in the pic, still on the left, you can see the old bookcases I made into raised beds.  The bed next to them is where the giant daisies and fuchsia from the front garden were dumped, and you can see a planter with some strawberries in, and a green bag that has seed potatoes in.

On the top right of the image is the pea trellis I made out of the cot sides (I'll do a detailed post about that in the near future) and below that is the raised beds made of old drawers. It wasn't too bad as a quick bodge, but I'll be doing my future raised beds differently.

The garden is a huge work in progress still. We've learned what works, what definitely doesn't, and why, pretty as it undoubtedly is, we hate bindweed. We've had some excellent crops and some epic fails, and learned a lot about the needs of our particular garden. I'll try and catch you up with the story so far in future posts.

Next year, I want to go all out, and turn about half the garden into a fully functioning allotment. I till have no idea what I'm doing (although I feel more confident in my ignorance now), I still have no money, and this very "helpful" beast

has decided that he really likes digging too. But the benefits, for my mental health, for my physical health, for my children's newly found tolerance of vegetables, and for the local wildlife, far outweighs the nettle rash, bad backs, and epic pintrest fails.

I've loved growing some food this year, and feeling closer to the earth. Hopefully now I have the skills under my belt to scale everything up -or learn a few hundred more ways that don't work.

Come along with me as I battle bindweed and brambles and try to turn my neglected garden into a functional kitchen garden on a shoestring, without upsetting Mother Nature too much.