Harvest overwintering onions and Garlic now

Hard at work harvesting in the VEC garden

Time to do a litle bit of digging. I have been reading that over-wintering garlic will not grow past midsummer(June 21st) so harvest it now, give it time to dry off and start using it right away. Apparently main crop (spring sown) Garlic should be harvested before the end of July too. Not sure if I have ever harvested them that early but I'm giving it a go this year and we will see how it works out. Overwintering onions are ready now too, their round bodies should be sitting up on the soil, leaves and stalks bent over, as if to say-pick me! I'm ready.

Last week the lads harvested both from the VEC garden amid messing and laughing-it's hard to keep them focused on the task at hand for very long. They did manage to hold it together for long enough to measure the yields in quantity and weight and we had a good discussion about the drying off part which is really the most important.

onions and garlic laid out on the bed

When you are drying maincrop onions and garlic you must treat it as a long term job. First you pull up the crop, if the weather is fine you can leave them lying on the top of the bed for about two weeks to do the initial drying. In bad weather you will have to take them into a tunnel, a cold frame, or at the very least onto dry ground where they wont get rain for a few weeks. After that first drying take them to the north side of your house, on a sheltered dry spot, dry them out for several more weeks until the skins turn papery and the neck of the onions in particular are very thin and dried out. They must get to this extremely dried out atage to store well for the winter.

If you can't work-eat

I'm on holidays, well sort of, in between correcting homework, perusing new curriculum's, feeding house guests and at times trying to hide down the bottom of the garden from phone calls and emails(made a bit difficult by the incredibly miserable weather we are having). Maybe I should go on a real holiday-you know somewhere far away, but what would the veg do without me? As any gardener knows you can't go away, not from May to September anyway!

Yesterday was a washout. Are we getting used to this? No! we are still optimistically waiting for Summer to arrive? of course we bloody are -any day now. Dace says the best thing about Irish weather is how fast it can change, and today is a big improvement over yesterday, so maybe she's right.

Dace spent yesterday cleaning up her new bike

The only thing to do on wet days is to cook and eat. By a happy coincidence I caught Hugh F Whittingstall on Sunday evening on more4 doing a whole series at river cottage on veg. Everything looked amazing,and pretty easy too, and it's not geared as veg to go with meat so much as self contained meals for vegetarians. As Dace is a vegetarian and yesterday was so miserable we made a fritatta recipe from the series for lunch. We amended the original slightly using new potatoes, the first courgettes, and baby broad beans-it was absolutely delicious with a lovely garden salad and Daces home made pesto. Later on for dinner we got some fine big Irish tomatoes, some Aubergines, and Irish peppers in Tipp town.We put them together with more courgettes from the garden, onions and garlic from the VEC garden, red wine vinegar and sugar to make a delicious ratatouille, served of course with a big pot of home grown spuds.God it was delicious, I forgot all about the weather.

Rain, what rain?

Courgettes at about the right size for picking

Courgettes; pick them small and pick them often. Don't believe those people who tell you about stuffing and roasting over sized ones in the oven and how utterly delicious they are. It really doesn't matter because I guarantee you'll never get round to it!

Blackbird invasion on the fruit bushes

blue scare tape, makes a weird anti-bird  noise

Those bastards of birds have appeared in droves, attacking Logan berries, gooseberries (only the sweet ones of course), blueberries and anything else vaguely looking ripe and ready. I am ready to Murder, all sorrow for last weeks bird casualty is gone! that's for fecking sure!!!

Out with the scare tape, and the nets and a shotgun if I had one. Ginger is one cat too few, I need an army of angry cats to keep these flying pests at bay. Where could I get an army of angry cats I wonder?

The scare tape is up and they just ignore it. Now its causing me trouble ducking and diving underneath and around it. Its constantly bloody raining so I cant pick the fruit for jam!!! Arragh!! in desperation I go out in the rain and pick the sweet gooseberries. At least we can eat those in the next few days. God I hate the bloody blackbirds!

To kill Green fly or not?

Greenfly colony on broad bean tips

Summer is great but its also when all your main pests arrive. Very often advise dispensed by learnered scholars in books about what to do with an invading pest army arrive goes against your own good common sense and better judgement. And because we are conditioned to believe "experts" and not trust our guts we often do things we would rather not do.

I had just put down Amateur Gardening and was reading Anne's column about aphids on broad beans when  I noticed clusters of greenfly (not the usual black bean aphid) on the growing tips of all the broad beans. The typical advise is to pick off the tips and dump them, taking the munching horde of invaders with you. But after breaking off the first few tips I found myself face to face with a fat contented ladybird and realised she was already hard at work destroying the new greenfly colonies. On the other side of the bed I found hover flies darting in and out of the broad beans grabbing greenfly for a lunch on the go!

Does it make sense does to go out spraying even harmless soap based mixtures on pests, or breaking off the growing tips, when you can allow a natural food chain to work on your behalf ?
Aphids are the Junkies (and sluts! they reproduce at savage speed) of the insect world-they carry around diseases from plant to plant. Chocolate spot, the black death of broad beans, is often transmitted by them. That's the real fear behind getting aphids on broad beans, not that they are sucking sap out of the plant but that they are spreading an incurable disease while they are at it.

Fear has the world gone mad, I think I'll just take my chances. These are mature plants with really good pods filling with beans.I left my ladybirds and hover flies to it and I will keep an eye on things to see how it goes. By the way Anne's advise on the topic was very good;

1 If the beans have set pods and you have ladybirds taking care of the problem don't worry about it too much, keep an eye on it, but natural predators should sort the problem out.

2 If the plants are just flowering do control the problem as aphids can infect and distort the flowers and later pods.

Amen sister.

Baby Broad Beans

Delicious!!

One of the cool things about growing your own food is deciding at what stage you want to eat it.Could you walk into the supermarket and buy baby broad beans? not a hope, and if you're shopping in Limerick forget broad beans altogether, apart from an unusual Green grocers in Newcastle West nobody else I know has them for sale.

Granted broad beans are not exactly the sexiest veg known to man(or woman) but they are extremely good. I like them at all stages, small young and green with a soft sweetness, fully grown up and mature with a pleasant mushy peas texture, and at all the stages in between.Still, I somehow find it hard to convince other people to try growing and eating them. Why is that?

Picking broad bean pods, just twist them off the main stem

The first lot of Oldambaster are podding up nicely and I picked them the other day, more out of impatience than anything else, dying for something fresh in the pea and bean department to go with lamb chops and our own new potatoes. They were small, bright green and incredibly soft. Seamus shocked me by deciding he was totally enamoured with them, and commanding that henceforth no mature broad beans shall cross the kitchen floor en-route to the pot.Quite a turnaround for someone who just about put up with them up to now.

For those of you trying out broad beans and hey! other pea and bean family members for the first time pick them young&tender not starchy and mature and you may convince your picky family members to like them too.

Managing Blight

From this.....

to this!

If you get Blight there is only one way to manage it, cut down all your potato stalks to the ground and the spuds underneath should be fine for a few weeks after.When you are cutting the stalks down keep your eyes peeled. If any of the stalks have begun to rot then the tubers underneath may be infected too, and cutting off the stalks won't stop one rotting lot of spuds from infecting its neighbours.If any of the stalks are mushy, have yellow leaves or look slimy dig out the spuds underneath too. Otherwise all your spuds may rot.

It was with a heavy heart that I cut down all of my potato stalks in the first early bed. Don't get me wrong I'm used to doing this job as I get blight every year without fail. But this time it was different because for the first time I noticed the whole plethora of life living in and under the potato jungle canopy, and it broke my heart to destroy the Eco system of so many small insects.

Moths like to rest in cool undergrowth during the daylight hours

There were ladybirds on the leaves, moths resting in the cool shade underneath, spiders, centipedes, earthworms, all living on the cool spud forest floor. In 10 minutes their nice potato forest was reduced to bare earth! I know it's no use feeling bad about it, blight was spreading too quickly between plants, the weather conditions driving it forwards with no let-up in sight. In a short time the whole bed would have been reduced to a mass of rotting stalks with that terrible rotting blight smell that makes me think of the famine.So-far, fingers and toes crossed, my main crops are unaffected, but the second Earlie's are showing the first signs so they too will be chopped to preserve the crop underneath and act like a fire break in stopping it spreading on further. Another forest ecology to be destroyed. I find it all quite depressing.

Unlucky bird

Ordeal almost over-just a little netting bound on the right wing

The whole point of growing fruit is the opportunity to eat it. Unfortunately the birds think I'm growing it for them. And so at this time of the year a small war breaks out. Me V's the birds, all over soft fruit.

This evening coming up the avenue I spotted the cage over a lone red currant was twitching violently. Once I parked up and walked back over a very unfortunate black bird had gotten himself well and truly tangled in my net while busy robbing a branch close to the edge of the fruit cage. He was going demented trying to get himself out, but each frantic flutter was making him weaker and tangling him up even more. I'd feel bad for him but these feckers regularly clean me out.

I couldn't for the life of me get him to calm down. Each approach made him squawk like mad and fight even harder. In  the end I gave up. Freeing Birds, even blatant robbers like black birds is a two man operation.

A few hours later Seamus was back and we tackled him together. He held him still while I cut (my fecking net) to free him. Towards the end of the operation he began to close his eyes-never a good sign, it was obvious the fight was going out of him, he probably had become too exhausted to make a good recovery. That said at one stage he took a swipe at me and I nearly hit seamus with the knife I jumped so badly.His fate was sealed when he was finally freed. He hobbled badly across the lawn unable to fly, leg broken and a wing damaged. Seamus put him up in the field away from where Ginger might find him. To die in peace.

This is the hard part about gardening. Sometimes your own actions directly result in the death of something else. Even if the something else is a thieving bastard.