how my garden is growing..

We've been growing our own for a few years now and we are getting the hang of it with things we have grown before. This year our sucesses are purple basil, oregano, the chili plant, rhubarb, courgettes and hopefully the tomatoes - no harvest of those yet.

Super fail has been the beans (just leaves, no buds?), spuds (too dry, very small spuds) and raspberries (just super duper fail, birds aren't even eating the meagre fruits).

Also our plum trees are doing really really well, we'll have lots of them in a couple of weeks (hopefully the wasps won't get there first), and blackberries are looking well for the Autumn. I'll be making more jam again!

We are hoping to grow into autumn too, with some leeks going in this week, and I need to research whether I am too late for autumn squashes.

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first harvest - courgette and blossom pizza

Things are moving slowly in the garden this year, we've just harvested the first vegetables (ok actually we harvested some potatoes but the crop wasn't so great this year) - some teeny courgettes and some of their flowers too.

This is our first time growing courgettes successfully, last time we happily put them in the bed straightaway and they got eaten up very quickly! These were grown in the greenhouse first off and then planted out in a big pot once they were bigger. The plant has been slow moving in this weather but we've had a bit of rain now and it is growing much faster - we might even have one of these courgette gluts everyone is always going on about?

I chopped up the courgettes finely and put them on top of my favourite pizza base recipe with the flowers on top of those whole (stalks removed).

Pick the flowers in the morning or midday when they are fully open, dip them in a bowl of water to remove the little black bugs that courgette flowers attract. Then store them in a bowl of colder water in the fridge until you are ready to use them.

We treated them to some nice laverstoke mozarella and lots of herbs from the garden (sage, basil and oregano).

Such a summery meal, the taste of homegrown courgettes is nothing like the watery supermarket ones!
The flowers are lovely like this too, they are very courgetty (is that a word?) but also beautifully floral. Yum!
I am going to try them stuffed with cream cheese and deep fried soon too.

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Spuds..

So we’ve had our first crop of potatoes! I love proper homegrown potatoes, apart from tasting about a hundred times better than anything you can buy in the shops, they are so very easy to grow, we’ve never failed at potatoes (same can’t be said for other things we have grown before). We got 4lbs from our plants this year, so that will last us quite a long time. Check back for more progress, our salads are coming along nicely as is the tomato plant –which seems to be yielding one very huge tomato rather than lots of them.

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