Beer Ball

Hi everyone, it's been a while since I've blogged about anything, but I'm going to try doing a few updates a week from now on, especially for the folks in Australia.

This is a picture from a softball tournament my team hosted this weekend in Finsbury Park. It's called Beer Ball and the rules say that you have to have a beer in hand from the early morning, and you have to chug it if you do anything stupid. And if you do something particularly stupid, like getting the start time of the tournament wrong and showing up after the first game was finished, oops, you get spun around in the air while chugging. Also you had to play with a ridiculous hat on and every now and then you would have to do pretty unhelpful things, like batting left-handed and everyone swapping fielding positions. It was great fun, and only one injury; poor Claire hurt her ankle pretty bad tripping over one of the bases and got carted off to hospital.


From now on I'll be adding posts to our old London Blog

First Harvest Food!

Celebrations and high fives all round! This is the first meal prepared with freshly grown and picked harvest. We had a few tiny little leeks from pots last year and Guy and Sarah grew potatoes in their garden, so they managed to pick 6 lovely potatoes and maybe 4 tiny pencil sized leeks and make this delicious soup! Very well timed too, as now everything is covered with a few inches of freak snow!

Carrot Seedlings!

These are some other seedlings we planted in early January. As you can see in the picture they are in little pots made of newspaper. I treated myself to a gardening kit for christmas and one of the things that came with it is a paper potter. It is used to turn old newspaper into little seedling pots - the business! I made them as tall as possible - they are around 6 inches high and around 2 inches wide.

There is mold growing on all the pots at the moment - it's the furry stuff in the picture. This is totally fine and won't harm the plants. It's the combination of compost, paper and wetness. I'm probably over-watering them so it'll dry out when I get the balance right.


January is very early for planting carrots though and most people I asked about it said that Febuary even was pushing it a bit, so I don't have a huge amount of hope for the little guys. Carrots have a thing called a tap root - a long, fast growing thin white root that goes straight down. This then swells over the growing season to become the carrot. If the carrot doesn't have enough room to grow down then the tap root gets twisted leading to some crazy mutant shaped carrots. The worry is that the root will reach the bottom of the pot long before it's warm enough to plant them out.

Here we have yellow carrots 'Jaune Obtuse de Doubs', regular orange 'Nantes' carrots, red 'Samurai' carrots and finally purple 'Purple Haze' carrots. The full carrot rainbow!

Aubergines

Aubergines are among the seeds that we planted in early January. These little fellas went in on the 5th. I read in my veg magazine (I'm a veg nerd) that because our summers are so short, it's important to get aubergines going indoors so that they are ready to fruit the second it is sunny enough outside. They are slow growing so should be manageable enough indoors till April. Me and Hugh have a really sunny windowsill they can live on in the meantime.


This is how big they are now. As soon as a few appeared I took of the plastic lid and as soon as the little guy in the middle is a bit bigger I'll put them in their own little paper pots.

I got the seeds from Real Seeds, and they are of the variety "Diamond".

Seed Planting!

I started off a pile of seeds a few weeks ago and they are now starting to look like proper seedlings! I'll put pictures up of them later but for now I wanted to show what I've been planting them in.

This is the style of pot that Wasabi restaurants use to sell their soya beans in. They are perfect for starting plants from seed. The plastic cover acts as a mini-greenhouse, and they are just the right size for getting around 8 seeds planted!

We have red onions, spring onions, leeks, aubergines, carrots, peas and sunflowers started this way. The peas and sunflowers are huge and are hardening off in our freezing cold kitchen before we put them in the greenhouse for the final hardening off. After a few weeks there they should hopefully be ready for planting in the real world!

Pea Shoots!

This is what is keeping me sane while the weather is too freezing to go outside growing anything - Pea Shoots.

Below is a picture of the little fellas being planted. I soaked the peas (regular pea seeds) in water for an hour and then popped them into a little seedling tray, around a cm deep and covered them with compost. When they started appearing i put the whole round of compost with all seedlings into a bigger pot and voila - here they are growing happily in the top picture!

When they get to be a few inches high, cut them down to around an inch and eat the tops. They are nice flavourful little salad leaves. The stalk is nice too. They will grow back again a number of times before they start giving up the ghost.

Beans for Everyone!

We planted a selection of beans around a month ago. We cleared around a foot of space on both sides of the bean support and mixed in a good lot of compost.

The first to be planted was a few seedlings from a clleague of Hugh's. These are at the back of the line in the picture here. I'm not sure what form of beans they were, but we'll soon find out. They look happy enough in their new home. They haven't grown any taller, but the weather has been very cold.


The next was a selection of broad beans from an allotment neighbour of ours. These are the big ones in this picture. These are moldy as they have been getting wet, but when we planted them they were all perfect. Our neighbour had milions of the seeds and said that we could plant them in August. He said to plant 2 together, with the split in a certain direction. We forgot what direction he said, so we planted them split down. Hopefully this was correct. We planted the rest of this side of the support with these beans, and half of the other side too.

We also replanted the beans that were growing on the climber when we got it. These are the white ones in the picture. I think these are some form of french bean, as they look like a picture I saw on some seed packets recently. We planted these over half of the far side of the support. Now we'll definitely need another structure!