Salad Lunch

With small amounts of space you can grow several vegetables that are quick to grow and don’t require a lot of maintenance. Before I put up my polytunnel I had 4 vegetable beds that were about 3 foot by 4 foot each.

Being able to go out and pick some fresh veg to make a quick lunch makes growing your own worth the effort.

The tricky ones here are the tomatos and cucumbers, they don’t like the wet, windy and sometimes cool summer temperatures that we can get in the summer time in the north west of Ireland. You could certainly put up a small polytunnel to grow the vegetables or keep them in your conservatory if you have one.

When you can make yourself a great healthy lunch to get some of your 5 a day, the effort is worth it. Just go and pick what you have, throw in a bit of olive oil, salt, your favourite cheese and some balsamic vinaigrette and your ready to eat.

Vegetables Grown

Vegetable	Supplier	Notes
Cayenne Pepper	Suttons	I started these plants off indoors in March and transplanted them outside in June. Growth has not been great as I was quite late putting them out. Having said this though, I have a continuous small supply for the last 3 months and there are plenty more on the way.These will turn red if left long enough on the plant. The green ones are still quite hot. The taste of them are amazing compared to the ones I can buy off the shelf in the supermarket.
Marketmore Cucumber	Mr. Fothergills	I was late getting these plants going and they did not get into the ground until the end of August. I have gotten several cucumbers and there are plenty more on the way.
Carrot Rondo	Suttons	These are a special type of carrot that produces small round roots as you can see in the picture. I planted these in July and am now harvesting them. So that’s about 10 weeks from planting the seeds to harvesting the carrots.
Peas	Suttons	I planted these in July and growth has been very slow until I put them in the polytunnel. Now that they are sheltered from the wind the growth is really taking off. I don’t have many pea pods so I just pick the ones I have and throw them in a salad.
Spinach	Suttons	Plenty of spinach is growing and I am harvesting leaves every day and having them for lunch.
Lettuce	Suttons	These leaves are nice but I think I prefer the lettuce that produces a head like Little Gem.
Roma Tomato	The Organic Centre	I started these plants off indoors in March and transplanted them outside in June. I did not harden them off and the leaves went translucent and I thought the plants were going to die. The came back fine and there have been plenty of tomatos the last few weeks. They have been late to mature and I put this down to the stress I put them under by not hardening off the plants properly.

The harvest fresh from the garden.

The vegetables chopped up with dressing and into the bowl. Nice.

Spinach Fritatta

Spinach is a lovely vegetable to grow. It’s low maintenance and is one of the leaf vegetables that can be continually harvested. You can cut these outer leaves as and when they are ready and more will grow from the center of the plant.

I sow these seeds from suttons.co.uk

I planted mine outdoors in July this year and I have been picking leaves off the plants since the beginning of September. Growth has been good the over the last few weeks and now that the polytunnel is up, I expect to be picking leaves for the forseeable future.

I have a leaf or two of this on my lunch sandwiches or chopped up in a salad. If you want to cook with your spinach, here is a handy recipe that takes less than 10 minutes to make.

I am a fan of Jamie Oliver so I used this recipe from his website: Veg Frittata

Refactoring the recipe:

• I like to slice up a tomato and lay them flat on the frittata and push them into the mix before I cook it on the stove
• Some say that spinach can have a slight bitterness when they grow large. If you find that your leaves are not quite sweet enough, put 200 ml/6 oz of fresh cream into your egg mix and that will make up for any bitterness lingering from the large spinach leaves
• If you don’t have any feta cheese then cheddar is also a good substitute. Some people find feta cheese to be quite a heavy taste so cheddar might smooth the taste out

Spinach is one of those vegetables that reduces quite a lot when cooked. You might think you have too much for your frittata but when it cooks down you think you don’t have enough.

The frittata has cooked on top of the stove and is ready to be put in the oven now to finish it off.

A pan full of spinach. You might see this amount and think you have to much.

The spinach reduces greatly after a couple minutes of cooking. So don’t be shy with the spinach.

Cucamelons

I do like to try new fruit and vegetables and as I was browsing the suttons.co.uk seed catalogue earlier this year I came across the James Wong Range and these Cucamelon seeds. I remember seeing these growing in the “wild” where I grew up in Port Orange, Florida. We just thought they were weeds and used pick the little melons and throw them at each other. No one was ever brave enough to eat one, not even on a dare.

It’s was probably too late in the year to plant them but I did sow 3 seeds just to see what might happen.

I don’t even know if we will like them. So far they have required very little maintenance and I now have 3 plants that are covered in little melons. I have high hopes that they will be nice since the plan is to have these to snack on like grapes.

I planted these on July 30th in pots of compost and placed them in my office window. It’s now October and they are happily growing away. Next year I will start them off earlier and grow them in the polytunnel as well. I hope that some of the melons on the vine will fill out and ripen . I’ll let you know what happens.

The cucamelon plants about 4 weeks after planting.

There are dozens of these small melons on the plants.

More small melons.

Plenty of melons.

The cucamelon plants are growing very well in the window.

 

 

Veggies like being spaced out

Due to the limited space I had in my temporary vegetable beds, I decided to sow my vegetable seeds quite thickly. You know, the spacing listed on the back of a seed packet isn’t there just to fill up the space on the back of a seed packet.

There are many reasons for properly spacing out the seeds. Some that I have noticed are:

• Crowded plants don’t grow as quickly as those with plenty of room
• You will end up with one dominant plant overshadowing other smaller plants. You’re really just wasting seeds by doing this
• When it comes time to go on a search and destroy mission to find and eradicate pests, proper spacing means not damaging plants as you push them out of the way while you are having a look aroundo

You might even see some seed packets say to sow thickly and then remove all but the strongest plants. I find playing the “natural selection process” with vegetable seedlings painful and it always seems to disturb the soil around the one seedling you decide to leave.

In the future I will spend the time to space out the seeds when sowing.

Only having one or two plants ready at a time isn’t going to make much of a meal at dinner time.  The kids say, “What’s for dinner dad?” and I produce produce one kohl rabi, a carrot and a few lettuce leaves. Don’t think I’d get away with that.

The Kohl Rabit doesn’t like being space so close together. The seeds were all planted at the same time and there just isn’t enough room to grow. What you want is enough of these ready at the same time to make a meal. One or two Kohl Rabi plants are not going to go very far on the dinner table.

Notice how much smaller the plants in the middle are compared to the plants on the left and right. The Kohl Rabi seeds were all planted at the same time. The extra inch of space makes all the difference.

This is the mess of growth you can get sowing seeds so close together. Some plants will overshadow other plants and searching for pests is nearly impossible.

Plenty of space betwen the plants makes searching for pests easy and quick. Just a quick light shake of the plants will cause mose pests to drop down where they can be easily picked up.

With pests like these hanging out in the patch, finding them quickly and easily without disturbing your plants is essential.

These cabbage plants were overshadowed by the other larger cabbage plant. I have pulled them up and put them temporarily in pots for planting out later.

Notice how much smaller the plant is compared to the others.

The Spinach Beet is overshadowing the Sweet Basil which were both planted at the same time. The Spinach Beet grew quicker and now the basil has no chance.

Tomatillos – Salsa from my office

I ordered some Tomatillo seeds from the James Wong Homegrown Revolution range from Suttons.co.uk . I like salsa and think it’s always worth trying to grow something as you never know what success you might have. I did plant them rather late, July 30th, but hey, you never know. I planted 3 seeds and as you can see in the photos, they did germinate. I put them on the window sill in my office so they would get plenty of heat and warmth.

It’s now October 3rd and the tomatillo plants have grown quite large. There are several yellow flowers on the plants. They are not self pollinating so you have to pollinate the flowers by hand. The plays are indoors so no bees to handle the job of pollination. You could use a paintbrush or a cottom swab and spread the pollen by hand from one flower to another. I don’t know if I will get any tomatillos so late in the year but I’ll let you know if I get any success.

Tomatillo plants with several yellow flowers.

The 3 plants have grown quite large.

Freshly repotted and ready for, hopefully, continued growing.

I don’t think salsa will go very well with the Christmas dinner, but salsa on New Year’s eve will be a treat!

Salsa will be easy to make as I have most the ingredients growing:

• Tomatillos
• Cayene peppers
• Coriander

I just need some limes and some salt and pepper to taste. If not this year, definately next.

The polytunnel is up

I have finished putting up the polytunnel. Needless to say it was not a project I would like to tackle again any time soon. It would seem that digging a trench, putting a few poles together and covering it with a plastic sheet would be an afternoon job. It was an afternoon job, over several days. It’s all up now, now all I need to do is start on the inside. There’s a lot of work to do building out the beds and getting everything ready for planting. I’ll keep you posted on progress.

The polytunnel up and ready.

I had a few nice sunny days for working outdoors.

View from the garden looking out onto Lough Allen.

I started a few veggine boxes off earlier this summer while I was organising the polytunnel. Still a lot of work to do inside but I think this time of year is a good time to work on the setting up the planting area for next year.

I had a few veggie boxes started in July that are now happily living in the tunnel