Final harvest in the barganews vegetable garden

Maybe now is the right time to bring you all up to speed on just what has been happening in the barganews vegetable garden. The last article was written during the first week in August and was entitled “It’s harvest time in the barganews vegetable garden” In it we wrote: Lettuce and courgettes, green beans, borlotti beans, green peppers, cucumbers and aubergines are all ready to be picked. So are the tomatoes and basil. The carrots have been a disaster – tiny, straggly miserable objects, so have the onions -  planted at the wrong time when the ground was waterlogged but the real star of the garden has been the potatoes. The field is now just about ready to be turned over and the new potatoes brought to the surface.

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Two weeks later we did dig over the top field and pull out all the potatoes. An incredible 400 kgs of potatoes to be exact.  Just think how many there would have been if the porcupines hadn’t been gorging themselves at the start of the season. These potatoes and now all safely stored away in a dark, dry and cool place ready for the winter.

For the whole of August and most of September there has been a constant supply of tomatoes coming off the field. Most of which had been turned into pomarola and either bottled or frozen – more on that in a later article.

We had a good year with the beans as well. Two sorts of Runner beans and borlotti, all of which have been dried  or turned into sformatto and then deep frozen.

The maize – Formentone otto file – which we put in a couple of lines as an experiment to see if the ground and conditions were right did actually give quite a sizeable crop. These are all being dried in the sun and later on this month they will be ground to make polenta – more on that too in a later article.

Those onions and carrots which we put in back in April when the ground was incredibly waterlogged and up until last week looking a complete disaster – the ground turning concrete- like around them and making extraction almost impossible during the very dry summer, surprisingly needed only a day or so of rain this week to soften the ground and bring them to the surface. The tiny, straggly miserable looking objects in August had miraculously turned into quite decent looking carrots and onions more or less overnight. Isn’t nature wonderful?

• Vegetable garden – end of the season
• Seed potatoes, 250 onions and electric shocks
• Grey bamboo, red ants and water siphons
• Downsizing and death by electrocution
• 50 kg of seed potatoes