How many potatoes can 2 people eat, anyway?

A couple of weeks ago, I promised a veggie tale, following on from the success of our fruit this year. What a productive summer it has been and what a bountiful autumn is promised! While the fruit keeps on coming (our freezer is full of apples, plums and rhubarb to see us through the winter, plus we get the occasional strawberry treat), the veg haven’t disappointed us either.

We started our potato harvest pretty early, with first and second earlies sprouting in the greenhouse from late spring. This was closely followed by more earlies in one of the beds and then the main crop Maris Pipers and Desires, which have been prolific and are now safely stored in hessian sacks in the cool of the pantry to keep us in potatoes for several months to come. Some of the Desires were particularly fun, we thought – like little characters all of their own!

Not for us the usual 4 bed crop rotation advocated for very sensible reasons by experienced gardeners such as Kettle Acres. One potato bed just wasn’t enough. The one we used for the earlies is now stocked with sprouts and cauliflowers which are bravely resisting the onslaught of the dreaded cabbage white butterflies and, having dug up the last of the main crop last week, D has been busy filling the space with leeks, onions and a couple more caulis which – hooray! are starting to show little white heads peeping through the green.

So you might be forgiven for thinking that we would be proud of our success with the humble tatty and calling it a day for this year. However, you would be wrong. Way back in the early summer, our thoughts turned to our Christmas table. We had tried to buy late crop seed potatoes last year and been unable to find any in our usual garden centre. However, this year we had more success and we may have gone a little mad, planting 5 bags in the greenhouse. Not as mad as they have though! We did plant them a little earlier than we had planned, as they had started to chit all by themselves and, in early September, they are starting to flower already. The chances of them getting to anywhere near Christmas are slim unless we store them very carefully.

It’s not all about potatoes! Last year, in our first attempt to grow carrots, they averaged about 2 inches in length and were mostly as fat as they were short. Some were almost square. The hard work digging the new beds this year appears to have been successful, and some of our carrots have been a little more traditional in length and shape. Not all though – one looked suspiciously like a demented octopus and we were breaking off tentacles for dinner all week.

The garlic has been disappointing in one way – it looks very limp, not very well-grown and definitely in the green. When we pulled one up, to see if it had grown at all, there was a single spring onion-sized clove, rather than a bulb, hiding under the soil. Once I cooked it, though, I stopped being disappointed very quickly. I have never tasted such sweet, delicious garlic. I used it in a tomato pasta sauce, made with entirely home-grown ingredients, and, once peeled, it mashed effortlessly into a paste to flavour the sauce. Our onions have been very similar – much smaller than those you buy, but sweet and mild, perfect for eating raw in a salad or on a sandwich.

And there is so much yet to come. The corn on the cob, which we bought on a whim and which has been a revelation to us. Who knew that it would sprout ears just like any other corn, but that the cob actually grows much further down the stalk after forming a hairy wig worthy of Donald Trump himself? The parsnips, also grown with Christmas in mind. We have discovered you need patience for parsnips, sown in April and to be pulled once the weather turns colder. Not as much patience as you need for asparagus though. For its first year, it has grown well and, following everything we have read, we have resisted the urge to harvest a single spear, allowing them to flower and then die back. Apparently, we can eat a couple of spears next year and then a few more the year after – they are definitely a commitment.

We have leeks in the beds, peppers in the greenhouse and tomatoes pretty much everywhere. D’s succession planting has kept the beds full and things moving and we are proud of what we have achieved in this, the second year of our New Simple Life.