Under the radar ..

Today was that rare thing, a day given to tending the vegetable garden. Jill’s uni friends were over for lunch so I dropped beneath the radar..

European drone fly

in appearance mimics honey bee drones.

All too frequently I’m rushing onto another task but today I just tended to the plants. Bird calls. Sunshine. Watching the flowering marjoram which is a living city of butterflies and hoverflies.

Carrot ‘Early Nantes

.. are cropping well. No carrot root fly damage.

I used stored rainwater on recently-planted seedlings and dilute comfrey ‘tea’ to feed cucurbits and tomatoes. The comfrey liquid festers and attracts hoverflies to lay their eggs in my dedicated and stinking big barrel. I measure my comfrey liquid success in the yields of tomatoes and squash but also by the number of rat-tailed maggots I spot. Rat-tailed maggots are as unlovely as their name suggests but go on to pupate and become our beautiful hoverflies.

‘Jazzy’ potatoes had finished so I twisted off the dried haulms and harvested 8kg. ‘Clean’ with no damage, they should store well.

That’s 29kg of spuds harvested so far…     

Carrots ‘Early Nantes’ cropping well too.            

92kg of vegetables…

Which is itself within a total of 112kg apples, soft fruit and vegetables harvested so far.

Using an average of £1.67 per kg for organic potatoes at Tesco, our potato harvest so far is worth £49.

Our soil is quickly reduced to dry sand which it is currently and so I’m especially pleased with bumper yields this year.

Perhaps earlier than usual, the garden apple harvest begins…

First, weighing in with 4kg on apple cordon is Discovery. It is a sweet-scented desert. Hornets gorge on them.

Apple ‘Discovery’

… The earliest cropping of our apples.

Not quite ready yet but hanging so heavy that branches need supporting is Keswick codlin also on apple cordon - 1 kg of apples so far, dislodged by their weight as I tied them up. Their fruits boil down to a fluff which is ideal for apple sauces or fruit compotes.

Neither variety are good keepers and so the pressure is on to give away or use..

Apple cordons take little space but are already giving us more than we can eat. Most of our apple cordons are twenty two years old and the trees are only a little bigger than when they were originally planted.

And at £2.40 per kg for organic apples at Tesco, that’s £12 worth.

Why are we importing apples at this (or any?) time of year .. and why don’t more folk grow their own?