It's Harvest Time!

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The harvesting continues apace and the peas and broad beans are now all in the freezer… why do they all ripen at exactly the same time? We do have more peas growing out-with the moon and control beds and also so dwarf and runner beans, the small size of the moon bed dictated that we could only grow a limited number of veg. as part of the trial

Here I am harvesting both the peas and the beans in the moon bed and, yes, the photos were taken on different days

Lifting the pea vines, they, and the broad beans, were cut off just above the ground so that the nitrogen in the root nodules could return to the soil.

The pea harvest remember the rows in the moon bed are only 4 foot in length

Then it was the turn of the broad beans

In addition to yielding bigger crops the legumes from the moon bed had a slightly better flavour – but only slightly!

At the same time we’ve been thinning the carrots and enjoying eating the thinnings, fingers crossed there is no sign of root fly, possibly because we are the only folk growing carrots around here (heck we are the only folk growing vegetables just about!). We have also harvested our first primo cabbage from the control bed, currently the brassicas in the control bed are still ahead of the moon bed on growth, which I’m putting down to their having been planted over a week earlier.

We are having some problems with caterpillars on the brassicas and David is checking the plants each day and removing any he finds. Worryingly we found one of the cabbages in the control bed had root fly, we will be keeping a close eye on the rest in the hopes that it has not spread.

I’m finding that keeping to the ‘right’ days to harvest from the moon bed is a bit of a challenge. Chatting to another moon grower she admitted that, like me, if she was just harvesting enough for that night’s meal she would do so whether it was a root harvesting day or an above the ground harvesting day. However, we both agreed that if we were harvesting for storage then the correct days needed to be observed.

I am amazed how well growing the veggies in containers in the field has worked – we’ve had a complete crop of spinach beet and some useful size carrots. Unfortunately either the slugs or the pigeons got to the dwarf beans and at the lot. But we do have some growing in the garden. The runner beans have finger sized beans on them…

A close up of one of the primo cabbages showing the caterpillar damage

I’ll try to post a blog a little more regularly over the next couple of months as we harvest more produce!

• 28 Jul, 2009
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