Monthly Archives: July 2015

Galina Tomatoes

Galina tomatoes large yellow cherry tomatoes

Galina tomatoes (left), a Siberian large yellow cherry tomato with a long growing season.

I thought I’d take a little time to post about the variety of tomato that I have probably grown in more seasons than any other: the Galina tomato. This is a potato-leafed vine variety that produces high yields of large yellow cherry tomatoes. I have grown these every year since 2011 (making this the fifth successive year). When I first grew these I had never tried a yellow tomato before. That was part of the appeal – that year I also grew Black Cherry and Green Zebra tomatoes. Over the last couple of years I have noticed supermarkets starting to…

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Making Carrot Wine

Carrot Wine Fermenting

Homemade carrot wine fermenting in a demijohn

I’ve never made carrot wine before, but I have been tempted. I was recently passing a farm that was selling feed carrots for £1.50 a net. I decided to invest this small sum and try to put the carrots to the best use I could. The majority were used as food, but I thought being in possession of so many small and forked carrots was the perfect excuse to give carrot wine a try. I searched online and found a recipe that was being raved about. Generally I refer to Brian Leverett’s Winemaking Month by Month book for all things…

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Sights That Made Me Smile

Immature medlar

A young medlar growing on our patio medlar tree.

Growing your own can be disheartening sometimes. A couple of my runner beans suffered minor attacks from snails when they were in pots on the patio, but the vast majority were pristine. Within a couple of days of planting them out into the vegetable patch, every single one has been attacked by slugs/snails, and is covered with blackfly. As things stand they look like they’ll all survive, but it can be demoralising. But, just when I’m reflecting on the prospect of not getting the harvest I imagined from a particular crop, I’ll see a sight elsewhere in the garden that…

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The Garden – A Quick Update

Squashes and courgettes in the pumpkin patch.

The area now prepared with a grand total of 7 squash, 5 courgette, 1 pumpkin and 1 patty pan plants all in position.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in the garden. Aside from the mammouth tasks of weeding, watering and generally tending to our plants that are already in their final positions, we’ve also planted a lot more out. Our most noteworthy achievement in the last fortnight is probably that we cleared the remainder of the pumpkin patch. We have now, for that whole square area that was lawn, removed all of the turf, turned the soil, forked in manure, made ridges for the plants, and planted out something into all but two of the positions. These final positions will be…

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Growing Our Own Mushrooms – First Batch Harvested

The first chestnut mushroom harvest - they grew faster than I expected!

As you may have guessed from the photo, despite my plans to the contrary, I didn’t manage to harvest the first crop of chestnut mushrooms whilst they were still small. The problem was that they grew so much faster than I expected. I posted on Thursday that they were almost ready to be harvested. Then on Friday they looked just about there (by which I mean they were nearly the size of the chestnut mushrooms that the supermarkets sell). Then on Saturday morning they already looked bigger than the supermarket ones. Joe and I were very busy in the garden…

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