Apple blossom on one of the trees in our garden.
No work for me today as it’s a bank holiday, so we spent some family time together in our garden. We really appreciated all of the blossom on our fruit trees and took quite a few photos. We’ve posted most of these on Instagram today. Our Instagram page can be found at: https://www.instagram.com/slightlyselfsufficient/ Here are the photos we shared, plus a few bonus ones that didn’t make it to Instagram.
Windfall quinces - thank you Storm Angus!
The end of October was a pleasantly autumnal affair, with some nice autumn sun and cool, but not cold, temperatures. That was true right up until the evening of the final day of the month. Then as of the morning of the 1st of November it became bitterly cold and we were hit with several days of morning frosts! This caught us unprepared, and so we were in a panic to harvest the last of our more temperature sensitive crops. The main crops that we were desperate to harvest before the frosts caused severe damage, were the last of our…
Beautiful blossom on our dwarf quince tree.
Spring has well and truly sprung here in the East of England. We’re surrounded by beautiful blossom in our garden. We’ve also been busy planning this year’s crops, preparing beds and sowing seeds. It’s strange to think that we’ve been in this house for a year now. This time last year we were just sowing the first of our seeds – a very late start due to the move. Despite this we still had a very successful growing season. This year we’re better placed as we’ve started earlier – so we’re hoping for another bumper harvest. The many plum trees…
Just some of what we grew and produced this year. Top left - bottom right: winter squashes, parsnip, kohlrabi, a batch of jam, mushrooms, spiralised courgette ('courgetti'), plums, tomatoes and courgettes, squashes in our pumpkin patch.
This year was our first in our current home with our rather large garden. We moved into this house in May, and although we were late out with many of our crops, we’ve had a very successful growing season. In this post we’ll look back over the year and share where we feel we were successful, and where we were not. Soft Fruits By far our largest and most used soft fruit crop was our plums. We can’t really take much credit for this crop, as all of the trees were already here when we moved in, and we have…
Our homegrown quince poached in syrup served with some clotted cream - yum!
Here at Slightly Self-Sufficient HQ, we love quinces. This fascination started about four years ago when we followed a Nigel Slater recipe for a Christmas pudding which called for a couple of quinces. Neither of us had ever used one before, and we found them astonishingly difficult to source. Then, in a remarkable act of serendipity, I started helping at a local community garden and found that there was a quince tree growing there. It had been a poor year for them, but I was told to help myself. So I took the two we needed for the recipe and…
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…