Tag Archives: Parsnips

May 2017 Growing Update

Broad beans

This month saw our first broad beans of the year harvested.

What a turn around we’ve had in the weather this month! The arctic winds have subsided and for the last couple of weeks it’s been like summer. Plus a few times in the last week we’ve had rainfall at night followed by a sunny day, which has done wonders for our plants. We’ve been very busy this month in our garden and at the allotment, although we’re still behind schedule. We’ve also started harvesting, with our overwintered broad beans now yielding returns. It’s been another month where we’ve struggled to find time to get the jobs done that we wanted…

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2015 – The Year In Review

Just some of our homegrown produce from this year.

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…

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Late December Garden Update

Alpine strawberries starting to fruit in December

Strawberries starting to fruit at the end of December

December this year has been very mild. Indeed, the Met Office are reporting that here in England it has been the warmest December since records began in 1910. We have certainly seen that here in our garden and elsewhere. With daytime temperatures between 10 and 14°C, many of our strawberry plants are convinced that it’s spring, as the photo above shows. With no threat of frosts we have left many of our beetroots to be harvested and we are still picking them fresh as and when we require them. Even our dwarf clementine tree still sits in the front garden…

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Pumpkin Patch Update

A winter squash of the variety 'Turk's Turban'

A 'Turk's Turban' Squash Growing in the Pumpkin Patch. There are a couple of smaller ones too.

Here at Slightly Self-Sufficient HQ we’ve been very excited about growing our own winter squashes. We’ve never had enough space to grow them before. We did try a dwarf ‘Butternut’ squash variety last year in a large pot, but it didn’t produce any fruit. So upon seeing the garden in our new house for the first time, Liz and I exclaimed in unison that we could finally grow squashes! Why have we been so excited to grow winter squashes? First and foremost, they make for excellent eating. They are a very versatile ingredient. They make fantastic soups and, unlike their…

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