Summer Veggies Sorted

6

Sunday 27 April, 2014 by Uncle Spike

Summer is almost upon on us once more, yay! And so the winter veggies are out, and duly replaced with summer varieties; of course, after plenty of digging over, compost and goat poo added beforehand 🙂

Over the years you get to suss out what grows well, and what is just a pain in the butt and really not worth bothering over. In rough farming territory like this, the amount of bugs, pests and afflictions that attack your produce make is necessary to either a) spray the hell outta everything day in, day out, or b) go with the flow and just plant the least affected crops.

We go for plan B these days.

And so we don’t go in for many crops, but these are the ones that work with virtually no problems. In all I only have to spray against red spider twice or three times over the whole long growing season, and only after fully stripping all the produce first. That way we manage to minimise any impacts to our health (unlike the produce in the shops or even at the local market – after all, we know what the locals spray, and you wouldn’t like to know!).

First we have peppers (or biber) in three areas this year (see below for one of these areas). As always, we vary or rotate the sites of each crop. We have sweet red peppers (good for cooking, salads, and freezing down), long thin sweet peppers that are divine when picked fresh and eaten whole, small hot peppers, and medium light green peppers for salads. We also cut up and freeze bags and bags of peppers down for winter, plus dry them and even flash dry fry and freeze them to add to our home-made tomato sauce.

We also have 12 dwarf cherry tomato plants in this image too – others will go in the greenhouse in a couple of week’s time, with some cucumbers (already have a few outside too). We have virtually given up on other types of tomato; it being a crop notorious here for needing insecticide sprays. But we have found that the dwarf cherry tomato plants are definitely the most hardy, and about as productive as the peppers. We also freeze bags of these down for year round cooking – can’t eat them all in summer; one year we picked 200 every couple of days!

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The next big crop which will keep on going through to late November is aubergine, or eggplant as some of you may know it (but still cant see the ‘egg’ connection there) – we call it patlican (patt-lee-jann). These seedlings are always very week for the first month, but end up over a metre high and with thick 1-2cm stalks! We can cook them, freeze them and dry them – a very versatile vegetable.

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Sweetcorn are planted out for summer harvest, as are the seeds from last years okra or Ladies Fingers (weird name – I’m gonna stick with Okra). We have added a number of beans (white, black, brown… a whole mixture) to go along with the corn, simply as each helps keep the other safe from pests. Let’s see if that works this year. 

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