24th July 2021, Broccoli, nails, courgettes and progress
Through the white mesh of the butterfly and bird prevention netting, the very first broccoli head begins to take shape. The leaves are edible too, allegedly, something to look forward to and unavailable from conventional sources. That’s another beautiful thing of growing your own food, you get to eat parts of the vegetable that are normally not sold.
Courgette / Pumpkin / Butternut squash leaves are all eaten in South Africa and full of nutrition. Who knew? Totally missed here in the UK, well certainly by us. Carrot tops, beetroot leaves, sprout leaves amongst a few things we can eat and will be plentiful from the “Haven”.
Desi showing us her glam nails, apparently an activity amongst young girls using local flowers to decorate their nails. (Not seen this before in the sheltered backwaters of Watford and being a boy.)
The courgette plants have gone absolutely wild. We planted 7 of them and having battled initially with the slugs, they have grown so prolific even a wagon of slugs couldn’t now take them out. We grew some yellow and green ones this year. Both types are producing an abundance of fruit, not much maintenance, and good for filling up space and ground cover. For next year will have to learn how to train them as they have a tendency to creep along the ground in a direction you don’t want - in our case, the path.
The whole plot is beginning to fill up with a mass of green vegetation and from a standing late start we are very thrilled with where we have got to here at the end of July. With a couple of growing months still available and a bit of wet summer thus far, things are behind but full of promise. We expect the potatoes to begin dying back soon as we have envisioned they could be available to eat from 2nd week of August (but we shall see).
The cabbages are looking amazing. When we decided to plant 40+ I thought what will we do with all those, now I can see them growing nicely. I’m still asking, what will we do with all those cabbages? Anyway another success story, just hope we get to them before the wildlife! The slugs enjoy a good cabbage, so I’ve heard, and they are enjoying this wet summer.
