Quinta das Abelhas

Its been quite an oddly cold year so far, but finally spring seems to have sprung.
Mother goose has been sitting on eggs (including some chicken and duck eggs) for some time, and today i discovered that mother duck has started sitting in the other corner of the chicken shed, probably on a few chicken eggs as well as her own!

Oca that I planted last month is now sprouting. This is an unusual tuber Oxalis Tuberosa, from South America. The leaves look like clover, and the tubers are used like new potatoes with a delicious lemon taste (so they say, we havent grown or eaten before). We got 5 small tubers from the Real Seed Catalogue. They need quite a long growing season, as the tubers reproduce at the end of the season, providing a supply of winter food. And they arent related to potatoes, so dont suffer from blight or colorado beetles. Hopefully we’ll get enough crop from these few tubers, to eat enough to decide whether we like them, and to plant a decent plot next year.

I have actually planted out peppers and courgettes three times this year, only to have both previous plantings wiped out by late frost. Finally now the weather looks like it will stay warm enough for these heat-loving plants, and the few in the garden are starting to grow. We also now have 100s of seedlings coming up in trays, including 29 varieties of tomatoes! This is our most developed courgette plant:

Beans are also doing pretty well. The broad beans, favas, are now in full swing, and we are eating them almost every day. Soya beans are coming up. Some chick peas are in flower, while later plantings are poking through. And a couple of rows of Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are doing very well:

And I have just planted some rows of Indian Metre-Long beans - these are fantastic. The beans can actually grow to a metre! Last year we grew 3 plants, and had a meal of the beans at least once a week. This year we are planting many more of the seed beans saved last year.

There is a lot of activity in the gardens now, as we fill the raised beds with crops to eat fresh through the summer, and to bottle, freeze and dry for winter food stores. We are eating asparagus every couple of days, and it is starting to look like an even better year for strawberries. Salads are becoming more interesting as more and more variety abounds in the garden.

Over the winter we have done pretty well with salads and the stocks of food preserved from last year, but it is great to now be eating more fresh stuff. In previous years we havent managed to be eating much home grown at this time of year, but this year we are already often eating meals almost entirely from our own labour. With the steadily increasing price of petrol, and the knock on effect this has on food prices, it is reassuring to be eating our own produce, grown from seeds we saved in previous years.

Stumble it!

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