Quinta das Abelhas

Courgettes, pumpkins, dinosaur squash, spaghetti squash, butternuts… we love ‘em. Easy to grow, full of carbohydrates, hugely productive and easy to store for the winter.

Sophie’s garden has a couple of beds full of various squash, which are loving the sun and the moisture-retaining horse manure, which of course also feeds them to make them grow big big big!

The above was a new bed with nothing in it just over a month ago, and now contains a few courgette plants, several pumpkin or butternut plants (I forgot which was which when i gave her the germinated seedlings!) and some borage plants that attract the bees. The courgettes stay within the bed, but the other squashes tend to grow out, trailing over the paths, other plants and generally getting in the way. We’ve talked about trying to grow them up a trellis, but I wonder how this will work with plants that produce larger fruit. I think butternuts would be good to grow vertically, instead of horizontally, taking up less space in the garden. This may be a must-do next year, as we are growing more varieties every year and space will eventually be limited. We really love butternuts, and they kept on a shelf in the adega for over 6 months, alongside several hard-skinned pumpkins.

Heres the first pumpkin of the year, growing in a bed that was an old compost heap. Its almost the size of a football, and growing. I hope it keeps growing before it turns orange. There are lots of other baby ones appearing everyday, so we should have plenty of pumpkin through this winter.

At the other end of that bed, a self-seeded New Zealand spinach is doing very well. It doesnt require much water and is perennial, spreading over time. A very useful plant to grow in this climate, supplying us with a decent bunch of greens every few days - cut the branches just above a side shoot and it multiplies.

My garden is, as I have said before, much more of a chaotic jungle. Heres a shot of a bed with courgettes on the left, various pumpkin-type plants on the right, growing out over the paths and under the vines.

You can’t see the pumpkin side, but here we have courgettes planted in mounds of compost in the middle. Behind them, growing up the trellis are butter bean plants. I’ve had no luck with these before, because they don’t seem to like the hot sun. This seems to work, allowing the courgettes to shafe the beans. There are also a few self seeded tomatoes in between, a few tiny cucumber plants hopefully about to shoot up the trellis, some sunflowers, which I plant everywhere (their roots are meant to inhibit weeds and they act like secondary trellis uprights for the butter beans) and some bush beans, which are also benefitting from the courgette shade. In front of the courgettes there is a row of salsify, long thin root crop, which are delicious and also don’t require much water.

And, here is yesterdays harvest for dinner:

I include this here, because it contains the first proper sized round courgette, about the size of a cricket ball. A few leeks, some purple sprouting broccolli, lettuce, green beans, swiss chard, several courgettes, rocket leaves and a few beetroots made up yesterdays pick. For dinner I made a green salad, boiled a pan of small home-grown potatoes and stir fried the leeks, courgettes, beans, some chickpeas, broccolli and a few sausages, that needed using, chopped into small bits. All with a dash of olive oil and soya sauce.

Stumble it!

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