This years garden season is coming to an end
2023-09-26
After a long summer and an unusually warm fall, garden season is finally coming to an end. Time for a look at what worked, and what didn't.
Firstly, my tomato plants are still giving fruits but you can tell that the plants are exhausted. It'll end soon. My Chili plants are still going strong. I'm guessing I can bring them in and they keep producing after the outside would be too cold. Interestingly, the Indian chili plant that my wife planted is slowly growing. It is about 15 cm tall now, the bugger takes its own sweet time :D. We'll repot it and bring it inside.
My gherkins are gone for about a month now, but they did give me a bunch more harvests, which have been pickled. That whole endeavour has been a huge success and I'll definitely do that again next year. One thing to note though, I need to keep planting a lot of seeds. Since I want relatively small gherkins to be pickled, and harvesting them triggers the plant to produce more flowers / fruits, I do need a bunch of plants so that one harvest fills at least one, better two, jars. Not a problem, but something to keep in mind. This year I had six plants and that seems to be the lower limit.
We did dial back our efforts to grow herbs this year and focussed on Basil and Sage. The Sage had some issues initially — we think because the pot was overcrowded, it became better when we separated the plants — but it is healthy now. And very tasty! The Basil plants are growing nicely as well and keep providing us with enough leaves for the occasional homemade pesto and fresh leaves to put on pizza. We hope that we can bring the plants inside as well and let them overwinter.
The salads didn't really work. One plant decided to finally grow a few weeks ago and gave some edible leaves. But it is growing long as it is growing towards the light. Something to keep in mind next year: Put the salad in a spot with more direct sun. The salad plant is growing flowers now, I want to see if I can get seeds from that, for next year.
About the attainable food crafts
I wrote about attainable food crafts earlier this year (link below), let's have a look at what I achieved:
- Bread baking. That's a no-brainer. We did this before and it has become a habbit again.
- Pickling. As mentioned above, I've pickled the Gherkins from the balcony. They're perfectly edible but I'm not super happy with the first batch, the taste could be better. In later batches I've added more mustard seeds, onions and other flavorings. We'll see if that helped as I open those jars later this year.
- Jam making. We went to a public Strawberry plucking field and got a few kgs of berries in summer, some of which I turned into Jam. It is very very tasty and something I'll definitely do more of. Not complicated either. We still have berries in the freezer, I need to get on that. Note for next year: get more berries, jam goes faster than predicted.
So the only food craft from that list that would be attainable in our current living situation and that we haven't tried is growing mushrooms. Simply didn't get around to it.
I guess the take-away here is that everyone can get back to the roots and grow some stuff, even in small appartments. Good to know!
We do have some ideas about what we want to grow next year, but we also want to shift houses, so we will have to see what our future situation will be. One thing that I will start in a couple of days though is to plant one tomato seed per month and put it inside, next to our southern window. The idea is that staggered grows would provide us with tomatoes throughout winter, if there is enough sun. We shall see.
Links
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