Page 38 - Simply Vegetables Autumn 2021

Late summer activities
BY EMILY PLUMB FNVS
We thought we would do a similar series of articles to last year where we share some of the crops that we are sowing and growing later on in the season. We will aim to share an update on how we got on with each of them in future SV magazines – good, bad, or ugly!
Peas
A couple of new varieties to us in 2020, Eddie and Cascadia, we were impressed and so have given them another go
this year. We sowed an earlier sowing of each in the spring and then another in the early summer, but we sowed another lot of each on 24 July. These were then planted out on 8 August. Eddie are a regular garden pea variety and Cascadia are sugar snap peas.
As we have previously, we are growing the peas up some wire mesh, fixed in place by tying it to a couple
of stakes that we have knocked in the ground. From previous sowings, we think the peas might benefit from something a little taller, but we haven’t thought of what we can use just yet, so we have re-used the wire mesh from the first sowing on these ones.
We planted the peas out 4 – 6 inches apart along the wire mesh and then watered them in with some liquid seaweed solution to settle the soil around the plants. We then put up a cage over the two rows of peas. We usually grow our cauliflowers under this type of cage, but in this case we’ve used it to protect the peas from the pigeons. We threw a piece of bird netting over the top to prevent the pigeons coming for a feed of tasty young pea shoots.
We are hoping to be able to start harvesting some peas in early October, but it will very much depend on
the weather over the next couple of months. Fingers crossed for mild temperatures until then.
Courgettes
We have also done a late sowing of
a couple of our favourite varieties of courgettes, Tuscany and Midnight. These were also sown on 24 July,
and the photo taken on 8 August. It won’t be long before these are ready
to be planted out. Now we just have
to keep our fingers crossed that the weather stays mild for long enough for them to produce a decent number of courgettes for us late in the season!
Tuscany is Dad’s favourite variety for growing outdoors, and Midnight is our favourite container variety. Although we tried a few new container varieties this year, I’m not sure we’ve found one to completely rival Midnight just yet. We have definitely found some heavy cropping varieties (Black Forest and Piccolo in particular), but we still don’t
think you can beat the compactness
of the Midnight plants. That being said, we will almost certainly give the other varieties a second chance next year, as every growing season is totally different!
We will be planting these out in
the next couple of weeks, and will be growing each plant vertically up stakes as we do with all our courgettes now. It’s such a great way to save space.
And also much easier to harvest the courgettes than clambering around trying to work out where the fruits are.
Broad beans
Last but not least we have the Luz de Otono broad beans. This is a new variety for us, but one we wanted to try as they are developed to be harvested in the autumn and have pods around 25cm long. We’ll have to wait and see! These were sown on 12 July and planted at the start of August. We’ll have to see whether they’re as quick to crop as they’re supposed to be but hope to let you know in a future SV magazine.
38 Simply Vegetables