Page 35 - Simply Vegetables Spring 2022

It’s sow simple... best bits and lessons learned in 2021
In this article, we thought we’d take a look back at some of our favourite harvests of 2021...
First up, we’ve got tomatoes we grew lots of different shapes, sizes, and colours of tomatoes last year. Some were more successful than others, but Big Beef has got to be one of our favourites. A couple
of years ago I didn’t even like tomatoes to eat raw, but I will happily tuck into an entire beefsteak tomato now!
Next up, we’ve got the courgettes. We grew all our courgettes in containers
last year, but that didn’t stop them from producing plenty of fruits. At one point during the summer, courgette was on the menu every day, and you can see from the below why!
So many shapes and sizes! And we can confirm that the round ones cored out and then the centres mixed with some minced beef and then topped with a little cheese are absolutely delicious!
Another firm favourite with us are carrots. Again, these were grown in a container
– it’s surprising how many you can fit in
– and a single container produced quite
a few feeds for us. In fact, this year, we’re hoping to grow a few more containers sown a few weeks’ apart to extend the harvest time.
A new variety for us last year was the Striped Armenian cucumber. It wasn’t
the quickest to get to fruit, but once we realised that it only seems to set fruit on
a side shoot – we were ready to rumble. The shame of it was, that we’d wasted so much of the space we had to let it grow in nipping out the side shoots like we usually would! Therefore, we had an awfully long
vine with absolutely nothing to show for itself. We did at least get one fruit from the plant though!
Last but not least, we’ve got our Pak Choi, these were another first for us in 2021, but definitely something we’ll be trying again. Last year, we didn’t even get a chance to plant the poor things out, so they grew to maturity in their 3′′ pots. They still did pretty well though, although it seems that they do seem to have a tendency to
go to seed as soon as the weather gets warmer.
Although overall we were really pleased with how our little garden grew for us last year, we still had a few learnings from the 2021 growing season.
Our first one relates to peppers; we’ve just about come to terms with how long peppers take to grow now – absolutely ages in case you’d missed it – it doesn’t make the loss of one of the slow growing fruits any easier. We grew D’Asti Giallo yellow bell peppers again last year, and everything was going to plan. This pepper plant had been sown in mid-January 2021, and we had some lovely bell peppers coming along just waiting to finish growing and ripen to their lovely yellow colour.
However much to my surprise one morning in September, one of our peppers had completely deflated and detached itself from its stalk. I couldn’t believe it! I’m sure it didn’t actually happen overnight,
I’m sure some little beastie had got into it somewhere round the back out of sight and it had gradually been disintegrating, but
it was still disappointing to find a deflated pepper hanging off the edge of the pot that morning.
Luckily, we had two more peppers that grew on to maturity. They didn’t turn yellow before the weather got too cold, but we enjoyed them as green peppers anyway.
Our other big surprises last year related to our tomatoes. As always, we grew far too many different varieties, but we really enjoyed seeing them all grow, form fruits, and then ripen. After this, we rather enjoyed eating them all too – raw or cooked! We even froze some that were going spare which we’re now enjoying in soups and sauces throughout the winter.
Last year, we learned that slugs and snails are rather partial to ripening tomatoes. In fact, a common garden snail can literally decimate a salad sized tomato overnight as you can see from the photos. The most frustrating thing was that they never finished one tomato before they started on the next! And like birds with fruit, they always get there just before you consider its fully ripened, and so just before you’re about to pick them.
It wasn’t just our slimy garden fiends that were after a bit of our tomatoes though.
It turns out that stag beetles rather like them too. I found this little beast in one of the tomatoes one morning. It’s not clear whether the beetle made this hole, or whether it was an opportunistic beetle that came in after a snail had started the job. However, the type of hole seemed different to us, so we think there is a possibility that it was the stag beetle! I suppose we’ll never know unless we catch one red-handed next year!
Simply Vegetables 35