Page 43 - Simply Vegetables Winter 2020/21

Ironman broccoli
decent sized plants, so hopefully we’ll get some good purple sprouting broccoli in the New Year.
The Fargo and Cendis cauliflowers, seeds that were left over from what King’s Seeds kindly donated to us to give out at one of the events we supported at Hyde Hall in 2019, have also produced half decent sized plants. However, they aren’t starting to form heads yet, so we’re not sure whether they will in time before the cold weather kicks in. You’ll have to wait and see!
Courgettes
Well we can’t say that we didn’t get the milder autumn weather that we were
hoping for, so our courgettes certainly came through for us. In fact, we harvested our last
Hawkesbury Wonder 1
Peas
courgettes last week. They had started to tail off towards the end, and were nowhere near as vigorous as they had been in prior months (or compared to the plants we grew during the peak growing season), but it was still great to be able to prolong the courgette harvest for a few weeks longer!
As you can see from the photo, the plants are looking a bit sorry for themselves now we have hit November. They don’t do well with the cooler weather and cold nights. However, we would still do a late sowing again next year as we are big courgette fans, and the ones in the supermarket just aren’t the same!
Broad beans
Needless to say, things can’t always go right! That was definitely the case for our Express broad beans. Unfortunately, these got overtaken with rust quite early on, so we lifted the plants and disposed of them.
French beans (and peas!)
The Hawkesbury Wonder French beans also came good for us given the warm weather. We had plenty of beans to eat during October, and they are great as they are a bush variety, so don’t take up too much space and can easily be grown in pots.
Personally, we prefer the taste of the
Savoy cabbage
round podded Kentucky Blue climbing French beans, compared to the flat podded Hawkesbury Wonder, mainly because they seem to be more fleshy and juicy. However, the Hawkesbury Wonder are still nice, and are much easier to grow where you’re short on space or where you want to prolong the season as the pots can easily be lifted inside.
The second sowing of peas also produced some peas. As expected, they didn’t produce a crop as large as the sowing we did back in the summer. But it was nice
to be eating home grown Eddie peas and Cascadia sugar snap peas in October! Luckily for us, they flowered before the weather started cooling down. However, what we did find interesting was that the initial plants themselves looked healthy than those in the first sowing, we think because it was slightly cooler and damper weather which encouraged good foliage growth. However, we do think it encouraged the plants to flower later as they got so carried away with producing foliage, so perhaps we could’ve had even more peas if it had been slightly drier and warmer. We’d have to see another year, as this is the first year we’ve grown peas like this so it might’ve just been an anomaly!
So there you have it, late sowing is worth a try - Ed
Eddie peas growing
Hawkesbury Wonder 2
Typhoon broccoli
Simply Vegetables 43