The gardens and polytunnels are looking great at this time of year, most of the
plants are growing really well, and we have had fantastic harvests for the past couple of months.
It has been a good growing season so far, with enough warmth for most plants to grow fairly
quickly, though more rainfall would have helped. Here in Ireland we have thankfully avoided the
extremes of heat and drought that so much of the rest of Europe has experienced this year.
And this year we have been doing a decent job of keeping on top
of all the work in the gardens, for the most part,
so there is an abundance to harvest. But this time of year can be a lot of work,
with so much to harvest, and process and preserve for the winter, and the vegetables keep coming
We joking refer to this as the Tyranny of Abundance, but also not joking.
I don’t think there is any one crop that epitomises this Tyranny of Abundance more
that the courgette or zucchini plant. This vegetable is famous for producing
way too much for people to be able to keep up with, and we have planted quite a few plants.
There are multiple plants in 5 of the family scale gardens, and earlier in the summer I had
been growing 15 plants in the larger polytunnel as part of variety and harvesting size trials.
So at one point there were 39 courgette plants to harvest from, with almost half growing in the
polytunnels, which is perhaps a bit excessive. I like to grow a lot of courgette plants so
that we can have lots for supplying our local community in the shoulder seasons,
when the weather is cool and the courgettes are not growing as quickly.
But this means that there is often way too much when the weather is warmer,
and it seems that each plant is able able to produce another courgette every day or two.
The main way we deal with, or at least to reduce the excess, is to harvest the courgettes when they
are quite a bit smaller when it is warm, and to let them grow a bit bigger when it is cooler.
Even harvesting each courgette a day earlier can significantly
reduce the amount of vegetables that need to be used, but this does mean that we need to be
in the gardens harvesting at least every two days. And we try to be very thorough when we are
harvesting, to make sure that a courgette doesn’t remain hidden among the leaves
and allowing it to quickly transform into a massive marrow, but we still end missing some.
I have removed the plants for the trials, so we are now relying on half as many courgette plants,
and as the weather is cooling we are delaying the harvesting, allowing each
courgette to get a bit bigger, to get more out of the plants as the season slows down.
Cucumber plants can be the same, at least those plants that we grow in
the polytunnels here in temperate Ireland. A strong healthy plant from a good variety
can produce a lot of cucumbers, if the weather is warm enough and they have enough soil moisture,
fertility and space to grow into. The cucumbers can grow really quickly,
and when the nights are warm we need to check the plants almost every day.
Similar to the courgettes, we prefer to harvest them a bit smaller, as we think they taste better,
or at least to harvest them before the skin gets tough and the seeds get too big.
I like to grow enough plants to supply us a reasonable amount of cucumbers at the
beginning and end of the seasons, but this can also leads to a glut in the heat of the summer,
especially with the recent warm weather. But I like when this abundance is available
for harvesting, as I process some of the cucumber varieties into lots of jars of pickles.
And we even grow varieties of cucumbers specifically to harvest small for pickles,
which definitely need to be picked every day or two, and will make as many jars as I can
during these periods of abundance, even though it adds to the workload at a busy time of year.
I haven’t figured out a similar strategy for processing and storing
the excess amounts of courgettes, but that is something to work on.
The other summer crops that need to be harvested promptly in order to get
the best quality are peas and beans. We planted batches of peas and broad
or fava beans in four of the outside gardens this season, and with these vegetable plants
there is a lot to pick over a period of a few weeks and then the crops are finished.
As usual we planted a batch of each of these crops in the four different gardens, using the same
variety and sowing them at the same time, so that they are comparable across the different gardens.
But this meant that they were all mature and ready to pick at the same time earlier in the summer.
Which is beneficial for processing and freezing loads for the rest of the year,
but it does demand a lot of time picking every few days to ensure the best quality, and then
more time podding, blanching and freezing. We could succession sow these crops, to be
able to harvest smaller amounts over a longer period of the summer, especially with the peas,
and to eat most of them fresh, to enjoy them more in season, rather than storing so many.
But this would reduce the ability to compare the gardens, so we put in the work to pick lots of
peas and beans and to process and store the abundance for a short period of time.
Unfortunately the cropping of the peas and broad beans happened at the same time this year,
and I’m planning to delay the sowing of the peas by a few weeks next year
so that the time consuming tasks for both of these crops don’t overlap so much.
We also grew a lot of green beans in one of the polytunnels this year,
with a variety trial of both climbing and bush beans, and the harvests from a lot of these
plants needed to be done at about the same times as the peas and broad beans outside.
Seven of the nine different varieties of climbing beans all developed harvestable
pods at the same time, just when the peas were starting to mature as well.
So that was a lot of harvesting for a few weeks, with a lot of time searching
in amongst the leaves and vines for all the pods. And I tried to harvest the beans every 3 days,
in order to be able to pick the pods at their best, but I didn’t always
have the time to do this, and some of them ended up getting a bit tough and stringy.
The trial of 10 different varieties of bush beans was in the same polytunnel, but the
different batches were sown at different times as the earlier spring salad crops were removed.
So this thankfully spread out the harvests a bit more, so there wasn’t
so much work to do at the same time. We won’t be doing the same variety trials
again next year, but we are still planning to sow a lot of these valuable crops that are so
time consuming to harvest and process. I need to plan the timing of these crops
better next year so that the peas, broad beans and green beans in the polytunnel
are not all needing to be harvested at the same time, and to extend the cropping of each of them.
This would definitely reduce the amount of time spend searching for
the pods at a busy time of the year. Thankfully most of these crops are
finished for the season, but there is now an abundance of runner beans to harvest.
These types of fruiting crops really need very regular harvests, and with the beans and peas
it can be a lot of work searching for the pods, and then even more work podding and processing.
But other types of crops can cause issues as well.
We generally try to keep a close eye on the broccoli and cauliflower crops,
as they often have a short period of just a few days when they are at their best for harvesting,
especially with the fast growth of the summer. Although they can store for a short while in the
fridge, they are the type of crops that are so much better to eat when they are ready.
And I found the same with the sweetcorn that we grew for the first time in the polytunnels
this season, as the plants dictated when we were going to be eating cobs of corn,
especially if we want to enjoy them when they are at their best.
With root crops there is thankfully a much longer period of time when they can be harvested,
but I have found that there can still be an issue if we don’t harvest them fast enough.
This has been the case with some batches of fast growing beetroot and turnip varieties,
where we planned to harvest the closely spaced plants when they were quite small.
But in come cases, we were not getting through them fast enough, and as the
days and weeks passed, the remaining plants kept getting bigger and bigger,
which meant it was even harder to keep up. And some of them became a lot bigger than
we had wanted, and quite stressed with all the competition between the remaining plants
that probably didn’t have enough space, water or nutrients to continue to grow quickly.
And this led to a decline in quality, with some of the roots becoming tough,
and the leaves degrading, so they were even less likely to be eaten.
We were able to salvage a lot of these crops, but it would have been better to harvest them a
lot earlier, and to plant smaller batches, rather than struggling to keep up with all the growth.
And there are other crops, which are grown to produce a continual supply
of leaves over a longer period of time, which sometimes produce way too much.
Chard is definitely one of these crops, and one of the most abundant crops that we grow.
And one of the varieties of kale that we are growing this year
is also producing a lot more than we can use.
With the warm, but not too hot weather, both these plants are producing a lot of leaves very quickly.
Although there isn’t the same kind of urgency to harvest these leaves on time,
the longer we leave them the more there are. Once the leaves grow to full size they will
keep for quite a while on the plant, but we have found that the quality declines over time,
and that the leaves are actually better when harvested just before they are fully mature.
And for the past few month, they have been producing too much, especially as
there is an abundance of a wide range of summer crops available at the same time,
and greens like chard and kale are not so popular at the moment.
One crop that I didn’t imagine I would have too much of is tomatoes, or at least I really
look forward to the abundance that we do get. Tomatoes are always popular, and we usually eat
a huge amount, and make lots of tomato sauce and store for the colder times of the year.
For the past two years we have been growing lots plants in one of the large polytunnels,
but have been doing varieties trials, and not all of the varieties are very productive.
This year we have been growing a similar number of tomato plants in the new larger polytunnel,
but only with the more productive varieties. And the soil fertility in these newly
established beds seems to be really good as the plants are growing really well.
And the warm weather we have had this summer, especially the warmer nights, means that the
tomatoes are ripening considerably faster. All of this has led to a significant
increase in the amount of tomatoes available to harvest each week.
So, for the first time I have too many tomatoes, and have been passing a lot
off to friends for processing, similar to what a lot of gardeners do with courgettes or zucchini.
Overall it has been a really good growing season, and with more growing space including
a third polytunnel, we have produced more vegetables this summer than every before.
Managing soil fertility better and supplying enough water, and gradually
improving infrastructure is definitely part of that increase, and having Kris take on so much
of the work has really helped. And I’d like to think that the
gradually improving skills, knowledge and experience is really starting to pay off.
But it does mean that there is a lot of food to harvest, which takes a lot of time,
and even more time to process what we want to store for the colder parts of the year.
Thankfully I have a Vegetable Fridge, a type of honesty stand,
which makes it easy to distribute so much of this abundance to people in my community.
There is still a fair amount of vegetables that end up back in the compost pile,
to be recycled into next year’s vegetables,
which is a waste of possible food, and the time and resources that went into producing it.
But this seems to be fairly common for a lot of vegetable growing,
especially when we plan for a mediocre year and end up getting a really good growing conditions.
My job is to readjust the planting plans for next year, to try to even out the supplies,
avoid overlapping labour intensive harvests and to spread out availability
over a longer part of the season, all while trying to grow as much as we can.
But it is really great to see that when the gardens are well established
and things are working well, and the weather is good,
the abundance of vegetable gardens in this climate can be really amazing.