The big summer harvest

It has been a good while since my last post. The garden has seen little action for a few weeks and as a result is understandably not as productive as you would imagine given the time of year.

After a couple of trips away from home during July, last weekend we finally got out in the garden to harvest what was left in ground and ready to come up. Despite our seemingly poor efforts over the past few weeks and months, we had a surprisingly successful harvest in that there was actually stuff to pick!

Here is a run down of the big summer harvest...

64 shallot 'Longor' harvested (from 13 sets sown in February)


72 Onion 'Purplette' (90g)


650g of Beetroot
14 baby roots & 7 larger roots

10 bulbs of Garlic

a handful of Nasturtium seed pods for resowing (seed recycling!)

1.54kg of salad potatoes

mostly Roseval, about a dozen Pink Fir Apple

A few freshly harvested potatoes were washed ready to be cooked...

...and then eaten with homegrown purple mange tout... delicious!

Unfortunately the Pink Fir Apple potatoes were not much of a success with a very small harvest. We think this is down to a combination of them possibly bolting in the april heat, lack of water and some stems breaking under the general weight of the foliage. That said, the Roseval potatoes had exactly the same conditions and we had a great crop from them. All of the potatoes were grown in potato planters, which seemed like a great idea to begin with, however when it came to checking if they were ready to harvest, the whole bag had to be emptied and the plants seriously disturbed in the process. We'll be growing our spuds directly in the ground next year.

The slugs ate the foliage of all our baby salad onions, however we still have plently of tiny bulbs to eat and they are really strong!

The slugs and snails had a good munch on the leaves of the beetroot too, however we have still harvested a pleasing amount of roots to eat!

The garlic was grown in containers and the bulbs produced are pretty small. This may be down to lack of space in the container I'm not sure. I'll definitely be planting garlic again this winter though.