HOME & GARDEN
‘Aye, Shona, it was a pleasant enough night. An awffa lot of singing, though.’ June is the most exciting month in our tunnel. Sliding the door back gives you an instant fix of warm air, pungent soil, sprouting seedlings, swelling fruits and the promise of things to come. Time to plant out summer crops – tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, second sowings of beet- root, cucumbers and basil. Daily growth is vis- ible. More frequent watering is required now and ventilation to reduce risk of blight. Our first strawberries are colouring up. The sweetest and most prolific are ‘Cambridge Fa- vourite’ and ‘Elsanta’. My plants are three years old so this will be their grand finale. Last year, I grew them high up in guttering over the tomatoes. I later discovered they were in- fected with the blight fungus which had landed on the tomatoes and we lost half our tomato crop. This year, I blowtorched the growing area in an effort to kill lurking spores and suspended the strawberries over more blight-resistant crops. We’ll be harvesting the first ‘Zeebrune’ shallots over the next few days, satisfyingly from our own seed. There is very little space left for sowing things directly into the soil. In any case, I have more success raising plants in modular trays, trans- planting them when the conditions are right. This way, I can gain at least four weeks of grow- ing space. We are big fans of Kohl Rabi, easy, quick to grow and scrumptious. On a recent family holi- day in Austria I found seeds of a ‘giant’ variety. Looking more like a melon than a tennis ball, it’s three times the size of the UK version. But does it taste as good? We’ll see.
Suspending strawberries keeps fruit fresh
Early ‘Anya’ potatoes (those fabled long legs in my mothers wardrobe) were in the polytunnel this year. Waxy, firm and totally delicious – there were just not enough of them. Does anyone ever have enough? On August 2 and 3, the tunnel and garden will be open in aid of
ScotlandsGardens.org. Hope you can come. Next month: Harvesting and Storage Preparing for the Hungry Gap Non-edibles in the Polytunnel
Peaches swelling nicely 23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40