Courgette Madness and Other Squashes

Alan Titchmarsh reckons that the average family of four needs two courgette plants to keep them in courgettes for the season........ so why then did we plant seven!!.

Don't get me wrong I like a courgette, I think they are a tasty and flexible veg and we use a lot of them, but the spreadsheet Heather kept (Yes I know!) shows we nearly hit the 100 fruits mark.

It comes to the point where you can't give them away, friends and family hide when they see you approaching with one and the only solution seems to be to pick them while they are still small enough to shove through a letterbox. Eventually your fridge looks like this!

The number of fruits one plant can produce never ceases to amaze me and we had a good year as you can see.

 

 

Add to this the range of other squashes such as pumpkin, marrow, spaghetti squash and the ornamental gourd and you start to see the scale of the problem we are dealing with here.

We will cover the spaghetti squash separately at a later date as they are an interesting one, by what about those gourds.

You can't eat them, so why grow them. It's an American thing, Heather is from the US of A and insisted on them, here what we ended up with.

We gave them away to  local schools and churches for harvest festival and used them to decorate the front garden for Halloween. They actually went down rather well, but maybe not so many next year.

The pumpkins were shop bought as we only grew small more edible ones, but I kept some seeds to grow my own next year.

Calling Fellow Veggie Bloggers

My list of other peoples blogs to link too not surprisingly got a little out of date in the 9 years this wasn't updated. If you are a blogger with a similar site, or a keen veggie cook then please send me a  link so I can link to you and feel free to point your readers here.

Thank you

We Are Back In The Farming Business!!

After a break of 9 years Dickys Farm, now known as Dicky and Heathers Farm, (there is a fellow keen gardener with me), is back in production.

In fairness it never stopped, following a few life changes I handed it over to my dad to run and never blogged it. Now with it all getting a bit a bit much for him, and with a very knowledgeable partner in crime it's time to pick it up again.

We started last year but never blogged it (the power of Facebook prevailed), but I've decided to start posting again.

When we started again we were a little on the back foot as my dad hadn't been able to clear up as much as he would have liked the previous year, the dangers of getting old he tells us. We had a lot of digging, weeding, clearing and sorting to do although the soil was in  great condition thanks to his hard work.

Here is what we started with, generally it just needed clearing, weeding and digging over.

A very over grown strawberry bed during its clearance. Heather dug to China after that bind weed. We took runners and will start again with them next year.

The Rhubarb and Raspberry's got a  bit "grassy" over the winter and still need a bit of work. Less canes and a herb garden is planned.

By shoving the Mrs up on the shed roof you can get some aerial shots. Things are just getting going here, lots of bare earth still to be seen.

Aerial 2  - Early days for the beans, wind nearly got them but they hung on bravely.

When your back aches from digging, even if you cheat and use machinery, there are some things that make it worth it. Here's couple of shots of our hauls. Hoping for even better next year!

Once I've sorted the rest of the pics from last year I'll post some more along with the current state of play.