Harvesting, Preserving and Seed Saving

Hello Everyone,

Bob and I hope you are all very well and enjoying your Gardener’s Box. I am wondering what delicious menus you are creating in your kitchen.

I have been a little busy in our kitchen. Over the Summer season we have harvested lots of our tasty produce, for instance…Plums, Raspberries, Blueberries, Gooseberries, Blackberries, Cucumbers, Onions, Courgettes, Tomatoes and now our Apples. I am now preserving to let the Summer tastes be sampled in this Autumn season and on into the Winter season. Joy!

We will have Jams, Pickles, Chutneys and Sauces available on the website from next week. Our chief taster, Bob, approves, particularly the jams.

The Apples are being harvested on a daily basis and our storage boxes are filling (space! we need more space!). We grade the Apples as we go, which is why we are harvesting them little and often so that we cope with the influx. Those Apples suitable for storing are the A Team. The B Team are not perfect enough for the boxes, but ideal for juicing.

Next weekend we will begin the big Apple jucing exercise. This event is always exciting…watching each process of firstly crushing the Apples into a pulp, then placing the pulp into the press where we are able to watch the juice gush out, then it is bottled and finally placed into the kettles to be pasteurised. Only four processes which are repetitive. However, after the first couple of hundred bottles we are happy to be coming to the end of the juicing season. At the moment, we are excited and looking forward to the start.

This week we have been really busy harvesting. As ever, we reached capacity for you, our lovely customers on the box scheme. The restaurants were also requiring lots of our Fresh, Local, Organic produce. This we are really happy about. Not only do we get the business but it does reflect well on their individual businesses, that they ,too, are busy.

The week saw unusually high temperatures. The average temperature for here on the farm is 13* but we were many degrees above this. This is discombobulating as what do you wear!? We dress for the Autumn but end up taking each layer off by 10am. The plants are also confused. We have seen extra flushes of growth, particularly those unwanted plants. We are working as if it is still Summer but know that we should be getting ahead of our Autumn duties such as clearing spent beds and preparing for overwintering crops.

The biggest advantage has been seen in the greenhouse as the seedlings are running away with themselves. This is fab as we will be able to plant out maybe sooner than we think (time! we need more time!). The growing medium we have used for our seed sowing this time has been our very own compost. It seems to have worked a treat. We are feeling grand about being able to use Mother Nature’s gift of compost. We will continue with this choice for sowing alongside topping the growing beds with compost.

Mother Nature also presents us with the opportunity to create an even bigger life cycle. We have begun to save and store our own seeds. In the past we have always felt we needed a guarantee of viable seeds so used suppliers. We have done a little seed saving but this time we are going big! We will not be able to save seeds from every vegetable we grow, but where we can we will. The companies we get the organic seeds from were very few. Now it would seem more gardeners are ‘Going Organic’ which has increased the suppliers available. Plus they seem to have a greater supply throughout the year as opposed to the start of the sowing season. Competition within the seed businesses has helped us to contemplate collecting our own. We thank them for kicking us into action. We will still be using our suppliers for F1 Hybrid plants and those vegetables which take a few years to create the right seeds, for example the Alliums.

Bob and I never in a million years thought that we would be doing what we are doing! We maybe OAPs but we continue to learn and are enjoying growing in soooo many ways.

Thank you for your continued support.

Have a great week.

Speak soon, take care,

                Ann