Flowering vegetables: the curiosity continues

A few months ago I blogged about letting my vegetables go to seed just out of curiosity, and I've now got quite an interesting collection of flowering vegies in my backyard.

My leeks have been in flower for quite awhile now, with their beautiful purple and white bulbous heads.  I'm thinking of planting them in the front garden as ornamentals next year, along with some artichokes.

flowering Leeks

I also had a good hack away at my purple artichoke thinking that it'd stopped producing for the season.  The green artichoke had just started so I'd moved on.  Apparently the purple artichoke loved the hacking back to the stem (it had grown to about 2m cubed) and immediately started producing buds again.  So there's a tip! To be honest, artichokes are a real treat, but I'm pretty sick of them now. I'm letting both the purple and green artichokes go to flower now for the season, just to see their big thisley flowers and compare the different varieties.

A large purple bud opening up

You wouldn't have thought I hacked this plant back a month ago. The artichoke's revenge

My green artichoke buds opening up

 This is just an observation, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the green artichokes go purple on their tips when they're opening (and I suspect just past the point of edibility), and the purple artichokes go green on their tips.  If you look at the photos above of the purple and green artichokes respectively, you'll see what I mean.  When the buds are younger they're pretty much all purple or all green.

I've also let one of my green cabbages (actually one of my only cabbages that survived the great snail plague of 2010) go to seed.   It went from being a smooth round surface one day to having these curly flowering stalks exploding out the middle the next. I was thrilled!

the flowering cabbage with some broccoli seeds hanging overhead

 and now to the plants that I get to see flower AND still eat them...

My first tomatoes are starting to blush.  I loathe buying tomatoes at the shops when I have so many plants in the backyard, and so I've been hovering over these plants constantly, waiting for the first tomatoes to ripen.

Roma tomatoes

 

Cherry tomatoes

I also have my 'experimental' eggplants starting to grow spikey things.  I say experimental, because people keep telling me that Tasmania is too cold to grow eggplants. I thought I'd try anyway.

one of the spiky things growing on the eggplant.  I'm assuming it's the fruit.

more spiky things with some arty-looking water drops

one of my great successes last year were my lebanese cucumber plants, so I thought I'd relive the dream

I've never grown corn before, and I'm a bit concerned that my plants are a lot smaller than those at the community garden down the road.  Could it be because I planted them too late? Or perhaps that they had to grow over and over after snail attacks?  I'm not sure exactly what stage they're up to yet, or how the corn forms, but to be honest they're fulfilling quite an interesting role at the moment: garden sounds.

When I think of gardening and the senses, sight, touch, smell, and less so, taste, are all obviously engaged.  However, I think the sounds of the garden can get discounted. Obviously birds have a significant place in the sound landscape, but the sounds of plants are usually only activated when wind is involved.  Even with only a small breeze, corn makes an amazing sound.  It's more than rustling. I only really noticed it today for the first time (I've not been gardening much lately due to work commitments), and at first I couldn't work out where it was coming from.  I wasn't consciously searching for the sound, it was just something that was mulling around in my head. It pleased me that such a distinctive but soothing sound was produced by my largely ignored corn stalks.

I wrote recently about planting all these watermelon seeds.  I transferred the happy-looking seedlings to the garden once they got to about 4 cm in height.  From I think a total of 20 seedlings, this little one below is the only one left. Snails. Again. 

A happier story involves my pumpkins that are keeping my apricot tree company:

to the left of the tree are the turkish pumpkins, to the right, butternut. In the foreground, asparagus.

a butternut pumpkin mid-growth (when are they ready to eat?!)

I can't remember the full name of this pumpkin, but it has the word Turkish in the name.

Picked Cucumbers

Overwhelmed by the sheer number of cucumbers in my garden, I finally took a couple of my friends' suggestions and pickled them.  I pickled 10 of them, but bear in mind that they were massive mofos.

Immediately after pickling.  They're now a darker colour.

I chose a Pickled Cucumber recipe from the Taste.com.au website after considering pages and pages of recipes.  I was also tempted by this recipe, and a couple of bread and butter cucumber recipes, however, in the end I couldn't go past the sheer simplicity of the Taste version.  It basically required you to thinly slice the cucumbers, stick them in the jars (note, the recipe states a preparation time of 10 mins, yet it took me about 2 hours to cut and arrange the items in the jars and sterilise the jars) along with dill and black pepper (I added black mustard seeds as well), then pour over a boiling mixture of water, white wine vinegar and salt.  Too easy! 

You have to wait a week before eating.  I was a wee bit nervous this evening when I performed the ceremonial pop of the jar, however, they tasted perfect.  

I'm feeling slightly smug right now.  Happy times.

A walk around the vegie garden

I haven't posted any pictures lately, and yet I've had so much growing.  Here's an overall view:

top tier: pumpkins, leeks, spring onions

second tier: globe artichoke, fennel, tigerella tomatoes, bok choi, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, rocket, lebanese cucumbers, lettuce, mesculin

third tier: multiple types of tomatoes including Roma, cherry, Grower's Delight, Digger's [something], Lenah Valley market unidentified; basil, dying passionfruit, unidentified curcubit.

fourth tier: failed cauliflowers, dwarf beans, white beans.

 From another angle.  You can see the rhubarb in the top right corner.

Crazy pumpkin plant, stretching over two garden beds.  I had to build a 'bridge' between the two beds:

My lone artichoke. I thought I'd try one and see if it survived before trying more.  It's growing like a fiend, so I think I'll get another:

A few young fennel plants. Only four survived the snail feast:

The only cauliflower (out of 10 plants!) that has actually produced a flower: 

Rocket:

My two faithful cucumber plants.  They look a bit scungy now, but they're still growing and producing about four cucumbers a week between them:

Beans.  Also looking a wee bit scungy but they've got a second wind and are producing slowly:

tomatoes

 

My cute tigerellas (so stripey!). Still waiting for them to go beyond the green faze...

Rhubarb

Unidentified Curcubit:

Young broccoli seedlings, with my trial dog-proof snail poison box based on a suggestion by Hobart Kitchen Gardens.  I've never used snail bait because I don't like the idea of poisoning the soil or my dog, however I've lost so many seedlings to the damn creatures that I was willing to compromise

Bok Choi and Spinach plants:

Herbs including flat and curly leaf parsley, rosemary, basil (my better basil is cuddling with the tomatoes), coriander, chives, spring onions, dill, oregano, lemongrass thyme, and mint. Oh, and a scungy orchid:

Last but not least, my cute little fig tree who has more fruit than leaves. I know I should be taking the fruit off to encourage it to grow, but I feel mean because it's trying so hard!

at the mercy of nature

Maybe I'm being a wee bit dramatic, but for the first week in a few months I haven't had that many vegies.  Why this week? Well, Sod's law says that if I've got a market stall this week with the intention of selling some of my vegies, then the beans will dry up, the tomatoes remain green, the cucumbers are slightly too small, and the pumpkins, albeit massive, are not ready for picking.

Today was the second Lenah Links market, and the organisers were really keen to have some fresh produce at the markets.  I initially planned to sell only my pipecleaner creatures, but ended up selling a few of the produce I had that was sellable: rocket, rhubarb, the herbs rosemary, parsley, oregano, basil and thyme.

I also got up early, despite a hangover, and picked a massive bag of blackberries which I made into tiny blackberry pies for selling.

I stupidly didn't get a photo of today's stall or the pies, but here's the blackberry pie I made last week from the same lot of blackberry bushes along the rivulet in Lenah Valley:

Cucumbers: 'insert the male flower carefully into the female flower'

I trotted off to the Hobart Bookshop to buy The Royal Horticultural Society's Fruit and Vegetable Gardening in Australia.  I browsed a massive selection of gardening books before choosing this one because it's

a) focussed on Australian climates and seed availablity,

b) has lots of colour pictures and good diagrams (great for visual people like me)

c) covers everything from compost and weeds, to individual plant varieties in detail,

and most importantly...

d) is clearly written in everyday language.

I really wanted to find out about the spikes on my Lebanese Cumber that I was querying in my previous post, and whether or not at 12cm it's ready to harvest.

They don't answer my hairy question, but I have learned what seems to me, a kinky fact about cucumbers (and pumpkins, zucchinis and melons, apparently for that matter.  My confusion in distinguishing between my pumpkin and cucumber plants is not because I'm stupid after all!).

I'll admit at this point that I often giggle my way around the garden patch.  Last night when I was out measuring my cucumber with a ruler (while sucking on an icypole), the old woman behind me stuck her head over then fence and said

"hello dear, what are you doing?"

"oh [embarrassed, blushing]... I'm measuring my cucumber [waving the ruler in the air]. I want to see if it's bigger than my mother's.  Do you know why it could be so hairy?"

Now, the conversation was totally innocent.  But for some reason, everything I said seemed to have some sort of sexual connotation, and it was all I could do to keep myself from laughing.

Then I was looking in this gardening book this morning, and came across this handy hint about hand-pollinating cucumbers:

Help cucurbit plants [cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, melons etc.] to set fruit by pollinating them by hand, rather than waiting for insects to do it.  Pick a fully open male flower - one with no embryonic fruit at the base - and carefully pinch off all the petals to expose the stamens, which bear the powdery yellow pollen.

Insert the male flower carefully into a female flower - one that has an embryonic fruit - so that the pollen is transferred from the male stamens onto the stigma of the female flower.

Surely after almost 3 decades on this earth, I should be more mature as to not get amused/slightly grossed out at the thought of 'assisting' cucumber plants in this way.  But no.

Still, I want my garden to be successful, so I went outside to give it a go and discovered that I seem to have only female flowers:

female flowers are the ones with the baby cucumbers between the stem and the flower

It looks like my poor cucumber will just have to pleasure itself.  At least it won't have to argue about who will put the garbage out though.

Oh, and I ended up picking and eating the cucumber, despite its spiny features (I peeled it in the end):

It was a lot milder than the Lebanese Cucumbers I buy in the shops, although it quite sweet and not as bitter.

The cucumbers have started hatching!

This afternoon I took a closer look at my Lebanese Cucumber plants and discovered to my surprise that I have quite a mature cucumber on my larger plant, measuring 12cm long!

It has little spikes all over it, and I'm wondering whether the spikes fall off when the cucumbers are fully matured, or whether they're just 'despiked' before they appear in shops?  Obviously I've never grown cucumbers before.

When I looked at the flowers on the rest of the plant, they appear to have little cucumbers ready to take off between the flowers and stalks:

v. cute.

I also have pictures of the only two lettuces that survived the snail attacks when they were babies (note the space around them filling with weeds - that's how many I planted and lost!):

And my relatively more successful spinach: