January – The Wrap Up

• Value of produce harvested: $122.50
• Most valuable crop: Basil
• Seeds sown in punnets 9th January (all except Spring Onion and Celery potted up on 29th January):
  • Tomato – Stupice, Yellow Currant
  • Cauliflower – All year Round
  • Lettuce – Mix
  • Broccoli – Romanesco, Calabrese/Green Sprouting
  • Beetroot – Cylindrica,  Detroit Dark Red
  • Cabbage – Red Express
  • Kale – Toscano
  • Celery
  • Brussel Sprouts – Long Island
  • Spring Onion – Straightleaf
  • Chard – Rainbow
• Seed sown in the ground 16th January
  • Kohlrabi – Purple Vienna
  • Radish – Champion, Watermelon, Mix
• 4kg of cucumbers turned into Bread and Butter pickles

As you can see I have sown my winter crops.  The tomatoes are purely experimental, I shall sow some more each month for the next few to see how they react.  I’m not really expecting much (if any) in the way of fruit but it will be interesting to try.  The other new crops I am trying are Brussel Sprouts and Kohlrabi, the remainder I have grown and enjoyed previously.

Of course none of this seed sowing frenzy is really about January which, for me, was more about holidays (and rats – which I promise not to mention again in this post).  I did harvest a good range of produce though.  Highlights being beans, basil, cucumbers and zucchini’s of varying sizes.

My garden is looking nice and overgrown at the moment.  The rocket is draped down over the lawn, the beans struggle for space competing with the rampaging zucchini and a remarkably tenacious golden nugget pumpkin that I swore I’d killed a month ago.  The eggplants are threatening to topple over (why I don’t get bigger stakes I don’t know…) and the capsicums and chillies, although confined to pots, have taken over what used to be a path to the car port.  I am hoping that all this will mean a bountiful February with lots of everything summery to eat.

Pretty much all of my crops are producing as expected (if you ignore the rodent losses) the one exception being the beans.  My beans don’t seem to be producing as many beans as usual this year.  The Purple King did OK but have died back a bit now.  The bush beans have put on a lot of leaf growth but have yet to produce many beans and despite flowering for the past month or two the Scarlet Runner beans haven’t set any beans at all.  This is the runner bean plants second year.  They didn’t produce last year either but I thought that was purely that I’d sown them very late but now I’m starting to think its something else.  Anyone with any thoughts?  The flowers do look pretty though.

On a completely different note some of you may have noticed that I have introduced captcha code to the comments.  This is part of an attempt to rid my site of robots which are eating up all my web hosts resources.   If you have any issues with Captcha then please let me know and I will try other options.