Kitchen Garden Forum

It's been my 1st year of planting fruit and veg for myself and the Jerusalem artichokes have produced head and shoulders above the rest!
They're great to treat like potatoes (and imho more tasty!) and they're great raw in salads. Easy to scrum with a nail file, don't need peeling!
They give a lovely display of flowers in the summer and the birds love the seeds.
The ones in a pot won over the ones in the ground for ease of harvest (tip upside-down, choose what you want, put the rest back for later / next year)
A winner all round in my books!

What's been a winner for you this year? Be it taste / abundance / uniqueness?

Afternoon Stonecoloured, after a bit of a slow start, my Slenderette French beans cropped really well and the flavour was very good too.
All the potatoes produced a heavy crop, with little damage and the taste from them all, is good.
Actually, everything did fairly well in the end, even if they were a little late getting going, as things carried on cropping a month later than in some years.

No doubt: peas and broad beans, followed by garlic.

Apropos Jerusalem artichokes, Stonecoloured: ours do very well every year but every year I also end up throwing lots of them away because we can't manage to eat them all without exploding! How do you avoid that? In soup I use asafoetida, but you can't really do that when roasting them.

Gooseberries and redcurrants in the soft fruit front, and climbing beans (French & Runner) on the veg front. Freezer is still loaded with them and our small household is going to be hard pressed to consume them all before the next crop arrives without dying of boredom!
My leeks have been unusually disappointing due to rust and even the courgettes stayed under manageable proportions.

Oh, I forgot to give my outdoor mini cucumbers an honourable mention. Two plants provided more than we could eat all summer. They just kept coming and coming and their texture and crispness was unbelievable, compared with the items masquerading under that name sold in the supermarkets.

Monika wrote:Apropos Jerusalem artichokes, Stonecoloured: ours do very well every year but every year I also end up throwing lots of them away because we can't manage to eat them all without exploding! How do you avoid that? In soup I use asafoetida, but you can't really do that when roasting them.

Yet to find a way! Just make sure that the OH also eats them at the same time and shares in the toot-tooing! Not tried them in soup... yet!

Primrose wrote:Gooseberries and redcurrants in the soft fruit front, and climbing beans (French & Runner) on the veg front. Freezer is still loaded with them and our small household is going to be hard pressed to consume them all before the next crop arrives without dying of boredom!
My leeks have been unusually disappointing due to rust and even the courgettes stayed under manageable proportions.

Oh, I forgot to give my outdoor mini cucumbers an honourable mention. Two plants provided more than we could eat all summer. They just kept coming and coming and their texture and crispness was unbelievable, compared with the items masquerading under that name sold in the supermarkets.

What type of Gooseberries are you growing? This is on next years to-do-list, so I'd be keen to know what you recommend
Haven't got to the "no more stage" with anything.... yet!

What type of mini cucumbers do you recommend?

I have one red gooseberry plant which I think is is Pax which has never cropped very heavily. The gooseberries are small and although quite sweet, stew down to a slightly muddy brown colour which I think makes a gooseberry fool or stewed fruit look very unappetising so for that reason alone I wouldn,t grow it again by chioice . I also have two Invicta green bushes. They crop much more heavily, the fruits are bigger, and I leave them on the plants as long as possible, rather than picking them young to allow them to really sweeten up.

I have tried various Mini cucumbers over the years including Petite and Mini munch. They have all cropped embarrassingly well in a south facing outdoor border. i just dig as mich compost or msnure as I can spare arouns their root area and keep the roots well watered. In really hot westher, misting the leaves seems to help them too.

All the fruit has been overwhelming th is year. I'm surprised you don't like Pax gooseberries they taste lovely and make nice pinkish red jam. They are a bit dainty I suppose because they've been bred to be thornless which is another plus.

And, guess what - I've picked two ripe strawberries this morning, outdoors in a tub.

Thinking about it all the vegetables have done well too particularly the onions, shallots and garlic. After the late start due to a cold May every thing has been exceĺlent once it got going, and the extended warm autumn has given everything a bit longer to ripen up.

our apples have been fabulous this year. leeks have seemingly dissolved into the ground after being transplated to their final growing spots, having spent 6 months not growing very big at all in the nursery bed :/

It kind of varies as each harvest comes in, but I've got some great big Jerusalem Artichokes this year which is great as previous years have been a bit of a nonsense preparing, but moved on now to say my pointed sweet peppers in the greenhouse! Thanks to this nice weather I am still picking perfectly ripe, large red peppers - look as good as those in the supermarket! (Took 3 last night).

Got 4 more on the plant to coax into redness & have lined the pot with aluminium foil to help the light along but I think I may have to settle for nice big green ones after looking at the weather report! I must say as much as I have enjoyed the spell of warmth, it does feel weird, especially looking out the kitchen window this morning to see the first little daffodil out beside the dahlia flowers!

Westi

Most productive fruit: raspberries and redcurrants.
Most productive veg: the chard, I think. It was still going strong when I was last up on the allotment (sadly a fortnight ago).