Hail!

Well, I didn't plan for this one. A heavy downpour of hail hit on Christmas day. The aftermath is illustrated here:

Hail damaged kiwi vine

Hail damaged pumpkin vine

Hail damaged zucchini plant

Large leafed plants were the worst affected. Some tomato plant branches were ripped through too. Still, it is not a major disaster as most plants should recover.

Post-Christmas Harvest Special

Zucchini, super sized

See the problem?

This is what happens when you go away for a few days in peak zucchini growing season. The one on the left is normal sized but the others are a little too big to taste good and will end up in the compost.

Spring Onions Re-Sprung

A little experiment with spring onions. The spring onion pictured below was cut off at ground level, rather than pulling out of the ground. And lo and behold, it has begun to re-grow. It is now several centimetres tall. Will it become a full size spring onion again? How many times will I be able to cut it and have it re-grow? Time will tell.

Spring onion re-growing

Monster Egg

I've seen the occasional newspaper article with a proud chicken owner holding up their monster egg. Always good fun. I probably won't make it into a major publication with this one, but it is out of the norm so worth showing off here.

Monster egg on the left, typical size on the right

The photo doesn't quite do it justice but the monster is about 50% bigger than normal. The one on the left of the photo is 102g, compared with a more typical size at 67g on the right. The monster won't fit into an egg carton properly. I'll be thinking about the poor chicken that laid it while I'm frying it up :)

Update 29th December 2011:
Turns out this egg had a double yolk as pictured below.

Double yolk egg

Monday Harvest – 19th Dec 2011

In the grand tradition of garden blogging, Monday Harvests detail what I've harvested in the past week.

The first harvest of green beans yielded 437g from 33 closely spaced plants.

Green beans

Next we have some beetroot (variety Burpees Golden) and carrot:

Beetroot and carrot

Which were sliced using a mandoline:

Sliced beetroot and carrot

Then fried in oil to become yummy chips:

One batch of the fried beetroot and carrot

The carrots were especially sweet tasting. The beetroot had a hint of original beetroot flavour.

Also harvested in the past week was some basil, outer leaves of Cos lettuce, a spring onion and some alpine strawberries.

Comely Corn

The sweet corn (variety True Gold) is growing rapidly taller and starting to flower. It was sown on 27 September. Notice the tiny inter-planted climbing beans that should climb up the stalks. There is also a pumpkin vine heading their way that will grow between rows and keep weeds down. Thanks to the American Indians for this idea.

True Gold sweet corn

Flowering sweet corn

The top flowers are male which pollinate the lower female flowers to become the corn cobs.

Beautiful Beans

The bush beans (variety Baby Sun) are looking almost ready for harvesting. Seeds were sown on 8th October.

Baby Sun beans

The climbing beans (variety Blue Lake) which were planted a little earlier are just starting to flower so it's good to have both varieties for an extended bean season.

Blue Lake beans

Terrific Tulips

These were the tulips newly emerged in mid September. I heard you can eat the petals, so I tried them, and they were sweet and tasty – worth trying!