Blackberries

If there is one place in the garden where we have looked with the most hope and anticipation, it is near the blackberry bushes. Both my wife and love those black, sweet soft-fruits. We've tried one or two a while ago that had a slight hint of blackness, but that was predictably disappointing. The other day when we were in the garden, there were lots of deep dark blackberries, and some careful and repeated tasting revealed they were read for harvest!

We collected close to 2 kilo (4 lbs.), about a third of that got either eaten immediately, on the way home or during desert. It still left

me with 1.3 kilos,

which I turned, with tremendous pleasure into a great marmalade. I made it the French way this time, taking the whole fruits, and after washing them adding the same amount of sugar and left it overnight at a relatively cool place. The next morning I cooked it slowly for about two hours with regular stirring.

It made 7 posts.... though when I wanted to make the photo I noticed one went AWOL already. I doubt the others will last very long.

There are still some blackberries ripening on the plants, both barbed and non-barbed, but not great amounts. I still hope to collect about 1 kilo (2 lbs.), but try a recipe I have seen for blackberry-peach marmalade. That sounds interesting and I would be very pleased to give it a try. I am not sure where I would obtain the peaches; we have got quite a few peach trees on the farm in France that seem to have lots o peaches this year -- but those won't be ready until September. So I can either freeze the blackberries for now and wait for our peaches, or buy some peaches at the local fruit & vegetable shop. Waiting until September would probably be the best, because we would use our own fruits -- just, I doubt whether I'll have the patience.

With our love for blackberries in mind, I am trying to set up a second stop in the garden with a couple of plants, that should double our potential harvest next year.

Nice harvest

Unfortunately, I didn't have the time this week to visit the garden. Either the weather was too bad, or our schedule too tight. I will probably have time to go later this afternoon, and for a more substantial period tomorrow.

Regardless, I already had a good gardening day today -- I visited the used books section at the thrift shop on the other side of the road and scored four books.

The first one is a 45 year old book on the growing of strawberries; the book isn't too big but enough to have information from beginner level to experts. Lets hope the knowledge will help me to boost next years strawberry harvest!!

The second one I found is about pruning fruit trees. I have still quite a bit to learn in that department, so it is a very useful find. It has a surprisingly large section about the different tools to be used for pruning so I guess I'll have some

more things to add to my Christmas list. I will also still

need to find some literature about the pruning of soft fruit bushes, though that seems to be a little more trivial then the trees.

The third book I scored is one with 88 tips for the

vegetable gardener, lots of illustrations and schemes. It also seems to

go nicely into the different diseases and afflictions of and the potential remedies or ways to prevent those.

The nicest book I found is one which is titled "Old Garden Knowledge Newly Discovered" (that's a rough translation). It seems to be a collection of small facts and tips; one that astonished me a bit is the recommendation to bury some sweet water fish under tomato plants. I am sure there will be lots of these little facts. Even if I won't use them, it will probably be an interesting and amusing read.

As an afterthought, they are, evidently, all in German. It will take me a while to read through them -- and I seem often to get stuck in getting which particular fruit/vegetable they talk about.

Abundance

Up till now, we didn't have a big problem keeping up with the produce; sure some of the salads bolted, but in my opinion who doesn't have some bolting salads didn't plant enough of them (besides, I'll let a handful of them until their seeds are dry -- which means I'll have more then enough seeds for next year). However, now the garden started producing in earnest, which means that we have too much of lots of vegetables.

Every second or third day a big courgette can be picked up, we harvest kilos of green mange tout beans and we have more red beets then we ever wished for. The last thing isn't surprising, because they are far from our favorite staple, we plant them to use their foliage to mix in with salads.

I also harvested about a pound of blackberries, I tasted one that was nice and sweet and collected the rest of the black ones -- we were in for a surprise when we ate them after dinner on Saturday, they were not quite as sweet as the one I tasted. I'll leave the rest of them a couple of days longer; if they don't get as sweet as we hope they would get we'll turn them into marmalade. We've got a small apartment, with a small freezer, so conserving fruits & vegetables is not quite an option, but we can always find some space for for marmalade's.

Reading around on different blogs this weekend, I noticed the mentioning of eating purslane, some of which my father-in-law had pointed out to me a couple if weeks ago. I looked around a bit in the garden to collect a couple of hand fulls and and the web about different options to prepare it. This website has detailed information about the nutritious values and how to grow/prepare purslane. We decided to eat it 'as is', mixed in with a couple of different salads and other leaves. We dressed it with a bit of truffle oil (real one, nothing synthetic!) and ate it with some home baked fresh bread.

Quick drop-by

The title is both with regards to the blog and the garden, yesterday. Between work, an afternoon spend taking care of the kids and the cooking/bathing/bedding thing, I had approximately 45 minutes to run up and down to the garden. With a 15 minute walk each way that's generally hardly worth the effort, but we had a bag with kitchen scraps that contained some rotten apricots, which we didn't want to reside on our balcony any longer.

The alternating heat and humidity have not been bad for the garden. A zucchini that had been to small to even consider harvesting last weekend had taken humongous proportions, which also meant a spontaneous change in dinner plans. Even the third, and rather small, salads start to bolt right now. I guess we'll still have some good ones for a couple of meals, but then we have to hope the fourth and fifth batches can take over (the fifth batch went in this weekend, so it will take a while before we can eat...).

We evidently didn't take good care when harvesting the peas, which we took care of about 10 days ago. In the bed, that now has several different members of the brasica family in it, about 25 small pea plants can be seen. I am hesitating whether I should keep them, and transplant (but where??!) and hope for a second harvest, or whether it's better not to bother and clean them out.

Last, but not least, just before having to take off back home I had a quick look at the tomatoes, and there's more and more little ones appearing. All, both small and big are still very green though. I guess we can only hope for more warm and sunny days.

Weather issues

Weather has been rather weird here the last couple of months, and is seldom in accordance with the predictions. For one, we had snow until late in March which prevented planting of many early harvest crops.

We experienced a first drought period with warm weather in the end of May and beginning of June, which gave many plants severe growth delays, though I guess we were lucky there was quite a bit of moisture left in the ground for some plants with deeper reaching roots to survive. Last week it was unseasonably cold; this week warmer weather was predicted but instead a rain front has arrived.

Regardless, we have been lucky enough to harvest quite a few fruits and vegetables so far. Salads are of course a main crop and grace our dinner table virtually every night. Peas and green manche-touts have been served several times now. Last week I picked the first courgette with more to follow this week if the weather permits.

It turned out we had quite a few rhubarb plants, so we have eaten it in several different forms, and there's quite a few jars with rhubarb marmalade and strawberry/rhubarb marmalade waiting in the cellar for times when fresh fruit is less abundant. The strawberry bed we inherited was actually quite a mess, so we transplanted about 90 plants in April;we got some hands full of berries from them, but tried to pinch out most of the berries to get them settled properly hoping for a nice harvest next year. The remaining plants in the old bed gave us around 5 pounds, which I guess we can't complain about. The bed has now been cleaned out, and another 50 plants have been transplanted (current rain should do them good!!).

Our red currant bush did quite well. I had never seen one before that had been grafted, but apparently it works quite well. The berries mostly ended up in a mixed berry marmalade which also include josta-berries, strawberries and raspberries. We are currently waiting for the Logan and blackberries to ripen, which shouldn't take too much longer, depending on the weather.

Our cherry tree bloomed wonderfully in early spring, and many cherries appeared. Unfortunately, the bird population of Zurich seems to have had quite some nice parties among ours, and those of the neighboring gardens, so we ended up with just a couple of handfuls. Our plum tree didn't even bloom, so there's nothing there. They are Reine Claude's, a variety that's hardly available on the market, but supposed to have a great taste. We can only hope for next year....

Our small apple tree did quite well, though I removed about two thirds of the budding apples not too challenge the tree too much. With a bit of luck it should be able to give lots of apples in a couple of years, even though it is not ideally placed.

Last, but not least on the fruit front are the grapes. I am utterly inexperienced with them, and had thought I had pruned them rather rigorously this winter. It seems I have to be even more merciless because they are putting shoots in every direction imaginable, but there's relatively few grapes....

I'll try to post some photos next time around.

Did add one single photo.