courgette past using the whole plant

hi everyone.
this is my courgette pasta that i love so much so i decide to share my recipe. this is what i do:
once a week i cut a leaf from each courgette plants so you can have enough leaves for a dish for 2 ( i have 10 courgette plants)

this is my harvest.

after that you need to pull out the strings that are in the leave otherwise you will found in your plate. to do that you can just use a knife as i do in this picture

after you clean all the leave you need to chop everything in piece but separate the flowers. now let boil a pot with salty water and then drop the veg ( except the flowers) in the pot. let boil for 5 min and then add the pasta.

when the pasta is ready stir in a pan with olive oil, chopped garlic, and the flowers.

enjoy

potatoes day... and more

Another busy day in the garden…

After I’ve been in shops I found some packet of seed potatoes 8 for 99p so I thought to buy some of them and try to grow them in container…. In the last week I found a lot of flower bucket from supermarket so I decided to plant them one seed potato for each bucket…

I’ve bought only 2 varieties : red duke of York and sharp express only because I thought to try some first early potato considered that the  buckets are only 10 litre big so a main crop wouldn’t succeed in that small space…

I plant 16 buckets of potatoes and I put ¼ of the bucket with compost, then I placed the seed potato and then another ¼ of compost… when then potato will grow I will earthing up until the bucket is full only leaving 3 cm from the top… because the temperature is still a bit cold even if is not frost I pop out one of my mini polytunnel and cover them up..

After that I sowed some more carrots and spring onion in a 12 inch container, transplant the first trial I did a week ago, and then I pop them under the mini polytunnel (considered that was still a bit of space for 2 more pots) and I sowed as well 8 broad beans the Sutton (because the first batch is not germinate yet and I thought to plant a safety batch in case they don’t germinate) and 8 peas kelvedon wonder (the same reason)…

Then the weather was getting very dull so I moved back inside the kitchen and I transplant some of my seedling that were in the unheated propagator on the windowsill.  

The seedlings were:

4 garden delight tomatoes

1 nasturtium thumb tom

2 broccoletto quarantino riccio

2 kale dwarf green curled.

Now is time for me to relax and enjoy my cup of tea…

30/04/12: my potato are growing well even if the weather is not the best

07/05/12: after 1 week  the potato are doing well

as you can see on the above picture the flower bucket are full now and no more earthing up is required.... i think at the end of may i will be able to harvest them...

12/05/12: keep growing

 after not even 1 week my potatoes are growing very well... i have to say that maybe a bit of sunshine and the temperature over night about 7 degrees have helped them... i can smell potatoes in the air...

nice lovely plant

 well everyone know that this year is not been a nice year... we start with end of march with nice sunny day, April like December, may very cold and frost in the beginning and hot almost 30c at the end and June well.... rain, rain, rain and more rain.
but the potato plant seem to grow very well but underneath the potato are still small after 14 weeks ( they supposed to be ready in 10 weeks).

when i pull up some of them the quantity was so small but full in flavour... been the first year growing them and considered the challenge weather i considered a victory and definitely to try next year and chit them at the beginning of march...

sun or not sun

after a nice week in march i thought the spring was start already but i was a fool..now the weather is rubish.. not enought sun and everything is growing very slowly and i can't even leave anything outside in the blowaway because sometime is very cold and the temperature is close to 0c. so back all the fleece over the tree and every night  all the plants back to the kitchen...
the good news that everything is growing..

my strawberry are already in flower and the same for my apple trees, all my hardy plant ( peas, broad beans, carrot, spring onion,  beetroot, radish,leeks and salad leaves) are growing well under cover.
today a day off work but with the weather been crazy ( rain and sunshine every 10-20 minutes,this is april) i thiught to sort my alpine strawberry and plant one by one in small module till they get bigger to transplant them in 3 inch pots. it took me about 1 hour and half but in the end i have a nice 30 alpine strawberry plants...

set up the garden

Finally 1 week of work and luckily was a sunny week, but a bit cold at night. I had a project to do and I decide to do in this nice week. I’m going to grow everything in pot and I noticed that the cordon tomatoes are not secure enough with some bamboo canes or metal spiral and considered that here is so windy all my tomatoes will just fall on the floor so I build a kind of pergola that will help to hold in place the metal spiral and plus as you can see from the picture on the 4 front posts I will let climb some nasturtium and I will put 3 hanging baskets with some tumbler and garden perl tomato .

 

For the same reason ( windy area) I thought to build 2 veg cages for my 2 containers’  beds, with a layer of fleece around and on top with net curtain for ventilation for the morning and at night I will put a fleece to protect them… plus doing that I protect the brassicas, the carrots and any veg that will grow in there from pest ( I hate aphids and carrot fly, they ruin your hard work).

Now my garden is set up soon I will start to fill up the main pots with the seedling that for now the are in and out the greenhouses ( as I said is been quite cold at night and I don’t want to loose my baby veggy….

spring is coming

This week is been a lovely week... the sun was out, the temperature was worm and my crocus are in flower….that make me feel that spring is definitely in the air…

I decided to do some potting and seeding....

I start to transplant a lot of my seedling that with this sun they really grown fast and the true leaves were coming through...

I transplant in 10 cm pots:

4 tomatoes money-maker

1 tomato garden delight

5 French marigold

Plus because I was excited I thought as well to try some squash as a trial even if I know that Is way too early to start but I did anyway because it sound weird but in Italy is a delicatessen eat a plate a pasta with a courgette leaves, so I will eat only the young leaves.

What I transplant then was:

1 pumpkin big max

1 butternut squash

1 courgette black beauty

1sweet pepper California wonder

2 courgette striato d’italia

After that I thought to fill up the propagator with more seeds so I decided to put a new batch in it :

2 basil sweet Genovese

2 tomatoes tumbler

2 kale dwarfs curled

2 sweet pepper minimix

2 sweet pepper California wonder

10 leek prize taker…

I did all this on Monday and today I finally pick up from post office my new birthday present from my fiancé: a wormery

I just finish to build it up and now just wait about 3 weeks and I can start to feed them  with kitchen waste… this year is going to be a busy garden… I’m already excited

my first seeding...

This morning I was off work so I decided to start my main seeding considered that I start few seed 2 week ago only because I thought this year to change my compost from peat base to peat free… after I realized that the compost was good for seeding I took all my equipment and start…

The heated propagator is plugged in and I pull out from my shed the seed cell trays, some toilette roll cardboard for peas, some compost ,tweezers,  the label stick and of course the seeds box.

I prefer using cell module tray then the traditional tray, because I find easy to transplant the seedling into a small pot, after I put 2 - 3 seeds in each cell and then I pinch out the other leaving only the strongest one…

For peas and beans I use toilette roll cardboard or peat pots because they hate transplanting so when is come to sow I just put all in the big pots where they will grow...

What I’ve been sowing to day was:

4 tomatoes garden delight

4 tomatoes moneymaker

4 lobelia sapphire

4 nasturtium thumb (pot variety)

2 nasturtium tall (trailers variety)

4 marigold French

2 snap dragon flower

6 sprouting broccoli

6 carrots early Nantes

4 courgette black beauty

1 butternut squash

1 pumpkin

15 peas kelvedon wonder (dwarf variety)

15 peas Oregon sugar pod (dwarf mange tout)

12 broad bean (the Sutton)

my garden experience 2012

hi everybody,
this year i will start to grow my own but not just growing some courgette like i did last year but i will start a new experience in growing my own fruit and veg... i finally found something that really love to do as hobby. grow your own is important for me because if you not doing properly you end up with nothing so if in the end of the season i will harvest a lot of veg and fruit i will be so proud of myself...( i always want to succeed in anything i've done in my life).
because i don't have an allotment ( i put an application but you know that the waiting list is long) i decided to grow in container at home... while i was reeding book, wesite, forum, etc i found out that the better way for me to grow my veg is a square foot gardening method...
wait a moment i can't because i have a patio garden....so..... here we go.... found a solution.... because i grow in container why not try a squarefoot gardening container...
i made 2 bed 3ft x 4ft each one made of 12 square pot big 1 sqft.. this will bee even easy because if osme plant will need some extra space i wil just move a bit so they dont overshadow other plant. plus this will make a crop rotation even better just put different plant in differe pot ( by plant i mean the group that they belong) for the soil i will some john innes compost because they are made of loam and sand base so next year i will only adding some home made compost e planting again.

this is the plan that i made and how it will be after... now the pot are empty but soon i will start to fill them up... as you can see the lower bed have 4 extra pot but i'm not sure if i will use them.
plus on the top left there are 8 square pot where i will try to grow some corn, i hope they will grow..
on the left side you can see 6 pot up side down in there i will put  momeymaker and gsarden delight tomato (3 each ). and as i said before i love courgette so i will grow 6 plant in a building bucket..