Category: gardening

What’s the deal with British food?

~ Lkvy ~ 1 Comment

A few minutes after getting home from work on Friday, my phone notifies me of a new email from work. I usually ignore these when I’m not on the clock; however, this email announced a few free slots for the Royal Victoria Marathon for interested staff. Within five minutes, I’d signed up for my first marathon.

Along with entering my shirt and sock sizes, I was asked what I wanted the announcer to say about me when I cross the finish line. Not that it makes a difference, as I won’t be able to hear it anyway. Nevertheless, I hope they honour my wish:

Before flying to London, I recruited the upstairs tenants to water the garden, as the roomie was also headed out of town for a week. I’d planted new radish seeds a week before I left, fully expecting to return to a new crop of fist-sized radishes, along with a bounty from the tomato, bush bean, and Hungarian hot pepper plants that had yet to bear fruit.

I’d long become disillusioned about my purple moon cauliflowers, of which sprouted leaves that only continued to get larger and more abundant since this June 20 picture:

A week before I was to return, I received this picture via WhatsApp. The purple moons had sprouted in my absence:

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Rewind.

~ Lkvy ~ 1 Comment

Behold, my beautiful, lush garden.

The green sugar snap peas, purple moon cauliflowers, and bush green beans are well underway. The green lettuce, kale and butter lettuce are ready to be harvested. The Hungarian peppers are struggling, and the cherry tomatoes are taking their sweet time. The arugula has already bolted and were ripped out this morning, as were the radishes. In the previous two years, we grew the Cherriette variety of radishes, but this year we planted the Easter Egg II blend, named for its range of colours from white to burgundy. They went from seed to R.O.U.S. (radishes of unusual size) in just six weeks:

This is the largest intact radish from this morning’s harvest. There were larger ones, but they’d cracked, and bugs had worked their way into the crannies, so I discarded them in the compost bin. Even after getting rid of all those fissured radishes, the bounty is too large to be divided among two people, especially when just one radish is the size of an apple.

I’ve tried my hand at pickling:

Shredded on the left and thin slices on the right. Supermarket-purchased dill in both jars.

With new seeds in the soil, I’ll have three weeks to discover new ways to prepare radishes. Candied radishes? Caramel radish? Radish ice cream?*

Continue reading “Rewind.” →