Vegetable jam

I haven't had a chance to do much in the garden of late due to work, family and other commitments and my to-do list was filling up, so I was very glad to set aside this morning as my day for doing all of the gardening chores.

Thor is angry that people are butthurt about a female Thor!* The sky must be rent!

I quite like rain, so I went out anyway, but only lasted about 10-15 minutes before coming inside as drenched as if I'd jumped in a swimming pool fully clothed.

The one advantage of having a rainy gardening day was that it gave me a chance to plan the garden a little bit better. When I decided that I wanted to try a year without buying vegetables, I sat down and planned out how I was going to get things year-round. I have a schedule which details when I need to plant seeds, when I get to harvest things and which new plants will go in to replace the harvested stuff. This was all painstakingly researched and I thought I had a foolproof plan.

However, either I am too much fool to be stymied by mere foolproof or the interwebs research I made led me astray. The plan tells me that I ate three cauliflowers and two cabbages by the middle of last month, making room for the winter cabbage and the overwintering sprouting broccoli. The reality is that none of my cauliflowers have formed a head yet and I have harvested only my first cabbage today.

Photo not taken in June

Granted, this is much better than last year, in which the Very Bastardish Caterpillars ensured that I didn't get any cabbage and that most of my cauliflowers never formed a head (the only one that I did get, I threw away halfway through eating for being utterly disgusting and riddled with dead caterpillars). So +1 for the brassica nets for doing a brilliant job. However, it has left me with something of a log-jam. The seedlings for the winter and spring brassica have grown up big and strong and are ready to be planted, but there's nowhere to plant them.

This is further complicated by the fact that I can't just put them in any bed that has a space - any bed that I grow spring brassica in won't be usable for brassica next year as there won't be a season in which it can be rested and used for green manure. My grand plan took that into account, as I had set aside which cabbages and cauliflowers would be harvested first so that it would fit perfectly into my crop rotation scheme. Unfortunately nature doesn't appear to've read my grand plan, as the only things close to being harvestable are in the beds that I wasn't planning on rotating!

All things told, it's a mess and has left me trying to fit a quart into a pint pot. I've had to pot up seedlings, then repot into bigger tubs when it became obvious the problem wasn't going to be solved before they became pot-bound, then find a place to put them where the butterflies won't get them. I did have them in the brassica cages inbetween the actual planted cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbages, but the summer vegetables have grown now so there's not enough space.

Thankfully, I got rid of a shed last month and opened up a whole new area of space in my garden, allowing me to create... this thing.

It's like an orphanage for displaced brassicae... in a shanty-town. Made by people who'd never built a shanty town plant orphanage before. Out of inferior materials. Yes, this literally was the best I could accomplish. There's a reason why my wife does the construction in our house.

It's just about sturdy enough to keep the butterflies off, which is the main thing, and has managed to keep most of the winter brassica alive long enough for the first one to be planted into its final position.

Thrive, little sprouting broccoli. And don't let those big kids push you around and steal your lunch sunlight.

The important thing is that I've learned a valuable lesson about trying to cram too many plants into my garden and will learn from this experience next year by reducing my ambitions and growing slightly less. I definitely won't just react to this by trying to build more vegetable beds and expanding the empire further.

Honest.

PJW


*The best stupid comment I've heard about it was someone on Facebook who mentioned off-hand that superhero comics now have an unrealistic and unnatural number of characters as women just to placate 'liberals'. Unfortunately, it was a topic on a friend of a friend's post, so couldn't ask him exactly what percentage of people being women he thought to be "realistic."