Beanpocalypse!

This month has mostly been about beans.

This was the first harvest. I've brought in about four times as much since then.

The garden has 10 runner bean plants planted to grow up a bamboo A-frame, another three in a planter by the door and a selection of 5-6 dwarf yellow French beans to go in the Three Sisters bed. I am coming to the conclusion that I have overplanted. For the past fortnight, the question has not been, "What shall we have for dinner?" but, "What are we eating with the beans?"

Still, I'd rather this than be struggling for what to put on the plate like I was in June. The garden is now providing a bit of variety - I've had broccoli and cabbage and courgette and potato and beans of course. We have had two new things this year. The first is onions, which is kinda sad considering that they were one of the first things I tried to grow three years back. I've had sort-of onions in previous years, but they were sad little failures that I only ate because I'd put work into them. This year, they're actually worth the name.

The second new thing is aubergines, which is very exciting. I did try growing my own from seed, but they didn't really get anywhere, possibly because they failed to get repotted during a busy period. The success story has come from a grafted plant, which is quite a nifty idea if you're happy to pay the extra. Basically, the garden centre grow a plant that has a big, strong and sturdy root system and then decapitate it. They then graft a plant that normally had a weedy or temperamental root system (like aubergine, tomato, cucumber, etc) onto the stump and encourage the two halves to bond.

It's a brilliant idea, because instead of having a boring plant that's really good at absorbing nutrients and a useful plant that dies if you cough on it, you have a Frankenstein's monster that's hardy and useful. The idea was taken to it's zenith when somebody managed to create the utterly pointless, but kinda cool, TomTato, which is a cherry tomato plant that grows potatoes with its roots.

Like Frankenstein's monster, but without its creator being a complete emo tool. Note also, the photo-bombing green bean in the top right.

Anyway, the grafted aubergine has produced enough already to make the sole recipe I know with aubergine, which is pork chops with an aubergine/tomato thing. Very nice indeed.

One other thing which has been new this year is coloured vegetables. I've tried before without much luck, but I've already managed to get a whole meal out of them: yellow courgettes, yellow beans and purple carrots.

A carrot of a half-decent size! Not from the experimental pot though - I'll update on that in the next post.

The one major thing missing from that dish is the interesting-coloured cauliflowers that I planted way back in March. I have yet to see hide nor hair of an actual cauliflower head forming so far, even on the ones that I cheated and bought from the garden centre. The grand plan was supposed to have me eating cauliflower back in May/June, but I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if I was just even more over-optimistic than I'd realised. I'm sure last year I had cauliflowers before now, but they were sickly things riddled with caterpillars that tasted absolutely disgusting, so it's entirely possible that the heads were formed in a final doomed effort to procreate before death by pests.

All mouth. No trousers.

The non-production of cauliflower is pretty much solely responsible for the traffic jam of winter vegetables. The orphanage for displaced brassicae is falling apart, pretty much as quickly as you would expect my bodge-work to do, and it's going to be interesting to see if I actually get to transplant any more of the winter veg before they are completely stripped back to the stem by caterpillars and slugs. I may be going hungry come January.

PJW