Cabbage-topia

As briefly mentioned in my last post, I have a habit of planting my seedlings in one go, without giving any thought to how big they will eventually get. This turned out to be a particularly large problem with my cabbages. Basically, the people to cabbage ratio was heavily against the humans. Despite our best efforts to give them away and eat cabbage for breakfast, lunch and dinner, we still ended up with far too many than we could deal with. The solution was a well spent morning in my kitchen batch-blanching the remaining veg.

Since I have never blanched anything in my life I thought I would go through the basics of what I did. If you've never done it before, I hope I can help. If there are any blanching experts out there, please feel free to comment on where I can improve!

To start I halved my cabbages and soaked them in salty water to get rid of any beasties that were still lurking (note to self - get nets to deter caterpillars next year!). Then I finely shredded the halves. My understanding of blanching is that you have to get the veg hot really quickly and then cool it quickly after about a minute.

The way I did this was to plunge the halves into boiling water and boil them for 2 minutes. I took them off the boil and straight into cold water. Since I had 10 halves, I then went onto boiling my second one. When that needed to go into the cold water I shifted the first half into ice water before boiling the third half. I continued in this way, shifting each half along the stage until I had a huge pile of blanched cabbage draining on some kitchen roll. Once the cabbage was dry, I then divided it into sandwich bags and popped them in the freezer.

Some of the tutorials will advise keeping the freezer as full as possible to prevent it warming up. One article I read even advised filling your freezer with bread when it started to get empty. We've got quite a small freezer anyway, so I didn't really bother with this bit too much.

One thing I will add to the blanching process - if you've got a lot of batches, you will need to refresh the water frequently as it will quickly warm up. Also, be prepared to live with your house smelling like cabbage for the rest of the day!

Minimum Preparation - Maximum Results

In keeping with my mantra of "very little effort, money or skill", I can honestly say I've done nothing to prepare my soil. I know the books tell you to get your soil pH levels tested, mix certain ratios of poop to mud to get the best soil, and rotate your crops so all the nutrients aren't sucked out.

While I'm sure that all of these things make for a far better crop than mine, I'm only feeding 2 people and I want to spend as much time relaxing in my garden as I can. And faffing about with test tubes isn't my idea of a good time.

So I decided to take the lazy route. My theory is that if it's meant to be, it will be. If I plant a seed and it does well, then great. If it doesn't, then it's not suited to my garden for whatever reason and I should try something else. That way, I won't be wasting a load of time, effort or money on improving my soil for the sake of some cucumbers.

Using this theory I've grown 15 different types of veg in 3 years, and learnt a new lesson at each step of the way:

Potatoes - do too well, they need to be kept in a pot
Tomatoes - do better in the mud than in the growbag and much less watering required
Spring Onions - always seem to come back to life no matter how much they dry out
Radishes - grow from seeds sown straight into the ground but slugs love them
Cabbages - they get a lot bigger than you'd think, plant them far apart
Beetroot - so easy to grow, they survived under my cabbages with virtually no sunlight
Sweetcorn - take up a lot less space than you'd imagine
Squash - really fast growing
Lollo Rosso Lettuce - much hardier than I expected
Spinach - needs picking regularly, you'd only need one plant to feed two people all summer
Leeks - another vegetable that seems to need no water
Celery - just plant them through some black fabric and leave them to it
Carrots - sow the seeds in a pot, not directly in the ground

The only true failures I've had so far are peas and purple sprouting broccoli. I tried the peas twice with bad results both times. I'm going to give them one last chance, by growing them in a big pot. If I don't get any luck there, then I'll admit defeat. The broccoli was a heartbreaking disaster. Having just two plants survive my premature planting out was bad enough, but returning from holiday to find them utterly decimated by caterpillars was too much. Next year not only will I be more gentle with the planting out, I'll also be sure to keep them under a net.