No more bare soil!
We planted spinach, Italian (Bianca Piatta) and French (Navette de Nancy Feuille Entiere) turnips, bulb fennel, rocket, beetroot, baby leeks and Mizuna. How amazing is that to be planting seeds in the warm sun starting the third week in August!
We harvested onions, courgettes and beetroot and just one early squash.
Anyone who is waiting for an allotment or curious come and plant, harvest or just chat it is open to everbody in or near Louth.
Having said that we are not there next Sunday but shall be the following week at two, check the blog to see changes to open times.
If you want the squash to store, then they need to stop growing and harden their skins. We leave our out until frost threatens then bring then in to a warm house for 2 weeks, then set on a shelf in the pantry not touching each other. That way they will last all year. Or you can eat them young with the skins on, lovely roasted young or old!!
ReplyDeleteI ate a squash last night and can guarantee that it tastes delicious roasted!
ReplyDeleteHi Nick, Do you mean you have to leave the squash until they've finished growing if you want to store them? If so, how do you know they've finished growing?
ReplyDeleteThe natural chain of events seems to be: the squash start to develop(increasing in size), they stop getting larger and start to put there energy into seed development(stop getting bigger),because they have stopped getting bigger the skins no longer need to be thin and soft so can start to thicken and toughen(which is what you want for storage and what the plants want to protect their seeds over the winter.The skin sometimes changes colour now. If you leave the plant to do this naturally, when you come to harvest you have a good robust squash which will take being plopped in a wheel barrow or basket and taken away to your house for further skin toughening. It is possible to store squash harvested with thin skins but you must be very careful to not damage the skin(think how easy it is to pierce a courgettes skin). I think the moisture content of a young squash is higher aswell meaning that it might spoil sooner than a mature squash.As I said, to be safe we just leave them on the plant until the leaves die back and harvest before the first frosts.
ReplyDeleteHope this makes sense!