Succession Planting: Harvesting Beetroot, Chilli, Carrots and Cucumber & Planting More

This week I’ve been very busy in the garden. I harvested a 10-litre container of cucumber, around 1kg of chilli peppers, a 10 litre container of carrots, another of beetroot and a enough green beans for two family meals.

We also continue to sell bags of spinach. I also planted more cucumbers, baby marrows(zucchini), spinach, onions, beetroot, chives and three packs of flower mixes. I plan to do more planting in the next couple of weeks.

My main aim in starting a garden is to produce almost 80% of our food supply. The biggest challenge making sure that we have a good supply of vegetables every week, all year.

I notice that our supply is not consistent, and we tend to go through a feast or famine situation, and I’m unhappy about that. So I’m going to plant more often/every month, so I always have things growing/ready for harvest.

Last night it rained, so today was cool enough for vegetable soup. The soup was easy to make. I used 8 whole potatoes, 2 herbed onions and 2 packs of herbed carrots from my frozen stash from the Spring crop, a teaspoon or garlic and ginger mix, dried parsley (from last summer’s crop), 1 pack of tomato paste and 2 packs of cream of mushroom soup, all boiling in 2 litres of water until the vegetables were soft, the water reduced and the mixture thickened. I added paprika for seasoning.  I used a big pot, so I had enough for lunch for everyone and I'm goin

My Mid-November Onion and Cabbage Harvest

Over the weekend, I'm going to clean the onions, cut, saute and freeze them in small meal-sized packages. They should last me months.The  cabbages I'll just clean, cut and freeze.

From Garden To Table

Look at what I picked for lunch yesterday.  Nice to be able to just go get what i need from the garden, no? The green beans were soft and sweet and so nice!

Inching Our Way To Mid-Season

We are now approaching the end of the first month of Autumn, inching our way towards mid-season. We are still harvesting plenty of spinach, onions, parsley, basil, thyme and chilli, with the occassional green peppers and roma tomatoes.

But I can see that I will need to stagger my plantings much more effectively to allow the vegetable harvests to be staggered throughout summer and autumn, and not have one big batch at a time and little left for the rest of the season.

Kelebogile, the part-timer gardener who helps me with the heavy lifting, prepares the soil for me to transplant seedlings

Preparations for Autumn/Winter planting are underway. So far, the following seeds have sprouted:

• Peas
• White beans
• Broad beans
• Carrots
• Spinach
• Beetroot
• Swiss Chard
• Roma tomatoes
• Onions (3 types)
• Potatoes
• Sweet potatoes
• Butternut
• Cucumber
• Coriander
• Cabbage
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Nasturtiums
• Sweet peas (climber and bush)
• Wildflowers
• Allysium

We've begun transplanting tomatoes and cabbages, and will transplant or thin the rest as and when needed. I still have more seeds to plant - some for later crops of the vegetables named above, and some for new vegetables we have never planted before.

I am very happy with our progress though, and I feel that the food we harvested in summer and early autumn is contributing heavily towards my family's food security.

Then there are the unexpected bonuses: like today I was in the garden, picking some red jalapeno chilli to bottle for future use and street food vendor who regularly buys chicken from us came by and found me in the garden. On impulse, she decided to buy a whole bundle of jalapeno chilli to use on her food. It wasn't a big sale, but i've enjoyed some regular sales even though i don't advertise at all, as i don't view my gardening as a business. But  the money goes into my seeds funds and at the rate it's growing, it should buy me some nice seeds for Spring planting. The garden being able to pay for seeds would be very nice.

P.S Food Police: For the past week, I've been very consistent with meals, eating when I needed to, even when I didn't feel like it. Today's dinner sucked though: I was in the mood for lasagne, and SIL was going to town to do her own family's grocery shopping. So she volunteered to bring me a pre-packaged meat lasagne frrom Checkers Hyper.  To say it was bad is a kindness:   the mince tasted like bad soya and there was very little of it. There were two sheets of lasagne in that one boxed serving. MAYBE! The rest was the sauce, which kinda tried to make up for the lack of substance in the meal. Someone remind me why i bought this pre-packaged stuff, when I could have made my own lasagne/ or at least, bribed SIL into cooking it for me?