Showing posts with label top 5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label top 5. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 October 2012

Top 5: Cut-and-come-again vegetables

On Sunday, I posted about my discovery of fennel as a cut-and-come-again vegetable.What do I mean? Well I guess I have two ways of defining this. One definition is veg that you can harvest as a whole but that you only harvest in part by taking parts of the plant when you want, leaving most of the plant in the ground to gather more later.

Then I guess there is another way to define cut-and-come-again. Plants that, if you harvest in the right way by leaving their roots in the ground,  they will come again.

I don't do a Top 5 very often, but the post about fennel got me thinking about cut-and-come-again vegetables and how handy they are.

In no particular order here are my Top 5 cut-and-come-again veg.

1. Lettuce
Lettuce is a great cut and come again. While you cant take all of the leaves at once, selectively picking off  leaves from a number of plants at one gives you enough for a salad bowl without harvesting the whole plant.




2. Broccoli
A classic cut-and-come-again. Once you have harvested that central head, the sprouts keep coming. And they are such a handy size - no need to cut the side shoots up before cooking.

3. Celery
Celery is probably one of those plants that you can both harvest individual stalks and also cut the plant off at the base. I personally haven't cut it off at the base and had it re-sprout, but City garden, country garden has and attests to it and I will try it out myself.

4. Spring onions
I tend to pull my spring onions, as you can see from this picture, but many I know cut the onion at the base allowing it to re-sprout. I am going to try this to keep the crop going in future. Another version of getting the most from your spring onions is to buy them in the shops but plant them in the garden straight away. My mother and brother do this regularly they tell me. It keeps the onions nice and taught - preferable to them going limp and slimy in the bottom of your crisper!



5. Fennel
I accidentally discovered that fennel was a cut-and-come-again. Read about it here.


I guess there is another definition of cut and come again vegetables - they might be the ones you can 'bandicoot'. Bandicoots are cute Australian mammals that can raid your root vegetables. So in Australia we call raiding your potato crop by grubbing around with your hand and taking a few potatoes only without ripping the whole plant up - 'bandicooting'.

Which vegetables do you use as a cut-and-come-again? What's your Top 5. Which vegetables do you 'bandicoot'?

Suburban Tomato and The New Good Life  do great and regular  Top 5 which I read each week. Pop over to theirs.

Saturday, 30 June 2012

Top 5: Garden friends

I am rather fond of Suburban Tomato's Top 5s. It's a nice sort of discipline - thinking about the top 5 things.
With little being picked from my patch, I started thinking about the things that I rely on in my veggie gardening and that are actually gardening friends. Here are my top 5. 

1. My hat
Rain, hail or shine my hat is a vital garden tool. Rabbit felt hats are not only good at keeping the sun off your head, but are very water repellent when you want to garden in light rain.

Perhaps most importantly, because I have fair skin (and skin that is currently having some treatment for pre-skin cancers despite being 'careful' for many many years) my hat is not only a fetching addition to my garden style (I am joking), but it is essential  to preventing as much skin damage as possible.

This is quite an old hat. It first belonged to my lovely husband but the hat shrank a little and so it was passed onto me. I don't mind hand-me-downs.

The black band I made from some lovely black silk thread I bought when we visited a Tibetan part of Gansu Province in China many years ago now when the hat still belonged to my husband. The silk thread (it came in black and a vibrant red) was used by Kampa Tibetans as an addition to their long plats. I can distinctly remember sitting on the verandah of a fabulous Tibetan-styled rustic courtyard hotel and making it.

The feathers are from a 
cockatoo and a kookaburra found some time ago while bushwalking.
It has two holes in it now and the felt is a little dry and scratchy, but it will keep being used till it dies and then it might become a rabbit and silk addition to the mulch under the lemon tree - a fitting place of rest.

2. My secateurs


Handy little friends, these are. With these in your hand you feel like you are a real gardener ready to conquer the world! They are almost always in the garden with me. What would my espaliered limes be without my secateurs?

You can see that they are pretty dirty.  I keep reading gardening books that say I should be 
cleaning them, but I don't.

3. My harvest basket



This brings such joy. I love the crack of the cane when it is weighed down with a basket full of lemons, I love the polished handle in my hand.  I love filling it with my home grown produce.

4. My garden knife
This is an old bread knife. I suspect that it may have been given to me as a leaving home present - you know the pile of things your mother gave you when you first moved out that were her cast-offs (I mentioned I don't mind hand-me-downs). 


It  was a perfectly good bread knife so I am not sure how it ended up being a garden friend, but it is very helpful for cutting broccoli heads, cutting string for ties for staking, sawing thru giant stalks of spent sunflowers and cutting up the hard stems of the broccoli to include in the compost bin.

It has a lovely wooden handle that has lovely grain markings. It feels very nice in the hand like all knives should feel.

5. My seedling waterer screw top thingy
I discovered the joys of these screw on tops when we lived in England and I first started raising seeds in my little green house.

They screw easily onto the tops of mineral water bottles and deliver a little gentle spray of water ideal for your  seeds and seedlings.

I was delighted to find these available from the Diggers Club when I returned to Australia.
.....

I want to throw in another thing , not really becasue they are part of a top 6 but becasue I like the picture so much.  What are they? Twist ties!

In accordance with that great Australian tradition of keeping furniture on your verandah, we have a lovely hat rack on the back veranda.  It is a handy place to store my twist ties (and my hat).



What are your favourite garden friends? The things that reliably assist you in your patch? Things that you'd find it hard to do without ?

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