Our small garden kept on giving until late in October. This is not a botanical classification of the things we harvested, just a way to make the story more organized. Here is the first part about the harvest. Read about the planting in my previous post.
Fruits
With about two square meters of strawberry plants, we were surprised how much such a small surface can yield. Strawberries are a low maintenance plant. We just put mulch around them and checked for slugs often. Our son ate most of the harvest, so not jam resulted from these.
We planted the red currant bushes last autumn, so there was not a lot to harvest this year. The red currants had the same fate as the strawberries – our son loves these too. Funnily enough, he doesn’t like the store bough currants nearly as much, although they taste the same. I suspect is the eating directly from the bush that he is missing.
We inherited a black currant bush from the previous tenant. None of us like them very much fresh, but it seemed such a waste to not harvest them. From the 4-5 kilograms I plucked, I made several jars of jam. I used a strainer to remove the skin and the seeds from the currants and the results was delicious.
The grape vine was also in the garten when we took over it. I have no clue what kind of grapes it produces, but these species of grape vine is used a lot around Europe for providing shade. The fruits are sweet on the inside, their skin is sour and they have a lot of seeds. Compared to the sweet, seedles, thin skin version from the supermarket, with these grapes you are never bored when you eat them.
We planted one melon seedling just for fun, without much hope for the outcome, considering the rainy, clowdy weather I enjoy around my area. The seedlig grew a lot and made plenty of flowers and tiny melons. Soon I understood that I need to keep this plan short and force it to store its energy in 2-3 melons if we want to get something edible out of it. In the end we got 3 melons, which were fairly tasty.
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? I leave this discussion to biologists and culinary experts. I made it my personal project to grow tomatoes this year after the complete failure from last year. Tomatoes are high maintenance. They love light, but no direct sunlight. They need water, but not on their leaves. They have no control over how much and in what direction they grow. Their fruits are disproportionally big compared to their fragile stems. They are also very sensitive to parasites.
My husband built a small covered enclosure to protect the tomato plants from direct sunlight. A friendly neighbour sprayed the plants with a Bordeaux mixture. I pruned them almost weekly and supported the stems with sticks. The hard work paid off and we got a lot of tomatoes during the summer. At the end of September, my mother-in-law even had enough to prepare two huge 8 liter jars of pickled green tomatoes, a popular preserve in Romania.
I will continue this post soon.