Grow Your Own Archives - The Smallest Smallholding

Cambridge Favourite strawberries

June 14, 2017 by Lucy

The little patch of strawberries are starting to ripen and I’ve got my very first crop of strawberries to enjoy this year.

Cambridge Favourite strawberry crop

I started off with four little Cambridge Favourite strawberry plants, bought for about £1.29 each from my local independent plant nursery. I added a couple more freebies that were sent with a plant order earlier this year, and with a little (and I mean, minimal) TLC, the plants have thrived, flowered and fruited. We now have a small but vigorous strawberry patch that has endured despite the late April frosts earlier this last spring.

It seems Cambridge Favourite have proven to be a successful strawberry variety, which need only a little love and attention to produce a decent yield. I’ve given mine a couple of liquid seaweed feeds, and an initial mulch of general peat-free organic compost at the beginning of the year, when I divided the plants and runners. Our sandy soil also helps with drainage, and with a regular water every few days the plants seem happy and healthy.

It’s now a question of beating the birds and woodlice in a race to see who can enjoy the ruby-red spoils this summer!

Filed Under: fruit Tagged With: Cambridge Favourite, Grow Your Own, strawberries, strawberry

Pink Lemonade Blueberry

May 18, 2017 by Lucy

If you like something a bit different, and enjoy experimenting with new varieties of fruit and veg, then you’ll like this. I recently posted about bringing a taste of the exotic to my little English cottage garden potager patch, with my Valentina raspberries. And now I’ve added another interesting and unusual variety into the mix; a Pink Lemonade blueberry. I got mine from Marshalls Seeds but you can get them easily online pretty much anywhere!

Apparently this variety of blueberry is much sweeter than its blue-hued counterparts, and flowers with delicate pinkish to white blooms in spring. The hardy plant then produces a large crop of bright pink berries mid-summer, followed by a steady harvest through to early autumn.

Sounds good to me.

If you know blueberries, then you know that they need ericaceous soil and love full sun. Whilst there’s not a lot I can do about the abundance of lack of sunlight in summer, I can control soil conditions. We might have sandy soil in this part of Mid Bedfordshire, but it’s not really acidic enough (between pH 4.0 – 5.5) for these fruit bushes to thrive planted out in the borders. So I’ll be starting my Pink Lemonade blueberry plant off in a large well-draining container (the plant could grow up to 4-5ft) with ericaceous soil, and giving it a regular top up with diluted tomato feed each month. In spring, a liberal mulch of leafmould will also help to keep the plant balanced, fed and healthy.

Apparently Pink Lemonade blueberry plants are self-pollinating, which means they’ll produce fruit with just one plant. That’s all I’ve got for now, but if I choose to buy one or more blueberry plants, it’s said I’ll get a bigger, better crop. To be honest, I’ve got about three years until the plants will produce those juicy, jewelled berries, so I’ve got time to grow my blueberry collection before then. Perhaps a couple of heritage varieties will do…

*This is not a sponsored post. I have not been asked to mention/promote/link to Marshalls Seeds!

Filed Under: fruit Tagged With: acid soil, acidic soil, blueberries, blueberry, ericaceous oil, exotic fruit, Grow Your Own, how to grow blueberries, pink blueberry, pink lemonade

Little Harvests

July 11, 2016 by Lucy

The harvesting has begun – we’ve already got a fridge full of calabrese and during the last fortnight I’ve been picking fat pods of peas every other night. I only put in a handful of plants, but they’ve thrived, carefully planted at the back of the veg patch so as not to overshadow other crops and happily scrambling up some old metal grilles that were used to protect the old chicken ark from Mr Fox.

I love podding peas – it’s intensely satisfying, opening up pods of neatly packed chubby green globes of goodness and popping them out. I hope that next year I’ll be able to feed my daughter freshly podded peas to encourage her to enjoy tender homegrown, organically produced fruit and veggies.

The calabrese has taken on a life of its own, and where I harvested big florets off the top of the plants, smaller shoots of tender stems have sprung up, willing to give us just that little bit more before the plants go over.

The garlic hasn’t been so virulent; with lots of rain this year we’ve had our worst bout of rust, so not sure how the bulbs have fared. We’ll see… as long as we have something to use I won’t mind too much as homegrown garlic is just unbeatable. The downside though is that we won’t be able to grow any kind of alum in that same patch for three years.

And on my two tiny apple trees, we have some fruits appearing. The Blenheim Orange must be on a dwarf slow-growing rootstock, but it’s managed to produce a few fruits this year. The Charless Ross is much more vigorous and the offerings are looking so much better than the lone fruit produced last year. I’m already thinking about apple crumble!

There is a definite kind of peace in wandering about the veg patch before dinnertime, picking and harvesting fresh, homegrown food before preparing it for dinner. It’s like a piece of life’s puzzle that just slots in and makes you feel a little bit more satisfied, a little bit more complete. I might not be the world’s best food grower, but it doesn’t matter. Because next year, I can always try again.