The end of the summer crops...

It has been a very busy month at Malmsbury Kitchen Garden. In the garden, early autumn is the time for changing over from summer crops to winter and spring crops, and in the kitchen it's the time to finish preserving the end of the summer crops harvests.

Styrian Hulless Pumpkins

The melons and pumpkins have started to come out to be replaced by peas, broad beans, carrots, parsnips, radishes, turnips and swedes. The beans have been replaced by kale and asian greens. The tomatoes are out, but the chillis, capsicums and eggplants are still in the ground. 

Triamble pumpkins

All of the brussels sprouts, cabbages and cauliflower have been planted, and this week the last of the chard, spinach, broccoli and khol rabi will go in. Next week, the garlic, shallots, leeks and onions will go in, followed by flowering bulbs and then the main autumn planting will finally be over! 

I will continue to plant greens and herbs under plastic over the next few months. This will be an experiment to see how long into winter I can continue to plant these crops.

I'm also trying some new salad crops this year. Lambs lettuce or Cornsalad, also called Mache is an extremely popular salad green in France, especially through winter. I've grown it before many, many years ago at a school garden in Collingwood. Hopefully, I'll have the same success in Malmsbury

I'm also trying out Witloof Endive for the first time. Apparently, I will be able to harvest the green leaves through winter just like normal endive, and in early spring remove all the leaves and hill the soil around the plant to produce the blanched leaves that we all know as witloof.

In the kitchen, I've been making my way through the end of the tomato harvest making tomato kasoundi, semi-dried tomatoes and green tomatoes pickled in vinegar.