Garden Centre

Thursday, May 24, 2007

When Size Matters

Those are supposed to be miniature summer Savoys. In other words, you should be looking at some small, tightly-packed cabbages, a bit bigger than a cricket ball, but not much. As you can see, that’s not what we’ve got! They are still nice cabbages, but they haven’t formed hearts and they seem likely to continue growing until they come up to my knees and are as big as footballs.

Because of this unexpected growth, we’ve had to lift the mesh lid, because the snails were just using it as a convenient browsing system, crawling out onto it to munch on the leaves as they pushed the mesh up. They actually have less chance to eat the cabbages without the lid, because they have to crawl up the outside of the plant and traverse the tough outer leaves to get to the tender inner ones, instead of picking the best leaves to eat by zooming across the mesh as they were until a couple of days ago.

Here’s what we did wrong:

Germinated the seed too early
Put the plants in a soil that was too rich.

But at least they haven’t bolted, which would have been rather sad.

It’s a good problem to have, in a way, better too big than too small, as long as there is still a real flavour to the crop, but it’s something to remember for next year. We haven’t grown cabbages here before, and next year I think we’ll start with the full size plants anyway and firm them in much harder in poorer quality soil.

The mesh wasn’t to keep snails out (obviously) but a Falco preventative. That’s Falco in the bottom left corner: the Cairn who eats everything. Actually, not absolutely everything. He can’t be bothered with cabbage for example, and lettuce without salad dressing is not worth the effort, but he’s got his eye on the carrots next to the cabbages now that I've had to lift the mesh, and as soon as they are big enough, he’ll dig them up and eat them! We have a tayberry at the bottom of the garden, and every year he eats every berry he can, and I find the bush is denuded of fruit, even to the point of his being able to reach the bottom half of some fruit but not the top, so he nibbles them and leaves the top half of each fruit hanging just out of reach!

Labels: garden tasks, garden tips, garden vegetables

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:13 AM

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