Tuesday 16 June 2009

My First Crops From Pots!

I hope that Mr Bob Purnell will excuse me from drawing so heavily on his book title for this blog post, but my excitement this morning can't be contained – the London Vegetable Garden has yielded its first radishes!

In hindsight (a wonderful thing, but I'm hoping my mistakes will help you chaps out there), I planted my radish seeds too close together, so many of the plants and leaves have been fighting for a very small space. The resultant crop of radishes has therefore been quite varied, as you can see from the picture below, although amongst those, we do have some decent looking ones!

I've scrubbed up a couple of the radishes I'd be comfortable entering into a competition (well almost) and laid them next to the seed packet, as shown below:

As you can see, although I haven't managed to grow enough radishes to open a stall at a farmer's market (yet), this hopefully illustrates just what can be achieved from the confines of such a small urban vegetable gardening space. I'm really proud with these big radishes – and the fact that they look so similar to the picture on the packet!

Please take this as motivation – which is what this London vegetable gardening blog is all about. Why not try planting some radishes of your own? Simply use a decent sized pot and remember to SOW THINLY! Good luck – I'd love to see everyone's results. After all, if I can achieve this on a London balcony next to a busy, smoky London railway line, your balcony, windowsill or patio can too!

8 comments:

  1. Callum-

    Very nice! Have you tried carrots or onions yet? Maybe even beets or garlic? The possibilities are endless. We have our own garden but it's much bigger. We have blueberries, raspberries, garlic, jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, grapes, cherries, sunflowers, peas and beans and I have a herb garden as well. We keep adding to it every year. Eventually we won't have a backyard just yummy stuff to eat. All of this on a 1/2 acre lot.

    Good luck with all your plants this year!

    Denise

    nittinfool.blogspot.com

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  2. Congrats on the harvest. :0)

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  3. great work! loving the seed packet/show photo!! very photogenic radishes indeed :) do they taste as good as they look?

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  4. What inspiration! I'm hoping I'll get to my harvest before the squirrels do. :-) I've just started organic veggie gardening in Washington, D.C. and have been fortunate enough to be able to blog the whole way along.

    Keep up the interesting posts and congrats!

    -Kate

    http://mtpleasantgarden.wordpress.com/

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  5. Wow a little larger than mine (grown in a pot on an Amsterdam balcony) :-)
    I like your photo...

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  6. Congratulations on your first 'Crops from Pots'! Isn't it a terrific feeling, growing your own food? So now we know how good they look, let us know how good they taste! Far superior to anything you'll buy in the supermarket, for sure.

    Bob P.

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  7. Awesome dude - how did the taste?

    If only I'd listened to people that told me to sow thinly - all the herbs I'm growing are now squished into little pots - roll on the weekend when I'll have a chance to repot them and give them some space

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  8. Thanks to everyone for the kind comments. It really was a great moment to pull radishes up from the soil, wash them and then eat them as part of a salad - the difference in taste was simply unquestionable! I hope the tomatoes do the same!

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