Last May is when I started building and planting out my two veggie patches with spring and summer produce. I can’t describe the feeling of excitement of watching these seedlings grow week by week, the anticipation of how big the potatoes and carrots were getting under the soil, and whether I should just leave it one more week so they might be just that little bit bigger! OK, I’ve gone a little crazy since growing my own, but there is no feeling like that of new life after hours of hard graft in soil preparation, of feeding and watering, staking and bug spraying (with white oil of course!), and then the time comes to plunge the fork into the ground, lift up the soil and see your harvest sitting their in all its full glory.

First it was my potatoes. I planted these first. I had a couple of seed potatoes (potatoes in the kitchen rack that had grown a couple of legs). I threw them in the ground, covered them with soil and waited….and waited… and waited. Finally after three weeks the first green shoot was through. Before I knew it these shoots were four and half feet tall, producing flowers and leaves. The more I watered them, the more they bushed out and grew. I sprinkled blood and bone and dynamic lifter on them every few weeks (potatoes take about 5 months to grow), watered them a couple of times a week. Then the plant comes to the point where it has done enough growing and it starts to die back. The leaves become yellow and shrivel, the trunk of the plant starts to wither and eventually bruises and falls over. The first time you see this you scratch your head because it seems like you have killed the plant. Just keep on watering. Once the plants have died right back, the harvest is ready. And boy was mine ready. I pushed the fork gently into the ground near the stem on the plant and loosened the soil. Being careful not to pierce any of the potatoes I started to unearth beautiful potatoes. Some were the size the of new potatoes, the ones that taste so good with a salad, some were bigger and some were smaller. I harvested about 5 kilo’s of potatoes from about three plants.

If you have read my first blog entitled Beginnings and Failings, I recall the story of how my greenhouse was destroyed not once but twice in a storm. The second time it crashed I rushed to plant all the seedlings into my veggie patches. I had nowhere else to store them. The patches had carrots, beetroots and silverbeet popping up all over the place, not exactly companion gardening, but survival is better than loss. The vast majority of these seedlings survived and I am still picking the harvest the today. So far I have harvested six kilos of carrots, numerous beetroots and so much silverbeet that much of it has been blanched and in the freezer as I couldn’t eat it all fresh. Out of a personal disaster of losing my greenhouse, life survived and I still got to reap and enjoy the benefits!

Now onto probably my greatest success story of this current harvest season – beans! Green and purple runner beans. I like beans as much as the next guy, but I probably shouldn’t have planted as many seeds as I did. Everyday when returning from work I would go out into the garden and check my patches. It seemed like no matter how many I picked the day before, more appeared and had fully grown. The contrast of the purple bean against the green lush leaves of the plant was a site to behold. Each day I harvested handfuls and handfuls of beans. The salad drawer in the fridge was full of beans. My wife kept asking if there were any more and what were we going to do with them all. I had so many beans growing that a fair amount went past ready and became bitter and stringy. With these I have decided to try an experiment, I have simply peeled the bean, popped out the seeds, in the process of drying them out and will plant a few, I say a few because while it was great to harvest so many, I am a little off beans right now!

When it comes to harvesting your produce all the hard work that you have put in I forgotten. The appreciation and the exhilaration that you have managed to not only keep something alive, but that it has actually produced fruit, makes the experience of eating it all the more enjoyable!