Homeschool Garden Club - Jobs for September

Welcome back to learning.

The Garden Club has been running through the summer holidays, we offered our time to one of our families to help clear their old sheds in return for any useful tools and equipment for the Garden Club. Everything came out of the sheds and was sorted into what the family wanted to keep, what was going to the dump and a huge stock pile of goodies in the form of pots (plastic and terracotta) came our way. Along with a few handy plants which are now in my front garden (thank you!).

Our return to learning has meant we have already started the clean up the Garden Club's garden because the heavy rains brought many plants down. Both the potatoes and tomatoes were hit by blight this year. And there looks like a little bit of rust creeping in. So we have been clearing these first and not composting them.

The weather this year has been a bit up and down and many of our crops have struggled to ripen on time or gone to seed very quickly. However, saying that we have had kgs of apples, pears and plums off the trees and the raspberries and blackberries are coming in and their harvest too will be big too! The cookery club ran out of freezer room with the apples. We had to give buckets of apples away to families within our homeschool community. We have two apple trees left to pick!

So, we are learning to bottle and can the pears. We are experimenting with different recipes too. Poaching the pears for breakfast with porridge has been very popular but not as popular as a very nice chocolate and pear pudding which we all liked and that has used up the first quarter of the pear harvest.

We are only now starting to harvest the beetroot, carrots, celery, courgettes, cucumber, beans and some of the onions. The borlotti beans have been a surprise winner with the young gardeners, not only for their colours but also for their flavour. We have been learning how to dry these and keep them safely in a jar, but we did try them fresh: sausage and bean casserole will never be made with tinned baked beans again, apparently!

You may remember that back in the spring we labelled up the leeks, the red onions, the white onions and spring onions with labels sent to us, by the RHS. However, the wooden labels rotted. So, when we were potting on we needed new labels. There was a bit of cross-communication as to who would make the labels and we ended up with lots of unlabelled trays of seedling and we were unable to identify which was which. We eventually planted them out in small rows with labels saying "leeks or onions?" and we have a mixture of the leeks, red onions and white onions in small blocks. It has been fun this week harvesting them and finding out which is which. The white onions (Bedfordshire Champion and Ailsa Craig) have done well. The red onions (Red Baron) are still a little small but as we harvest the others they will have room to grow.