Save the cabbages

I finally found out why everyone hates cabbage whites with such a passion. The remaining cabbages were coated with cabbage white caviar and there was nothing for it but to harvest all of them and process immediately. Three red cabbages were cooked up with apple, cloves and red wine and portioned up for the freezer and four white cabbages (Christmas Drumhead) went into the crockpot to make sauerkraut (hopefully no mould this time - we're keeping a close eye on the water level this time). A small red cabbage went into a home-made Pickl-It jar for making red sauerkraut and there was still enough cabbage left for a big batch of coleslaw.

It was definitely a good idea to get the cabbages and other brassica going early so that I'd harvested all the cauliflowers and most of the cabbages before the cabbage whites started laying eggs, but next year I'll net the remainder as soon as I see the little white blighters.

Another pest I encountered last week was gooseberry sawfly caterpillar. They'd already deleafed two red currants before I spotted them on the jostaberry. Now what do you do about that? Not even the chickens wanted to eat those.

 Poor jostaberry, chomped by gooseberry sawfly caterpillars

The major excitement last week other than the referendum (and the reason that I didn't really get any weeding done) is that we had the conservatory redone. The frame was so rotten and full of ants that we decided to bite the bullet and have it redone from the brick up. And it's marvellous. It should now be usable all year round as it's properly weather-tight.

Loving the shiny new conservatory

The harvests are still plentiful. The peas Douce Provence are super tasty and the mixed radishes are just fun. And then there are still bumper crops of carrots and courgettes. I'm now trying to cook something with chard one day a week, same with kale and swedes. The chard makes a great curry and kale is much nicer with sesame oil (and bacon). We've invested in a dehydrator which arrived this week. Experimentation with veg crisps, fruit leathers and dried tea herbs is about to begin.

Colourful harvest

As usual, we had sunflower casualties - this time due to me lifting up the horizontal sunflower to let Jim scythe underneath. But they make such cheerful cut flowers.

Sunny sunflowers

Back to weeding tomorrow.