Show us your home grown grub

[Joeboy]

A stolen Aldi basket full of homegrown apples.
Should be close to 10kgs once processed.

[Moxi]

Croftermanie,

How does your polytunnel stand up to the winds at 300m above sea level or are you in a sheltered position ? I keep thinking I will get one but we are also at 300m ASL and on an exposed mountainside, so we get the westerlies in full force and its always given me sufficient doubt to dampen my plans.

Moxi

[Moxi]

JB, that looks more like a repurposed abandoned receptacle to me far better to be doing you good service than polluting the local water course as many of its kind tend to find themselves.

Moxi

[Joeboy]

JB, that looks more like a repurposed abandoned receptacle to me far better to be doing you good service than polluting the local water course as many of its kind tend to find themselves.

Moxi

Thanks Moxi, I am liking your style of though. A possible river rescue basket.

[AE-NMidlands]

We're eating spuds (lovely clean crop this year,) onions (crop halved by allium leaf miner,) runner beans. (Climbing French were good but now drying off for saved seed) dried beans still in store from previous years, tomatoes (just still yielding, but a good year) cucumbers, courgettes, Beetroot now lifted and pickled. Few parsnoips because of poor germination, maybe half a dozen self-seeded ones scatterd round the garden! Lettuce did unusually well, cabbages are good and PSB and kale looking good for next spring, leeks look good too, grown under fleece to keep the leaf miner out....

Freezer now full of all sorts of red fruit including strawberrries, except Loganberries which went into wine. (No room for apples so they go into a cool garage.) Plums had good blossom but a light crop.

Massive apple crop of Bramleys and Potts Seedling plus russets now in store, Katy eaters almost finished, Sunset now on the go, Rubinette and Jupiter almost ready to pick and go into store. Pears half picked, first Beurre Hardy now ready to eat (gorgeous - but laxative!) Conference will ripen in a week or two, hopefully later.
(Bramleys and Potts Seedling on standard trees in the lawn, Katy and the pears on dwarf pyramids, Sunset and Jupiter on cordons give crops far bigger than we can use so friends and family get a bonanza in good years!)

[Joeboy]

We're eating spuds (lovely clean crop this year,) onions (crop halved by allium leaf miner,) runner beans. (Climbing French were good but now drying off for saved seed) dried beans still in store from previous years, tomatoes (just still yielding, but a good year) cucumbers, courgettes, Beetroot now lifted and pickled. Few parsnoips because of poor germination, maybe half a dozen self-seeded ones scatterd round the garden! Lettuce did unusually well, cabbages are good and PSB and kale looking good for next spring, leeks look good too, grown under fleece to keep the leaf miner out....

Freezer now full of all sorts of red fruit including strawberrries, except Loganberries which went into wine. (No room for apples so they go into a cool garage.) Plums had good blossom but a light crop.

Massive apple crop of Bramleys and Potts Seedling plus russets now in store, Katy eaters almost finished, Sunset now on the go, Rubinette and Jupiter almost ready to pick and go into store. Pears half picked, first Beurre Hardy now ready to eat (gorgeous - but laxative!) Conference will ripen in a week or two, hopefully later.
(Bramleys and Potts Seedling on standard trees in the lawn, Katy and the pears on dwarf pyramids, Sunset and Jupiter on cordons give crops far bigger than we can use so friends and family get a bonanza in good years!)

That sounds smashing

[ecogeorge]

Got offered a quantity of pears - a mixture of windfalls and picked, - perry and eaters .......
Processed 148 lbs of pears into 42 pints of perry .......result.
George

[Oldgreybeard]

Croftermanie,

How does your polytunnel stand up to the winds at 300m above sea level or are you in a sheltered position ? I keep thinking I will get one but we are also at 300m ASL and on an exposed mountainside, so we get the westerlies in full force and its always given me sufficient doubt to dampen my plans.

Moxi

Not sure if this helps, but when we were still living in Cornwall, in a pretty exposed moorland location, I protected our poly tunnels by using fence posts, about 5ft high, driven in all around the poly tunnels (a couple of feet away from them). I stretched some of that orange mesh stuff, scrounged from a friendly road works crew, tightly between the posts, leaving a gap of about a foot underneath (so I could get a strimmer in there).

This windbreak worked a treat, and made the polythene covers last about three or four times longer. Instead of the covers failing from fatigue from flapping around, they only needed replacing when they went a bit opaque and brittle. I'd never have believed such a simple windbreak would work as well as it did. I think it worked mostly by just disturbing the air, as there never seemed to be much strain on the orange mesh stuff.

[CrofterMannie]

Croftermanie,

How does your polytunnel stand up to the winds at 300m above sea level or are you in a sheltered position ? I keep thinking I will get one but we are also at 300m ASL and on an exposed mountainside, so we get the westerlies in full force and its always given me sufficient doubt to dampen my plans.

Moxi

We have had it for 5 years and it has done fine so far but;
1) it was a 30m commercial one (that we got second hand) and we halved other length so the hoops are spaced quite close (about 1.2m) and are larger diameter.
2) I planted a load of willow about 10m on the windward side which gives it some protection.
3) I've got a sweeping brush handy in winter to knock the snow off before it gets too heavy as I've seen a few that have been flattened by snow.

If I hadn't got this tunnel cheap of have definitely looked at a polycrub. I was in Lewis last winter and didn't see a single poly tunnel but there were polycrubs everywhere. They know about wind there!