Harvesting Abundance 🌿 July’s Fresh Vegetables from Garden to Table

It's July and the garden is bursting with things that I need to pick. So I'm going to take you along with me. We're going to harvest as much as possible right now and I'll spend the next couple of days doing all the hard work of processing, but you'll get to see what the harvests from my garden look like this time of the year. And this is such a good time for things like cucumbers, for zucchini, for certain types of like the thornless blackberries, there's going to be so much. So let's start with the cucumbers at the back of the poly crop. Despite all of the leaves and the vines all over the place, there are only two cucumber plants here. The one here in front, this is an Armenian cucumber. It's my favorite type and the flesh tastes sweet no matter how big they get. It's not producing any fruit just yet, but the one back here, this is more of a standard salad type cucumber. It has loads. So I've got my secateurs. Let's get picking. As I predicted, check this out. There's a lot of cucumbers in there. The challenge with salad cucumbers and preserving them is that they don't really tend to keep their crunchiness once they've been preserved. So these are not, in my opinion, a good candidate for making dill pickles, for example. So I think we're going to be having some cucumber salads for the next few days, maybe a bit longer. I'm going to give some of these away to friends and I'm going to keep a closer eye on how those two plants are producing. When it comes to certain crops like zucchini and cucumbers, you only really need a couple of plants, I think, for a small household. As usual, I have a lot growing here inside the polycrub. There are, of course, tomatoes, which I grow wound up strings. They're right down the sides of both of these side beds. I've got melons here in the middle. They're also on strings. There are eggplant, aubergines, basil, lemon basil, so much. And I just picked some of the zucchini, the little courgettes, from the two plants that I have in here as well. I put them in here as a fail safe because last year was abysmal for weather outside and I didn't get any. So this year I've got some in here and also some out in the garden. So I will definitely have those. Another crop that is doing very well and that the honeybees adore is one that is completely spontaneous. I had no plans to grow it ever, but I saw plants for sale at our local garden center and I thought, why not? Let's give it a grow because I've never done it before. And these are cucamelons. They look like itty bitty mini watermelons, but they're actually more like a cucumber. And I've not grown them before, as I've said. So this is my first season with them and I'm finding that the ones that I let get quite large and grape-like to more round are tougher because you do eat these whole. So the ones that are more kind of oval, like actual mini watermelons, those are the ones that I'm picking and enjoying more. And if you have grown this plant before, do give me some ideas for what to do with it because this is something that I imagine that you would use mainly as like a salad cucumber, but I wonder if they would be really good fermented. I think I'm going to try it anyway, but do let me know as a comment if you've ever tried these. Blackberries grow wild in a lot of places. So why bother growing thornless blackberries in your garden? Well, as you can see, they are very large. They're about the size of Logan berries. There's no thorns. They create a really nice boundary, a living boundary. I planted this up just a couple of years ago and they taste delicious. And if you grow them in your garden, just outside your house, you can just nip out and pick them as they ripen. If you leave them too long on the vines, they can desiccate and affect the other fruit. But if you are quick to it, you can get them before the birds get them, take them inside and either freeze them in batches or make jams or any kind of dessert that you want, really. There's no limit to what you can do with a blackberry. And if you want to grow these, I have a video showing how to build this trellis and you can pick up thornless blackberry canes or small plants from a lot of different nurseries. There are a lot of things growing in this bed. Lettuces, these are salad onions that I've let go to flower. The bees are loving them. There's some elephant garlic that I need to dig up soon, all kinds of things. But this here in the front is a root vegetable, root vegetable, called kohlrabi. And there are a couple of large specimens here on the sides and I'm just gonna snip them if I can. There we go. And show you. It's an unusual type of vegetable. Very common, I would say, in Europe. But outside of there, you don't really come across it. And it's not actually a root. It is the swollen stem of a brassica. So this is related to cabbages and broccoli and cauliflower. It's just been bred to have a really swollen stem. And once you take the leaves off and you peel it, it's really lovely, really tender. You can have it raw or you can roast it. It's divine roasted, so sweet, so good. If you've not grown or tried kohlrabi before and you like cabbages and you love broccoli, then definitely grow this vegetable. It's delicious. July is a bountiful month, that's for sure. So besides the cucumbers and cucamelons and blackberries and the kohlrabi, I've got a lot more here. Everything from broad beans and these sugar snap peas to some brassicas that are a little bit bolted but still perfectly edible. We've got the very first plums of the year. Oh my goodness. Actually, the first plum is gone now. I had to enjoy that on my own off camera. But I've got so much here and I don't want to waste it. This represents a lot of work, a lot of tending plants, a lot of thinking about what I want to grow and where everything is going to go. And we're not going to be able to eat all of this. We're two people and there's going to be more coming from the garden soon. And so the important additional skill that we need if we grow a vegetable garden is to know how to preserve food. You don't need to use a pressure canner for a lot of methods and I go through various ways that I preserve food in another video. For example, the blackcurrants that I picked, I have a kilogram of them, so 2.2 pounds of them, fermenting in my first batch of blackcurrant wine in a long while. So you can make wine, you can make liqueurs if you want, pickles, chutneys, jams, so many different types of food. And freezing berries is simple. So if you would like to see some of the ways that I use, go on and watch that video next. It should give you lots of inspiration. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video. Bye for now.