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Late arrivals

July 31, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

There aren’t many times in the year when I don’t have some young plants about the place, just poking their noses above the soil.

At the moment it’s mainly salads and a few annual herbs – I sowed some coriander last week and I’m gearing up for some more parsley soon to see me through winter.

But my most welcome new arrivals, just getting into their stride about now, is my last sowing of French beans for the year. Goodness knows why I need more French beans: the climbing ones I sowed in April kicked in about a week or so ago and every two days I pick a bucketful. We have now made the transition from early-summer broad beans and peas to mid-summer beans; endless, endless beans, eaten in every possible way you can think of (I’m trying to come up with a way to sneak beans onto the breakfast table – the only remaining bean-free meal of the day – without the kids noticing but haven’t come up with anything yet. Though French bean smoothies have a certain promise.)

But it’s just become a habit to pop a few rows of French beans in at around the mid-July point. French beans have quite a short cropping season, so though I might be a bit snowed under at the moment, give it a few weeks and the supply will suddenly dry up. Yes, the runner beans will carry on, but if I’m truthful it’s French beans I really love. So if I don’t make the effort to put in the extra crop, I’m always regretting it by about mid-August.

This lot have come up really nicely so far: they’re ‘Delinel’, a dwarf variety with lovely pencil-thin filet beans. I’ve grown them before, though I must admit I find dwarf types a bit tricky: the trouble is you’re always sowing them at a time of year when it’s a bit hot and a bit dry, and that’s not ideal for sowing seed. Previously I’ve found the seeds have struggled to germinate, and then the plants have had a job to get to a good size too.

This year, though, when it’s been hotter and drier than ever, somehow I’ve pulled it off: just goes to show, you never can tell in gardening. I did water them religiously every day for the first couple of weeks until they started to show above ground, and they’re in a bed at the bottom of the slope, which is the soggiest bit of the allotment. I dug in a load of extra compost, too, so I guess that’s the key to good dwarf French beans at this time of year: lots of water and nice rich soil.

It’s essential to choose a dwarf type for late sowing, rather than climbing beans. You want them up and at it as quickly as you can: climbing beans just haven’t got the time to get up those poles and cropping before the cold weather arrives and puts a stop to all that. Dwarf types, on the other hand, only have a foot or two to grow before they can turn their little beany minds to producing flowers and therefore beans.

That means this little crop will be productive from about mid-August. Which, coincidentally, will be just when my climbing French beans start calling it a day. This year, if things continue to go to plan, there will be no let-up to the French bean avalanche until well into September. Anyone got a freezer going spare?

Posted in Allotments, sowing | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Rogues’ gallery: Bindweed

July 28, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Bindweed on a seek-and-destroy mission against my bronze fennel

Here it is: the mother, father, grandmother and great-aunt-twice-removed of all weeds.

Bindweed has to be the absolutely most detested weed of them all. My own garden is riddled with it, and it seems the moment I turn my back (usually still aching from the last two-hour session of forking out bindweed roots) it’s slithering up from the ground again.

I wouldn’t mind so much but it’s such a destructive weed. Anything else growing in your border – and it doesn’t have to be tall, just there – is gradually, relentlessly strangled and pulled down, swamped by those large, smothering leaves and throttled by mercilessly twisting stems. It takes just two weeks from no sign above ground, to murderous thug clamped around hopelessly damaged and dying plant. No wonder we all hate it so much.

My allotment, thankfully, escapes the worst. It does have bindweed, but it’s what I call Type 2 bindweed: the non-nuclear warhead of the weed world.

There are two quite different weeds which we call bindweed, though they look similar: the nasty one that strangles plants is Calystegia sepium, but there’s an altogether better-behaved one commonly known as field bindweed – Convolvulus arvensis. This one is relatively easy to deal with: it has smaller leaves, smaller stems and a slower rate of growth. It tends to scramble outwards before it goes upwards, so you spot it more easily. And the roots, once dug up, don’t regenerate anything like as fast. The one golden rule is never, never to let it flower: if you do that you’re lost, as it produces copious seeds and you’ll never get rid of it.

The white, spaghetti-like roots of bindweed are fragile and will re-sprout from the smallest broken fragment

But back to Armageddon. I have now had eight years straight of dealing with bindweed, and I think I know as much as anyone about the tricks of the trade: but the fact remains that I still have bindweed. It is, quite simply, impossible to eradicate once you’ve got it. It probably doesn’t help that some of it is on my next-door-neighbour’s side of the fence, and since they are, though otherwise lovely people in every way, non-gardeners, I must resign myself to new bindweed roots re-invading as soon as I’ve cleared the last lot.

Bindweed eradication is therefore part of my daily gardening life, and will be for the foreseeable future. I follow a general policy of not letting it get too established, and so we live in an uneasy truce, though there are occasional skirmishes: the bindweed claimed victory over a batch of sweetpeas last year, but I socked it one with the glyphosate this spring when it made the big mistake of turning up in a bare patch of soil instead of lurking in the shrubbery like it usually does.

Anyway: for what it’s worth, here are my weapons of choice in the war against bindweed, in order of preference. If you too are fighting the good fight, I wish you luck: may all your roots emerge unbroken.

1: Hand-forking
This is the main way in which I tackle my bindweed problem: it is the most low-tech of them all but by far the most effective. Unfortunately it’s also the most time-consuming, but I’ve grown to quite enjoy it, a bit like small children enjoy picking scabs. There’s something very, very satisfying about teasing that that brittle bindweed root oh-so-gently from the soil until it yields and comes up long, spaghetti-like and intact.

Using a hand fork in among your plants, or a border fork in more open patches, dig the bindweed up by the roots, tunnelling down as far as you can and doing your utmost not to break the fragile roots as the bindweed will regenerate from the tiniest fragment left in the soil. Luckily they’re easy to spot, even in winter, as they’re very pale, almost white, and smooth. You must do this religiously every two weeks from March to November.

2: Glyphosate-based weedkiller
I know: it’s not organic. But sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. I mainly use glyphosate when bindweed has crept off my veg borders and onto the paths, or onto a patch of bare soil: that way you can spray it without getting any drift onto your veggies. Otherwise, this weapon is of limited use as bindweed rarely shows itself properly until all your other plants are in leaf too: and since bindweed twines itself so inseparably around your plants you won’t be able to kill the one without also killing the other. One alternative is to untwine the bindweed and lay it out on bare soil before spraying it – though that rather assumes you have some bare soil nearby, too. The other alternative is…

3: The cane-and-glyphosate combo
This is a good trick if you’ve got densely-planted borders and can’t get in among your plants to dig out the bindweed.

Place a tall bamboo cane in at intervals among your plants and let the bindweed climb up it (you can even train stray shoots onto it). Then when it’s really happy and romping up your decoy pole, remove the cane (this is quite easily done with a bit of wiggling about) and cram the top growth of the bindweed, still attached to the plant, into a clear plastic drinks bottle with the top removed: a large jamjar does the job well too. Another alternative I’ve heard about but haven’t tried is to remove top and bottom from a plastic drinks bottle and slide it over the top growth like a sleeve.

Then you spray a load of glyphosate-based weedkiller into the jar – thus easily avoiding spray drift onto other plants – and soak the bindweed foliage. Leave it there for a few weeks to suck the weedkiller right up into its stems and roots, and enjoy the spectacle of one of your worst enemies dying, horribly and very thoroughly.

4: Hoeing
In extremis, if you don’t want to use weedkillers and can’t find time to hand-fork every fortnight – or if you’re just on your way up the garden and spot a tendril of bindweed sneaking up your kale stems - you can just remove the top growth at ground level. 

This stops the weed clambering up your plants, but it’s a temporary stopgap and doesn’t really get you out of removing bindweed the hard way, as the top growth will reappear in a matter of days. Mind you, even bindweed is unable to survive without any green leaves above ground, so you might over time (and I mean a lot of time) eventually weaken the roots as well.

Posted in Allotments, Rogues' Gallery | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

Veg plot flowers

July 24, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Sweetpeas, flowering their socks off: you can't have enough of them.

It’s not all veg round here, you know.

Actually there are quite a lot of flowers in my patch. Of course there are all the flowers that come with veg: yellow tomato and cucumber blossoms, purple and white potato flowers, and the lovely red and white fountains of flowers climbing up my beanpoles. But I’ve also got flowers all over my allotment and the veg garden at home which I’ve planted especially and which don’t turn into veggies.

Now though this might seem to be breaking the First Law of Allotments which dictates that there shall be nothing on an allotment which is not Useful, in fact it is entirely legal and above board. And I’m not even talking about edible flowers (even though many of the ones I grow are edible – not that salads garnished artfully with pretty petals ever figures very highly on our rather chaotic family dinnertable).

Nope: I’m talking about flowers which are there to protect my fruit and veg. This is what’s generally referred to as companion planting: a lot of guff is written about it and you can get very complicated about it, but as far as I’m concerned there are two or three flowers I wouldn’t be without for their ability to deter pests (or decoy them) and attract insects in to pollinate your veg. Tomato flowers are, after all, a little shy and retiring to attract the attention of a passing hoverfly, but a cluster of vivid orange marigolds shouting around their feet certainly will.

Marigolds do a great job of protecting your tomatoes

Marigolds are actually one of my favourite veg plot flowers and I plant them everywhere. I sow seed in among my tomatoes in the greenhouse when I plant them out, and by now they’re obligingly covering the ground so I don’t have to do so much weeding. They smell quite distinctive: not everyone likes it, but whitefly absolutely hate it. It’s also strong enough to disguise a tomatoey smell, and so if you’ve got marigolds hanging around the greenhouse any other pests that might be passing with evil designs on your toms get completely confused and go away again.

Another favourite, for similar reasons, is the nasturtium. Like marigolds, these are a doddle to grow: you just pop in a few seeds while you’re sowing or planting out your other veg and they’ll more or less look after themselves. I also raise a few in pots or modules from early spring so they’re in flower just in time to act as a decoy for blackfly under broad beans (the blackfly like nasturtiums even more than they like broad bean shoot tips – so though your nasturtiums look dreadful, at least your broad beans are left alone). They’re also good ground-coverers with their big, good-looking leaves.

Vivid red nasturtiums brighten up the plot - and distract marauding blackfly

And last but not least: sweetpeas. I grow tons of sweetpeas: in fact I never have enough and every year I wish I’d grown a few more. I start with sowing into loo rolls in mid-October, for early flowers the next year (and yes, it really does make a difference: there’s about a month in it, by my reckoning). And then I add a second sowing in March for flowers in June and July: this year’s March sowings are flowering their socks off as I write.

These are, I confess, very nearly a frippery: I’m not much of a flower arranger but even I can make sweetpeas look good. They even pass as artlessly beautiful just plonked in a jamjar. Even better, they fill the house with scent so sweet you go around sniffing the air dreamily for days.

However, I justify such indulgence by citing the other major advantage of sweetpeas, which is that bees just can’t resist them. And while they’re there, hopefully they’ll be visiting my bean plants too (they may even spot the tomatoes just the other side of the glass inside the greenhouse next door).

And I will admit – though not within hearing of my fellow allotment holders – flowers just make your veg plot look pretty. There’s something about the rows of bright orange marigolds edging my onion beds (they deter onion fly, and carrot fly as well) that makes me smile every time I see it. And that is perhaps their most useful function of all.

Posted in Allotments, Greenhouse growing, Other stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Pick of the month: July

July 20, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Pea ‘Ambassador’

My favourite crop of all the year, just begging to be picked

I’m a bit spoilt for choice this month. The allotment is absolutely bursting with produce: courgettes, carrots, beetroot, onions, spuds, some chard, loads of cucumbers, a smidgen of early kale and the beans just starting to get into their stride. And that doesn’t count the salads and the herbs, still going strong. But if I had to pick one veg out of all of them which I look forward to with more anticipation than anything, it’s got to be peas.

I can never grow enough of them. Fresh peas are a whole different animal from the frozen variety: they’re firm, a little crunchy, and the flavour. Oh, the flavour.

If you grow your own you will know the unbearable, irresistible temptation of raw peas. This is not something to confess to those who have known nothing but Birds Eye: they will look at you a little strangely and start to edge away. But the initiated will understand that if you give in and break open a pea pod while still on the allotment, you are lost: you will eat them all, every last one, before you’ve even put them in the bag let alone got them back to the kitchen. Peas are one of those veg which turn their sugars into starches almost as soon as they’re picked, so if you eat them straight off the plant they’re at their very best, full of sweetness and utterly, utterly delicious.

At the petit pois stage: for my money, not quite ready to pick yet

Luckily this year I’m growing ‘Ambassador’, which is one I haven’t tried before though it’s been around for a while. I didn’t realise what I was missing. This is one of the most productive peas I’ve ever known. My April sowing is still cropping lustily after a month or so of heavy picking: and the May sowing is just about to take over, so I’ve got double harvest on the way. Even I can get some peas back to the kitchen when there are this many coming along.

What’s more they’re robust, trouble-free, generally cheerful and easy-going plants, happily scrambling up their peasticks to about 4ft or so and showing no signs of pests or diseases apart from a few pea moths (compulsory when growing your peas outside: shell with care, and always look at those peas you’re scoffing straight off the plant before you put them in your mouth).

And as if that wasn’t enough, the peas are just great. So fat they’re almost bursting from the pods, and a wonderful flavour. While I’m on the subject, it’s worth saying a little here about when to pick peas: it’s a fine art and I still don’t get it right all the time.

Oops - missed one. Once the skin is wrinkled they're past their best

You can, of course, pick peas as mangetout while the pods are still flat, young and tender, cooking them pods and all. But I’m afraid I think that’s a bit of a waste of all that pea-ish potential. Instead I prefer to wait through the skinny stage - that’s petit pois if you’re impatient, about the size of those polystyrene beads you get in packaging and though delicious, using up so many pods to get a decent portion that you’d need an entire allotment’s worth to feed a family. Instead I hold out until the pea pod is a good centimetre or more wide – the pod looks fat, but the skin is still green and smooth.

As soon as the skin wrinkles, the peas are a little past their best: you can still pick them, but they’re nowhere near as perfect. If the skin gets really wrinkled, forget trying to harvest it and leave them on the plant to dry. In fact I’m doing this anyway with some of the pods which are left on my April-sown plants, which are now starting to yellow. Once they’re brown and crispy I’ll take out the dried peas and save them for next year’s seed supply – the ultimate in thrifty gardening.

Posted in Allotments, Harvesting, Pick of the month | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Hampton Court 2010: Magic mushrooms

July 16, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

I couldn’t leave the delights of this year’s Hampton Court without saying a little bit about what I discovered tucked away in a shady patch under a rickety old lean-to in a forgotten little corner of the Home Grown exhibit.

Most people were walking past without noticing it – mind you that may have been something to do with the distracting and slightly alarming bee-keeping demonstration going on right next to it. But though it may have looked just like a pile of old black plastic bags, this was something pretty special.

I’ve always wanted to have a go at growing mushrooms at home. Everyone I know who’s tried says it’s a hiding to nothing: you buy your mushroom kit, spend ages fiddling about with dowels and drills and old logs, and then…. nothing.

But that’s no reason to give up: mushrooms are the prima donnas of the vegetable world (yes, I know, they’re not vegetables, nor are they plants, or animals, but give me a little leeway here). They demand nothing but the best: a constant temperature, not too hot, not too cold (I’m told 16-19°C is perfect), somewhere where it’s not only shady and damp, but crucially where there’s not too much air movement. Whatever you’re sowing the spawn in must be 70% moist: no more, no less. That’s wet, but not waterlogged: and if you put it in just the right spot (see above) you shouldn’t need to water it. If you do, you use rainwater and you soak from below, never water from above.

So like all the best things in gardening, mushroom growing is a challenge, and one which is particularly demanding and prone to accidents of nature which are entirely out of your control. But one day, after what seems like decades of trying, it’ll all come together and your unpromising bit of damp log will suddenly bloom with a thousand perfectly-formed shiitake mushrooms: and that, my friend, is why we do it.

Shiitake: These grow mainly on rotting wood, so give them a stump of hardwood, as recently cut as possible (no more than 6 weeks ago) and at least 30cm across. You buy dowels impregnated with the spawn: drill holes in your log, insert the dowels as snugly as possible, and drip candlewax on the end to seal it. The mushrooms have a smokey, soft texture which lifts the flavour of whatever you put them with: chop them into omelettes or curries to turn good cooking into gourmet.

Pink oysters: There are pink, yellow and grey oyster mushrooms, but pink oysters are something special: they taste a little like crab, and you won’t find them in the shops as they don’t keep well so you’ll have to grow your own. Oysters are the most easy-going and will grow in just about anything that’s vaguely like rotting wood: obviously the just-cut log method, as for shiitake, works fine, but you can also grow them in piles of newspapers, toilet rolls or even old phone books.

King oysters: Another very special oyster mushroom you won’t find in the shops. This is pretty rare, and I’d never seen their extraordinary bladder-like fruiting bodies anywhere, shops or otherwise. I’m told they have the best flavour and texture of all the oysters: slightly fibrous, with a meaty flavour a bit like chicken. I’m not sure quite where you’d get hold of the spawn, but if you do find some, grab it: it’ll probably be your one and only chance to have a go at growing this fabulous creature.

Brown chestnut: Ah, now here we’re back on more familiar ground. Everyone knows the chestnut mushroom: the brown ones are the best as they have 20% less water and so a wonderfully firm texture and rich flavour. They also keep for about a week longer than ordinary mushrooms. Of course there has to be a payback: they’re also more sensitive to temperature changes, fluctuations in humidity and so on, and you’ll get a lower yield for your money. Having said that, they can also double their volume within 24 hours, so even at a lower yield that’s a pretty impressive quantity of mushroom.

Chestnuts grow not on wood, but in semi-composted straw: make your own by creating a hotbed out of fresh manure and straw and turning it every few days for up to five weeks. Wait for the temperature to settle to the required 16-19°C and then mix the mushroom spawn right the way through the compost so it establishes well. After a few weeks, cover with a layer of soil to provide the bacteria the mycelium need to start fruiting: and, hopefully, with a bit of luck and not too much of a following wind (fungi need it airless, don’t forget), you’ll be away. Good luck!

Posted in Other stuff, Unusual veg | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Hampton Court 2010: The wierd and the wonderful

July 12, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Lovely multi-coloured leaf amaranth on the Bangladeshi Allotment: pick, cook and eat like spinach

Hampton Court is always a great place to pick up ideas for widening your veg-growing horizons: but this year they’ve surpassed themselves.

I thought I was doing pretty well this year what with my sweet potatoes, yacon and tomatilloes. But that’s nothing to the exotica on display in the Home Grown exhibit, right at the heart of the show. They included balsam pears (bitter, a bit like lumpy cucumbers to look at, and grown much the same way too); chinese artichokes (Jerusalem-artichoke-like knobbly roots); snake gourds (see balsam pears – except long and skinny) and oca – South Americans use this instead of potato, I’m told, which is odd as I always thought that was where potatoes came from. Maybe they ran out after they gave them all to us.

Add to that the ancient fruit and veg now making a comeback after 400 years or more in the wilderness, and my notebook filled up with things to try next year. Here are a few of them.

First grown in the 1600s, skirret is a little like a parsnip, with similarly lacy flowers that look gorgeous in the veg patch. When you pull it up, though, rather than one long root it has a bunch of finger-like roots instead. Shakespeare's contemporaries would have known it's sweet enough to eat raw: it was a real delicacy then.

This is actually just a lime tree - but you see those lovely waisted leaves? This is kaffir lime: and unlike most citrus, it's grown for the leaves not the fruit. You chop them into Thai curries. Even better - it's pretty much hardy in milder bits of the UK, so one of the most reliable of all the citrus to grow outside.

Now this is one I've had on my 'wanna-grow' list for some time. Okra - or 'ladies' fingers in my family - are one of those foods you either love or hate: we love them, especially cooked and served as a side dish to curries. They need to be kept as warm as possible, which means a greenhouse, but otherwise they're straightforward.

How wierd is this? Strawberry spinach is another veg grown several hundred years ago but now out of favour: the young leaves are picked and eaten like spinach, and then you've got those jewel-like berries, a bit like wild strawberries so they say. Is it a vegetable? Is it a fruit? I haven't the faintest - but I'm trying it next year.

Another forgotten variety that's staging a comeback: medlars are one of Britain's oldest fruits. The strange open-ended fruits are preceded by some of the prettiest white blossoms you'll ever see on a fruit tree, which means even if you can't be bothered to 'blet' (semi-rot) the fruit in order to eat them, it's still worth growing

Hmm... not quite so sure about this one, but I found it in the Floral Marquee and was fascinated to hear its tubers are edible. Amorphophallus konjac is variously known as voodoo lily or devil's tongue: it produces a dark purple hooded flower which stinks of raw liver, so I'm told. The tubers apparently make a good soup or can be sliced into stirfry. If you can get over the smell.

Posted in Fruit, Shows, Unusual veg | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Hampton Court Flower Show 2010: Veggie heaven

July 8, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Giant cabbages in immaculate rows in the massive GYO centrepiece garden Home Grown

Never mind all that Chelsea razzmatazz and flummery. If you grow veg, the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show is where it’s at.

The show has always been where the GYO movement has found its natural home: probably as much to do with the timing as anything else, since there’s not much growing by Malvern (April), and Chelsea (May) requires major forcing efforts to get a show. But by July everything on the plot is bursting and burgeoning and generally looking pretty damn good. There was hardly a show garden without its fruit and veg: they stood in for hedges, draped themselves over obelisks and walls, lent sophistication to flowerbeds and carpeted the ground with greenery. Here are a few of my favourites.

Aren't these fantastic? These potatoes stuck with feathers, on the Shakespeare's Allotment garden (by Barry Locke, who's head gardener at Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford - now there's a job to envy), and they're pigeon scarers. Apparently our portly and bird-brained feathered friends think they're kestrels and won't come near them.

The ultimate in chic colour contrasts between the sultry, near-black ruffled leaves of perilla, and the zingy yellow of golden marjoram. From Food for Thought, a small garden by Bonnie Davies.

Fabulously architectural globe artichokes holding their own against salvia, penstemon and eryngiums in the wonderfully veg-packed Girlguiding UK Centenary Garden by Philippa Pearson

I liked this idea: ancient grapevines trained up on stems to make a loose raised hedge, underplanted with flowers. From An Uprising of Kindness, the Emmaus garden by Bill Butterworth.

You wouldn't be able to grow these here, but you can sure as hell admire them. Lotuses in the Reflections of Thailand garden, which incidentally won best in show: apparently you eat the rhizomes pickled, roast the seeds like nuts and use the young leaves a bit like vine leaves, for wrapping food

This was probably my favourite small garden: the Bangladeshi Allotment. The ground cover was coriander and mustard, and the bedding was two colours of amaranth: it was packed with unusual veg, too. Snake gourds, balsam pears and yard-long beans were just a few of the veg I'd never even seen, let alone tried growing before.

Another fantastic edible plant combination: purple pak choi and gorgeous asparagus peas (must, must, must grow these next year) in the Girlguiding UK Centenary Garden

It's good to see veg making inroads on the flower borders, and looking so good, too. Here it's a lovely architectural courgette, plus some parsley and beetroot, in among the heucheras and dianthus in the Shakespearean garden Twelfth Night, by Yvonne Mathews.

Posted in Fruit, Herbs, Shows, Unusual veg | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Rogues’ gallery: Blackfly

July 3, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Look under your bean leaves and if you find this, panic

I have a confession to make.

I have been Less Than Vigilant. Actually, I’ve been downright lacksadaisical in my approach to veg gardening: a quick swish round with the watering can, dig up a few spuds for tonight’s tea, and then dash off to my desk to fit in the twenty thousand urgent tasks I should have done by yesterday. Which is a slightly beating-around-the-bush way of saying I’ve been a bit too busy to pay my poor veg plants as much attention as I’d like.

As almost always happens when you turn your back for a little while, the bugs move in. I’ve already suffered a greenfly outbreak earlier this year: they arrived in numbers undreamt of in previous years, possibly something to do with the cold winter, or global warming, or both.

I should have known that where greenfly lurk, blackfly won’t be far behind. And so it has turned out. I went to have a look and see if any of my broad beans were ready to eat the other week: and the black plague had moved in while I wasn’t looking.

I had done what all good broad bean growers do back in May, and pinched out the tender tops of my broad bean plants to put the blackfly off – it removes the bits they like best, so the theory is that they go find something else to eat – and though it’s worked in previous years, this year the numbers have been so great that it’s made not a jot of difference.

A plague of blackfly smothering my beanstalks

They’ve not only taken over the broad beans: they’ve moved in on the runners and the climbing French, too. Spreading like sticky black soot up stems, splaying out over the undersides of the leaves, swarming over buds and flowers, they turn everything black, black, black. Sadly that includes many of my embryo broad bean pods: blackfly suck sap, voraciously, and that means stunted growth and poor, grey, shrivelled beans. You cannot let such mayhem go unchecked.

Had I been doing what good vegetable growers do, I would have spotted my blackfly infestation at a much earlier stage because I would have been checking my plants carefully every few days, keeping an eye out for anything going wrong.

I would have spotted the little blighters as soon as they crept out of their horrid little eggs – unlike greenfly, which camouflage themselves so effectively, blackfly show up beautifully against green stems and leaves. Then I would have squished them with great relish between thumb and forefinger. It’s a simple – if a bit skin-crawling – way to nip a blackfly attack, quite literally, in the bud.

It’s a little late for that now up at my plot, though. I did try to squish the blackfly on the runner beans and got a modicum of success, at the price of fingers black and squidgy with mushed blackfly (whoever said gardening was a romantic and beauty-filled pasttime clearly didn’t grow veg).

Incidentally, when you have volumes of mushed blackfly of this order you can make a solution of squished pest and spray it back on the plant to deter future attacks. Apparently the spray smells of the danger hormone they give off as they die. I’d like to assure you that this is second-hand knowledge as I have never tried this: the idea of dead blackfly sprayed all over my broad beans, to say nothing of the process of actually making the stuff, is so unappetising that I’d rather just let the blackfly get on with it.

This is what your crops look like if you let blackfly take hold

Anyway: I’m having to resort to other tactics. I blew some of them off simply by blasting the plants with a hose on a middling-high pressure setting: if you actually jet-wash them you do tend to blast off the buds and flowers too, so this is definitely a method to use with care, and only really on the main stems and leaves.

For buds and my poor beknighted broad beans, I’m afraid I’ve reached for the spray gun and I’m coating my plants every few days until the blackfly give up the ghost. So far, so good: the black army has been stopped in its tracks and is definitely in retreat. It’s all right – I haven’t gone chemical, as these days there are, thank goodness, organic insecticidal soap sprays you can buy off-the-shelf.

If I was organised and efficient, I would have collected up all my little odds and ends of old bathroom soap in a jar, mixed them with water and used that: just as effective, and doesn’t cost a penny (it does tend to clog up the nozzle on your spray gun though – soaking it in clean water between uses seems to sort it out).

However, of course if I was organised and efficient, I wouldn’t have a blackfly problem in the first place. And I’d have some decent broad beans to harvest. If that isn’t an argument for taking five minutes to look over your crops every morning, I don’t know what is.

Posted in Allotments, Rogues' Gallery | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Playing gooseberry

June 28, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Before...

Now normally by this time of year I’m enjoying the first fresh fruit of the season (if you don’t count rhubarb, which is technically a vegetable, and forced strawberries, which are cheating). But this year my gooseberries, growing along a fence by the path that leads down the garden, have been puzzlingly conspicuous by their absence.

I was remarking on this the other day in front of my little girls, and wondering out loud if birds had been at the fruit (hasn’t been a problem before, but you never know). Two pink faces later I discover that the pests in question have two legs and a marked preference for My Little Ponies. This proves to be an unexpected drawback to growing my gooseberries as cordons: yes, you can fit loads of different varieties into a small space – I have four growing along a 10ft stretch of fence – and yes, it makes them far easier to pick as you don’t have to burrow in among all those thorns. But that last advantage turns into a distinct disadvantage when it turns out that little fingers are finding it a lot easier to do the picking too.

Actually I’m secretly very pleased my kids turn out to share my liking for gooseberries: I adore them myself but I often find I’m in a minority. Gooseberry fool is a little early-summer ritual in our house (well, it was, in the years when the girls couldn’t get past the prickles) and last year I also discovered home-made gooseberry icecream. Yum.

Cordon gooseberries need a tiny tad more attention than bush-grown, simply because you’re trying to curb their natural tendency to grow into a bush. As you can see, mine have become distinctly shaggy in the last few months, so it was high time for their summer haircut.

...and after

The whole idea of cordon pruning is to check all that green growth (which diverts the plant’s energy into producing lots of stems and leaves) and thus encourage it to produce lots of flowers and fruit instead, on short ‘spurs’ along the main central stem. This is a whole lot easier than it sounds.

It seems a bit mean to remove all that growth the plants have been putting on enthusiastically since spring, but steel yourself and do it anyway as it has lots of benefits. Not only does the sun get at the fruit a bit better for ripening (well, it would if there were any fruit left, anyway): it also checks growth, as all summer pruning does, and keeps the plant nice and compact.

It’s a straightforward process: if you look closely at the branches coming from the central stem, you’ll see that there’s a first little cluster of leaves, usually three, followed by single leaves coming out from further up the branch. You count five leaves – the three at the basal cluster, then two more above that – and snip away the rest of the branch just above the fifth leaf.

You do that for every branch, all the way up the stem. And that’s it. You’re left with a neat column formed by a single, thicker brown stem, and then more-or-less equally long stems radiating from that at regular spacings. Tie in the leading shoot to its support if you need to (I train mine upright, but you can also do it at a 45° angle which they say produces more fruit), and give your plants a good soaking while you’re at it, just because it’s a good chance to do it: you can scatter some slow-release fertiliser, like pelleted chicken manure, around too if you’re feeling keen.

The result is a healthy, strong-growing plant which hopefully will be laden with fruit this time next year. Shame they couldn’t be this year, really. Now all I’ve got to do is deal with my little pest problem….

Posted in Fruit, Pruning | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Hard graft

June 24, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Basking in the sun: my grafted peppers are already showing signs of fruiting

There are some things where you think, ‘Life’s just too short’. Stuffing mushrooms, for instance. Tidying up your second daughter’s bedroom. Growing celery (has anyone, ever, done this successfully at home?). And grafting vegetables.

Grafting is actually a really old idea: people have been doing it for at least 2000 years. You take the roots of a plant that grows vigorously but has perhaps less than wonderful fruit; and you graft onto it the top half of a plant which might not be quite so robust but which has particularly delicious fruit, or disease resistance, or pretty foliage. The rootstock lends its strength to the scion (the bit that’s grafted on), so you get a very special plant that grows like topsy and has fantastic yields to boot.

It’s usually used for trees: most apples are grafted onto rootstocks of particular types (dwarfing ones like M26, for example, keep the tree small and are great for cordons and espaliers. The issue of why they should name apple rootstocks after motorways is another matter). But just recently seed companies have been trying it with tomatoes – and this year, green peppers.

I tried growing grafted tomatoes a couple of years back, just out of curiosity. The variety was ‘Elegance’, which was a new one on me but has now become a firm favourite: good, medium-sized fruits with a really rich flavour.

The graft point is quite obvious on the stem: scion above, rootstock below

Though I’ve come back to the variety again, though, I don’t think I’ll be shelling out for grafted toms again any time soon. The grafted plants shot up like rockets to begin with – twice the size of the ungrafted ones by July. But then the ungrafted plants got going and caught up – so by the time the main harvest was at full throttle, there was nothing in it. Admittedly, I started picking fruit from the grafted plants about a week or two earlier: but there wasn’t such a huge difference and I was left wondering why everyone put such a lot of fiddly effort into splicing tomato shoots onto tomato roots with little bits of sticky tape.

But someone, somewhere must have shown enough of an interest to get them doing the same razor-and-stickytape routine with green peppers, and being a sucker for trying out new things I just had to have a go.

There’s the added frisson of unpredictability simply because I’m not actually all that good at growing peppers (or chillies, come to think of it). I suspect I might be keeping them too cool: they’re real sun-lovers and although my greenhouse is frost-free, it’s been going down to only two or three degrees above this spring. So my peppers sown in February have been sulking (again). Must sow them later next year.

But anyway, alongside my somewhat miserable (but recovering now that it’s sunny again) home-grown peppers I now have three grafted peppers growing. At the moment, a little to my surprise, there’s not much of a difference: maybe the grafted peppers were being kept a bit on the cool side too. But I am watering them every day and they’re now basking in the sunlight in my allotment greenhouse, so the race is on. I’ll let you know the results in due course.

Posted in Greenhouse growing, Propagation | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

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