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Pick of the month: March

March 14, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Leek ‘Bleu de Solaise’

Isn’t that a wonderful colour?

Somewhere between that steely-blue metallic effect paint finish you get on very expensive cars and the deep aquamarine of the ocean somewhere very hot and sunny.

This is my number one favourite leek for using in among the ornamental plants, or in potagers where the look of the veg is as important as how they taste.

The rich colouring of the leaves is like nothing else you’ll find in the plant world and goes with just about everything: I think this year I’ll try sowing some vibrant orange Tagetes patula around their feet, or maybe a little yellow-and-white feverfew to contrast all that strength with a little frothy prettiness.

Because leeks in the ornamental garden are definitely a strong statement. They’re emphatically vertical, standing some 50cm tall like punctuation marks among lower-growing plants. They’re also evergreen so you can work them in to your winter garden to add a slate-blue accent: mine are planted in my front garden, patrolling behind the box hedge like sentinels and looming over the ferns and heucheras.

And if you’re thinking, yeah, that’s all very well but what about the flavour – well, ‘Bleu de Solaise’ scores there, too. It’s an old heritage French variety: you’d expect nothing less than perfection in the cookery department from our friends across the water, and you’d be right. Rich, earthy, intense, with pleasantly oniony overtones, it’s leeks like you’ve never realised they could taste before.

I eat every other one, leaving the ones behind to grow fatter, and I also leave half a dozen in the ground to flower, which they will do in the summer of their second year. Leek flowers are lovely, a delicate starry powder-puff of palest greeny-grey. Not, perhaps, as spectacular as ornamental alliums (don’t plant them alongside or the leek flowers will go all but unnoticed next to all that razzmatazz) - but they have a subtle, unostentatious charm all their own.

Posted in Pick of the month | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

That’s shallot

March 10, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

If you don’t count the broad beans and garlic, both of which I put in before the winter proper began, shallots are always the first off the starting blocks in spring on my plot. Normally I have them in by mid-February, but this year I’ve held back a couple of weeks because I didn’t fancy planting them with an icepick.

I’d been taking a few years off shallots until last year, as I couldn’t see the point of them when I was growing onions anyway. And they were always a bit disappointing: I never managed to get the fat clusters and bumper yields everyone else went on about. So I came to the conclusion that it was a waste of good onion-growing space.

In fact, as it turns out, I just didn’t know how to grow shallots. I got given some ‘Hative de Niort’ last year and plonked them in for lack of anything else to do with them. I had to squirrel off a chunk of a bed that was intended for beans, which meant it had had bucketloads of compost poured onto it the previous year, so it was particularly rich: unlike my previous sorry specimens, grown on the good but quite ordinary soil I thought onions liked, these shallots thrived most gratifyingly. It was a good lesson in the importance of doing things differently rather than giving up if they aren’t working.

One thing I hadn’t bargained for is that shallots are much more entertaining than onions: they split into little clumps which gradually splay outwards on the surface of the soil and look very sophisticated, making you feel secretly a little swanky about how good you are at growing vegetables.

I got a massive harvest – three sizeable net bags full from a single row – and each perfect little shallot was fat, succulent, bronze-burnished and inviting. We’ve only just finished eating them (long after the stored maincrop onions finished) and the flavour was fabulous too. Anyway: so I’ve now been entirely converted to shallot-growing for the foreseeable future.

This year I’m planting ‘Jermor’, as long and elegant as ‘Hative de Niort’ is short and fat. It’s also French, though, which bodes well for the quality of the flavour. At the other end of the row are some ‘Red Sun’: I’ve got a bit of a thing about red onions and love cooking with them, so I thought I’d try some red shallots too for a change. 

Quite apart from their  interesting growing habits and good looks, shallots are invaluable for another, more practical reason: they store a great deal better than onions. A string of well-dried onions will last pretty well until maybe January or February before you start getting the odd green sprout or rotten patch. Shallots, on the other hand, store for a year or more: you can still be eating last year’s shallots as this year’s are being dug if you grow enough. This means they bridge that annoying onion gap you get between about February and July – and if you use anything like as many onions as we do, that by itself is why I will never be without shallots again.

Posted in Allotments, sowing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Limping out the other side

March 4, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Broad beans always look ropey after a long winter

In celebratory mood this week as the sun is out at last! The ice-covered puddles have melted and are drying up, the soil is becoming workable, and I can smell spring in the air.

First for the post-winter casualty-assessment inspection were my four rows of broad beans, which have been sheltering under their polythene cloches all winter. Poor things – they’ve soldiered bravely through but it’s been a hard campaign. There have been losses, and more than a few are walking wounded: broad beans always look a bit ropey when you uncover them again for the first time in spring, but this is a particularly hard-hit troop.

Actually I never expect a perfect turnout after winter, even under cover: polythene cloches can only do so much, after all. Though they’ll keep off the winds and the worst of the rain, and raise temperatures inside two or three degrees, in minus-10 that still means it’s minus 7 under there. To say nothing of the weight of the snow pressing them down almost flat to the ground at times, despite my regular efforts at scooping it all off again.

But these are the hardiest broad beans of the lot: ‘Aquadulce Claudia’, the tough-as-nails Foreign Legion commandoes of the broad bean world. They may have been beaten to the ground by the worst winter we’ve had in 30 years – as we will no doubt still be telling our bored grandchildren for decades to come – but it takes more than that to keep a good bean down.

Even the most battered broad bean leaps back to life once spring arrives

The great thing about broad beans is that they re-sprout from the base: so even when you’ve got a plant whose leaves are chewed, whose stem has blackened with rot, and which is lying prone and pathetic on the ground, don’t root it up as long as it has some green on it somewhere. Chances are it will start producing new leaves, just like many of mine have done, and they’ll grow up to make fine healthy broad bean plants as if all this had never happened.

And as for those we’ve lost along the way: well, there really isn’t any hope when all that remains of your broad bean plant is a string of gooey brown slime, so I spent this morning clearing the casualties away so I could see where the gaps in the line were. 

Then I just brought in some reinforcements: new seeds plug the gaps nicely, and since they’ll be flowering and fruiting a month or so later than their overwintered neighbours they’ll keep the crop coming nicely for longer than it otherwise would have done. Straight in the ground, six inches apart, and in a months’ time you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Posted in Allotments, sowing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Tales of an impatient gardener

February 28, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

It’s no good: I can’t resist.

This happens every year in February. There’s something about the turn of the month that makes your gardening brain go into “spring” mode. Whatever the weather outside – and let’s face it, we’ve had some pretty horrific weather this year – I just want to get growing.

If I were a sensible gardener, I would stand by my cast-iron resolution made last year when I sowed my seed too early (again). I would restrain my twitching fingers until at least mid-March, because I know that seed sown later will always catch up with the struggling weaklings you produce sowing when it’s too cold, too grey, too damp, and just too unspringlike for them to thrive.

Unfortunately I am not sensible: I am impulsive, impatient and imprudent. So the middle of this month found me in my greenhouse sowing an inordinate amount of seed, trying to kid myself that I was trying to get a head start on the season but actually knowing in my heart of hearts it was just to make myself feel better.

I’ve sown an early crop of most of the hardiest veg such as ‘Early Nantes’ carrots and my ‘Countess’ parsnips, as well as some ‘Tom Thumb’ lettuce, mixed salad leaves and celeriac, all of which you can rely on to germinate at low temperatures. More risky are the greenhouse crops, which I’ve started now as they need to hit the summer running as big, beefy plants in order to produce a good yield. The trouble is they also need high germination temperatures and are generally inclined to feel the cold.

At the moment, I’m peering anxiously at the pepper and chilli pots which are stubbornly refusing to show signs of germination despite nearly three weeks in my increasingly compost-sprinkled but relatively warm office. No sign of the aubergines either. I think I may have to re-sow if they don’t pop up some time soon. Next year if I succumb to temptation again I’ll give them a bit more heat.

The tomatoes aren’t doing too badly: after the first tentative hump of seedling stem showed last week they’ve been popping up every couple of days. And of course the hardy stalwarts that keep a gardener going at this time of year are romping away: that’s the first tray of salad mix you can see in the picture, and the Tom Thumbs are up and growing too. No sign of the carrots yet (they’re sown in loo roll inners) or the parsnips (ditto) but then they always take a few weeks and generally don’t cause any trouble.

For all that success has been more patchy than it ought to have been, it does your soul good to see seedlings poking their way into the world at this time of year. And that, to be honest, is what it’s all about.

Posted in Greenhouse growing, Propagation, sowing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Forcing the issue #2

February 24, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

What a stop-start spring this has been.

A week of watery sunshine got me all Tigger-like and bouncy in anticipation that finally, at last, the winter was over. Weeds were weeded, beds were forked over, edges were trimmed.

Now it’s minus-goodness-knows-what at night again, blistering cold wind and sleeting rain all day. The allotment is under water, as is most of my garden, and I’m forced to retreat back into the greenhouse. My Tiggerish enthusiasm has flopped like a frost-stricken seedling and I’m now tending markedly towards an Eeyore frame of mind.

But it takes more than a little setback like that to keep a good gardener down. Before the weather closed in again, I managed to dig up half a dozen rooted runners of my super-reliable mid-season strawberries, ‘Cambridge Favourite’, for forcing.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite the right variety for producing the very earliest crops: if you’re serious about your strawberry forcing you should choose an early variety like ‘Honeoye’. I do also grow this variety on my plot but I’ve found it hasn’t settled in too well – it’s possible that the soil is a little too heavy for it, and I confess I did let them get a bit weed-suffocated last year so they weren’t exactly given the best chance. So ‘Cambridge Favourite’ it is.

Strawberries need a good spell of chilly weather to get them to initiate flowering and fruiting, so there’s no point in getting them in for forcing too early. I don’t think there’s much doubt that there’s been plenty of chilling this winter: so I’m pretty hopeful that these plants should be at just the right stage for potting up. They’re just runners which I deliberately didn’t cut off at the end of the season, instead allowing them to fall onto the ground and root where they fell: after that it’s simply a matter of digging them up carefully, snipping off the connecting runner and replanting them indoors.

I have a couple of these old tin baths kicking about – I bought them on a holiday in the Isle of Wight a few years ago after spotting them in a corner of an architectural salvage yard (my long-suffering family are quite used to me dragging back bits of old junk from holidays: it’s one of the few times I get the chance to mung about in salvage yards, which is a shame as it’s one of my all-time favourite leisure activities and a fantastic source of useful things for the garden).

The strawbs won’t be in there more than a few months so I’ve just used peat-free multi-purpose compost: I’ll start backing it up with a liquid feed as soon as they’re flowering. I reckon I’ll be eating my first fruits in around early May – a month sooner than from my crops outside. Now that’s something to look forward to.

Posted in Container veg growing, Fruit, Greenhouse growing, Propagation | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Safeguarding the future

February 20, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

I’ve fulfilled a long-held ambition this year and put my name down for the Heritage Seed Library.

This remarkable band of mainly volunteers have taken it upon themselves, very nearly single-handedly, to save all the vegetable varieties they can.

The majority of the veg we grow are registered under the 1973 Seed (National List of Varieties) Act. It seemed like a good idea at the time, as it guaranteed that all seed were uniform, stable and distinct: so you can be sure that what you buy is what you get.

The trouble is that unknown thousands of varieties never made it on to the database, and at a stroke became illegal. You cannot sell or buy such seed: the only way you can get hold of it is if someone gives you some.

The 1973 Act might have ensured growers knew what they were getting, but it also ensured the vegetable gene pool was dramatically limited to those few dozen varieties of each type of vegetable which made it through. Not good news when you’re trying to breed new varieties for, say, pest and disease resistance, or to withstand the effects of climate change.

That’s why the HSL is so very important. They’ve scoured the country collecting seed from that funny-looking bean Auntie Doris has grown in her back yard for years, or the carrots Joe down the allotments has honed to perfection over decades. Once they’ve got the seed, they grow it on, either at the Garden Organic gardens at Ryton or through a growing network of Seed Guardians – doughty volunteers who grow these often very rare heirlooms on their allotments or in their gardens, save the seed and send it back so it can be redistributed to Garden Organic members across the land.

And that’s how such seed become more widely available. There are several success stories: the Victorian runner bean ‘Painted Lady’ was once endangered but is now mainstream; and the crimson-flowered broad bean was saved by the Seed Library and is now much in demand for its spectacular good looks (I’m growing some this year myself).

The HSL redistributes its seed through its catalogue: and that’s what dropped on my mat the other day. So yet again I find myself indulging in more seeds than, strictly speaking, I should be committing myself to, as I get to choose 6 varieties as part of my Garden Organic membership and it’s full of tempting stuff like acocha (described as “ideal for an amateur production of Day of the Triffids”) and African Horned Cucumber (perplexingly prickly but intriguing).

I passed on both – maybe another day when I’m feeling braver – but here are my heritage choices for 2010:

Carrot ‘London Market’

Climbing French bean ‘Blue Queen’

Asparagus kale

Melon ‘Green Nutmeg’

Pea ‘Clarke’s Beltony Blue’

Squash ‘Virginia Rooster’

All have great stories behind them and date back at least 80-100 years plus: I’ll let you know how I get on with them!

Posted in Other stuff, Unusual veg | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Pick of the month: February

February 16, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Parsnip “White Gem”

All right, all right. You can stop laughing now.

Newly washed and presented to my family for inspection, my 9-year-old’s reaction to this was, “Ooooh, Mummy, you’ve grown an Ood!”(1)

I have terrible soil for growing parsnips. Despite ladling on barrowloads of compost and well-rotted stable manure, despite lovingly constructing raised beds to create better drainage, it remains stubbornly full of stones, claggy and clayey: to grow long, straight, beautiful parsnips you need deep, sandy soil that’s light as a feather with not so much as a pea-sized pebble anywhere to be seen.

The reason I persist in producing candidates for wierdly-shaped vegetable contests is that I love the taste of home-grown parsnips. It’s one of the many veg that you never buy from the shops again once you’ve tasted your own. From the shops, they’re bland, uninteresting, rather mushy vegetables; those you grow yourself are crunchy, full of texture, and richly, even fragrantly full of flavour. In fact home-grown parsnips taste so damn… well… parsnipy that I find they sometimes need diluting: a family favourite is to mash them with carrots, or you can add them to your mashed potatoes too (plus salt, pepper and lashings of melted butter – food for the gods).

This is the crop I sowed last year (in loo roll inners for the first time which is why they’ve all developed quite well until they hit the actual soil). It’s a bit the worse for wear having spent a very harsh winter in the ground, but once peeled, perfectly fine on the plate.

The variety, though, is one I don’t think I’m going to try again: ‘White Gem’ is billed as growing in any soil (the reason I chose it), resistant to canker and fine flavoured. Well: it failed the first one, but I don’t really blame it for that as I don’t think the parsnip has been invented that could grow well in my soil. And the other two it passed with flying colours.

What they don’t mention, though, is that it has a socking great core to it which is chewy as old leather and twice as bitter: so while you think you’ve grown a huge parsnip you actually get about a quarter of that in edible parsnip flesh after you’ve cut out most of the middle of each root.

Of course I could just harvest them earlier, as woody cores develop with age: but the whole point of parsnips, to me, is that they sit there all winter waiting for you to dig them up. So while the search continues for a variety with a very small core, I’m trying ‘Countess’ this year – much praised for flavour and whiteness of flesh. I’ve just sown them, so when they come up I plan to follow the Medwyn Williams school: core out a borehole with a long pipe or crowbar, fill it with compost and topsoil, and sow (or plant) into that. Here’s to perfect parsnips, for the first time ever, this time next year.

(1): In the highly unlikely event that there are any of you out there who are not conversant with the ins and outs of the latest series of Doctor Who: there is a rather fetching picture of an Ood here. I think you’ll agree it bears more than a passing resemblance.

Posted in Pick of the month | Tagged , | 4 Comments »

Of sun and wind

February 12, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

This is the other coveted prize I carried home from the wonderful Potato Day I went to in Hampshire the other week. It may not look very promising: it’s just a knobbly sort of lumpy thing a couple of inches across. But within that unglamorous exterior is the promise of wonderful things to come.

It is, of course, a Jerusalem artichoke, and I popped it into the ground just as it was a short time after I took this pic. You can plant them pretty much any time in early spring as they’re very nearly indestructible: a welcome change from the variously tender, fussy or just plain difficult unusual veg I generally try to grow.

Jerusalem artichokes have been here since about the 17th century, but aren’t widely grown – possibly because of an unfortunate side effect which has given them a very rude nickname (just try saying the name with an ‘f’ in front and you’ll see what I mean). When we had a go at cooking them up into a soup the first time we tried them, that wasn’t so much the problem as the screaming heeby-jeebies they gave us at night: I’ve never heard of nightmares as a side effect of Jerusalem artichokes and am willing to believe it may have been some entirely unrelated factor, so we’re giving them another go.

Even if they don’t agree with us, Jerusalem artichokes are beautiful in the garden. They’re related to sunflowers so make big plants, a good 2m tall, topped with those lovely cheerful yellow blooms. They’re so sturdy that they make good windbreaks (no pun intended) for more exposed veg patches too.

I’ve planted mine in what I optimistically call my ‘jungle garden’ – devoted to big, lush plants like bananas and the like (there’s an edible passion fruit in there too but I’m having a battle over it with the slugs at the moment, and the slugs are winning. But that’s another story).

Thanks to the truly connoisseur selection of everything at the Potato Day this is no common-or-garden Jerusalem artichoke, either (that would be the variety ‘Fuseau’, in case you like common-or-garden). Oh no: this is ’Boston Red’, which as you can see has a nice pinkish tinge to the tubers. I don’t know much more about it than that, although apparently it’s a fiddle to clean up as it grows so knobbly (though you wouldn’t know that from the tuber I’ve got).

You’ll notice I’ve only bothered buying one tuber: that’s because nothing, with the possible exception of bamboo, spreads faster than a Jerusalem artichoke. I should have at least half-a-dozen of these and possibly more by the autumn. I’ll be eating some of them – but the rest I’ll leave in the ground to bulk up to a nice big patch of sunflowers. I expect in a few years I’ll be cursing them bitterly as I beat them back from the rest of my garden, but until then I’ll just enjoy the show.

Posted in Unusual veg, sowing | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

The eyes have it

February 7, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

Get a room full of keen veg-growers together at this time of year, and sooner or later you can guarantee the talk will turn to whether or not you chit your potatoes.

It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that’s handed down unquestioned from gardener to gardener through the ages: when your seed potatoes arrive, you stand them up in a bright but frost-free place – not too warm though, and out of direct sunlight - with the end with the most ‘eyes’ (little tiny buds) uppermost. This, they say, encourages your spuds to form little sprouts, giving them a head start on the year.

When I first started growing veg I chitted my potatoes religiously every February: that’s what the books told me to do. Then one year I forgot. I couldn’t quite face chucking out a whole years’ worth of tubers, and if I waited another month to chit them it was going to be too late to plant them: so I thought what the hell, I’ll put them in anyway.

Result: bumper crop of spuds and you couldn’t have told the difference. A few years later I did the same thing again under trial conditions. Not quite to RHS standards, you understand, but I did scribble down what I did when and what happened next in a slightly muddy notebook.

I planted two lines of new potatoes next to each other, one chitted for a month from early February, the other planted straight into the ground from the packet. The chitted potatoes appeared above ground much sooner, and grew on more strongly to begin with: but by May the non-chitted spuds had caught up, and by harvest time you couldn’t have told the difference. What’s more, I weighed the crop I got: there was no more than a few ounces in it.

All this has firmly convinced me that you don’t actually need to chit potatoes.

Why, then, have I just painstakingly laid out my lovely selection of new, second-early and maincrop potatoes in eggboxes under the staging in my frost-free greenhouse?

Because if as most gardeners do you buy your seed potatoes a month or more before you’re intending to actually plant them, you’ll quickly discover that they start chitting themselves anyway. If you’re storing them in your shed in a netting bag while they’re doing this, the sprouts tangle themselves up with the netting, grow in all sorts of funny directions and by the time you get around to planting them are so pale and weedy that they snap off the moment you touch the seed potato (if you haven’t already snapped them all off getting them out of the bag, of course). Which is a big waste of potential potato plant if you ask me.

I lay my potatoes out anyway, just as you would if you were chitting them, so that they sprout more normally and are easier to handle come planting time. So in answer to your question: yes, I do chit my potatoes, but no, I don’t.

Posted in Allotments, Greenhouse growing, Storing, sowing | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

Spud-ilicious!

February 2, 2010 by crocuskitchengarden

I don’t know if you’ve ever paused to wonder how many potato varieties there are. Take a guess. Maybe 30? Or 50 if you count all those wierd knobbly heritage varieties?

Well I counted 128 on offer at the 12th annual Hampshire Potato Day, held in Whitchurch, near Andover, at the weekend.

There were French gourmet varieties like ‘Anais’ (first early) and Scottish stalwarts like ‘Kerr’s Pink’ (late maincrop). There were blue ones – ‘Edzell Blue’ (second early) and ‘Salad Blue’ (early maincrop) among others - pink ones (maincrop ‘Pink Fir Apple’)  and red ones: ‘Highland Burgundy Red’ (second early) has a red heart when you cut it open, which is intriguing but slightly unnerving.

There were very modern ones: ‘Sarpo Mira’ and ‘Axona’, maincrops bred in 2002 and 2003, have a deserved reputation for blight resistance; and very, very old ones – late maincrop ‘Fortyfold’ has been grown since 1836. I was very taken with this one as its knobbly tubers are bright purple with white blotches, but since it was bred about five years before blight began ravaging its way through potato growing everywhere (amazing to think there was a time when potato blight didn’t exist) I suspect it would be a martyr to the disease.

And that’s not even counting a number of varieties on display which are so rare there aren’t enough of them to sell, and as well as potatoes…. look, why don’t I stop going on and just let the pictures tell the story.

'Black Bishop Choir Boys' - super-rare and gets my prize for best name of the day

Another old variety so rare it's not sold but handed down through the generations

'Salad Blue', a good-looking Victorian variety which stays blue on cooking

Four double rows of potato crates stretching right across the hall offered a bewildering choice

It wasn't all potatoes though - veg displays and heritage seed merchants were there too

... and peas and beans by the half-pint, as well as onion and shallot sets galore

My haul at the end of the day was 10 tubers each of the maincrops ‘Majestic’ (Scottish, 1911), ‘Mayan Gold’ (yellow-fleshed, 2003), ‘Pentland Squire’ (all-rounder, 1970) and ‘Vitellotte’, a French potato dating back to 1875 which I’m very intrigued by as it’s dark purple, right down to the foliage, and the taste is said to be astonishingly good. I also snaffled some Broad Bean ‘Crimson Flowered’, a Jerusalem artichoke (of which more later) and – my find of the day – a yacon crown, courtesy of the wonderful specialist nursery Edulis.

Potato Days were started by Garden Organic, who still hold the biggest of all of them at Ryton, near Coventry. That’s a bit of a hike from my neck of the woods, so I just went to the nearest one: there’s a list of all the potato days held across the whole country here. They carry on well into March so there’s still plenty of time to go to one near you.

Posted in Shows, Unusual veg | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

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