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The 52 Week Salad Challenge: January

Jan 27th, 2012 by Sally Nex

January salads: fennel, sorrel, onion leaves, daylily leaves and a snippet of parsley root

When I took up the challenge set by Michelle at Veg Plotting to find salads to eat from my garden every week of this year, it took a little while for the penny to drop that she was starting the challenge at the beginning of the year. Logical, you might think, until it occurs to you that it is January.

This most difficult of months in the veg garden means my salad pickings have been – let’s face it – a bit thin. If you’re efficient you’ve got greenhouses and coldframes packed to the gunwhales with winter salad mixes you sowed in September last year, growing, perhaps more slowly, but enough for you to pick a goodly meal.

In an emergency, of course, you can always try sprouting seeds: microgreens, grown on a windowsill, make deliciously different salad ingredients (I tried this last year: radish sprouts and pea shoots were my firm favourites).

But for now, caught on the hop, I have to fall back on what I can find in my garden that’s already there.

Feathery, airy bronze fennel leaves are exquisite to eat right through the year

Normally salads are the ultimate in grow-your-own fast food: sown every couple of weeks, up within days, pickable (just) within a fortnight.  They last all of a month or two, then they’re gone – eaten, bolted or just a bit too mature for enjoying raw.

Wouldn’t it be great, I started thinking, if you had plants which produced salads for a bit longer. Even better: over winter. And certainly into next year.

And the more I looked, the more I discovered that there are more perennial salad ingredients out there than you’d think. In fact, I’ve amazed myself: with literally no effort, I’ve been able to pick something for salads every week of this month.

If you widen the net to include things like corn salad (so plentiful and prolific you’re never without it even though it’s strictly speaking an annual) and young leaves picked from winter veg, you can add kale, beetroot tops and the very tiniest chard leaves, too. Colourful, as well as delicious!

Ten of the best Perennial Salads:

Sorrel: to be used in moderation, as they have a really powerful flavour. French sorrel is big, beefy and green; red-veined sorrel is altogether more refined, with burgundy veins. Both carry young leaves right through winter and taste sharply lemony and tangy.

Fennel: this deliciously aniseedy herb carries a frothy tuft of young growth right through winter: bronze fennel in particular looks gorgeous sprinkled sparingly in with larger leaves

Garlic: instead of pulling all your garlic in August, leave a few in at the end of the row to overwinter. Then at this time of year you can be snipping the slenderest shoots like chives to sprinkle on salads. This works well with overwintering onion shoots, too.

Salad burnet: evergreen Sanguisorba minor is generously productive and so low-growing you can tuck it in around other things; pick the smallest, youngest leaves as older ones are too tough. The flavour is fresh and subtle, a little like a nutty cucumber.

Garlic cress: hard to get hold of but worth tracking down, Peltaria alliacea is another evergreen herb with a spicy, garlicky, almost mustardy taste.

Mint: as we all know, mint grows like billy-o through most of the season and it’s all you can do to keep it in check. At this time of year, though, it dies down to a little basal foliage of tiny, tender leaves: sprinkled on salads, these are just delicious.

Wild rocket: stronger (even stronger?) than the related and more familiar salad rocket, this is a robust little herb that comes back year after year. It dies down in winter, but you’ll keep it going later (and start it growing earlier) by covering with a cloche.

Horseradish: another salad ingredient to use sparingly, and only the very youngest of leaves as they get poisonous as they mature.  A peppery flavour, with quite a kick.

Scorzonera: This useful perennial vegetable produces long black roots that taste of artichokes, but you can also pick the leaves when young: a little bland in flavour, but pleasant with other spicier ingredients to pep them up (the flowers later in the year are edible, too).

Daylily leaves: every veg garden should have a daylily (Hemerocallis) or two: the flower buds are crunchy and sweet, like a cross between peas and lettuce. Most varieties keep some leaves through winter: pick them young and fresh but don’t overdo it, as they’re laxative.

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Posted in Herbs, Salads, Unusual veg | 3 Comments »

Recipe of the month: January

Jan 23rd, 2012 by Sally Nex

Romanian Sirbusca

(Potato and Root Parsley soup-stew)

Deciding what you do with your root parsley once you’ve grown it is easy: you just plump for one of its multiple identities and use it just like you would parsnips, or carrots (or parsley, if you’re using the tops). We had ours roasted alongside the Sunday joint, and very delicious it was too.

But to pay true homage to this most Slavic of vegetables, you need to cook it Eastern European style. It’s jolly cold east of, say, Austria, so it’s no surprise that the local cooking involves a lot of hearty stews and warming soups: inner insulation, you might say.

This one is about as hearty and warming as it gets: it also makes the most of the many virtues of parsley root, using both its underground roots and its topknot of fresh green parsley. I can’t make up my mind whether it’s a soup or a stew (you can make it with the emphasis on either) but whatever, it’s a filling, nourishing and delicious lunch that’ll set you trudging out onto the snow-lashed plains with a glow in your cheeks.

2 parsley roots (or if you happen not to be growing parsley root this year, just use smallish parsnips - and you’ll also need to get yourself a bunch of fresh parsley)
1 onion
1 carrot
1kg (about 2 1/2 lbs) potatoes
1.2 l (2 pts) chicken stock
225g (8oz) bacon
salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Start by preparing all your veg.

Trim the parsley roots, removing the tops, then peeling and dicing them. Top and tail the carrot and dice that too (peel if it’s old-ish, otherwise leave the skin on) and scrub your potatoes before dicing them skin and all. Finally peel and chop the onion.

Put the whole lot into a big pan along with the chicken stock, then bring to the boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer, and cook gently for about 20 minutes until the veg are tender.

While they’re cooking, chop the root parsley tops (or fresh parsley if you’re using parsnips) finely. Also cut the bacon into small pieces (if you can find lardons in your local shop, these save you a bit of work) and dry-fry them in a frying pan for about 10 minutes until they’re lightly browned. Remove from the heat and set aside.

At this point, you can decide whether you want it to be a soup or a stew. If you want a soup, put the cooked vegetables through a blender and whizz for a minute or so till they’re nicely creamy. Then return to the pan. If you want a stew – just leave them as they are.

Add the bacon to the vegetables, then sprinkle in the parsley and season to taste with salt and pepper. Give the whole thing a good stir, and simmer again for another five minutes or so before ladling into a big generous bowl.

 

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Posted in Allotments, Recipe of the month, Unusual veg | No Comments »

Pick of the month: January

Jan 15th, 2012 by Sally Nex

Root parsley ‘Atika’

Above ground it's parsley...

If there was ever a vegetable which couldn’t make up its mind, this is it.

It might be a parsley: and then again, maybe it’s a parsnip. On a good day, it could be a carrot.

The identity crisis even affects its common name: take your pick from root parsley, rock selinen, Hamburg parsley, Dutch parsley (good grief, it can’t even decide which country it comes from. Actually, it turns out to be Czechoslovakia) parsley root or just ‘that bloody thing that doesn’t know what it is’.

But all this general confusion plays beautifully into the hands of us veg gardeners. Because a veg that’s trying its hand at being several different things can be everything at once – and you get the best of all worlds.

Root parsley is definitely parsley (it’s Petroselinum crispum, but with a var tuberosum on the end betraying those swollen parsnip-like roots). But it’s a parsley that – like a parsnip – stays in the ground through most of the winter.

The luxury of having plenty of parsley to go and snip from the garden even in December and January can’t be overstated. I always have a bit of trouble keeping conventional parsley happy indoors: I think it’s too warm for it, so it grows more leggy than leafy, and besides I have a habit of forgetting to water it.

But this winter I’ve been able to pop into the veg garden and snip myself a few sprigs from each plant whenever I feel like it (don’t fleece them or they won’t have enough left to keep themselves going).

It’s a little coarser than your Italian flat-leaved summer parsley, with a slightly stronger flavour, but as long as you use a little less than you would normally it makes a very respectable substitute.

Then when you feel like it, you simply dig up the roots and use them just like you would parsnips, or carrots, or turnips for that matter.

...and below ground, it's a parsnip (and I'm about as successful in growing it straight)

They are much more delicate, whiter and smaller than parsnips – about 15cm long, and nowhere near as fat – but to my mind that’s a distinct advantage. I find a lot of my parsnips are hard, inedible core which needs removing before you can enjoy the root at its best: no such problem with root parsley.

The flavour is where this vegetable stops being like a parsnip and starts being more like a carrot. It’s sweet, tender, without any of the earthiness of a parsnip - rather like a carrot that’s been cooked with parsley for flavouring. It’s intriguingly, deliciously different.

I sowed mine in modules in spring, then potted them on a bit before planting them outside. I would imagine it wouldn’t be too troublesome to sow direct outdoors if you prefer. It doesn’t seem to have inherited the problems with germination for which parsley (and parsnips) are notorious, either.

After that it grows like a parsnip: in other words, it needs a good long spell in the ground to form those lovely little white roots.

Unlike parsnips (though like parsley) it’s happy to grow in the shade and are almost ridiculously trouble-free: mine spent most of their summer overshadowed by the rampant seeding radishes next door which I hadn’t realised would grow so big (I like their peppery, crunchy green seedpods). The root parsley didn’t mind a bit - they were just as good when I uncovered them as if they’d had the place to themselves.

If you’re strapped for space, and wondering whether you have room for parsley and parsnips and carrots this year, this may just be the answer. And even if you have all the room in the world, it’s worth growing for that intriguingly unusual flavour and easy-going nature. All in all, for a schizophrenic vegetable, it’s pretty nice to have around.

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Feeling fruity #1: Getting ready

Jan 10th, 2012 by Sally Nex

My future berry patch: it may not look very promising at the moment, but you wait.

No kitchen garden is complete, I’d argue, without a very large quantity of fruit as well as vegetables.

I’m not sure what puts people off growing fruit - it’s ridiculously easy, especially if you compare it to, say, preventing spinach from bolting - yet it’s usually an afterthought, with the possible exception of strawberries. But just growing veg is like living life in black and white: you’re missing a whole other dimension to your gardening life.

Berries dripping with blood-red juice, apples still warm from the sun, pears so juicy you have to eat them over the sink: fruit in the garden is the definition of luxury. You can be as poor as a church mouse and still live like a king if you grow fruit. It brings out your romantic, indulgent side, making you generous to yourself and those closest to you with sumptuous treats and illicit excesses of crumbles and pies and tarts and icecream.

I’m gradually repopulating my garden with fruit, and so far things are going well: we have the annual treat of three trees’ worth of apples, and my previously ailing ‘Conference’ pear produced a bumper crop last year. I’ve begun work (slowly) on planting what I’m optimistically calling the orchard on top of the hill: so far, so pathetic, with just one medlar and one quince, but I’m adding more each year.

But the most exciting bit is starting this year. I have a little spit of land, about 5m by 7.5m (that’s 16 x 25ft to you oldies) between my greenhouse and the wall of the garage which doubles up as my garden shed. And it’s just the right size for a berry patch.

It’s roughly rectangular, so I fancied something a bit more formal this time. I knew I didn’t want the usual fruit cage; there’s nothing wrong with them, it’s just that I suffer from delusions of grandeur and I’m after a fruit cage that doesn’t look like a fruit cage. I’m thinking tall slender posts with copper pipes between them, and swags of rope from a central point to hold the netting up.

Inside, I had in mind a geometric design, rather like a potager. These are very easy to draw up, given a little graph paper and a pencil: I did mine on the kitchen table.

Yes, of course I could have just done the traditional thing and made beds either side of a central path. I’d probably have given myself a lot less hassle that way.

But though it may seem odd to be ‘designing’ a kitchen garden layout, actually it makes the whole space so much more inviting, interesting and just downright beautiful. And that means you want to be in it: which means your garden is loved and cherished in a way a practical but visually dull space is not.

There’s absolutely no reason why a kitchen garden can’t be just as well laid out as an ornamental one, and once you’ve taken that on board, the possibilities for growing fruit and veg become downright exciting.

There is just one rule for designing a garden, and that stays more or less the same whatever you’re doing: keep it simple, stupid. I began by drawing some complicated fiddly thing with a diamond in the middle but that left me with lots of funny triangular corner beds. Then I tried a rather grand design with a sweeping semi-circle at the back: nope, not enough width, and besides, it would have been a nightmare to build and obscured the garage window, which is kind of attractive.

Given that the entrance is over towards one corner, I had to have diagonal paths: I also wanted growing space all round the edges, as I’m planning espaliered cherry trees (perfect for growing under netting: the birds get the lot otherwise).

I also needed a central space for a raised bed, or maybe a pot, so I can grow blueberries: my soil is unrelentingly alkaline, and my favourite fruit is stubbornly acid-loving. So my only option is to put some in containers of ericaceous compost. Luckily they adapt well to container life.

My central higher posts (the ones the swags of ropes will hang from) also had to go in the middle: so that more or less set me off on the design.

Here (with apologies for the lousy quality of the drawing) is what I came up with.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Designing your garden – working through the practicalities of what must go where, how you’re going to get from A to B (and back again), how you will reach your plants and – most importantly of all – where you can fit in your favourites – is the first step to creating a successful outdoor space. Even if all you want are rows of rectangular beds, a drawing will help you work out how wide your paths will be, where the shed will go and what you’re going to put in the shady spot where nothing much will grow.

It’s so much better to think through all these things well before you start chopping your ground up and laying paths all over the place: mistakes, or just the realisation you’re going about it all the wrong way, are so much more easier to put right on paper. Take the time now, write it all down, and you’ve got a blueprint from which everything else follows – and you can watch your dream turn into reality.

Next month: time to get to work. I’ll be stripping back what’s there now and starting to put in the bones of the garden.

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Posted in Allotments, Fruit, Hard landscaping | 2 Comments »

New Year, new start

Jan 2nd, 2012 by Sally Nex

And a Happy New Year to you all!

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting itchy. It’s one of those turning points in the gardening year: like in March when you start sowing seeds in earnest, or September when you clear your beds and the new season really begins. Now, the end of the old year and the unveiling of the new, is when I start getting twitchy, with all that untapped promise ahead and, no doubt, unforeseen trials.

It’s a time to think, hard, about how last season went, and see if you can’t do things better this time around. I try to avoid New Year’s Resolutions if at all possible, since I almost always forget what they are by the 10th anyway and even if I write them down I generally realise by March that I will never keep the garden free of the kids’ toys or get round to hoeing the veg beds every week without fail or resist sowing too much seed yet again this year.

However that’s not quite the same as resolving to learn a little from the discoveries, experiments and outright mistakes of 2011. So I’ve taken a little look back at what went right last year, so I can have a little inner smug-fest and also try to remember to do it again like that this year; and though it’s not quite as likely to give me a warm tingly feeling, I also take stock of all the things that went wrong. Apart from anything else it helps if I think there’s a point to all my little catastrophes, if only to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.

An awful lot of my post-2011 conclusions seem to be about tomatoes, which probably means everything else got along more or less OK. Though that might be just because I’ve forgotten; that’s the worst thing about mistakes. You only remember you meant not to do that again when you’re actually doing it again. And it’s going horribly wrong. Just like it did last year.

Things I have learned this year:

French shallots are the only ones worth growing. I have now tried ’Echalote Grise’ and ‘Hative de Niort’ and they were both a revelation. Big, fat, deliciously-flavoured, and one of those veg you kind of want to show off to your friends (but don’t dare for fear of losing them all – the friends, that is, not the veg). I’ve also tried Pikant, Red Sun and Golden Gourmet: perfectly respectable and perfectly reliable (Red Sun is the best of the three); but not a patch on the wow-factor of their Gallic cousins.

Cherry tomatoes need protection from birds if you grow them outdoors. My heirloom variety ‘Sweet Pea Currant’ was stripped of every single bright red bead this year. Lovely plants though.

Sprouts really do need staking. My plants were giants this year - the best ones I’ve ever produced – but ended up at a 45° angle because I didn’t realise they got quite that tall, never having grown very good ones before, and failed to stake them properly. Lesson learned.

Things I won’t be doing again:

Growing anything in grow bags. The whole thing was hugely unsatisfactory. For anyone interested in the result of my grow bag trials earlier this year: the best support was string wrapped round the roots (though they did have an irritating habit of snapping later in the year, so I think nylon string rather than jute). The single growbags cut in half and containing two plants were the only ones which produced passable results: even doubled-up growbags still didn’t do the biz, though with ring culture pots they were better. And if you really have to grow in these benighted systems – and you have my deepest sympathy – then water, water, water, or it just isn’t worth even starting.

Overcrowding the greenhouse. I always get overenthusiastic and plant far too many tomato plants in my greenhouse. This is Not a Good Idea. It’s fine while they’re little, but when they grow up they crowd each other out, it’s hellish trying to get into the back row to water and you can never get enough food into them to keep them happy. So from now on, it’s no more than 7-8 plants to a 6x8ft greenhouse. I still have no idea how I’m going to force myself to stick to this one.

Growing runner beans. I’m sorry; I know they’re an allotment staple and a Great British Vegetable. But I have tried dozens of varieties now, and picked them at all stages of development, and I still haven’t found one that doesn’t knot itself between your teeth when you’re trying to eat it. And when you’ve got something as string-free and delicious as a climbing French bean instead, you’ve got to ask yourself why?

Things I want to do for the first time this year:

Try some new tomatoes: actually I’m thinking about doing tomato trials a bit like my annual potato experiments (now a bit of a family institution, though rather hit-and-miss in 2011. Better varieties planned for 2012). There are so many wonderful tomatoes out there, and I’ve tried only a handful: and here, as with potatoes. taste is all. So watch this space: I will report back.

Get to grips with achocha: Mine was a bit of a disaster this year, mainly because I totally forgot to plant them out in time and they got too rootbound to do well after that. However they started like rockets and were lovely healthy little plants so I’m sure they’re worth another try.

Produce some salad for every day of the year: there is a challenge being hatched by my good friend over at Veg Plotting in which several of us fanatical growers will be trying to produce year-round salad. I don’t do too badly most years and have something to pick from March to around late October; but I want to navigate the doldrums which inexplicably hit in mid-August each year, and get my timings right for winter too (usually I sow too late – so nothing gets going till spring – or too early, so everything’s over by November). I’m hoping that with a little help from my friends, this will be the year I finally crack this particular nut.

So here’s to 2012: may all your carrots grow straight, may frost kiss the shoulders of your parsnips and may sun shine on your gardening from dawn to dusk (but not so much that you need to do extra watering :D ). Happy New Year!

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Posted in Greenhouse growing, Other stuff | 2 Comments »

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