Leek ‘Below Zero’
I tried a different way of growing my leeks this year. It’s not exactly textbook, but it’s given me the best harvests I’ve ever had.
I’ve always been a bit poncey about my leek-growing. This is mainly because I’ve become totally addicted to the steely-blue and utterly gorgeous ‘Bleu de Solaise’, which I’ve got into the habit of dotting among the flowers and shrubs in my ornamental borders as a kind of vertical accent (you see? It brings out my inner Garden Designer. I’m sure my colleague James would be most proud of me, but it don’t put food on the table, mate).
So enough of the lightweight: this year I put in some genuine, bona fide, belt-and-braces allotment leeks to see if I could grow them properly, like you’re meant to, and in enough quantities to feed us through the winter.
I went for one of the really hardy varieties – there are a few, like ‘Giant Winter’ and ‘Musselburgh’, said to put up with whatever a British winter can throw at them (and lately, that’s been a lot).
Except that I kind of ran out of time, so I bypassed my usual method, which involves sowing in trays, potting on until around pencil thickness (which they never, for some reason, seem to reach in containers, unless you use unusually thin pencils) and then planting them out lovingly into deep, wide holes made with the end of a dibber.
You’re supposed to puddle them in, which is a lovely way of describing simply plonking the seedlings into the bottom of the hole and filling up said hole with water, without backfilling, so they’re sitting in their own little bath.
There are very sensible reasons why you should do this: because your leeks effectively start a good two or three inches below ground level, their shanks (that’s the bit below the topknot of leaves) grow up pale, sweet and tender. So if you puddle in your leeks, you get exceptionally long, white shanks, so more leek for your money, so to speak.
Except I didn’t do that, because I couldn’t be bothered.
Instead, I simply sowed direct, into shallow drills in the usual way, covered them lightly with more soil and then forgot about them.
Leeks lend themselves to being forgotten about, as they’re wonderfully trouble-free plants. Even the seedlings are pretty much unbothered by pests, as mice hate anything related to onions and even the slugs don’t seem to enjoy them. So you don’t even have to protect them: as long as they don’t get smothered by weeds, they’ll come up and grow on without your help.
Having said that, in my favour was that I happened to sow them in a damp spell: the one thing that will really set back your leeks is if they go short of water, so if it’s dry when you’re sowing, do make sure you water and keep watering until it starts raining again.
The other rule I broke shamelessly was that I didn’t bother to thin them out. I did sow them sparingly, as I don’t like to see too much waste, but other than that I let them do their thing. I found they grew in clusters, with two or three larger leeks out-competing smaller leeks, effectively thinning themselves as they went along.
There are some disadvantages to this approach. The clusters were hard to harvest if all you wanted was a single leek: sometimes there were two or three hefty leeks in there, all their roots entangled, so the only answer was to lift the lot and pull them apart. Luckily leeks are also very forgiving and you can just heel the remaining leeks back in until you need them.
I also found that earlier in the season, the smaller leeks at the edges of the clumps made excellent substitutes for spring onions: they’re about the same size, and unlikely to get much bigger, so I snipped the youthful top leaves into salads. The slender white shanks can be eaten raw at this age too, or cooked whole into a stir-fry.
The size was perfectly acceptable – several of my bigger leeks hit a diameter of 5cm or so, which is as big as I want a leek to be for the kitchen. And the shanks, though they wouldn’t win prizes at the local shows, were long enough and white enough to make plenty of good eating. And more to the point, we’ve been enjoying them all winter and still have enough left for a few more meals – and it’s mid-February.
I had hoped this particular variety would get the chance to show off how well it lived up to its name: but as luck would have it, we’ve had one of our mildest-ever winters this year with the first proper frost on 13 January, so the jury is still out on how low Below Zero it can go. But it’s a good performer, trouble-free, slow to bolt and with a good, rich flavour: I’d grow it again, and you can’t say better than that.














