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Pick of the month: February

Feb 18th, 2012 by Sally Nex

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.

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Spud trials 2012

Feb 14th, 2012 by Sally Nex

Regular readers will know I’m steadily working my way through the several hundred varieties of potato – both heritage and more modern – grown in this country. So far, I have tried… well… about sixteen. A little way to go then.

Every year, though, I learn a little more. In 2011, I learned that choosing varieties for their disease resistance over and above everything else results in a boring set of potatoes.

It was the first year I’d grown on chalk, and knowing that alkaline soils make potatoes very prone to scab, I chose all my new varieties to trial based on the fact that they were naturally scab resistant (that, and that they weren’t purple: the main results of my 2010 trials being that purple potatoes are good for entertaining the kids with novelty mash, but not something you’d want to look at on your plate every day).

But when  you make your sole criteria the fact that a potato resists scab, I found, you end up with lots of scab-free but very tasteless, bland potatoes. So this year, I have decided to put up with the scab and grow for the reasons most important to me. So in my never-ending search for that holy grail of the potato that tastes wonderful, holds its texture well on cooking and looks utterly gorgeous – here are my potato choices for 2012:

Duke of York: I have succumbed. This has for years been the first early the others had to beat: in fact I grew nothing else until a couple of years ago (thanks to some crazy idea I had to trial dozens of different potato varieties). ‘Kestrel’ (a second early) came close in 2010, and last year ‘Accent’ nudged at its crown, but for me it’s still the undisputed best, so I’m reminding myself just how good it is (biased? moi?)

Charlotte: this year’s second early is another one I’ve wanted to grow for ages. Through these trials I’ve learned that though we love floury spuds for baking and roasting, we mostly eat our spuds steamed or boiled: and the best boiling potatoes are those with a waxy flesh. French-bred ‘Charlotte’ is described as salad potatoes – and that’s about as waxy as it gets – and what’s more, everyone raves about their flavour.

Pink Fir Apple: Another one everyone talks about – a lot. This was one of the first heritage varieties to appear on the scene: bred in 1850, it’s only been widely grown again for the last five or ten years. Since its return it’s set the bar high in taste, texture and of course knobbliness. They say it’s a pain to process but if it’s as good a flavour as they say, I’ll give it a go.

Mr Little’s Yetholm Gypsy: Sometimes you just want to grow a potato for its name alone: and they don’t come much more evocative than this variety, believed to date back to 1899. There’s a story, too: the shepherd Mr Little, who lived in Yetholm on the Scottish Borders, bought it at a horse fair in the 1940s and kept it going, more or less single-handedly, ever since. Oh yes, and it’s tricoloured burgundy red, white and possibly purple, too.

King Edward: I grew this one year on my allotment and though the yields were relatively small, they were among the best in flavour of any maincrop I’ve ever tried. That memory has stayed with me so I thought I’d give them another go: the ultimate floury-textured roaster, the only one my roast-dinner-maestro husband asks for by name, this could be a hard one to beat.

Majestic: This big, hefty maincrop has proved its worth again and again, the outright winner of my trials in both 2010 and 2011. I thought its flavour was slightly better in the clay soils of my allotment back in Surrey: but it did pretty damn well in the light chalk of Somerset last year, too. Let’s see how it measures up against this year’s crop.

Picasso: My wildcard for this year, I picked this one out after shamelessly eavesdropping on a conversation at the Potato Day where I picked up my tubers this year. The ladies in question wouldn’t go home without any ‘Picasso’ and swore by its flavour and reliability: it’s a modern variety, with good disease resistance and pretty, pink-eyed tubers.

Sarpo Mira: Every year I plant what I think of as my insurance crop: a selection from the incredibly reliable Sarvari Research Trust range, bred for their blight resistance. The foliage- and tuber-resistant varieties have the prefix Sarpo (pronounced Sharpo, affectionately known as Sharpies): last time I grew Mira it was next to a row of ‘Desiree‘, reduced to brown mush while its Sharpie neighbour still stood tall.

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Posted in Allotments | 3 Comments »

So… what’s new?

Feb 6th, 2012 by Sally Nex

Perhaps it’s because we’re always working with things that change: plants that grow, flower, fruit and die; and seasons that change from icy to sunny to downpour and back again (sometimes in a single day just lately: on second thoughts, even a gardener can have too much change).

So the Garden Press Event in central London, staged just before the start of the growing season each year and a shop window for gardening-related companies to showcase what’s new, is a magnet for us muddy-fingered types.

As usual, there were plenty of things to pique my curiosity this year: here are just a few of them.

The cloche that’s not a cloche: First: a declaration of interest. This is one of this year’s new range of products from Crocus, owners of this very blog: the rest can be found on the Outdoor Living page. That’s it: plug over.

But even if I weren’t writing for this august blog I would covet a wire cloche.

If you want to grow veg among your flowers, either because you’re short on space or because, like me, you can’t help thinking how damn gorgeous vegetables are, you have a dilemma.

Plant protections – fleece or netting – look hideous. Here’s the solution: pop them over your vulnerable kales or cabbages and it’s a garden ornament in its own right.

Raised beds made of Lego: Well, not literally, obviously. But that’s what WoodBlockX made me think of.

Each component is like a big wooden brick with holes in it. Just stack them up and pin them with the plastic dowels provided and… well, that’s it really.

Once you’re liberated from the diktat that raised beds absolutely have to be rectangles on a flat slope, you realise the possibilities of this ingeniously simple system.

Got steep slopes? These will terrace it for you. Want an L-shape, or a double-walled structure with a central space? Done. Base for a greenhouse? Yup. I’m fairly sure you could even manage circles and triangles if you really wanted to. It makes building raised beds… well… child’s play.

Solar-powered watering: Those with no mains water at the veg garden and therefore condemned to struggling back and forth with two fully-loaded watering cans, crave automatic watering systems that work.

Note the qualification. I’ve tried several of those bag-and-dripper systems: they do work, as long as you fill up the little bag around three times a day.

Add some solar powered panels and a pump, though, and now you’re talking.

It’s obvious, when you think about it. Irrigatia‘s solar-powered automatic systems (arriving on the Crocus website soon, we hope) work at their best when the sun is out: which, coincidentally, is when your plants most need watering. The pump goes into the water butt, and the panels fuel the motor: cue plenty of water, when your plants need it, at regular intervals. Job done.

Fancy basket hangers: Vertical gardening is still a great solution for space-strapped gardeners: when you run out of room on the floor, just go up.

Edible hanging baskets are a great way of using walls to best advantage: chillies do well in them, especially against a sunny house wall, or there’s always tumbling tomatoes with a little basil for flavouring.

This chic bracket hanging system, held in place with a suave little frog clinging to the wall, handles several baskets at once – multitask by adding bird feeders if you want. Perfect for putting the smallest of wall spaces to work.

Newspaper pots: Loo roll inners have one major drawback. There’s only so much loo roll a family (even one with three girls in it) can use: so you’re always running short.

Instead, make your own out of newspaper. They work in just the same way, as you just plant your seedling, paper pot and all, into the ground.

Paper rots, roots grow away, plant settles in without so much as a second’s check to growth.

The only thing is, you need something sturdy to wrap the newspaper round and you can never find just the right thing for the job. Well: here’s just the gadget you need. Wrap newspaper round, tuck in the ends, fill with compost and plant. Couldn’t be simpler.

Five star insect accommodation: Oh look, all right, I know you’re supposed to make your own on a long creative afternoon with the kids and some sticky-back plastic and attractive odds and ends you’re supposed to magically find lying around the house.

But oh I did think this insect hotel was a particularly pretty one. It provides shelter for all sorts of pollinating and pest-eating friendly bugs for the garden: ladybirds, butterflies, lacewings and bees (though I did notice also earwigs, which are perhaps less welcome: but you can’t be picky when you’re being wildlife-friendly, I suppose).

If it helps salve your parenting conscience, get the kids to watch it and count how many bugs they find crawling in and out. That should be good for an hour’s babysitting: now, where’s that G&T?

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Posted in Container veg growing, Hard landscaping, Other stuff, Shows | 1 Comment »

A Kitchen Garden Herball: Rosemary

Jan 31st, 2012 by Sally Nex

Dense, sturdy and evergreen: a rosemary bush is the backbone of any herb garden

Was there ever a herb that gave so much and asked so little in return as rosemary?

I wouldn’t be without it. I’ve grown it every which way: in my last garden, I trimmed three rosemary bushes into little hedges wrapped round the foot of some trellis. In this garden, I’ve inherited a big blowsy bush from the previous owner and I’m hunting for a prostrate rosemary to drape becomingly over the edges of my rocky herb garden.

A single imposing bush – they reach 2m high left to their own devices - grown in a sunny, free-draining spot gives you armfuls of fragrant stems: far more than you could ever use. We make great cushions of it in roasting trays and cook the Sunday joint of lamb on top so the meat becomes infused with its spicy essence. If you burn it on barbecues - laid on top of the charcoal – you’ll do the same thing to kebabs and chops and scent the air, too.

Rosmarinus officinalis, to give it its proper name, is one of the Mediterranean herbs, dense, wiry, robust and self-sufficient. It’s related to mints, though its needle-like silvery-green leaves look more like they should belong to a conifer.

It’s been around since at least Mediaeval times: in the late 1340s Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, snapped it up for her herbery of unusual flowering plants, collected from all over the world. She found her rosemary in Antwerp, or rather her mother spotted it and brought her home some cuttings.

Elegant prostrate rosemary is at its best tumbling over walls in a waterfall of blue

Since then it’s been woven through the history of British gardening: it was one of the herbs used to form elaborate knot gardens, woven over and under hyssop and box and thyme, and Henry VIII grew them in great long beds alongside lavender. In fact in the 16th century a visitor to Hampton Court described rosemary ‘nailed to the walls so as to cover them entirely’ – a way of growing the herb that surely deserves to be rediscovered.

The name comes from the Latin ros, meaning dew, and marinus – sea; thought to refer to the fact that it often needs no more than the water carried on the air to survive, although there are stories of Aphrodite having rosemary draped around her shoulders as she emerged from the sea.

It’s also known as Rose of Mary, as the flowers were meant to have been turned blue by the Virgin Mary spreading her (blue) cloak over a previously white-flowered bush. It has connotations of friendship and faithfulness, love (it’s often presented to guests at weddings) and youth: washing your face with rosemary water is said to keep your skin young and supple.

The essential oil carried in those rigid leaves is a powerful thing. Just a little flavours a stew or a soup: don’t forget to remove the sprig after cooking, though, as it keeps that fearsome rigidity right to the end. You can use it to flavour vinegars and oils, biscuits and stuffings.

Rosemary flowers are pretty, adored by bees - and edible, looking lovely in salads

It’s also a powerful medicinal herb: a mug of rosemary tea (take a sprig and steep in a mug of boiling water for five minutes) is said to improve your memory and may even stave off Alzheimers, for a while at least. It’s also said to help soothe depression and anxiety, tiredness, headaches and aching muscles: ‘Hungary water’ – a distilled water of rosemary – was invented to restore the paralysed limbs of a Queen of Hungary.

It is a little wayward and wild in its habits; in a way, it’s at its best untamed and exultant, eventually forming ancient gnarled and twisted trunks as beautiful as any sculpture. But, if you must, it can be trimmed, straight after flowering: my hedge was made of ‘Miss Jessop’s Upright’, which as the name suggests grows almost fastigiate in its determination to hit the vertical, and very easy to trim to shape.

Look out for ‘Benenden Blue’, with the most intense of blue flowers, and the broader-leafed ‘Tuscan Blue’. There’s also a white-flowered form, R. officinalis var. albiflorus, and several pink ones. R. officinalis Prostratus Group, rising to around 30cm before falling in a graceful cascade, is the one for draping over walls: it’s said to be more tender than most (rosemary is not 100% at the best of times and will turn up its toes in very harsh winters) so choose a sheltered spot.

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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 »

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