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Keeping up with the fashionistas

May 14th, 2013 by Sally Nex

Kaffir lime: glossy, exotic and very, very classy

Some may call it a lamentable need for distraction: gardening in the age of Twitter and Facebook. I call it an inquiring mind in the pursuit of a fuller appreciation of the infinitely varied world of edible plants. But then I would, since I’m doing it.

I’m talking about looking out for something different - anything different – to try growing. The insatiable urge to find new types of vegetable to grow is like a modern-day (and edible) version of plant hunting.

Pioneers like James Wong and Mark Diacono are the George Forrest and Ernest Wilson of their day, though hopefully without having to be robbed by Chinese brigands or gored to death by wild bullocks, as happened to the unfortunate Scottish plant hunter David Douglas in 1834.

And just as Victorian gardens filled up with then-new varieties of rhododendrons and you got to show off your new tulip tree to admiring horti mates, these days allotments are sprouting amaranth and oca, and there’s a certain cachet in pointing out your burgeoning crop of bang-on-trend Japanese wineberries or Szechuan peppers.

There is a point to all this fashionista trend-setting. Though there’s nothing wrong with spuds and carrots – quite the opposite, if you grow your own - just occasionally it’s nice to expand your horizons a little. After all, quite a lot of the things we now consider staples of your average allotment were once exotics - runner beans, for example, were brought to the UK by those irrepressible Victorians as an ornamental plant. It didn’t occur to them to try actually eating the seed pods for years.

Chillies on steroids: I've had to repot my tree chilli twice already...

Often you find your interesting-but-different experimental crop doesn’t entirely live up to expectations: last year’s achocha, a sort of cross between a cucumber and a green pepper, were pretty plants and easy to grow but the fruits were small and for my money, didn’t taste different enough from green peppers to explain why you’d grow achocha and not green peppers (apart, of course, from an insatiable need to be very, very fashionable).

But sometimes, you can be nicely surprised. My expanding clump of yacon is now among my favourite edibles in the garden. It does brilliantly in damp summers, looks gorgeous, is satisfyingly vigorous while behaving nicely to other plants around it, and yields huge, juicy tubers at the end of the year which taste a little like pears and are so sweet they can be eaten raw if you don’t care to cook them.

For me the hunt for new things to try growing is a search for the next yacon – a vegetable which expands my horizons and gives me something tasty to eat. I start every spring with something, usually in my greenhouse, which I haven’t yet grown, just to have a go, see if it’s worth it, and hopefully keep my veg-growing life interesting. Oh yes, and to boast about it to my friends.

Here are this year’s on-trend arrivals: I’ll let you know how they score on the yacon-ometer later in the year.

Kaffir lime: the first time I saw its waisted. glossy leaves in a show garden at Hampton Court I wanted this plant. They’re used in Thai cooking, which isn’t often on the Nex menu but may well be soon if this lives up to its promise. My track record with citrus isn’t great, but I’m always willing to have another go.

A little Chilean guava bush looking pretty as a picture already

Okra: every time I go into an Indian restaurant, ladies’ fingers, or bhindi bhaji, is on the order. I’ve had a go at growing okra before but the young plants shrivelled in our cold spring: this year I have a super-duper new propagator which is keeping them going nicely. They’ll stay in the greenhouse, trained on a wigwam, for upward-pointing fruits later in the year.

Tree chilli: more properly known as Capsicum pubescens, it has small and very hot chilli peppers and is basically much like any other chilli plant – except that it grows up to 2m tall in a good summer, especially if you keep it in the greenhouse. It makes a rather unkempt, straggly shrub and needs plenty of support.

Chilean guavas: These little shrubs look fabulous already with the new growth coming through coppery fresh, and they’re only 6″ high. Just imagine what they’ll be like with their pink, blueberry-like fruits in summer. They do need acid soil, something of a setback since I have unrelentingly chalky soil, but I’m growing mine in pots of ericaceous compost, just like blueberries, where they should be quite content.

 

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Posted in Fruit, Greenhouse growing, Unusual veg | 3 Comments »

Cherry training classes

May 5th, 2013 by Sally Nex

Before... not much more than a stick with a few leafy tufts, really

This could end up as a very short post. Along the lines of:

1. In the April following planting, cut off your cherry tree at around knee height from the ground, just above a pair of buds.

2. Er…. that’s it.

Luckily I’ve never been known for my reluctance to waffle on pointlessly and digress, so treat that as a pithy summary, verging on the abrupt, and I’ll continue.

It is time to make the first tentative steps in training my cherry trees into fans. This is a first for me: I’m inordinately excited about it as I’ve done ‘easy’ trained fruit before, like fans and lollipops, but never something truly challenging like a fan (I have stepover apples to try too).

So the evenings have been seeing a lot of poring over diagrams of cane and wire systems and leafy branches with big red slashes through them. I think I now have the theory straight in my mind.

Unfortunately, being me, I’ve got it bottom about face from the start, and I haven’t put in my supports first (bar a little 4ft high picket fence, which was there already so doesn’t count). If I had been a Good and Diligent Gardener I would have got them in long before I ordered my feathered maidens in February, but I didn’t have time and so they’re going to have to wait till later this year when I’m less busy.

Did you see that bit of jargon in there by the way? I’m getting quite good at dropping those into conversation. Stuff like spurs and whips and ribs too (I’m just beginning to realise this cherry tree training is a raunchy business).

Anyway, so I’ve got one whip and a feathered maiden (steady, there). For the uninitiated, a whip is basically a stick: a single stem without sideshoots. That’s my ‘Stella’, a really good, reliable dessert cherry I’ve grown before which is pretty much self-fertile.

..and after, pruned to two pairs of opposite buds ready to make a fan (I hope)

It does, however, fruit better with a partner (don’t we all) so I got it a friend. ‘Cherokee’ is another self-fertile variety but promisingly is said to be particularly good in damp areas (that’ll be Somerset, then), as the fruit don’t split as easily as most. Because I got this one from a different supplier, it arrived as a slightly feathered maiden – i.e. it was basically a stick, but had sent out a couple of shoots.

You need 1.8m (6ft) of height, and 3.6m (12ft) width for a fan-trained cherry on a dwarfing Gisela 5 rootstock - or, as the late, great Ken Muir points out in my much-thumbed copy of Grow Your Own Fruit, two fence panels. It’s not much, really – most even quite tiny gardens could just about manage it, and you can grow lots at their feet, too. I’m going to plant a sumptuous row of Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’ under mine to lure in plenty of bees to pollinate the cherry flowers.

I’ll go into the supports in a later post, as you really ought to get those in before you plant (it mostly involves horizontal wires 15cm apart). But assuming you’ve got those in there, plant your cherry tree just as you would any other: same height as it was in the nursery, nice good rich soil, back-fill and firm, water well. You know the drill.

Then, the April after you plant (yes, I know it’s May, but the RHS says we’re three weeks behind where we should be at the moment so I’m thinking that leaves us somewhere in mid-April right now) you cut off the whole stem to about 60cm above the ground, using a sloping cut just above a pair of buds. Remember that buds always grow in the direction they’re pointed, so try to choose two which are facing more or less along the support wires, out from each side of the stem.

I say 60cm, but actually that’s approximate: what you’re looking for is two sets of buds from which your side arms will grow, one the pair of buds you’ve just cut to, and another below them. So adjust the height if necessary so that this is what you’ve got.

With a feathered(ish) maiden like my Cherokee, you also cut back the side shoots (laterals) to one bud away from the stem.

And that’s it: you can leave it to grow now till early June or thereabouts, when you do the next step. I will be back with an update then.

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Posted in Fruit, Pruning | No Comments »

Pick of the month: April

Apr 25th, 2013 by Sally Nex

Brassica flowers

Edible flowers are the it girls of the vegetable world. It seems these days all the best-dressed salads sport a confetti of marigolds and cornflowers. The humblest cake sale can rustle up a lavender cookie or two, and if you’re lucky a cupcake studded with frosted violets. Heck, there’s even a wildly successful commercial edible flower farm, not far from here in deepest Devon.

Well – I realise I have never had my finger anywhere near what you might call the pulse of foody fashion, but I have a sneaking suspicion this whole edible flowers thing may be a tad overrated.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ll give anything a go. But at some level I’ve just had to admit I’m not really a frosted violets kinda gal. Not because I don’t think they’re pretty, as cake decorations go: it’s just that between the school run and cobbling together some spag bol and salad before belting off down the A303 (late, again) to take smallest daughter to her gymnastics class there ain’t much time left over to frost violets.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever chewed on a violet, frosted or otherwise, but they really don’t taste of very much. That applies to quite a lot of so-called ‘edible’ flowers: I’ve tried borage flowers in my icecubes (pretty, but they do get stuck between your teeth so) and calendula petals scattered on salads. I’ve crunched chive flowers, and much against my better principles, primroses out of the hedgerow. Not a flicker of flavour among the lot of ‘em.

Having said that, there are exceptions. If you’re discerning about the flowers you eat, there are just a select few which boast flavour as well as good looks: the Joanna Lumleys in a world of Tara Palmer Tomkinsons.

I’m talking peppery nasturtiums and strongly fragrant rosemary flowers; the curious sweet kick behind the pepper of a rocket flower (actually I prefer the flowers to the leaves); and the lettuce-like freshness of a daylily bud. Now these are worth seeking out.

But my absolute favourites of all edible flowers, the ones I enjoy as an annual treat from my veg garden as keenly anticipated as the first French bean or summer strawberry, are the brassica flowers.

By that I mean brassicas of every possible shape and size, for all their flowers look the same – a brilliant buttery-yellow cluster of tiny individual florets, sometimes surrounding a central boss of tightly-closed buds rather like a paniculata hydrangea flower.

I almost always let my brassicas run to flower in spring, partly because I’m bone idle and can’t be bothered to pull them out until I really have to plant something else where they’re growing, and partly because I know how much the early bees appreciate them. You almost always find some little buzzy insect stumbling about them in drunken euphoria to have found something quite so tasty at a time of year when there’s so little else around.

But I also let them flower so that I can enjoy eating their blossoms myself. Right now I have a whole troop of ‘Dwarf Green Curled’ kale budding up, and some otherwise rather raggedy-looking ‘Cavolo Nero’ heading for the sky too (brassicas seem to draw themselves up to their full height before flowering: a kale in full flower can be almost as tall as you are).

This year I’ve got some oriental brassicas doing their thing too, mainly the mizuna and komatsuna which are smaller, more demure plants in flower than the big, beefy cabbages but nonetheless a froth of butter yellow right now.

All I do is to snap off the flowers and/or buds, rather like little heads of broccoli. They do need a soak and a swish in a bowl of cool water for a while before you eat them, as those insects do like to crawl into their nooks and crannies (if this really bothers you, you can cover them in horticultural mesh, though your local pollinator population may never forgive you).

But once you’ve washed them, it’s just a matter of scattering them liberally over salads. They’re surprisingly meaty to eat, mainly because the stalks are so thick, and taste rather like the very tender white leaves you get at the heart of a cabbage: delicate, slightly sweet and crisp. Now that’s an edible flower I can make a fuss about.

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Posted in Allotments, Harvesting, Salads | 4 Comments »

How to plant a potato

Apr 16th, 2013 by Sally Nex

Oh all right, that title is a bit tongue in cheek. I’m assuming if you’ve read this far you’ve probably managed to plant a spud or two in your time.

But it’s my bet you’ve probably always done it in the same way.

There are, of course, lots of right ways to do very nearly everything. But sometimes, trying someone else’s right way may well turn out to be something of a revelation.

We all get into habits over the years, but it often pays to question why we blindly follow the advice handed down through the generations.

A few years ago I discovered, for example, that container grown plants actually do better if you don’t put crocks in the bottom (they prefer the extra moisture in the soil, I think).

And last year I had a little flash of insight (a rare and memorable event for me) and realised the people who wrote the stuff on the back of seed packets were often living fifty, sixty or more years ago, when the Thames regularly froze and global warming was something to do with that new-fangled central heating they just invented. No wonder none of our veg follow the rules any more.

So if you catch yourself doing something unquestioningly, just because that’s how you’ve always done it, maybe it’s time to wonder if it might be better done differently.

Just recently, I changed my potato-planting habits. Since I no longer grow in ramrod-straight rows any more (thanks to my shiny new triangular veg garden) I’m freed from the tyranny of digging foot-deep trenches, laying out the spuds in the bottom and back-filling. All good honest allotment practice, but now I’ve got a nice rich triangular raised bed to fill and I don’t feel like running great trenches through it.

So I’m just laying out my chitted potatoes 30cm apart (first earlies) or 45cm apart (second earlies and maincrops) each way, and then planting them like bulbs around twice their depth into the soil. It’s a great deal easier, doesn’t involve anything like as much digging, and I hope won’t make any difference at all to the yield.

There are some far more revolutionary ideas out there to help you break that trench-digging habit, keeping your soil intact and its micro-organism-packed ecosystem teeming. Here are a few of them:

Lasagne beds: Layer cardboard, grass clippings, well-rotted manure, compost… and whatever else you have to hand over the ground, in a giant sandwich of a raised bed. Halfway up, just include a layer of seed potatoes to sprout through the whole thing and help break it down.

Under black plastic: Lay a sheet of heavy-gauge weed suppressing membrane over the ground, then cut an X every 30cm and plant your potato through this. The shoots come up through the X and you don’t have to earth up – just peel back the plastic and pick up your spuds.

Lazy beds: A great way of clearing turf, you just lay your potatoes on a patch of grass at the usual spacings, then cut turfs from a strip on either side and turn them upside down on top. The spuds are happy, and the turf underneath is nicely broken down for you to use next year.

Alternative ‘earthing up’: Don’t bother earthing up with hoes and such like: simply stack old hay or straw, cardboard, or shredded newspapers up around the emerging shoots and it’ll do the same job. You can use grass clippings on top but not against the plants.

Straw bale gardening: Take a bale of straw, get it wet and let it rot for a couple of weeks. Make a hole, chuck in a handful of compost and a seed potato, and you’re off: the extra heat from the decomposing straw means turbo-charged growth and supersized spuds, too.

 

 

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Posted in Allotments, Container veg growing, Soil care, sowing | 6 Comments »

Up on the roof

Apr 5th, 2013 by Sally Nex

Possibly the most original green roof ever: the snack van from Lulu's Local Eatery

I came across what must surely be the coolest green roof in the world this week.

If you thought creating a green roof on your shed was a bit out there – how about converting the roof of your car?

That’s exactly what Lulu’s Local Eatery has done in downtown St Louis, Missouri. Their food van is pretty unusual looking anyway. But up on the roof, there are little raised beds full of fresh salads and herbs for the staff to pick and add to the falafels and wraps and tacos they’re selling down below.

Can you imagine the potential? All you’d need was maybe a roof rack and a big box and you’re set. Not only do you not need a garden to grow your own veg – you don’t even need a house. Plant up the roof of your Nissan Micra and you’ve got – what, about eight square feet of growing space? That’s enough to keep you in salads all year. Upgrade to a campervan and you’ll never need to go to the shops again.

Lulu's have simply installed little trough-like raised beds around the edge to fill with salads and herbs.

Micro green roofs are everywhere these days, and a great idea they are too considering how little space most of us have to grow things in. I came across a company earlier this year who put green roofs on dog kennels and rabbit hutches. You can green your bike shed, your garden shed, your logstore and the cupboard that houses your electricity meter. Put enough plants on top of everything and you’ll start to have trouble finding your house on Google satellite view. And that, surely, can only be a good thing.

Before you grab a trowel and a bag of compost and head out, though, there are a few things you should bear in mind.

First of all: green roofs are heavy. So if your shed (or rabbit hutch, or Nissan Micra) has little more than a sheet of plywood by way of a roof, you’ll need to strengthen it. You might be able to get away with a nailing a few planks across the top, but if you’re in any doubt whether the walls will hold the full weight of plants, plus wet compost, plus wooden edging – make a whole ‘false’ roof over the top, free-standing on its own sturdy wooden posts.

Actually creating a green roof isn’t that difficult. You’ll need to edge your roof with boards to make a kind of raised bed around 25cm deep. Drill holes through the bottom edge to let water drain out (it’s probably wise to put guttering underneath to catch the drips, too).

Green roof dog kennel from Enviroden. The labrador costs extra, I think.

Line with weed-suppressing membrane, to keep the soil in as much as to keep the weeds out, and fill with a light compost mix – your basic compost on its own is rather too heavy. A good mix is equal parts soil-based loam, peat-free multipurpose and perlite (a kind of volcanic rock which weighs pretty much nothing but helps aerate the compost and holds onto moisture).

If you can’t be bothered with all that – just follow Lulu’s example and make trough-style planters to go around the edge.

Once you’ve done all that, it’s time for the plants. Not all plants are happy on green roofs, particularly if they’re of the small-scale, shed-covering kind. Conditions up there are usually sunny and a little windy, with a shallow root run – not your average veg garden, then.

If your green roof is in the shade, salads, parsley and leafy veg like perpetual spinach and chard will be perfectly happy up there. If it’s sunny, though, go for Mediterranean herbs like thyme, sage, marjoram and rosemary, and fast-growing sun-lovers like beetroot, strawberries, and edible flowers like nasturtiums. Anything that says ‘perfect for containers’ on the seed packet is worth a try, too.

Just have fun and experiment with anything that’s not too deep-rooted, enjoys the sunshine and doesn’t mind things a little on the dry side.  You may never see your shed in quite the same way again. Come to think of it, if you grow enough, you may never see your shed again. Nothing like merging your garden buildings into the landscape!

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Posted in Container veg growing, design, Herbs, Other stuff | 1 Comment »

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