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A Kitchen Garden Herball: Mint

Apr 18th, 2012 by Sally Nex

Spring shoots of pot-grown mint (here M. spicata - spearmint) just poking above ground

You know that packet of mint-flavoured herbal tea you have lurking in a corner of the kitchen? Go find it now. Pick it up. Open the rubbish bin. And throw it in.

Once you’ve made proper fresh mint tea, the kind you get in teabags will taste like stewed cardboard forever more. I do not understand why anybody buys the stuff when it takes exactly the same amount of time to dunk a generous sprig of fresh mint in a mugful of boiling water and get a vastly superior brew.

Mint tea is my digestif of choice: mint, of course, is famous for its ability to settle the stomach, especially after a particularly good feast when your belt is out by a notch or two more than it ought to be. It’s useful for anything digestion-related: a mug of mint tea is even said to cure hiccups. It’s good for lowering temperatures, too, so try some next time you’ve got a cold.

The clean, fresh smell of mint is so all-pervasive we almost forget its origins in the herb garden. Toothpaste, chewing gum, breath freshener, sweets, icecream, chocolate, the Sunday roast (mint sauce and on the new potatoes), Middle Eastern tabbouleh… There can be few herbs so universally used.

The most common mint, the one we all grow, is Mentha spicata, or spearmint. The flavour is your classic mint, but it’s milder than the almost-as-widely-grown peppermint (M. x piperita). There’s a purple-stemmed variety, black peppermint, which is particularly covetable.

But you don’t have to stop there. This is a wide-ranging, generous family: a thousand different types altogether, and over 100 worth growing in the garden. It’s figures like that which make me itch to start a collection: I have only two or three so far, but I am drawing up yet another shopping list for the herb garden. Here are my top ten mints to covet:

Apple mint (M. suaveolens) - furry texture but fresh, appley taste

Apple mint (M. suaveolens) is prized for its flavour but not for the texture of its leaves, which are covered in down (it’s also known as woolly mint). Better for cooking only, perhaps. Closely-related pineapple mint, M. suaveolens ‘Variegata’, has a fruity flavour and white-splodged leaves.

M. x piperita f. citrata (Eau de Cologne mint) is one of the prettiest, with rounded purple-edged leaves and a lemony scent: this is the one to use in pot pourri. It’s got lots of differently-flavoured varieties, too: M. x piperita f. citrata ‘Chocolate’ – chocolate peppermint – is a gorgeously sexy dark brown and smells like After Eights; while ‘Lime’ has mulberry-coloured stems and… you guessed, a lime flavour.

M. x gracilis – also known as ginger or Scottish mint – has clear green leaves flecked with gold and a spicy flavour.

M. pulegium (pennyroyal) grows to just 10cm high, with lilac flowers in summer, and makes a ground cover so effective it nudges over the border into weed territory. The flavour is described as ‘coarse’ but you can make an ointment with the leaves to repel fleas and other insects: grown through paving in the garden it’ll keep ants away.

More ground-cover gems: Corsican mint, M. requienii, with tiny, with little rounded leaves that form a peppermint-scented carpet, and thyme-like M. cervina grow so closely they can be used for paths.

M. x villosa var. alopecuroides ‘Bowles’ Mint’: possibly the most ornamental of them all, growing far taller than most (to 1m in height) and with large, round, hairy soft green leaves.

M. x piperita in its sultry dark form - simply gorgeous

By the way – don’t try eating water mint (M. aquatica) – though it’s a pretty, if invasive, pond plant, its taste is acrid.

Whichever mint you choose, you’ll find them downright Tiggerish in the garden: extremely sociable, off to visit the neighbours the moment they get the chance, but with an unfortunate tendency to outstay their welcome. Like Tigger, they need keeping in check to curb their more over-the-top habits.

I keep mine in containers, but sunk into the ground to look natural while keeping their roots firmly in bounds. Raise the rim a tad above ground level too, or the runners hop over the top.

Pick leaves regularly to encourage fresh new growth, and watch out for mint rust: burnt-orange speckles and withering stems means digging up the plant, destroying it and starting again in another – hopefully rust-free – part of the garden.

Repot every year, chopping the congested rootball in half and repotting into fresh compost. You can do this in spring, but I prefer autumn, as then you can use the discarded root for forcing: pot up and bring indoors on a sunny windowsill and you’ll have a winter’s worth of peppermint tea ready for the picking, and not a teabag in sight.

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Posted in Container veg growing, Herbs | 1 Comment »

Feeling fruity #3: Building the path to salvation

Apr 2nd, 2012 by Sally Nex

Step 1: lay out the design with pegs and string, then build your path edges. Sounds so easy.

Ouch. I think I may have gravel-shoveller’s elbow.

I think we can safely say, following the last two or three weeks, that I am not and never will be a builder.

Five dumpy bags arrived one weekend, just after my husband turned up with a carload of timber. This brought a certain sense of urgency to the whole project of building what will, I hope, one day, be my fruit garden. Before that I’d been idly drawing pictures and moving a bit of soil around whenever I felt the urge. Nothing that cost too much, or took Herculean amounts of effort: although as regular readers will know last month I realised I was going to have to do something constructive after all that destruction.

So this month I put in a call to the builders’ merchants and set in train a series of events which meant I spent every minute of every free hour I had for two solid weeks either cursing hysterically at the fickleness of measuring tapes, or shovelling things.

That original design I came up with looked pretty do-able on paper, and in fact I was congratulating myself on how I’d simplified things into a layout I thought was understated yet elegant. Yeah, right. That was before I realised just how difficult it is to make paths that go around triangles.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here, from the beginning, is the blow-by-blow story of how you build a potager (that’s an ornamental veg – or fruit – garden). It’s a lot less simple than it looks. But, I must admit (now it’s finished), a lot more satisfying, too.

Step 1: Draw your design (covered here), sort out your boundaries and level the ground as best you can (covered here) and then using white string (not jute or green string – you can’t see it against the earth) and short canes, peg out your beds on the ground. I found it useful to bang in the top of the pegs so they were level with the tops of the fence boards – that way I could see straight away where my eventual garden level would be.

Step 2: Put in the path edging. Cor, sounds so easy when you put it like that. This took me three solid eight-hour days during which I turned the air blue, had a minor nervous breakdown and wished with all my heart that I had paid attention in woodworking lessons at school.

I used 10cm x 2.5cm board: the 1″ edge is solid enough to look sturdy without being as hefty as a scaffold board, and you don’t need more than a 10cm depth: this is to hold the top layer of gravel in place, which is no more than about 5cm, so you’ve got plenty of room for a layer of sub-base too.

Laying the edges of paths in this case was a sort of exercise in negative spaces: you’re not so much defining your beds, as the space between them. Once you’ve got your head round this, it becomes easier: as long as you keep the path widths even (in this case, 60cm for the wider paths across the middle and 45cm for the little access paths around the edge) the beds look after themselves.

Oh, and I pegged them in with short lengths (20cm or so) of 5cm x 2.5cm batten every metre or so, screwed in on the growing side so they didn’t get in the way of the membrane. Which brings me to…

Cut your weed-suppressing membrane to size and staple onto the boards

Step 3: A weed-suppressing membrane is essential for any path, as there is nothing more powerful than a dandelion and it will shift concrete and squeeze round paving slabs and laugh in the face of mere gravel. So you’ve got to keep them out altogether. And don’t mess around with the thin cloth-like stuff, either: you need proper Mypex, the woven stuff with the blue criss-cross lines. This turns out to be quite a nice job: I used a nail gun with a compressor to staple the membrane to the boards, but you can use a simple staple gun instead.

Step 4: I chose a self-binding gravel for my garden as I am all too aware of my failings in the measuring department, and paving slabs require a certain degree of accuracy if they’re going to look any good whereas gravel is very forgiving of little aberrations. I also didn’t want things to look too formal: although this is quite a formal garden, it’s in a rather wild and woolly countryside setting so I didn’t want to go too suburban.

Self-binding gravel is particularly useful as it sets like concrete as soon as it rains. It looks like nothing on earth: a side-product of the quarrying process, it’s got much larger stones than ordinary gravel and they sit in a sandy clay-like substance that makes you wonder how it’s ever going to look any good. But have faith: the stones sink as if by magic into the sandy clay which then settles around them to make a fairly smooth – if loose – surface which I like very much indeed.

What you can’t see (because I didn’t take a picture of this stage: by then I was too exhausted to lift my finger to the camera shutter) is that underneath the 5cm layer of gravel is a 7.5cm layer of sub-base (scalpings – three dumpy bags of the stuff). This packs down with a rammer to provide a firm, level base for the gravel. You don’t have to do this, but since scalpings are half the price of self-binding gravel you’d be a bit daft not to.

You can use a plate compactor on the sub-base, but not the self-binding gravel, as that knocks those sand-like ‘fines’ down through the top layer so they don’t do their job of binding it together. However I did tamp the top layer down by hand – you’ll see in the picture above that there are bracing boards across the still-empty beds, as the weight of the gravel plus tamping tends to bow the boards if you’re not careful.

Step 5: Fill the beds with a mix of bought-in topsoil and garden compost until it’s pretty much level with the path, remove the bracing boards, and voila: you are released from your torture and can resume normal life again.

Step 6: Limp away, weeping softly with relief, to a nice hot bath and don’t go back to look at your completed garden for a few days as the pain will be too recent a memory. When you do, though, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the really rather lovely garden you have created, just sitting there waiting to be filled with gorgeous plants. It’s the best feeling in the world.

How it all started...

...halfway...

...and here's the finished product (a large and rather gorgeous terracotta pot is on the way for the centre). Just add plants.

 

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Posted in Fruit, Hard landscaping | 6 Comments »

Think I’m going to eat worms…

Mar 28th, 2012 by Sally Nex

I don’t get on well with wormeries. The last time I tried composting in one – some years ago now – it was a disaster.

It started off well enough: we stacked up the boxes, filled one with kitchen waste and added our new wriggly pets.

After a while it all went quiet. No sign of wriggly things. The compost on the top layer wasn’t going anywhere and it was all getting rather smelly.  All in all, it wasn’t looking good. So we pulled out the bottom layer to see what was going on, and found our worms. Every single one was dead, drowned in all that brown liquid that collects at the bottom.

And that, according to Judy Burrage of Garden Organic, is where I was going wrong.

Judy was standing next to a deconstructed wormery at the time (this was at the Edible Garden Show, so don’t worry, she had a good excuse) so I took the opportunity to ask her what all the fuss over wormeries was about.

Wormeries, like bokashi bins and compost toilets, are marked ‘advanced’ in the composting section of my book. I’m much more of a chuck it in a big box and wait for it to go brown sort of girl. I don’t like to think too much about what’s going on in there: certainly not to the point of looking after the wildlife (brandling and tiger worms, in the case of wormeries).

But in fact it turns out I might be missing a trick. You see wormeries produce a highly valuable  by-product: all that brown liquid my worms drowned in was worm pee (don’t think about it too hard: just move on to the next bit. Quickly). And it turns out worm pee is among the most wonderful plant foods you can use.

One wormery produces an astonishing litre a week of concentrated plant food. That’s more than I get through in a month: this is the sort of quantity you can give away to family and friends (though don’t tell them the truth, whatever you do). Store in plastic bottles: freeze it if you dare, though label it clearly and make sure nobody defrosts it for gravy. Then when you come to use it, dilute it about 10 parts water to every one part worm pee (sorry, nutritious concentrated plant food) and use on to give a boost to just about everything in the garden.

The worm compost itself isn’t produced in anything like the sort of quantities you need to make a difference in the garden, so this – surprisingly – is actually a secondary product of wormeries. But it’s still pretty good stuff: very fine, not at all like your regular compost, you can mix it with perlite and use it as seed compost (it has fewer nutrients than regular compost so is better for young plants).

So: for those, like me, who are beginners at this wormery malarkey, here are Judy’s top tips for keeping the wriggly ones happy (and peeing copiously and regularly):

  • If you can’t find brandling or  tiger worms when setting up your wormery – there is, apparently, a
    national shortage of worms – try buying them from angling shops

  • Let off the liquid regularly, whether you use it or not. It builds up very quickly and needs
    emptying once a week – leave it longer, and your worms, as I  discovered, will drown

  • You can add cooked food waste to your composting layer but not too much: worms prefer fruit and
    vegetable peelings, chopped or broken up into smaller pieces

  • You should aim for a 3:1 mix of green matter (vegetable peelings) to brown (shredded newspaper or
    cardboard)

  • Keep your worms out of hard frosts in winter: either bring them in somewhere fairly frost-free, like
    the garage, or wrap then in bubble wrap or blankets, but leave air  holes: worms still need to breathe

  • When you’re emptying your finished compost, spread it out on canvas and the worms will work
    their way into the centre, making them easier to pick up and return to the bin

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Posted in Soil care | 6 Comments »

The 52 Week Salad Challenge: Of hot springs

Mar 23rd, 2012 by Sally Nex

Hello again! Been a bit quiet round here lately, hasn’t it? That’s because I’ve been out. Watering.

And then watering again. Then refilling the cans; and watering again.

This is just the sort of weather salads hate: long, hot days to gasp through followed by plummeting temperatures and a night for shivering. Then before you know it the sun’s up, temperatures soar and just as your seedling leaves have recovered from the frostbite they’re panting for air.

Salads, you see, are cool-weather crops: it’s no coincidence that many of the ingredients that go in a salad with the lettuce – baby spinach leaves, parsley, chervil – are all among those rarities, the shade-loving vegetable.

One side of my veg patch is more or less permanently shady: it’s a south-facing strip with a hedge along the south side, casting shadow onto the beds on the right of the patch as you walk up. Normally anything remotely resembling shade in a veg patch is enough to get growers wailing in despair and wondering what to grow. Not me.

I love shady patches. Without them I couldn’t grow chard; or spinach; or parsley. And most of all I couldn’t grow lettuces: yes, you can tuck them under the shade-giving leaves of brassicas or peas or courgettes, but at some stage (like now, when I’m growing more lettuce than I can handle thanks to VP’s 52 week salad challenge) you want to give them a bed all their own. And that’s when you need some shade.

Having shade outdoors is all very well in summer, of course, but what do you do at this time of year when you’re raising lettuce seedlings in a greenhouse and the temperatures are yo-yoing hysterically from near-freezing to near-tropical? Last spring was like this too, and I struggled with my salad crops just as much then.

If you don’t keep lettuce seedlings cool, they simply stop growing. If they get too cold – same result. So I’ve been bending over backwards to try to even out the temperatures for the little darlings as much as I can. Here’s how:

‣ Invest in a min-max thermometer. This tells you exactly how hot it is in your greenhouse (and how cold it gets at night when you’renot there). Anything above 35°C and your plants will be suffering. The digital ones are the best as they’re a doddle to read.

‣ Water. Water. And water again. Never ever let your lettuces go short during sunny spells like this one: even if they don’t wilt now, they’ll just bolt on you quicker later if they’re set back while still so young. I’m watering mine twice a day at the moment, and it’s only 19°C outside: but that’s translating to 38°C+ under glass. Goodness knows how I’ll manage if we have a properly hot summer too.

‣ Next, install proper ventilation in your greenhouse. Most 8ftx6ft models come with one window and one door: nowhere near enough. You should have 20% of the floor space in ventilation: for your average garden greenhouse that’s two louvre windows opposite each other plus preferably a second roof vent. Leave open all day, but close up again at night.

‣ Still a bit hot? Then add some shading: I don’t much go for shade paint as it’s messy, you have to wash it off at the end of the season and once it’s applied, it’s there all summer. Shade netting, on the other hand, is easily fixed (use the same fixings as your bubble wrap insulation) and can be put up and taken down as required.

‣ If that doesn’t get the temperatures down – remove a few of the windows. Sounds extreme, but it really works: when there’s a serious heatwave going on, it can be the only way to prevent a greenhouse overheating.

‣ And finally, if your lettuce seedlings are still drooping after all that, simply remove them from the greenhouse altogether, choose the coolest, shadiest spot in your garden and move them there during the day, returning them to the greenhouse at night. Time-consuming, yes: but not nearly as time-consuming as re-sowing all those salad leaves, wouldn’t you say?

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Posted in Greenhouse growing, Salads | 1 Comment »

The Edible Garden Show: veg-growing heaven

Mar 17th, 2012 by Sally Nex

Veg to make your mouth water

Two massive exhibition halls (plus the smallholder’s marquee), 170 stands, more new ideas and gizmos and plants and demonstrations to inspire anyone who grows edible plants …well, no wonder my feet are aching.

I take great reassurance from the popularity of the Edible Garden Show – doubled in size since my visit last year (and a good thing too, as it was a bit of a bunfight getting 11,000 people into one hall).

It’s proof that I am not alone in my obsession with growing plants you can eat. There are other people out there prepared to queue round the block to get in the moment the doors open at 10am, other people mad enough to get excited about getting their hands on a hard-to-find Stevia or intrigued by the chance to look through a magnifying glass at a slug being eaten by a nematode (nasty).

 

As always I was on the lookout for good ideas, and plenty of them there were, too. Here are my favourites.

Growbags you can take home on the bus

Mini growbags:

City gardeners have to be doubly inventive when it comes to growing their own. Worst of all is the compost dilemma: how are you supposed to lug some huge bag of compost back on the bus and then store it when all you have is a pint-sized flat?

Here’s the answer: growbags which pack down so small you can very nearly put them in your handbag. The pad of coir compost inside (no peat: even better) expands magically when you add water, becoming a plantable bag around 30cm square and deep, pretty enough to have out on show. Pack them with herbs, salad mixes, perhaps some chillies or dwarf peas for the perfect solution. (www.seeitgro.co.uk)

A stylish way to dry your veg (and seeds, and herbs)

Drying with style:

At the end of the season drying herbs (and chillies, and seeds, and beans for storing) is one of my favourite little rituals. I hang fragrant rosemary and lavender upside down in bunches; chillies are pretty strung into a ‘necklace’ using a needle and thread through the stalk.

Shelling beans, seeds and smaller herbs like thyme, though, have to be laid out flat: and take it from me, assorted trays teetering on the toaster or wobbling on the washing machine make for the kitchen from hell. That’s why this elegant little drying rack caught my eye: very simple, in washable cotton and wood, yet a very elegant solution. (www.netherwalloptrading.com)

A container you only need to water once a week

Drought? What drought?:

With east-country gardeners packing away their hoses with a deep sigh of regret and looking down the wrong end of a summer full of wilting plants and pathetic yields, I wasn’t surprised to see self-watering containers featuring large at the show.

These ones particularly caught my eye. They’re developed from 30 years’ experience with councils, whose low budgets required watering – even of hanging baskets – to be kept to a minimum. Inside what looks like a normal, sturdy container lies a reservoir with capillary matting. Fill it up once a week and your plants regulate their own water intake. They grow better, and you don’t have to be a slave to your watering can. (wateronceaweekcontainers.co.uk/

Could this be the answer to polytunnel cravings?

The gardener’s polytunnel:

Greenhouse, shmeenhouse. I want a polytunnel. You can grow just about anything in them, you get to garden in the dry even when it’s torrential outside and you extend the season at both ends by months.

There are lots of polytunnels out there: trouble is they tend to be a bit flimsy. Show me a polytunnel and I’ll show you one which is peppered with holes and held together with polytape. This one uses technology from professional growers, resulting in one of the best garden polytunnels I’ve seen: I particularly liked the way you can roll up the fabric covers for ventilation (the gap is thoughtfully covered with insect-proof mesh). (www.gardentunnels.co.uk)

Big hairy pots: ideal for plants, ideal for the planet

Hairy pots:

I’d like to wean myself off my plastic plant pot habit. I have hundreds of the things, rolling about the garden, taking up room and generally getting in the way. They drive me a little potty – sorry – which is why I’ve always been taken with the idea of pots which biodegrade.

Loo roll inners are my biodegradable pot of choice, and I’m diversifying into newspaper ones too. But the connoisseur versions are hairy pots, made of coir waste. Now I see nurseries are kicking the plastic habit too: I spotted dwarf peach trees being sold in hairy pots. Plant tree, pot and all and the container rots away: no root disturbance, no check to growth, and no plastic pot to blow around the garden once you’re done.

If you’re anywhere near Warwickshire this weekend – or even if you aren’t – make sure you get to the Edible Garden Show and take a look for yourself. The doors are open from 10am to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday: for more details and to get a ticket, click here.

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Posted in Container veg growing, Greenhouse growing, Herbs, Shows | 1 Comment »

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