The purpliest potatoes and other adventures

One of the major aims of this home growing malarky is to achieve things that I couldn't get in the supermarket or grocer. And what better example is there of that than PURPLE GODDAMN POTATOES?!

It's possible that I'm more excited about this than is rational, but I think these are awesome. They're a variety called Salad Blue, which were bred in about 1900 as a Victorian novelty. Despite the name, they're not a salad potato in the slightest: they're a maincrop rather than an early, all but the smallest have to be peeled to be edible, and they fall apart if they're cubed and boiled. And they're not blue. Apart from that, great naming work Victorian gardeners!

Leaving aside the excitement of "Holy crap, purple!", the allure of purple potatoes is that they are in theory healthier. The purple colour comes from anthocyanins which research shows to have an unproven correlation with improved health and neural development (or as the Mail no doubt put it, "NEW RESEARCH SAYS POTATOES CURE CANCER"). However in terms of the taste, I wasn't blown away. They were very bland, which is weird considering you expect brighter coloured things to taste stronger.

I'm torn as to whether I'll be planting them again next year. On the one hand, purple, which is very important. They also appear to've been very prolific croppers - I've not even harvested a full potato bag yet and I've got three and a half meals out of them. And perhaps the taste issue was just this one bag and they'll improve. We'll see.

The plate of purplish chips (not as impressive once cooked. The mash that I made the next day was a bit more grey than purple too. Maybe I'll just boil them next time. Or add some food colouring) aside, there's two more interesting things about that plate. Three if you count the sous-vide perfect steaks.

The first is the end of the beans-rush. The torrent stopped as abruptly as it began; all of a sudden there were just no more beans, like someone turned off a tap. The plants are still green and still trying to grow outwards, but it looks like they're pretty much done with providing me food, bar a couple of stragglers. It's a bit of a shame actually - I spent so much effort making sure that we would eat all of the beans that I think we actually succeeded in eating all of the beans. Practically none have been frozen for the winter, so I hope we don't find a recipe that urgently requires them!

Secondly is a brand new adventure for this year's growing - corn! This came from my Three Sisters experiment, which has so far held up its end of the bargain on two out of the three vegetables. I'm not usually a lover, or even a liker, of sweetcorn, but I was told that freshly picked is a completely different flavour to canned supermarket toot and it was interesting so I thought I'd give it a go.

Corn is viable to eat when the top tassels turn a chocolate brown, but it's impossible to tell from the outside if you've got anything or not as the actual eaty bit is concealed inside the green bits. So I harvested a few likely looking husks and carried them into my wife, who was declared expert on the grounds that I didn't know what I was doing and she didn't say "Not it" quickly enough. Plus, she's admitted to liking shop-bought corn before - that's plenty expert enough for me and frankly she should know better by now.

The husks felt light and I wasn't a hundred percent convinced that there was actually going to be anything inside. I thought we were going to peel away layer after layer of husk like an organic pass-the-parcel before discovering that nothing had actually grown. Imagine my surprise to find that we ended up with something that looked like you see on television!

 Before...

And after - wait, did I make that? That looks like real food! My wife used to do magic; I wouldn't put it past her capabilities to sneak in some professionally-grown corn and switch it out with some legerdemain to save my feelings. Thanks sweetie!

The corn was wrapped in aluminium foil with pepper and melted butter and oven cooked for about 10 minutes to my wife's expert instructions.

The results? Interesting more than delicious. It was very sweet and the taste was a concentration of all of those times I've eaten sweetcorn in the past and thought, "This is okay actually," without any of the bitter disappointment, aftertaste or horrible texture that ruins that thought a milisecond later. Fresh really does make a massive difference - it removes all of the nasty bits of the taste from it.

However, with all the nasty bits gone, I was left with a taste that was just okay without ever blowing my mind. It was nice enough, and I'll eat the rest of the crop this year with pleasure, but I'm not sure if I'll grow it again next year, especially given how much of a pain in the arse it was to get viable plants going without dying or being devoured. Not to mention the money I spent on constantly rebuying seedlings. Plus, since the whole point of it is that it tastes different and nice when fresh, there's very little point in trying to store it, which leave me in the situation I am now - there's two husks ready to go, but I don't fancy it right now.

It will entirely depend on if I have a spare bed in the garden once everything else is planned out, rather than being something which I will actively make space for.

PJW

The carrot experiments - an update

Constant readers may remember that I was having a problem with this:

And so I attempted to do this:

To try and achieve this:

The results so far have been promisingish. There was a very long stage where I thought the entire thing would be an expensive mistake. The compost sank slightly and the sand didn't, which meant watering it resulted in the sand washing over the earthy bits where the carrots were supposed to be growing. In addition, water + sand resulted in a lovely greenish tinge, which didn't fill me with hope that I'd be growing anything but mould.

Maybe I could claim to be growing nutritious algae? Or creating my own penicillin? Would you guys buy that?

However, little shoots finally appeared and it looks as though we have full-blown carrot action happening.

In theory. I've been betrayed by promising-looking carrots before, the filthy leafy-headed liars. We'll have to see what's actually underneath when the time comes to pull them up.

The observant among you might notice that only half of the carrots have come up. When I decided to grow my second batch of carrots this year, I bought several different varieties of interesting colours to experiment with, but I also bought a good amount of a nice reliable orange type called Eskimo. It was basically my control group - the weird carrots might fail, but I could rely on Eskimo to come up regardless of weather, watering or whatever.

You can probably guess which seed variety was planted in the blank spaces. Bugger.

By the time I'd realised that the entire packet of seeds was rubbish, I'd already sown about 30 of them in various pots and planters around the garden. Every time a tub came free after harvesting onions, nasturtiums, mange tout or garlic, I'd followed the same plan as with the experiment - I'd bored out holes with the drainpipe, filled them with special compost and stuck some Eskimo seeds in there to provide autumnal vegetables. To say I'm annoyed at wasting my time and effort would be something of an understatement.

To make matters worse, by the time I'd realised that I'd effectively been carefully planting expensive grit, it was verging on too late to rectify the situation. You *can* plant carrots in August, but they have to be the quickest growing variety possible, you have to hope there won't be an early frost and you have to feel lucky. Plus, when the packet says you can sow in August, they really mean the weekend of the 2nd/3rd, rather than the 24th.

Still, I've gone around today and resown all the sites with a variety of carrot seeds that I know do grow very quickly. I used them last year to great success and I've got no idea why I didn't just use them again - I still had half a packet left! I suspect I got overexcited with the January seed-buying fervour and wanted to try something new. Shan't be doing that again.

I also took the opportunity to move some dirt around and built a new bed for carrots, as I've discovered that a lot of vegetables do better in a bed than a pot and want to see if that holds true for carrots. With any luck, the big sowing today should means that we'll be inundated with carrots for Christmas. We'll see.

In one last bit of more successful news, I finally have a confirmed cauliflower head!

It's only one, out of nine, and it is very petite, but I'm still claiming success. With luck, it's still growing and there'll actually be enough for a meal in there when it comes time to slaughter it. Here's hoping.

PJW

Courgette Envy - How to play along at home, part 3

Courgette Envy sounds like a weird band name.

My eldest sister last year acquired a garden of her very own and was very taken with the idea of copying my grow-your-own efforts. I recommended a brassica cage, a few plants that were rewarding to grow, and a few bits of hard-won advice that I'd worked out from two years of experimentation. One of the things I especially recommended was a courgette plant, which would also be my first recommendation to anyone looking to dip their toe into GYO.

Five reasons to grow courgettes at home:
1) They're very hard to kill and very easy to grow. If they weren't so useful, I'd swear they were a weed.
2) They produce loads of fruit*. One plant alone will do plenty for the average person's needs and two will keep you very well stocked.
3) They're perfect for container gardening - they can grow in even quite a small pot, so so excellent surface area/food ratio and brilliant if you don't have anything but a patio.
4) They are very cheap - I got my pots at Poundland and my seeds at Lidl, so all I really had to pay for was the dirt.
5) They taste completely different when grown at home to the rubbery, tasteless mushy stuff that populates supermarkets, especially if you go for a yellow-skinned variety which are far more tender and far less bitter than the green ones that you're thinking of if you're making that face. Yes, I can see you doing it. Cut it out and give them a chance.

Growing courgettes is the simplest thing you'll ever do in a garden. You can either sow the seeds inside in April in little seed trays and then repot the seedlings outside in May, or you can just sow them directly into the big pots in May. They will grow without too much attention from you and form big-leafed spiky plants with plenty of flowers. Each flower will elongate out into a stalk that will thicken into a courgette. The size of courgette possible will depend on the size of the pot that it's in and you'll learn to recognise that after the first few. When they're at optimum size, twist it off straight away and then the plant will focus on growing more. A well-fed plant will produce one a week - I feed mine every other day (or so) with Tomorite, which is £3 for about 100 doses and produce results along this sort of size:

No traditional teaspoon for size-comparison today, so that dish they're in is the size of a small plate. Just in case you were curious.

Now, my sister has grown her courgette plant in the ground, inside the brassica cage, against my recommendations. I was of the opinion that she could get another broccoli plant in there and using space in the cage was a waste for a plant that caterpillars don't eat. However, she wanted everything together and so overrode me and put it into the ground. Now, both of us are rueing our decisions, for different reasons.

She offered to give me a courgette from her garden this weekend and I arranged to trade her one of my yellows for her green, as I thought it would keep to the spirit of the challenge. I wouldn't be importing food, but swapping it, meaning that the vegetable would still be the result of my garden. I knew my sister said they'd grown very big, so I cultivated the biggest courgette I could with extra feeds and watering, to make sure it was an even trade.

I'll spoil the ending and let you know that it wasn't really an even trade

My sister has managed to grow a marrow. It's got to be at least two foot long and for girth I can't quite reach all the way round it even if I'm using both hands. I had to put a plastic bag over the end after I cut it for its first use and it was alarmingly akin to applying a condom to the Incredible Hulk.

HULK TRUST YOU, BUT PREFER TO GET MUTUAL STD TESTS DONE BEFORE SMASHING BAREBACK!

Apparently the plant itself has taken over the bed and is bullying the brussel sprouts, who are normally the big kid in the playground. It also defends its bounty by hiding the fruit in thick leaf cover and spikes that are verging on thorns. Needless to say, next year she plans to take my advice and grow in pots, while I'm already working out which bed I can set to one side to grow my own monster.

I plan on chopping up, blanching and freezing as much of it as I can, in the same way I described last month. It won't store to be used as a standalone vegetable, but frozen courgette will go great in stews and soups. It'll be a useful addition to the winter arsenal, especially since the beans supply has now dried up without me ever getting around to really saving any of them. Slightly worried about running short come January...

PJW

*Yes, it's a fruit. The eaty bit is fleshy with seeds in the middle. Bit of wisdom for you - don't put it in a fruit salad.

Beanpocalypse!

This month has mostly been about beans.

This was the first harvest. I've brought in about four times as much since then.

The garden has 10 runner bean plants planted to grow up a bamboo A-frame, another three in a planter by the door and a selection of 5-6 dwarf yellow French beans to go in the Three Sisters bed. I am coming to the conclusion that I have overplanted. For the past fortnight, the question has not been, "What shall we have for dinner?" but, "What are we eating with the beans?"

Still, I'd rather this than be struggling for what to put on the plate like I was in June. The garden is now providing a bit of variety - I've had broccoli and cabbage and courgette and potato and beans of course. We have had two new things this year. The first is onions, which is kinda sad considering that they were one of the first things I tried to grow three years back. I've had sort-of onions in previous years, but they were sad little failures that I only ate because I'd put work into them. This year, they're actually worth the name.

The second new thing is aubergines, which is very exciting. I did try growing my own from seed, but they didn't really get anywhere, possibly because they failed to get repotted during a busy period. The success story has come from a grafted plant, which is quite a nifty idea if you're happy to pay the extra. Basically, the garden centre grow a plant that has a big, strong and sturdy root system and then decapitate it. They then graft a plant that normally had a weedy or temperamental root system (like aubergine, tomato, cucumber, etc) onto the stump and encourage the two halves to bond.

It's a brilliant idea, because instead of having a boring plant that's really good at absorbing nutrients and a useful plant that dies if you cough on it, you have a Frankenstein's monster that's hardy and useful. The idea was taken to it's zenith when somebody managed to create the utterly pointless, but kinda cool, TomTato, which is a cherry tomato plant that grows potatoes with its roots.

Like Frankenstein's monster, but without its creator being a complete emo tool. Note also, the photo-bombing green bean in the top right.

Anyway, the grafted aubergine has produced enough already to make the sole recipe I know with aubergine, which is pork chops with an aubergine/tomato thing. Very nice indeed.

One other thing which has been new this year is coloured vegetables. I've tried before without much luck, but I've already managed to get a whole meal out of them: yellow courgettes, yellow beans and purple carrots.

A carrot of a half-decent size! Not from the experimental pot though - I'll update on that in the next post.

The one major thing missing from that dish is the interesting-coloured cauliflowers that I planted way back in March. I have yet to see hide nor hair of an actual cauliflower head forming so far, even on the ones that I cheated and bought from the garden centre. The grand plan was supposed to have me eating cauliflower back in May/June, but I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if I was just even more over-optimistic than I'd realised. I'm sure last year I had cauliflowers before now, but they were sickly things riddled with caterpillars that tasted absolutely disgusting, so it's entirely possible that the heads were formed in a final doomed effort to procreate before death by pests.

All mouth. No trousers.

The non-production of cauliflower is pretty much solely responsible for the traffic jam of winter vegetables. The orphanage for displaced brassicae is falling apart, pretty much as quickly as you would expect my bodge-work to do, and it's going to be interesting to see if I actually get to transplant any more of the winter veg before they are completely stripped back to the stem by caterpillars and slugs. I may be going hungry come January.

PJW