Pint into a quart pot

The first lesson I learned when I started gardening was that there were many things that wanted to eat my vegetables more than I did and were nowhere near as picky about waiting until things were ripe as I was. It wasn't possible in the slightest to "share" - everything I grew would be stripped down to the bones or riddled with slimy holes long before it was in any edible state.

I also learned that it was well nigh impossible to "encourage" them away in a back garden environment. Home-made remedies like garlic or chilli infusion sprays were completely ineffective, commercial pest killers or repellents were completely ineffective and awful for the environment, and companion plants achieved fuck all, while taking up space not doing anything.

The only answer appears to be physically walling away the plants with netting to stop the pests from getting in and, as I've mentioned before, netting and I do not get along, mostly because netting is waiting until I let my guard down so it can try to break my neck again. So I've had to invest in a series of specialist pop-up Brassica Cages in order to survive my own garden.

Now, overall, the cages have been phenomenal. They spring open like a pop-up tent and keep their shape perfectly, without the need for my usual wonderful constructions of bamboo, netting, wire and hope.

For those who didn't missed the tale of the vegetable orphanage the first time around, I'll spoil the ending for you - it was less than perfectly successful.

Plus, they have zipped doors, which means that I can't pull my usual trick of perfectly securing insect protection around a plant before realising that I need to get to something underneath it.

There are only two major down-sides to them. The first is that they struggle in high winds, which, being on top of a hill, we have a *lot*. They have to tied down 15 ways from Sunday and require so many stakes for support that I'm actually giving serious consideration to growing a bamboo plant, just so I don't have to keep handing over money to the garden centre.

This arrangement fell apart, two days after this photo was taken, in a light breeze. Because I built it.

The other downside is that they cost a bomb. I justified it to myself originally on the basis that I grew all my brassica and leafy things in four beds that were exactly the same size. So while buying four nets would cost a lot of money, it was an investment and I would never have to buy any more, unless of course I decided to strip out all of my strawberries and take the opportunity to rotate some of the brassica away from the 1.25m2 beds to let the soil recover. And what are the odds of me deciding to do that?

Pretty high, as it turns out. You'd think I'd remember I was a phenomenal idiot, wouldn't you?

So, I was left with a 1.25m2 brassica cage to fit on a 1m x 2m vegetable bed. "Shouldn't be a problem!" I thought. "I'll just split the vegetable bed in half and make it into two 1x1m beds and then the cage can cover one of those. 1m is less than 1.25m, so it'll be fine!"

So far, so hoopy, until I came to actually trying to accomplish this and realised that the whole point of the cage is that it fits snugly without gaps, so that no butterflies can get in. This includes at the bottom, because butterflies are tenacious little buggers and aren't against going to ground level to get into somewhere. It also turns out that 25cm is quite a big gap to make just disappear.

Still, I went to my task with abandon and proceeded to try and make a quart pot fit snugly around a pint, using only heaps of gardening wire, ground staples, imagination, hope and a lot of swear words.

Nailed it

The snapping noise as I tied part of the net to itself and forced it into position was all part of the plan. I'm sure it'll be fine - it's probably designed to taper down from full size at the top to 4/5th size at the bottom and the fact that one of the straight bits now hangs limply at right-angles is a feature, not a bug.

It's also completely self supporting, apart from the stakes on every corner and 15 bits of gardening wire attaching it to the chain link fence behind. I did try using only 14 ties to the fence, but it attempted to break free and go back to 1.25m2 wide instead of squeezed into just 1m. There used to be a nascent chard plant on the left hand side before that. Now it's tied to the fence in 15 places and I'm digging out the chard seeds again.

Notice also the pots down at the bottom - they're actually vital structural components. They're pinning the bottom of the net to the wooden frame of the bed and, in the case of the one on the left, it's pinning the net to itself to take up some of the slack. To demonstrate the complete success of my genius design, I thought I'd take some pictures from the side view:

Go home brassica cage, you're drunk.

Oh for f... Anyone got the number of the local taxi?!

In the interests of not having the next breath of wind contort my broccoli plants into an integral part of an Escher-esque abomination of nets, sprung wire, leaves and chain link, I have now decided to buy a new brassica cage of the correct size. Hopefully I haven't unalterably buggered my £44 cage in an effort to avoid spending £29.

In other news, check out our pear tree!

The dandelions are also a feature.

Quite apart from being very pretty, that is a significant amount more blossom than last year. I hope that this is the year we finally get edible pears. Sure, we did eat the ones that grew last year, but that was more out of a sense of duty than out of any belief that they were actually fit for human consumption.

PJW

Packet of 9 for the weekend?

When I told my wife last year that I was thinking about growing artichokes, she was originally very pleased with me. It took 10-15 minutes of confused conversation before we realised that we were talking about two different vegetables with the same name.

Artichoke

Artichoke

They aren't related, they don't taste the same, they don't come from the same part of the world, they don't grow in the same way, they aren't even the same part of the plant! The fact that they are both named as artichoke is because the Westerner who "discovered" jerusalem artichokes for the first time had a clear problem with his tastebuds and thought it tasted like globe artichokes. No-one else has ever agreed with this man.

Since my wife is a terrible influence on me, I decided that I'd try and grow a globe artichoke as well. It's not exactly a practical vegetable, but it seemed quite fun and my wife forced me to do it. I was told that they were well nigh impossible to grow from seed and, being of a contrary mind, I decided that I was going to try and beat the odds. Ten seeds sown resulted in one viable seedling, which flourished in the late sunshine last year and built up enough size to survive the winter freezes intact, before reacting to the spring sunshine with a sudden and abrupt death.

This was rather upsetting for a couple of reasons - I was obviously expecting a first and very satisfying crop this year, and secondly, I had already underplanted my expected artichoke plant with a third, also completely unrelated, vegetable called an artichoke.

Artichoke

The globe artichoke plant is big and leafy and requires a lot of space, but it grows mostly up, leaving a lot of ground space uncovered. It's perfect to plant chinese artichokes under the shade of the leaves, as the tubers will grow in the space just above the globe artichoke's roots. However, if you've planted the chinese artichokes and then the globe artichoke ups and dies on you, then you'll just end up with the chinese artichokes taking over the entire bed and leaving no room for any future globe artichoke plantings.

Since I didn't have time to try growing another globe from seed, I decided to go to the local garden centre to buy a ready-grown young plant. My only option was this:

There are nine plants in there. Nine! A globe artichoke plant needs a bare minimum of 0.5m2 growing space and they prefer having 1m2! Who needs *nine*!?

To make this even better, they were squeezed in so tightly that the roots were all intermingled, meaning that it was impossible to remove one without seriously damaging another. I managed to separate out five plants and pot them up without too much damage and have just composted the other four. I think I would've actually just paid the same price for a pot that contained one undamaged plant as I just have for nine plants that have spent the last few weeks trying to destroy each other for precious soil-space.

Anyway, I now own five slightly damaged globe artichokes and I'm just praying that one of them will survive for long enough to be planted in my double-artichoke bed.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, I thought I'd also show you the results of my sweetcorn growing:

I'll give you a hint at what the problem is - there's sixteen seed-tray slots and only two seedlings.

This is a major problem because of the way sweetcorn works - you have to grow lots of them in close proximity to each other so that they can pollinate each other. Two is not enough. Plus I can't just go and buy seedlings from the garden centre, as these are a special variety that produces red sweetcorn and if I mix standard yellow sweetcorn in with them, then they'll cross-pollinate and I'll get something nowhere near as cool that might not taste very nice.

I'm torn between buying new seeds and giving these ones more time to germinate. If I give these more time, then I might lose my opportunity to plant new seeds in time for them to catch up (and grow big enough to be part of this year's Three Sisters) and I could end up with no sweetcorn at all, red or otherwise. On the other hand, buying more seeds is pretty much a guarantee to Murphy's law that all of them will grow and I will end up with more sweetcorn seedlings than I know what to do with.

Thoughts from the balcony? Plus anyone want to take globe artichokes off my hands?

PJW

How to play along at home, part 4 - Jerusalem Artichokes

The last bag of Swift potatoes is mocking me.

There are absolutely no signs of greenery at all, which is strikingly unlikely considering how much growth every other potato has already. I would normally put this kind of a no-show down to bad seed, but this bag has three seed potatoes in it and the odds are astronomical that all of them are duds. They just hate me. The feeling's mutual.

To compound the depressing potato-related news, it turns out that the Purple Majesty purple-black leaves, that I was so excited about the other day, are only temporary. They turn boring green like any other potato once the leaves get past a certain size.

I expect vibrant purplecy out of the potatoes themselves to make up for this disappointment.

The good news this week comes from a different type of tuber. Last year, I planted jerusalem artichokes for the first time with more than a little trepidation. All root vegetables are a little nerve-wracking because you can't actually see whether all your hard work is going anywhere. They could, to pick a random example, grow a 3ft tall leafy top while failing to grow anything at all under the surface.

To compound the all-purpose root veg anxiety, I had no idea what to expect from these except a few descriptions in books, which said that the top big resembled a sunflower with a big, wide, open, colourful, pretty flower at the top.

Pretty

Needless to say, I didn't hold out much hope for the actual eatey-part, but I was pleasantly surprised by a bumper harvest.

Maybe a tenth of our harvest. Scale is a little hard to tell in that photo - that's about five/six portions there, assuming you're using them instead of potatoes.

These were ridiculously easy and gave so much bang for my buck that I'm recommending that anyone who is growing any veg in their garden should give them a try.

How to grow:
Find artichoke from somewhere, stick in ground from Feb-April, ignore until November, dig up when hungry.

They don't particularly need watering, pruning or anything clever, although you may want to use stakes or string to support the stalks if they get too tall. The ground can be the worst bit of your garden if you like - my dad grew some last year in what was basically an alleyway down the side of their house and they grew superbly. They grow ridiculously tall, up to 7ft high, so light is rarely going to be a problem for them. And unlike a lot of root crops, they'll grow in stony, sandy soil and do very well.

They also require so little space as all the growth is up and down - you could almost certainly plant a shallow-rooted vegetable like bush-beans or even broccoli underneath them to make full use of your garden. I'm underplanting mine with nasturtiums this year.

The only downside of them is that they will come back next year - grow them once, grow them forever. Mine are being grown in canvas bags above the ground so I have the option to move them if I wish.

Tips of the new artichokes at the back, a nasturtium going for it front left and a really annoying weed front right that I didn't notice when I took this photo but it now annoying the crap out of me to the extent that I considered photoshopping it out before realising that that might be just a little bit insane.

This picture above shows a 1m long bag that cost me a fiver from Amazon - I expect to get three or four plants in there which will provide enough for 5-7 meals for both me and my wife.

Are they tasty?

Jerusalem artichokes can be used in place of potatoes in most recipes, but taste sweeter and nuttier - like a cross between a parsnip, potato and really nice sweet potato. They have the advantages of being really good for you, low in calories, and require very little preparation - no peeling or scraping, just wash and slice.

They store for ages; you can either leave them in the ground and dig them up as you need them (till about February, then they'll try making new plants instead of being edible) or freeze them after slicing and blanching for another 4 months after that.

The best way of cooking them is to slice into large circles and then deep-fat-fry or sautee them. The outsides crunch and the insides are fluffy, soft and melt in your mouth, with so much more depth of taste than an ordinary chip. You can also boil, steam and mash them, as well as use them to make very tasty soups. In short, the answer to the bolded question is yes. Very yes.

Sliced and ready to be dumped in the deep-fat-fryer. You may not have noticed this photo first time around. That's clearly because you didn't read the blog properly and not because I've just found it and inserted it into an old entry, George Lucas-style. It's okay though; I forgive you for not paying enough attention to something that I care about. I'm not hurt at all.

{sob}

They are a superb crop for me because they are low-maintenance, very low-square-metreage and super tasty. Plus they cost an absolute bomb to buy in the supermarket. That pile in the top picture would cost about £15 in Sainsburys. So they even give a touch of verisimilitude to my delusion that I'm saving money by vegetable gardening - is there anything that they can't do?

All things told, grow them - they're great.

PJW

Further adventures in vertical gardening

Another thing I've been doing over the last week or two is trying to resurrect my vertical garden that I made out of a tower of coke bottles. Last year was mostly a failure - the strawberries died very quickly, the coriander died slowly, the mint had a brief flourish and died and the lettuce was a roaring success, hampered only by the fact that I don't eat much lettuce.

I came back to it a fortnight ago to find that the death throes of the plants had sucked all the water and goodness out of the soil and left it a desert.

This may be a redundant question, but has anyone ever tried to water soil that has utterly rejected the concept of water? It's happened to me a couple of times in the past when I failed at indoor pot plants - once is reaches a certain level of dessication, the soil decides that it never liked water anyway and is better off with that bitch out of its life. So you try and bring soil and water back together and the soil is all, "Nu-uh - you broke my heart, but I don't need you anymore. I'm stronger without you and I'm happy with my new girlfriend, DeadLettuce."

So, I spent the better part of a day trying to convince soil that it did want water back in its life, which was mostly accomplished by trying to drown it. If there's a water shortage in Bath in the next couple of weeks, then sorry - that was me, emptying an entire reservoir's worth into a tower of plastic bottles.

If we're taking that metaphor to its logical conclusion, then I kidnapped and tortured the soil until it agreed to get back together with water. Also, please note the skeleton of the mint plant at the bottom. I tried removing it - it considered removing me instead. We've called a truce.

So, I finally have a moist tower once more and will be trying to grow things in it. The only inhabitants currently are two strawberry plants - I live forever in hope that, one day, they will be able to thrive here. Or at least produce one lousy strawberry between them. I've also got some lettuce growing under the artificial sun with the hope that, one day, I might eat some lettuce.

In other news, all but one of the "Swift" bags of potatoes have now shown signs of green bits. I don't fancy my chances of getting potatoes next week, as I was promised, but at least they may produce something at some time.

Far more interesting is that my Purple Majesty potatoes are showing signs of life. Actually, they may have been producing leaves for a while and just escaped my notice - the leaves are a very dark purple, which is very, very cool. Hopefully this bodes well for the purpleness of the potatoes themselves.

I've also managed to plant out some of the better seedlings into their beds inside the brassica cages. We now officially have 2 brussels sprouts and 3 broccoli.

I have once again used old coke bottles as home-made bell cloches to protect the vulnerable seedlings from wind, cold and the depredations of the local wildlife. This was my best trick last year and it's saved me a lot of stress and lost plants.

In looking up that link, I came across a picture of how big my seedlings were at the end of April last year. I'm definitely getting better at this game!

27th April 2014

12th April 2015

I've since had to remove the bell cloche off that one because the seedling was already pressing up against the top of the bottle. The difference is likely the improved artificial sun that my wife built me and that I outfitted with a more powerful bulb. God knows what it's doing to our electricity bills, but it's certainly improving my gardening.

There's also the first signs of mange tout coming up, which is promising. With any luck, it'll survive the pests this year. I plan on putting egg-shells around the more vulnerable ones and praying.

Not slug food. Please.

PJW

Weird and wonderful vegetables

One of the aims of the gardening this year is to grow new things and in that vein, I spent yesterday planting out some sea-kale seedlings.

Sea kale is interesting, because it's one of very few vegetables that are actually native to the UK, rather than being imported from another country, yet it's actually on the verge of extinction in the wild for the crime of being too tasty. It used to grow quite freely on British shingle beaches, but the Victorians ate so much of it that it nearly died out and only the fact that it was made illegal to harvest it in the wild has let it recover.

Naturally, cool + rare + too tasty to be allowed to survive = a vegetable that I'm interested in. Although one of the risks of growing odd stuff is that tasty is a very variable concept. These are described as "creamy", "maritime" and "kind of like asparagus" (which is spectacularly unhelpful as I don't know what asparagus tastes like either!) as well as belonging to the brassica family so having some taste relation to cabbage, kale, broccoli, etc. There is the very real risk that I might put a lot of effort into growing something that it turns out I absolutely can't stand. However my last gamble on jerusalem artichokes worked out very well (which I must write up as a blog post, now that I think about it), so what the hell - sea kale it is.

I actually bought a first lot of seedlings before the winter, planted them up and was very annoyed when they died off in the first cold snap, despite having fleece jackets over them. I had bought from an online nursery that I'd never used before (as rare plants are unsurprisingly hard to get hold of from regular suppliers) and was pleasantly surprised when my complaint yielded the immediate offer to replace them when they had new seedlings in the spring.

When the replacements arrived, I took the fleece jackets off what I'd thought were the dead seedlings, only to discover that they hadn't actually died, but just died back. They had in fact bounced right back with the spring.

In my defence, every other perpetual plant behaves in exactly the same way, so how was I to know?!

I feel kinda bad about the nursery sending the replacements now, so if anyone does want any seedlings, please consider Victoriana Nurseries, who do some very interesting things like perpetual cauliflowers, samphire and giant onions.

The actual growing and harvesting of sea kale is enjoyably odd too. You grow them like rhubarb - while plants like light (expert!), these are more tender when deprived of it, as they form slender white stalks while applying the up == light formula that we're all so keen on. Therefore, I have rewarded my seedlings for surviving the winter by putting a bucket on their head.

Allegedly, that should result in this:

Lifted from https://etaiyy.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/sea-kale/

Although I don't expect to see very much in the first year. As appears to be traditional at the end of every damn blog I write at the moment, I have seedlings going spare if anyone wants to join me in odd creamy salty leafy thing that you grow like rhubarb, I can provide the goods. Although this time it's only partly due to the garden centre only selling in bulk and partly because I've accidentally defrauded them. Someone take some off my hands to help me feel less guilty?

The other new thing I'm growing at the moment is oca, otherwise known as New Zealand yams, although no-one really knows why - they're not from New Zealand (although they are popular there) and they're not yams. They're a tuber from Peru which somehow failed to take off in Europe despite coming back across at the same time as the potato.

Not my hand - lifted from http://thriftyliving.net/2008/11/20/the-mystery-veg-revealed-mystery-veg-2/

They have advantages of being much more resistant to disease, not being damaged by exposure to sunlight (in fact, they taste better if left in sunlight for a few days after harvesting), not requiring peeling and being ready to harvest late-November through December when potatoes are hard to come by. The production of tubers is actually ignited by the plants being able to sense nights being longer than days and is accelerated by the first frosts.

The taste of them varies depending on how they're prepared - straight out of the ground and raw, they are sharp, sour and tangy, but leave them in the sun for a few days and the acid starts to convert to sugar and they can be steamed or roasted like a potato or other root. Plus you can use the leaves as salad greens. As mentioned before, I don't eat many salads, but I might be tempted to try one for these.

I planted out the tubers into pots last month and I'm already getting signs of life.

Trying hard not to make the "not Swift" joke again. We already have the running joke of FuckCarrots and that one's not funny in itself!

Unlike everything else that I have bought, oca tubers are available in sensible quantities and no-one can have any! Although if these are a rousing success, then I will undoubtedly keep back some tubers to replant - the growing process is very much like that of potatoes in that you grow oca plants from planting uneaten oca tubers.

One of the major advantages of oca is that they grow massive bushy green tops, but are generally non-competitive with other plants, which makes them excellent ground-cover crops for tall plants like beans and tomatoes. I'm giving serious thought to including them as a fourth sister for my Three Sisters bed, although I'll probably leave that for another year. I should probably try to achieve actual success with the basic Three Sisters before starting to screw about with it!

As it stands, I have my tomato beds laid out for the oca to be planted into, including this masterpiece which I'm quite proud of:

This bed will be combining quite a few theories together. The red bit is plastic mulch, which has the dual effect of stopping weeds and reflecting red light at the tomatoes. The science says that tomatoes recognise red light as a sign of competition which kicks them into higher gear. The white bits are bits of PVC pipe that watering can occur through, so that the water is going down to the roots rather than sitting on the surface. The dirt is especially mixed to be right for tomatoes and in the middle (where there's no x marking the spot yet) is going to sit an oca, which is a natural anti-fungal and will help support the tomatoes.

So yes, loads of science going into this particular tub of vegetables. The actual tub itself looks kinda familiar, doesn't it, especially in the context of putting a lot of science and effort into a particular vegetable with a foolproof plan for better results. I wonder why that is...

Oh dear.

PJW

Audience participation and leafy veg

Last week, I invited comment on what on earth I could use the unexpected extra space for that I'd freed up by relocating my strawberries. The main suggestion from Facebook comments was that my growing plan was lacking in leafy greens and I should get on that.

Now, I plan to take the advice, but it's important to understand that leafy greens and I have had an iffy gardening history. Dedicated blog-followers may remember that I extolled the virtues of windowsill lettuce last year and planned many more in my vertical garden. It is true, I successfully did achieve lettuces last year. Then I sat and watched as they died from nobody ever picking and eating them. Salads are not a common occurrence in my household (and let's have no quips about my weight from the more witty among you) and while it was lovely to be able to snip off some leaves when I needed them, I didn't need them often enough to stop the plant from feeling underappreciated and turning into a pretty flower.

The other suggestion was cooking greens - spinach and rainbow chard. I have a friend who swears by rainbow chard as being the easiest thing in the world to grow, but it just doesn't seem to happen like that for me. She gets this:

Lifted from http://onegreentomato.net/2010/10/28/fall-garden/

While I get this:

My garden, 5 minutes ago. Maybe I should start reading that onegreentomato blog?

Spinach and kale are the same story. They seem to be the food of choice for pests in my garden, now that the broccoli have been locked away in brassica cages, and there is nothing less appetising than a leaf that's got more holes in it than a colander. Even when they do survive, they don't seem to produce very much for me.

Looks nice enough, but considering spinach shrivels when cooked, that's about one mouthful's worth. If that.

This year is going to be different, however. One of the coveted spots in the brassica cages is going to be set to one side for a chard plant, with the dream that it might escape predation and grow into a proper plant. I am also giving up the dream with either spinach or perpetual spinach (which is supposed to be easier!) and going straight onto a plant called kokihi or New Zealand spinach, as it's sometimes known.

Quite apart from looking very cool, it has the distinct advantage of being native to the Antipodes (as the name would suggest) and thus allegedly invisible to domestic pests. I'll believe it when I see it, but apparently nothing here recognises it as food, which sounds promising. Plus, it's treated as a weed in New Zealand because it grows vigorously anywhere it can get hold of, which sounds very promising. Last on its list of virtues is that it can also be used just like real spinach in any recipe so I'll be very interested in how it adapts to the kitchen.

Here's the new plan for the ex-strawberry bed after the suggestions from the audience:

Incidentally, if anyone I know would be interested in joining my experiment with kokihi, the allegedly bulletproof green, I have plenty of seeds going spare.

On that subject, what is wrong with gardening firms and suppliers? It is impossible to buy anything in sensible quantities - plants or seeds. I wanted to buy some broccoli seedlings to replace the dearly departed and the minimum that I could buy was ten. I don't need ten broccoli seedlings and I speak as someone who has loads of room and grows a metric butt-tonne of broccoli. Worse than that, I decided to just buy cauliflower seedlings this year to avoid the debacle of last year, but the minimum quantity I could buy interesting colours in was 15 and to get the ones I really wanted I had to buy 21! It's not like they're that dear, but... okay, let's do the maths - that's about 3m2 of solid cauliflowers. Who does that? Who wants that? What the hell?

And let's not forget that these are advertised as "Grow Your Own" so it's not even like they're targetted towards businesses. I dedicate more of my garden and more of my spare time to growing vegetables than is strictly sensible and even *I* don't have room for 21 cauliflowers.

Seeds are even worse. I've got 100 onion sets this year because they only come in packets of 50 and I wanted both red and white onions. Swedes come in packets of 300 seeds, marked use by 2016. Even if you assume that half of them won't grow (which I wouldn't regard as acceptable anyway), that's more than one swede every three days. Now, I like swedes, but there's a limit!

In short, if you're inspired by my adventures and fancy growing anything, ask me first before buying seeds, cause the odds are good that I'll have some that I'm more than willing to press on you.

The garden is picking up this month from the disaster that was March - the replacement broccoli seedlings are growing well and I also have cabbage and brussels sprouts that I've grown from seed.

At the bottom, there are the broccoli seedlings that decided to try growing while the artificial sun was switched off that I was about to give the last rites to. They've bounced back superbly and I'm now confident that they'll actually thrive.

The fruit plants are greening up, including the mutant raspberry, which I thought I'd take a picture of as I didn't have one for the post about its rampage.

Evil mutant raspberry, as brought to you by JJ Abrams

I also finally have evidence that the Swift potatoes are growing something!

Well, one of them at least. The rest all still look like this:

I swear to you that this is a different picture to the last two times I've shown these three bags!

Entertainingly enough, they are being overtaken by the Anya potatoes, which are all thriving, despite having made no particular promises about quick-growing. I suspect that it's partially my fault - I clearly didn't start chitting the Swifts early enough and if I had, I might have better results by now.

Not Swift, but swifter than Swift, who I'm swift to say are not that swift.

Lastly, the winds that decapitated my babies are still swirling around, although at slightly lower speeds. It's an occupational hazard of being on top of a giant hill and our location on the corner where the prevailing winds normally aim means that we get a lot of rubbish and detritus blown into the garden (which is delightful). However, I think this takes the biscuit as the weirdest thing I've found in my garden:

That is the creepiest toy I've ever seen and would be so even if it hadn't just randomly appeared in my garden.

PJW

Knowing when to fold them

Someone I know has just bought a house and acquired a hugely impressive back garden with it, complete with several empty raised beds. Always one to try and spread my addictions, I've provided him with as many of my spare seeds and plants as he'd take.

However, because I'm not a very nice person, I have also taken the opportunity to give him what I can only describe as the horticultural equivalent of a practical joke. It's a mutant raspberry/loganberry/tayberry/tribble thing which has the advantage of producing lots of tasty fruit, but the fairly major disadvantage of being utterly uncontrollable. I was given it myself by a friend who in fairness did warn me that it would spread everywhere, but I was confident that I could contain it.

On a related topic, let me tell you about what I've been doing today:

He said, "Don't dig it there, dig it elsewhere. You're digging it round and it oughta be square."

More observant people may notice the green leafy thing on the right of the picture. That is the mutant raspberry/tribble. Earlier this year, the scene looked a little more like this:

Mutant raspberry on one side, in its own raised bed, surrounded by bricks and safely walled away from the bed where swedes and cauliflowers will one day grow. I thought I was safe, simply because there was no physical connection between the two sections of garden.

Fast forward three months and I've got little mutant raspberries popping up right smack in the middle of the bed. I would like to make it clear how impressive this is - the plant is going down through gravel, through sand, sideways through a small brick wall, and then breaking up through weed-proof plastic matting and popping up over a metre away from its original source. There are people who escaped from Colditz who would envy that kind of tunnelling ability.

I did have the option of just playing whack-a-mole with it and chopping it down every time it popped up, but I could see that becoming a losing battle very quickly. So instead, I spent the day emptying a 30cm deep and 130cm2 raised bed of soil and packing it into bags, before covering the area in a weedkiller so poisonous that it legally couldn't be sold to me as weedkiller due to EU regulations (if anyone asks, I was either disinfecting a path or clearing away foot-and-mouth disease). I now have to wait a minimum of 2 weeks before putting the dirt back in and another 2 more before I can plant anything there.

Not pictured - the unnerving sizzling noise and the frenzied flailing of dying earthworms that I didn't see before pouring it on.

I then put down two layers of super-strong weed-proof plastic and bricked the whole thing in. The only way that the mutant raspberry is getting in this time is by tunnelling through concrete or going through this woven plastic fabric, twice, which is guaranteed impermeable for 15 years based on just one layer.

I fully expect to see a mutant raspberry sprout popping up before the end of the season.

In my defence, I did warn my friend what I was giving him. I don't think he took me seriously enough though. Sorry mate, no take-backs, even if it eats your house.

PJW

Strawberries and option paralysis

After rebuilding my strawberry patch last year, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the results. It didn't provide a huge number of strawberries and those that were produced weren't great shakes in the taste department. After having gone through the effort and worked hard to keep pests away, this was slightly disappointing.

However, a little bit of research came up with a few reasons why and a lot of them were very easily fixed. I recently acquired the new James Wong book, Grow for Flavour (which I would thoroughly recommend to all and sundry), in which he's done research, experiments and read a lot of scientific papers to find the tricks and techniques to get the most out of growing your own. Like LifeHacking for gardening.

One of the major issues is sunlight. I got unexpectedly excellent results from a pre-made hanging basket of strawberries that I picked up from a garden centre and after a bit of thought, I realised why. The strawberry bed was against the 4ft high garden fence to next door, which is north-facing, whereas the hanging basket was south-facing. Now, I know plants like sunlight (I'm an expert, you know), but I hadn't realised a few extra hours sun could make such a difference to the flavour of a fruit. According to Mr Wong's research, strawberries in full sun are up to 7x sweeter than those in shade and the difference was noticeable in my garden.

In addition, the quality of varieties available to grow differs wildly. I'd kinda assumed garden centres would only sell nice varieties, but the majority of ones available were Elsanta or Sonata, which are the ones that supermarkets use. They're not terrible, but they're cultivars that are optimised for a) durability in transport, b) shelf-life, and c) size, with taste coming a long way down the list of priorities. Apparently they sell from garden centres because people want to buy what they're used to seeing in the supermarkets, which strikes me as a bit weird; I like growing my own cause it gets me something different to what I can get in supermarkets.

The varieties in my bed weren't bad ones, but they weren't the best ones out there either. That, combined with the need to move to sunnier climes has led to me scrapping the whole bed and starting again.

I have two distinct sections of garden around my house - the useful garden, where the vegetables grow, and the pretty garden, which is mostly non-functional except for a couple of fruit trees. The agreement with my wife is that the vegetable beds can expand as I like, as long as they don't broach the border into the pretty garden. The only problem is that the pretty garden gets the most sunlight and there was nowhere really in the useful garden that they could go. So my wife has rather foolishly allowed the strawberries to make their home just on the edge of the pretty garden. I don't think she realises what she's done.

The thin end of the wedge. Soon, it'll be all, "Hey sweetheart, you know how strawberries were allowed as an exception? Well, courgettes are a flowering plant too and they're really very pretty in their own right..."

I'm once again experimenting with vertical gardening, after last year's efforts ended in total failure. The above rather nifty wooden planters came from e-Bay and cost £22 each - they hook over and hang from the top of the fence and are just the right size for a strawberry plant each. The plants for these ones are Snow Whites, which are one of the ones recommended by James Wong. They also have the advantage of being white-coloured, which means birds don't recognise them as food, so no netting required.

One thing to look out for when buying strawberries - there are listings on Amazon and Etsy and e-Bay for strawberry seeds for berries of weird and wonderful colours: blue, black, yellow, etc. Unfortunately, these are all scams. You buy a seed packet for £2 a go and by the time you've grown them and found they're ordinary strawberries (or worse, whatever weed seeds were easily available to the vendor), any refund period has long since expired. Be careful when buying seeds online!

Anyway, going back to more normal coloured strawberries, my other varieties are Buddy, Red Gauntlet, and Honeyoye (latter two available from Homebase, whose website is rubbish). These, unfortunately, are visible to birds and so need to be underneath netting if we want to see any of them.

Thoroughly covered in garden netting and thus entirely secure against any birds or Peters who might want to get at the strawberries.

As I've mentioned before, I hate garden netting. It tangles as soon as you look at it, hooks around everything but the thing you actually want to fix it to and has two possible settings - a) fly off in the wind and trip up Peter when he next goes through the garden or b) so tightly secured that it's impossible for me to actually get in when I need to harvest or tend the plants. I'm hoping this teepee thing will work, although history doesn't lend itself to that hope.

The upshot of all this strawberry manoeuvring is that I now have a 2m x 1m vegetable bed sitting empty in the garden and I've found myself a little bit lost for ideas as to what to put in it.

This is very odd for me, as I'm usually complaining about not having enough space, but the bed's not very deep, so it doesn't lend itself to root vegetables or tomatoes. As for brassica, I already have my plan laid out for the space I have, which will give me 7 broccoli, 2 cauliflowers, 7 swedes 3 cabbages and 5 winter brassica, as well as 2 courgettes, 7 sweetcorns, 16 runner beans and 5 broad beans! So I'm a little unsure of what more I could actually need!

Added to this, the very fact of having space is leaving me with option paralysis - I'm just not used to being able to plant more than I planned for. Actually planting more than I planned for is a regular occurrence, but having the space for it is weird.

I've settled on using the space for three more cauliflowers, an extra broccoli, and some more beans and courgettes (sort of a two sisters approach). The first one is because I live in hope of actually seeing a viable home-grown cauliflower one day and the last three because they are massively productive and easy to freeze, so I'm hoping they'll to fill my freezer and enable me to last slightly longer through winter this year.

PJW