Growing a vegetable jungle

One thing which I didn't mention in my previous round-up post was the latest on the Three Sisters bed. That's because that's where most of the interesting things have happened in my absence and I felt it deserved a post (and a pic-spam) of its own.

For those who don't have a slavish devotion to my back-catalogue, the Three Sisters is based off an Iroquois tradition of growing corn, squashes and climbing beans together. The idea is that the beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, benefiting the corn and squash, the squash covers the ground with big leaves, preventing weeds from impacting the tall beans and corn, and the corn provides a climbing frame for the beans and a windbreak for the squash. It's a win-win-win. In theory.

Last year was a qualified success. The inter-connectedness of the three plants didn't really work out. I was worried about the English climate resulting in the beans overshadowing the corn and so chickened out by planting them up bamboo canes, which turned out to be pointless after I discovered I'd actually planted a non-climbing dwarf bean by mistake. Plus the pumpkins were an utter failure that not only failed to produce any fruit, but also broke out of the bed and attempted to throttle half the garden in a bid to survive. Said bid to escape meant it did very little shading. Still, I got both corn and beans out of the bed and the nitrogen fixing presumably worked, so, yeah, qualified success.

This year is so far a different story:

I think that is the most concentrated greenery I have ever accomplished in my limited gardening career.

I'll take you through the story so far. I started with my plan of attack, scribed in that most notable of tools, MS Paint.

Copy-pasted from the much larger garden diagram found here, cause I can't be arsed to draw it again square.

First off, I ditched the pumpkins of last year for courgettes, on the basis that a) I've had success with courgettes before and b) I actually like courgettes, which is more than can be said for squash or pumpkins. I also made the decision to go all-in and grow the beans up the corn instead of on a separate bamboo wigwam.

The bed is 1.25m x 1.25m and I started working on the basis that last year's efforts showed I could get good results from sweetcorn that was planted about 40cm apart, while my sister's garden showed that courgettes required room to spread when planted in the ground rather than a pot. So, I put the courgettes in the corners and worked out the tightest arrangement of corn/bean planting possible to squeeze in as many plants in as I could. This turned out to be 7 - two lines of three flanking the courgettes with one in the middle for luck.

Growing the beans up the corn introduced the issue of timing into the mix. The traditional Iroquois method sees all three seeds planted simultaneously, but the cooler English weather would mean that the corn would grow too slowly to support the beans and the leaves on the beans would grow so thick and so fast that they'd shade out everything else. After a small false-start with switching type of corn and a failure of the initial courgettes seedlings, I ended up doing the initial planting of the bed mid-May, with the beans not going in until a month later to give the corn and courgettes a head start.

Don't mind the oca that's appeared at the back, or the dwarf bean that's appeared at the front. Gardening plans are always flexible and I'm never immune to the urge to try and squeeze an extra plant into the space that's not really available.

From there, it's just been a case of letting it grow up and training the beans to grow up their appropriate corn stalks.

For scale, the tallest sweetcorn plants at the back are well over 6ft and still going.

However, the training effort went on the back foot pretty much from the get-go - the close-planting of the corn/bean units and the location in a corner has meant that it's become more and more difficult to get access to some of the sections of the bed as the foliage thickened. In addition, my attention to the garden suffered a bit from the impending arrival of Daughter II (The Daughtering) and the climbing beans were left to fend for themselves for the past few weeks as other things more urgently required my attention.

That has resulted in... well, neither words nor a still picture can do it justice.

Whether I'll see any beans from this bed is, as I said in the video, slightly up in the air (which is more than can be said for some of the beans' growth habits). However, I have already got significant courgette success and the corn is looking promising. With luck, the bed should provide a lot more than just "a valuable learning experience". And hey, at least it's been fun.

PJW

Passed times

So, yes. A few things have happened since my last post. The most significant is the reason why there's been such a hiatus - my new daughter arrived earlier this month and preparations for her arrival took up a significant amount of my gardening time and all of my writing-about-gardening time. However, I am currently in a briefly quiet house, with two precariously sleeping daughters, and have finally had time to go through all of the photographs that I've taken of the garden things that have happened since Wednesday 10th June. It seemed like a good time for a blog.

Following on from one of the last posts, I've learned a great deal about my experimental vegetable of oca. Mostly, it's that the research I did on it which called its growth "low, bushy ground cover" have a very different interpretation of low and bushy to me. The tomato pot that I excised the oca from last month has since gone on to produce some thriving tomato plants, however, the ones where I left the oca in are struggling to keep their heads above water:

 Let's play the "Spot the Tomato Plant" game! I promise you, there are three to find in this picture. One of them might even survive!

I've tried trimming them, tying them down to reduce their height (they're supposed to collapse to the ground in autumn anyway), squashing them under the tomatoes which I've staked up to encourage them to grow above the morass. No joy - it seems they thrive on being beaten and take up waaay more space than advertised. I think if this bed is to be repeated next year (which isn't a given, considering I don't even know whether I like the taste of the damned things yet!), then it will be with one oca plant flanked by two tomatoes, rather than the current setup of two ocas and three tomatoes.

One thing which I did learn from researching whether I could prune them is that the leaves are edible and actually quite tasty. They're lemony and tart and would go very well in a salad, assuming of course, that I ever ate any. Still, a bonus for any salad eaters out there who fancy a dual use crop.

Speaking of salad-dodging, the exciting adventures in making a tower garden from coke bottles have ended in complete disaster.

It was such a good idea in theory, but the practice has been let down on two fronts. The first is that it requires constant watering - by dint of its position by the drainpipe, it is sheltered from the rain and the very small surface area at the top would minimise any weather-based watering anyway. This is exacerbated by the fact that the bottles are see-through and so the sun bakes the dirt with the greatest of ease, leaving a dessicated tower that's impossible to rehydrate. The water flows around the edge of the dirt without sinking in and trickles out of the planting holes rather than going all the way down to the ground. I just don't have the regular free-time to water this as often as it needs.

Secondly, the design of the thing means that there's very little space for roots, meaning that you're limited in what can successfully grow out of it. Lettuce works just fine, as does sage, parsley and chives. However, the things that I actually like to grow and cook with regularly - brassicae, thyme, rosemary, strawberries - have all failed miserably as they require more space than this is able to provide.

In short, its only flaws were that it doesn't suit my gardening style nor the foods that I want to grow. Aside from that, it's perfect.

In terms of other things that have happened, actual food has started appearing, including purple potatoes and purple carrots.

These are particularly pleasing to me given my failures last year. The purple carrots are these ones, planted inside back in mid-February under the artificial sun. It's taken 6 months, but they've grown to a pretty reasonable size. I think the major ingredient which I was missing last year was patience - carrots are alleged to be ready to pull within 3 months of planting, but that's certainly not my experience this year. I've got a few more tubs of them planted at 3 week intervals and the next batch are certainly not ready to be pulled just yet.

I did manage one purple carrot last year, but it was of a variety called Purple Haze, which is the most common and popular purple carrot seed available. I've got no idea why it's common or popular, as it's actually only purple on the skin outside with the inside being orange like any other. This variety is Purple Sun, which was harder to find, but much cooler for being purple all the way through.

The purple potatoes are also a significant improvement on last year, which again suffered from being purple on the outside while less purple on the inside, as well as being not particularly tasty. These ones are very good to eat and, while they do lose a bit of their colour when cooked, I'm still hopeful of getting my ambition of bright purple soup. The only ingredient that I'm now missing is a purple cauliflower. And what are the odds of something going wrong with those, huh?

The great STRAW! experiment is undetermined as to whether it's a success or not. I was led to believe that I would be finding potatoes in the midst of the straw and that's just not been the case. Mostly, I've just had to dig through a thick layer of straw that's gone ooky to get down to the dirt, which has been delightful. However, once the straw's removed, it's revealed some potatoes sitting on the surface - not quite as advertised, but better than a kick in the teeth. Hard to tell if it's reduced my harvest at all, or even been any improvement over not hilling the potatoes at all. I think we'll see how the harvest as a whole goes before rendering an opinion, but given how much of a pain in the arse the straw has been to handle, I don't think it'll be making a reappearance next year.

I've also had a courgette, cabbage and broccoli from the garden, but those are relatively regulation vegetables for me now as they're quite simple to get crops from. However, one of the new vegetables has been an unexpected and resounding success.

This is kokihi, or New Zealand spinach, which I mentioned in a previous post. It was advertised as growing like a weed and being invisible to UK-based pests. Given that three weeks before that photo, that plant looked like this:

...And that I have cut off this amount of leaves from the plant twice in those three weeks:

...I'm willing to buy the "growing like a weed" claim. A huge, huge improvement on the sorts of yields available from regular or perpetual spinach plants, which are barely worth growing at home. I've had more meals from two kokihi plants in a month and a bit than I did from four perpetual spinach plants all last year. The only restriction appears to be that it likes direct sunlight; my second kokihi plant is near a fence and is nowhere near as impressive.

Just as impressive is the quality of the leaves that I'm harvesting. There's nothing less appetising than green leafy veg that something else has had a nibble at first and no amount of pesticides, slug pellets, companion plants or prayers has seemed sufficient to keep slugs from dining on my previous attempts at spinach, chard, and kale. The kokihi hails from New Zealand and promises that nothing in the UK recognises it as food, which is backed up from the fact that not a single leaf on the plant has had even a single hole, nibble or slug trail. They're just not even remotely interested. It's wonderful.

And while pests don't recognise it as food, I certainly do. It tastes just like spinach, cooks and wilts just like spinach and can be used in all the same recipes. It's not quite as good for you in terms of vitamins and minerals as ordinary spinach, but it's a close-run thing and I'd wager when you take into account the fact that you can pick it and eat it within minutes, rather than buying it from a shop where it's probably a day or two old (not to mention pesticides), it's probably even closer.

I'm looking forward to seeing how long it produces for, and whether it can even be extended into being a vegetable that produces in winter, which would be awesome. I also want to dig it up and see how deep and widespread the roots are - if the roots are deep and narrow, then it might make a perfect ground-cover under brassicae next year (and maybe even keep slugs and snails away from the main event), whereas if they're shallow-rooted, then they'd be perfect under green beans or tomatoes.

Lastly, I've finally found a use for those surplus cauliflowers that I had to buy in bulk. I've left them in the pretty garden, in large enough pots that they'll grow plenty of leaves, but without enough space to really accomplish anything, and they are now providing excellent food and breeding space for all the butterflies brought into the garden by the buddleja. Helping butterflies + encouraging them to stay the hell away from my crops = success in my book.

PJW