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

And so, it ends

Not with a bang, but with an "Oh, for fuck's sake." This was what I harvested today:

In my garden at present, ready to eat, there is one potential swede, the bags of potential Christmas potatoes and the jerusalem artichokes. That's it. And the freezer drawer from the autumn is looking empty already. I think we can officially say that I would not survive winter on my own and while it would theoretically be possible to go the year round without buying any vegetables, that would mostly be through takeaways and pizza.

Today, I go to the grocer's. Sad times.

Still, while the challenge is ended (and I don't think I'll ever try it again in quite so stern a format as I did this year), it has been fun and a hell of a learning experience. It's a long way from over yet - there's still brussel sprouts (hopefully) and purple broccoli, with cauliflower, broad beans, carrots and sea kale overwintering to hopefully come up in the spring. However, I thought that here (at the end of all things), might be a good time to reflect on things that I've learned:

1) Brassica cages and other forms of netting are brilliant. Everything wants to eat your edible garden if it can and even lethal amounts of pesticides don't really do the job. It's a hell of a lot easier to just seal off anything leafy from the evil things that want to destroy it.

As a corollary to this, I think that kale, spinach and chard may become indoor plants next year. I had great success with bringing lettuce inside and keeping it on a windowsill last year, with the only problem being that I don't actually like lettuce that much. I like kale, spinach and chard, but unfortunately so does the local wildlife, so I don't see much of it.

2) Some things aren't worth the bother. The white cauliflowers that I grew squatted in my garden, taking up masses of space and produced the square root of fuck all. The carrots also achieved little to nothing for lots of effort. Don't get me wrong - I like eating both cauliflowers and carrots, but I can go to the grocers with a fiver and come out with three large cauliflowers, a massive bag of carrots and change.

Next year, I'm cutting back on growing things that I can easily get the same quality easier and cheaper from the grocers. Purple carrots and orange cauliflowers are going to be the order of the day, along with asparagus peas, kokihi, purslane, sea kale, day lilies, dahlia yams, chinese artichokes and oca.

3) Other things are definitely worth the bother. Fresh potatoes, while still being a pain in the arse, do taste better. Sweetcorn, courgettes and mange tout as well. Broccoli and green beans aren't massively different in taste to those from the shops, but they produce masses of edible goodness in a relatively small space and the cut-and-come-again means that you get loads of meals out of them. Parsnips will also get a pass for being awesome.

4) Sometimes it's worthwhile buying seedlings rather than growing from seed. This entry shows the difference between a commercially-grown cauliflower seedling and my windowsill effort. It's very satisfying to grow something just from seed (the fact that I not have a fully-fledged globe artichoke plant speaks to that), but on other occasions it's not worth grinding your own flour.

Secondary to that is making use of grafted plants. My aubergines that I grew from seed achieved sod all, while the grafted one kept going way into winter and had to be actively put down to save the soil for next year. Little bit more expensive than growing your own, but a heck of a lot less frustrating.

5) Raspberries kick the shit out of strawberries. They've not come up on the blog much, but I bought 12 raspberry canes earlier this year and they've been producing solidly from August right the way through to December. Meanwhile, my strawberry bed emitted a brief flurry of strawberries in May and June and then settled down to producing leaves and nothing else (despite the bed allegedly containing several different varieties that should've done the whole season). Plus, there's very few pests willing to climb to get a raspberry off a cane. I think the strawberry bed might have one more year to try and redeem itself and then it might get repurposed the year after that.

What I did have success with was strawberry hanging baskets by the door. They also only produced a brief flurry, but they had the advantage of being a) away from pests and b) right there when I walked out the door. An experiment to be repeated.

I also managed to get at least 4 edible pears and 5 figs off my trees, although I expect more next year as they mature and come into their own. The dessert grapes were a massive, massive disappointment - lots of production, but what we ate made us horribly ill. There's several theories for this: I possibly accidentally picked from the wrong vine and picked unripe red grapes instead of green ones, the grapes themselves were small so perhaps not ready, we maybe didn't wash them as well as we could, the grape vines may possibly just be evil and looking to destroy us - there's lots of possibilities.

Unsurprisingly, we waited until the grapes were 100% definitely ripe, possibly even overripe, before picking the next set. Then we let them rot in the fruit bowl as my wife and I engaged in a grape-based Cold War of seeing who'd break first and eat the grapes "that were probably totally fine, really!"

Next year, there may be some kind of grape jam or amateur wine so that the evil can be processed out before we consume them.

5) Fuck carrots. Also leeks grow underground, courgettes grow huge when not in pots, pumpkins are a danger to everything while producing nothing, and parnsips can (and should) be grown in whatever leftover pot and space is available. Also, I should not be allowed to build things.

6) Winter vegetables need their own, dedicated bed with a brassica cage. Having watched my winter kale and spinach die horribly out in the open (partly through pests, partly through next door's cats pooping on them), I've decided that they need to be undercover. Also, everything needs to start earlier if I'm expecting to get crops through the year, which rules out any more misguided sharing with other main crops. I may plant quick-growing catch-crops, like mange-tout, rapini, ball carrots and chop-suey greens, for the spring, but nothing which I wouldn't be happy tearing up if the winter veg needed to go in before they were ready to go out.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the growing year so far. I went from June to December without buying any vegetables (a month longer than last year) and I got to eat many more things than I did last year. The count of things which I successfully ate from my garden this year is: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, courgette, mange tout, broad beans, green beans, french beans, sweetcorn, spinach, kale, nasturtiums, carrots (for certain values), parsnips, leeks, lettuce, aubergines, green peppers, red peppers, potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, figs and pears. Plus there is still rapini, brussel sprouts, swede and jerusalem artichoke to go.

The most important this was that I learned a lot and, as we all know, knowledge is half the battle. The other half is brutally murdering slugs.

PJW

PS. Fuck carrots.