Where the hell I've been

Wow. July, huh? That's quite a long time ago, isn't it?

The thing with gardening is that it requires time, especially if you're planning on writing about it afterwards. Something else happened in July which put something of a crimp on my time:

Daughter 2 of 2. Please see instruction manual for correct operation details.

Turns out that two daughters are actually more than double the work of one and I didn't actually get back out into the garden after that last post. This meant that a lot of it died a horrible, painful and messy death.

However, there were some successes from the year. I learned a great deal about sweetcorn and the fact that you do need to give it an awful lot of space if you want to get anything from it. I produced a massive amount of plant and sod all actual food from my Three Sisters garden. In fairness, the beans and the courgettes did produce, but I didn't get a chance to get out there and harvest, so they rotted on the vine.

I also learned about some of the odd foods that I grew. New Zealand spinach/kokihi - tasty, virulent, produces like nobody's business but not something I use very often in cooking. Oca - generally tasty, requires more space than I gave it, really didn't play nicely with the tomatoes. Purslane - hard to tell apart from weeds and probably got uprooted, as I got none. Sea kale - does not like pots and takes a year to thrive even in the ground. Daylilies - delicious to slugs and snails, dead now.

I also managed to achieve my goal of a purple soup. The purple cauliflower let me down, but I managed to use ordinary white cauliflower without diluting the colour of the purple potatoes and purple carrots too much.

So, now the daughters are both a little bit older and I have a little bit of free time back. Back to the gardening? Well, yes and no. I've just moved house this month, which gets me a larger house (to fit all the daughters that I have in), but significantly smaller garden space. I reckon I can fit in 2m² of raised beds in the back garden, which is something of a downgrade on the 14m² that I had at the old place, not to mention the myriad planters, pots and bags that were scattered inbetween.

This has forced me to a) concentrate on what I actually want to grow and eat, and b) get creative. The front garden now contains 2 x fig trees, 2 hanging baskets of strawberries, 1 hanging basket of blackberries, 2m of window box filled with strawberries, 2 blueberry pots, 1 gooseberry in a pot, some jerusalem artichokes, 3 planters for oca, and a bed which I plan on putting 2 rhubarbs and surrounding them with nasturtiums so that they don't look weird. I've also managed to find a very interesting bush raspberry - instead of growing up tall and taking over, it spreads outwards and can form a hedge, so I've got three of those on order. Oh, and a dwarf cherry tree. Front lawns are overrated.

Of course, this downsizing does mean that I've got an awful lot of stuff that I need to get rid of. Remember the broccoli cages that I constantly effuse over? Well, I have about 7 of them and need only 2. The spares are free to a good home, or even a mildly bad one.

Also, I have about 7-8 raspberry plants going spare, as well as some seed jerusalem artichokes. I would recommend both to anyone with even a little bit of space in their garden - they grow straight up, so require very little dirt, grow anywhere without complaint and produce loads of fruit/tubers. Anyone who wants one/some, let me know.

Oh, and there's plenty of mutant raspberry if anyone wants that. It has eaten through all of the barriers and colonised the bed next to it. I think moving was worthwhile just to put some distance between me and it.

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

Taking up the tuber

I was a little bit concerned that I might have over-cooked it with the number of seed potatoes I bought earlier in the year. I looked at the fact that I was growing two large dustbins and 14 potato bags worth of potatoes, with the prospect of another 8 potato bags for the Christmas potatoes and thought, "I've bought too many; I'll never eat all those."

All the potatoes I own in the world at present.

There are still 8 potato bags which were planted with Christmas potatoes back in August/September, but the problem is that the green tops died off/were eaten very early indeed. So I'm not 100% convinced that there's anything under the soil at all.

Is it a root vegetable? Okay, is it a parsnip? No? In which case, there's a very high probability that it can go fuck itself.

I think I may have spotted my weak link in the Challenge. If there's one thing that I have learned out of this year, it's that subsistence farming is hard. I knew winter would be challenging, but it's very hard living off just what you've grown. Plus, I'm not living solely off my growing: I can buy as many onions, tomatoes, and oven chips as I like, I eat extraordinary amounts of meat and my daughter's food is entirely exempt so I don't have to worry about her. In a survival situation, this garden would not be enough to provide all the food needs of my family, let alone give me enough to trade with the other apocalypse survivors.

My route forward is clear - in the event of the breakdown of society, the entire garden gets converted to parsnip-growing.

I am growing another type of tuber this year to help bolster my dwindling potato supply - jerusalem artichokes. These are very rarely grown in the UK (and bloody expensive if you want to buy them in the shops; last time I saw them in Sainsburys were £3 for a small portion's worth!), but they are a very nice vegetable. You use them just like a potato and they taste like a cross between swede, potato and parsnip - just slightly sweet and nutty.

However, this is the first time I've grown them, so I'm not sure how successful they're going to be. They're supposed to grow big sunflower-like flowers on top of 6-7ft stalks, but everything's died off before the flowers came out, which was disappointing.

I've tried scraping away a bit of the earth and can confirm that there is at least one artichoke under there, but that's about all I'm sure of. It'll be another magical mystery tour when I run out of potatoes.

Not at parsnip levels, but still better than carrots or swedes. PS. Fuck carrots.

PJW

Winter is coming

I'm always a bit ambivalent about this time of year - it's sad to be throwing away hard-grown plants and acknowledge that there will be no more courgettes this year, but it's also the time of planning for next year and clearing out soil for potential new crops.

Most of the beds have gone from this:

to this:

There are a few vegetables left from this year's planting, mostly the long-growing ones that get planted at the start of the year and don't come up until November/December time. The brussels sprouts, leeks, parsnips and Christmas potatoes are looking very promising indeed, whereas I suspect the swedes and jerusalem artichokes have decided against forming any kind of root in protest at being shoved at the back of a bed and ignored. It's the problem with root vegetables - you can't predict whether you've got a bonanza or bugger all until you dig them up, meaning "What's for dinner?" doesn't really have an answer until Schrodinger's vegetable is unearthed.

Still, even without those two, I'm confident of surviving winter. There is a whole freezer drawer packed full of frozen vegetables, even if half of it is my sister's courgette. Plus almost all of the winter vegetables are now properly planted in their rightful positions (finally!), although whether any of those will produce anything is a different matter altogether: I've never tried growing purple sprouting broccoli before, my cauliflower record is shoddy regardless of the season and my previous attempts at kale and spinach have proven delicious to the slugs and snails. Ah well, it's part of the adventure.

Part of putting the winter vegetables in has been drawing up the plans for next year. My gardening schedule is relatively intensive on the soil, but because I use raised beds that are on a concrete base and have year-on-year expanded my operations by handing over my paycheques to the garden centre for more dirt, it's not proven a problem as it's practically new dirt every year. Next year is going to be different, as I'm reaching the practical limits of how many beds can be fit in the garden and so I need to make sure I'm not overtaxing or building up diseases in the soil. A bed which grows broccoli from April to September, purple sprouting broccoli from September to April and then more broccoli the next year is soon going to run out of the minerals that make broccolis and be full of the germs and pests that like to live off them.

The answer is crop rotation where you grow a different thing each year to give the soil time to recover, but unfortunately a lot of my favourite vegetables all belong to the same plant family of brassicae, which makes it hard to move things around. Traditionally, you're supposed to replace brassicae with root vegetables the next year and put the brassicae into the space vacated by legumes (green beans, mange tout, et al), which wouldn't really be plausible in my garden. I'd have 5m² worth of onions and carrots, with 1m² in which to fit all my broccoli, cauliflower, swede, brussels sprouts, cabbage and kale. Not really going to happen.

So I've decided to set to one side the two oldest brassica beds, as they have grown the same crop family two years in a row, and turn them into something else next year. The other two are going to grow brassicae again next year, but they'll get a green manure of field beans (which are a legume) grown on them over the winter to replenish the soil and also have a top-up of new compost to hopefully keep them happy.

As such, the winter veg is being grown solely on the to-be-retired-from-brassicae-beds, as the others need to be left unproductive to replenish them for next year. Which is hard to remember when I'm trying to find a position to home for all of my kale seedlings.

PJW

Good use of time

I took today off work as holiday in order to relax and destress. Life has been busy of late and I thought a nice peaceful day of not doing very much would be just what was needed to recover a little bit of energy.

Today, I:

• Bought 450l (£24 worth) of garden compost
• Built a vertical garden and planted herbs and strawberries in it
• Bought and planted a cherry tree
• Bought and planted a rhubarb crown
• Replanted a loganberry bush
• Planted 30 early seed potatoes
• Planted some jerusalem artichokes
• Rearranged things so I could grow beetroot and then planted them
• Dug in the rest of the green manure on the brassica beds and then put a new layer of compost on top
• Realised that I'd used 450l (£24 worth) of garden compost in one day
• Covered all the earth round the fruit bushes in bark chips
• Planted another seed tray full of vegetables
• Squeezed said seed tray under the sun lamp and built some extra reflectors
• Lay down and may not ever rise again.

So yes, nice, quiet, relaxing, peaceful day of not doing very much. Granted, I now feel quite good about how the garden's progressing. While the sun's still going down at 6pm, it's well-nigh impossible to accomplish anything after a day at work and my weekends are busy for the next fortnight, so I was a little bit worried about the pile of jobs that might've stacked up in the meantime.

I was going to write about the vertical garden today, but I'm so knackered that I think that will have to wait for another day. Early to bed and hope to survive the rest of the working week.

PJW