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

Internet fame and other setbacks

I was at a wedding party the other night and someone, in the middle of normal conversation, made a reference to "Fuck carrots, eh?" It confused the fuck out of me; I was under the impression that only a couple of friends read this, possibly out of pity (and my wife, of course, who's contractually obligated).

It turns out that it's more popular than I thought. At a party mostly full of people who I know and like, but don't get to see very often, no less than 6 people came up to me specifically to say how much they enjoyed reading about my vegetable garden online. Not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with an audience. Hi guys - I'll try to keep doing whatever it is that makes you read this and not do the other things.

This time of the year is where the garden work switches, from sowing and cultivating seedlings, to planting things out and letting them grow and spread. I now have most of my major summer/autumn vegetables planted out in the ground and thriving.

Brussels sprouts 

Broccoli 

Experimental tomato bed and oca 

A plethora of beans - French, runner and broad from left to right. 

More oca, more French beans, some mange tout and a nasturtium

I have also planted out my leeks for the winter. If you remember last year, I learned a valuable lesson about leeks - despite being a leafy plant, the actual eatey-bit needs to be buried underground. Those who plant their leeks on the surface get lots of inedible green leaves and not very much in the way of an edible white stalk. I'm actually following the instructions and planting them in deep holes this time, so that they can be buried as they grow taller to elongate the stalk.

Thinking of things which need to be buried, I'm attempting something new with my potatoes this year, which may or may not work. In order to get the best harvest of maincrop potatoes, you're supposed to "earth-up", which basically means burying the leaves in dirt to encourage the plant to produce more potatoes higher up the stem. With the quantities of potatoes that I grow, this requires a lot of expensive dirt and a lot of backbreaking effort to apply it.

STRAW!

I did some research on the interwebs and found a lot of people claiming success with growing potatoes in straw. The idea is that the straw blocks out the light as well as dirt, fooling the plant into thinking it's underground. It's quicker, cheaper and requires a fuck of a lot less effort to apply. Plus, it has the added advantage of being easy to lift away and compost once harvesting's begun. No more digging for potatoes; now I just have to lift away the straw et voila.

At least, therein lies the theory. I'm willing to give it a go because it'll save me so much work, but I'm not convinced that it will block out the light well enough to not affect the harvest. Plus I've got trust issues with straw due to previous bad experiences. This time, I bought the straw from a local farm shop instead of pet straw, which brought its own issues. A bag was £2 and a bale was £3. I'd be a fool not to buy a bale, right?

Turns out that bales are very good value for money, as they are very heavily compressed and contain a lot of straw. The tied bale just about fit in the boot of my estate car. I put it in my shed and then cut the pieces of string that were holding it together so I could get some out. And then it just about fit in the shed. I used as much of it as I could, but I still have this much left:

Let's hope I don't need anything towards the back of that shed for another year or so.

Not a clue what I'm going to do with it.

The other disaster recently was not self-inflicted, but was instead the actions of the bloody winds that will not stop whistling about. My beautiful vertical gardening strawberry planters survived everything that nature could throw at them. Unfortunately, the fence that they were hanging from did not.

 Before

 After

After repairs. I was too upset to take a photo of what they looked like when I found them.

Thankfully, they all appear to have survived their faceplant to the concrete and I've managed to replant all of the ones that were thrown free. Whether they'll produce anything this year or be too traumatised is in the balance. I've also got my nifty vertical gardening planters, that are supposed to lift the strawberries into the sunlight and away from slugs and other pests, sitting on the ground, which is far from ideal. At some point, I'll look at finding somewhere else to hang them, but at present I just don't want to risk them going for a burton again.

Still, to end on a cheerful note, here's a picture of the vegetable garden in all its glory, lovingly stitched together from several different photographs.

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

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

Why March needs a good punch up the bracket

This month has been something of a disaster in the garden. Firstly, you may remember the over-wintered cauliflower that formed very tiny heads very early. The ones where I quipped that I should harvest the 5p sized heads now and have done with it to avoid further disappointment?

I'm a pretty flower!

Should've listened to my own advice, no matter how sarcastic it was.

Secondly, the Swift variety potatoes that I bought that were supposed to be harvestable in mid-April? There is not a single hint of a potato plant yet - I appear to just be providing lodgings for bags of dirt. I'm not hopeful of homegrown potatoes in a fortnight's time.

"Swift"

Thirdly, I planted the next tranche of broccoli seeds into pots before I went away from home for a long weekend. I didn't put them under the artificial sun because it seemed pointless to waste electricity on unsprouted seeds. I come back to:

The one time I don't want you to be bloody efficient and quick sprouting. No, Up =/= Light! Not yet, not until I've plugged the sun back in! Just chill the fuck out, okay?

They are now under the artificial sun constantly, in the hope of saving them. I don't hold out much hope.

Now, this shouldn't've been a massive disaster. I had my most successful seedlings ever this year - sown in February, nurtured under the artificial sun and I'd spent this month acclimatising them to outside conditions, ready to be planted out in a week or two. I had doted on those seedlings, giving them perfect soil, perfect conditions and going out to move them between the mini-greenhouse for shelter and warmth and outside in the sunniest spot in the garden to help their growth. I was going to have early broccoli, created myself purely from seeds and it was going to be beautiful.

And they would've been delicious.

You may notice a lot of the conditional perfect in that above description. You may also notice that, in the picture, taken just three days ago, they are on top of the mini-greenhouse, rather then inside. The weather had been fine and they needed to get inured to a little bit of wind and rain to build them up big and strong. So, that was where they were left when I left for the weekend.

Anyone who's been in Bath this weekend will attest to the 30mph+ winds over the last couple of days. I live on top of a tall hill. There is no current picture of what remains of the seedlings; I'm too upset.

Needless to say, I shan't be having early broccoli this year.

Bollocks.

PJW