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

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