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

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

A surfeit of cauliflowers

Speaking of not liking to throw viable plants away, my order of 21 cauliflowers seedlings was delivered today.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I made the decision to just buy cauliflower seedlings to avoid the debacle of last year and was kind of narked that I could only buy interesting colours in a quantity sufficient to cover 3m2 of nothing but cauliflowers. I have room for 5 cauliflowers in my vegetable plot according to my plan and I reckon I can probably squeeze in a sixth if I harvest a cabbage next week. This means that I now have I now have 12 cauliflower seedlings in various-sized pots, taking up the patio space in the pretty garden, with another 4 still in the packet because I didn't have enough spare pots of sufficient size.

I told you - strawberries were just a red herring the thin end of the wedge,

I'm telling myself that I'm keeping spares in case of the ones I planted out dying, but I can't see myself needing 15 spares, even with my cauliflower-growing skills. Don't suppose anyone wants some cauliflower seedlings? They're in funky colours? Anyone? Bueller?

Anyway, amidst all the shocking waste, those cauliflowers mean that I've just about finished planting for the year. The only things left to go are the climbing beans for the Three Sisters (atMFWTWKLitA) and the winter vegetables - kale, purple sprouting broccoli, over-winter cauliflower and perpetual spinach.

On the subject of over-winter vegetables, I've decided against planting more broad beans for next year. The ones for this year have been a phenomenal success, providing massive plants, loads of veg and doing exactly what I expected of them. The only downside is that I've realised that I don't really like broad beans. Only a minor drawback, I know, but probably enough that I won't try and grow them again next year.

Probably.

Finally, does anyone have any idea what purslane is meant to look like? It's one of my exciting new vegetables for this year and it's supposed to grow really well as ground-cover under broccoli, but I'm having a little trouble.

See the four big things in the corners? Those are definitely broccoli - I know this because I planted the seeds in deliberate locations and marked where I planted them. See the green bits in the middle? Yeah, they could be anything.

I may have improved a lot from my days of categorising every plant as "probably a nettle", because it stood as good a chance of being right as any other guess I made, but I apparently still can't tell the difference between a weed and something I want to grow. Usually, I rely on just murdering with a hoe everything that's not in the precise location where I know I planted something, but that doesn't really work when the sowing instructions for a vegetable are "chuck on ground and eat whatever comes up."

Hopefully none of the weeds in my garden are nightshade.

I think I might just plant some more broad beans.

PJW

The Ocaey-Cokey

So, anyone remember the new experimental tomato/oca bed, that was based on top of the bones of the failed carrot experiment from last year? The theory was very simple - a ring of tomato plants, which would grow big and tall, with a bushy oca plant in the middle that would spread out and provide ground cover without shading the tomatoes overly.

I'm beginning to think that pot's cursed.

Big and tall.

This is the problem with growing odd vegetables - it's very easy to get information on how a broccoli plant grows and what to expect of it, but more difficult to find what an oca does without growing one. I think it's safe to say it doesn't play nicely with tomatoes in that close a proximity.

I did consider trying to rescue the experiment - I turned the pot so that the shaded tomatoes would get their time in the sun, I fed them special tonics to encourage them to grow and I gave thought to trimming back the oca bush, as that allegedly wouldn't hurt the yield with the actual eatey bit being the roots. However, I quickly came to the conclusion that that was just shifting the deckchairs around on the Titanic - the pot either had to contain oca or tomatoes, not both. I had four other oca plants growing in various places in the garden, so that made my choice for me.

What was surprising was that the oca plant came out in one piece. I expected to have to hack it to pieces to get it out, but the root ball was compact enough to fit through the hole in the plastic mulch. I was left with a relatively undamaged plant and the sheer amount of crap that fills my sheds and attics testifies to my waste-not-want-not proclivities.

Thus, the Three Sisters bed has now been transmuted to "The Three Sisters and the Mad First Wife That We Keep Locked in the Attic."

Hannibal yams. Definitely not allowed out to play with the other children.

When I first started planning the garden for this year, I considered planting an oca in this bed on the basis that it would a) need harvesting far later in the year, b) have deep roots and thus not interfere with the sweetcorn or beans and c) is supposed to be low and bushy ground cover that's perfect for keeping weeds out of the empty soil that the sweetcorn and beans have between them. I originally decided not to, on the basis of getting the Three Sisters themselves to work properly before I tried fiddling with the theory and introducing something that could potentially fuck up three other crops. However, it turns out that I'm really bad at throwing away fully grown and viable plants, so here we are - another experiment, this one fenced in to try and keep it from eating the other children. Let's see how well this one goes.

PJW

Overwinter vegetables and first meal of the growing year

Yesterday, I ate my first full meal from the garden, a good two weeks earlier than I did last year. I was very pleased with this. It was horrible. I learned a lot.

The meal was this:

Invisible chips!

Steak, chips, early broad beans and carrots, with the latter two coming from the garden. In theory, fairly simple.

The broad beans came from a November sowing to survive over the winter and provide first vegetables in March/April time. They did the surviving thing great, but failed to produce anything more than leaves and some very nice flowers in April, upon which point, I promptly forgot about them. April's a very busy time as just about everything wants sowing then and my wife and daughter occasionally want attention too, they were right down the bottom of the garden and they kinda... well, fell out of the back of my head.

Until yesterday, when I spotted there were beans aplenty and harvested some of the bigger ones for dinner.

Now, broad beans can be harvested at two stages - either really early, when you can eat them whole like a French or runner bean, or quite late, when you remove the seed pods and just eat the beans inside. Yesterday, I thought I was eating them early. Turns out I'd missed that point by about a week or so. Bugger.

Still, my incompetence aside, there are other beans developing on the plant, and I have now learned to pick them before they look like the above picture. The bitter horrible taste has helped me grow as a person and as a gardener. I'm not sure what my wife gained from the experience. Perhaps nausea.

Still, that was only one vegetable on the plate. Surely the second vegetable could make up for it. Not as though it's my nemesis or anything...

You may remember last year that, in the midst of the great carrot experiment disaster, I had a problem with non-sprouting seeds late on in the planting season and subsequently planted a quick-growing variety in the hope of trying to get them up before the end of the year. I failed utterly at that, but decided to keep the pots going in the hope of overwintering the carrots and getting something useful in the spring. You're not really meant to overwinter carrots, but I thought, if it's good enough for the broad beans, it's good enough for the carrots.

It worked:

Holy crap, actual carrots!

Sort of. These carrots were perfectly edible, if not particularly well sized - that little collection up there was worth just under one adult's portion and I ended up scrubbing them rather than peeling them for fear of them disappearing on me. However, planting in August and harvesting in May has ended up with some very confused carrots.

Carrots are a biannual plant, that we treat as an annual. Basically, they're designed with a two year lifecycle - they grow first year, survive the winter and then use the second year to turn into pretty flowers so that they can spread their seed. The tasty bit is where they're interrupted halfway through, when they've stored up enough food to survive winter, but before they've put any of that into being a flower.

These ones have survived the winter, started thinking about turning into flowers and then have been yanked up and eaten. As a result, they ended up being neither one thing nor the other. The outside was nice, but each one had woody cores that just had to be eaten around. Considering that they were too skinny to peel, that didn't leave much actual eatey-bit.

Tasty. I don't think my wife's forgiven me for cooking her dinner yet.

However, overwintering carrots is still a partial success story, and I think there's options to improve. People on the interwebs have tried this before me and a bit of research suggests that I want to plant them a month earlier and harvest them at least 2 months earlier, in order to give them a bit more time to prepare for winter and a bit less time in the spring to think about flowering.

Basically, overwintering beans and carrots is great and could feasibly result in me getting first meals as early as March. I've just been slightly incompetent this year.

In other garden news, I am very close to my first functioning cabbage, which will no doubt be used to further my 1 year old daughter's education in her Polish heritage with glomkis. I think that'll be ready for next weekend. We had also had our first five strawberries from the clay pot, which I made the mistake of harvesting while carrying said daughter. She took one out of my hand, decided it was nice, and then demanded the rest. Wife and I shared one between us.

The strawberry plants that were involved in the accident appear to have mostly survived, although they're still a bit too traumatised to produce fruit yet. Lots of flowers and leaves, no fruit.

And finally, as I'm sure you've all been waiting for, the results of the final two Ruby Queen sweetcorn sowings:

Guess it wasn't the plastic root-trainers that caused the last 52 seeds to fail, huh.

Nothing from another 5 seeds. Quelle surprise. Also, bollocks.

Still, I have planted out my three successful Ruby Queen plants and hopefully they are enough to be fertile with each other and not too inbred.

Cletus, the slack-jawed sweetcorn husk, in the making

PJW

My mind is going... I can feel it.

Always label everything in the garden. You always plant seeds and you're so enthralled by the idea of what you're planting that you're convinced it's burned into your memory. Then you go away for a week or two and do real life stuff, only to end up with this:

I have no idea what these are. They're definitely intentional, but that's pretty much all I've got. Courgettes, maybe? Asparagus peas? I don't think they're dwarf beans, but I can't rule it out. What really bugs me is that I distinctly remember being pleased about planting them, about having found a place where they'd fit, because I was worried I wouldn't have room. But nothing besides remains - it's been eaten by mortgage broking.

I don't even remember if there's actually meant to be three of them or if there's only meant to be one and I was going to weed out the weakest two seedlings.

It's made worse by the fact that this is one of a set of two identical planters in my garden, which I normally plant identical crops in. The second one also has something unidentified growing, but it's clearly not the same thing.

Don't drunk-garden, kids.

Chard? Parsnips? Beetroot? Spinach? Could be anything. Vegetable surprise.

What hasn't been a surprise is the winner of the sweetcorn race of last week. Bloody Butcher produced seedlings in 7 of the 9 pots planted and actually produced 2 seedlings for 4 of the pots. That's 18 seeds, 11 germinations, resulting in 7 successful seedlings that are now thriving in the Three Sisters bed.

The second batch of Ruby Queen, on the other hand...  has been slightly less successful.

ONE!?

One damned seedling, again growing at a ferocious rate yet surrounded by barren earth. That's 1 from 26 seeds in this sowing, bringing us to a grand success ratio of 3 from 55 seeds. Radioactivity be damned, that's a shitty strike rate. Unfortunately Ruby Queen is very difficult to get in this country, as it's not a popular cultivar (no idea why!) over here, so I can't even change supplier and blame the seed.

My only thought is that the Ruby Queen has been planted in the plastic root-trainers, while the Bloody Butcher has been solely planted in the little degradable fibre-pots. Technically speaking, the root trainers are supposed to give better performance (which was why the Ruby Queen got in there, being first-sown and the preferred crop), but I suppose it could be a factor. I've planted the last five kernels of Ruby Queen into two fibre-pots, in an attempt to get one more seedling to at least allow me to plant a block of four plants.

Soon to be 3 from 60

That picture is everything that's growing under the artificial sun at the moment and represents the tail end of the indoor planting season. On the left are my new sweetcorn disappointments, the middle is swede and the right are replacement courgettes for the one casualty of the garden so far, which was either squashed by cats or hamstrung by slugs.

This weekend, I'm sowing the beans for the Three Sisters, a couple of rounds of dwarf French beans and the winter vegetables and then that'll pretty much be it for sowings for this year's crops. Next up - the actual eating.

I hope.

PJW