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

New Year, New Challenges

It's a new growing season and it's almost time to start planting things again!

Last year was all about 'the challenge' - whether I could grow an entire year's worth of vegetables in my back garden and go a calendar year without having to buy any. As it turns out, I couldn't. Well, I couldn't on my first attempt, certainly not with the number of mistakes I'd made or the choices of vegetables that I'd gone for.

Now, I did consider trying again. It is possible to do, but the problem is that it's not possible to do in a very interesting fashion - the answer seems to lie in planting nothing but lots of potatoes, green beans, courgettes and broccoli, and cramming the freezer full to survive winter. This strikes me as dull.

So instead, I've decided to give the challenge a miss and instead have a mixture of productive and fun. This means that carrots are still on the list, but sod growing any orange ones - I'm growing purple or nothing this year. Same with cauliflower. I have an ambition of growing the ingredients for a vibrant purple soup.

I am also growing a lot of plants that I've found in a very interesting book, James Wong's Homegrown Revolution. The theory behind it is that there are over 2,500 edible plants that can grow in the UK's climate, but most gardening books and garden centres only talk about 20-25: sprouts, swede, carrots, cauliflower, cabbages, potatoes, etc. Back in Victorian times, people grew all kinds of crazy things in their gardens; there are reports of people successfully growing pineapples using only glass and horse manure for heating. However, this all stopped with the World Wars and the emphasis on Dig For Victory - everyone was encouraged to Grow Your Own, but most people didn't know how. So the propaganda departments made leaflets and other literature telling people how and what to grow.

Nicked from https://emmymakesthings.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/vegetables-all-year-round/

So the reason why garden centres sell you cauliflowers, despite them being an absolute bitch to grow, is because a wartime bureaucrat had to make a list of patriotic vegetables - brassica made it in, while things like jerusalem artichokes and courgettes did not. After the war and rationing, people were in the habit of growing and eating the same old staid vegetables that the government told them it was patriotic to grow.

Homegrown Revolution's is a book about the many and varying vegetables that are fun, productive, make the best use of space and thrive in the UK climate. This year I will be trying out asparagus peas, kokihi, chop suey greens, electric daisies, saffron, purslane, sea kale, day lilies, dahlia yams, chinese artichokes and oca. Looking forward to new experiences from those!

January and February in the garden have mostly been about planning where I'm going to fit all of these things in. In previous years, there's been so much expansion of beds and creating new spaces, that most of the growing areas were filled with new compost and so rotation wasn't strictly necessary. This year, however, I'm absolutely determined I'm not going to create any more beds, so I've gone for some crop rotation and am resting my two oldest brassica beds to give them a chance to recover.

This means that I have two 1.25m square beds to use on interesting things. One of them is going to be set aside for root vegetables, which is a bit boring, but the second is going to be used for another go at The Three Sisters companion planting system. Last year, this experiment was notable for me planting the wrong type of beans (dwarf rather than climbing) and getting absolutely sod all out of planting a pumpkin. However, I did get some nice beans and sweetcorn out of it, and the idea of a three-way companion plant interests me enough to give it another go, but substituting courgettes in for the recalcitrant pumpkins. Plus, I found a variety of red sweetcorn to plant, which is worth the entrance fee on its own.

Do you see how cool this is!?

Here's the plan of how everything will fit together:

Click to embiggen.

This plan is already out of date and I've yet to actually plant anything out yet. Par for the course. Planting proper starts this week, beginning with early broccoli, indoor carrots, early onions and the first potato planting of the year. Looking forward to it.

PJW