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

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

Knowing when to fold them

Someone I know has just bought a house and acquired a hugely impressive back garden with it, complete with several empty raised beds. Always one to try and spread my addictions, I've provided him with as many of my spare seeds and plants as he'd take.

However, because I'm not a very nice person, I have also taken the opportunity to give him what I can only describe as the horticultural equivalent of a practical joke. It's a mutant raspberry/loganberry/tayberry/tribble thing which has the advantage of producing lots of tasty fruit, but the fairly major disadvantage of being utterly uncontrollable. I was given it myself by a friend who in fairness did warn me that it would spread everywhere, but I was confident that I could contain it.

On a related topic, let me tell you about what I've been doing today:

He said, "Don't dig it there, dig it elsewhere. You're digging it round and it oughta be square."

More observant people may notice the green leafy thing on the right of the picture. That is the mutant raspberry/tribble. Earlier this year, the scene looked a little more like this:

Mutant raspberry on one side, in its own raised bed, surrounded by bricks and safely walled away from the bed where swedes and cauliflowers will one day grow. I thought I was safe, simply because there was no physical connection between the two sections of garden.

Fast forward three months and I've got little mutant raspberries popping up right smack in the middle of the bed. I would like to make it clear how impressive this is - the plant is going down through gravel, through sand, sideways through a small brick wall, and then breaking up through weed-proof plastic matting and popping up over a metre away from its original source. There are people who escaped from Colditz who would envy that kind of tunnelling ability.

I did have the option of just playing whack-a-mole with it and chopping it down every time it popped up, but I could see that becoming a losing battle very quickly. So instead, I spent the day emptying a 30cm deep and 130cm2 raised bed of soil and packing it into bags, before covering the area in a weedkiller so poisonous that it legally couldn't be sold to me as weedkiller due to EU regulations (if anyone asks, I was either disinfecting a path or clearing away foot-and-mouth disease). I now have to wait a minimum of 2 weeks before putting the dirt back in and another 2 more before I can plant anything there.

Not pictured - the unnerving sizzling noise and the frenzied flailing of dying earthworms that I didn't see before pouring it on.

I then put down two layers of super-strong weed-proof plastic and bricked the whole thing in. The only way that the mutant raspberry is getting in this time is by tunnelling through concrete or going through this woven plastic fabric, twice, which is guaranteed impermeable for 15 years based on just one layer.

I fully expect to see a mutant raspberry sprout popping up before the end of the season.

In my defence, I did warn my friend what I was giving him. I don't think he took me seriously enough though. Sorry mate, no take-backs, even if it eats your house.

PJW

Courgette Envy - How to play along at home, part 3

Courgette Envy sounds like a weird band name.

My eldest sister last year acquired a garden of her very own and was very taken with the idea of copying my grow-your-own efforts. I recommended a brassica cage, a few plants that were rewarding to grow, and a few bits of hard-won advice that I'd worked out from two years of experimentation. One of the things I especially recommended was a courgette plant, which would also be my first recommendation to anyone looking to dip their toe into GYO.

Five reasons to grow courgettes at home:
1) They're very hard to kill and very easy to grow. If they weren't so useful, I'd swear they were a weed.
2) They produce loads of fruit*. One plant alone will do plenty for the average person's needs and two will keep you very well stocked.
3) They're perfect for container gardening - they can grow in even quite a small pot, so so excellent surface area/food ratio and brilliant if you don't have anything but a patio.
4) They are very cheap - I got my pots at Poundland and my seeds at Lidl, so all I really had to pay for was the dirt.
5) They taste completely different when grown at home to the rubbery, tasteless mushy stuff that populates supermarkets, especially if you go for a yellow-skinned variety which are far more tender and far less bitter than the green ones that you're thinking of if you're making that face. Yes, I can see you doing it. Cut it out and give them a chance.

Growing courgettes is the simplest thing you'll ever do in a garden. You can either sow the seeds inside in April in little seed trays and then repot the seedlings outside in May, or you can just sow them directly into the big pots in May. They will grow without too much attention from you and form big-leafed spiky plants with plenty of flowers. Each flower will elongate out into a stalk that will thicken into a courgette. The size of courgette possible will depend on the size of the pot that it's in and you'll learn to recognise that after the first few. When they're at optimum size, twist it off straight away and then the plant will focus on growing more. A well-fed plant will produce one a week - I feed mine every other day (or so) with Tomorite, which is £3 for about 100 doses and produce results along this sort of size:

No traditional teaspoon for size-comparison today, so that dish they're in is the size of a small plate. Just in case you were curious.

Now, my sister has grown her courgette plant in the ground, inside the brassica cage, against my recommendations. I was of the opinion that she could get another broccoli plant in there and using space in the cage was a waste for a plant that caterpillars don't eat. However, she wanted everything together and so overrode me and put it into the ground. Now, both of us are rueing our decisions, for different reasons.

She offered to give me a courgette from her garden this weekend and I arranged to trade her one of my yellows for her green, as I thought it would keep to the spirit of the challenge. I wouldn't be importing food, but swapping it, meaning that the vegetable would still be the result of my garden. I knew my sister said they'd grown very big, so I cultivated the biggest courgette I could with extra feeds and watering, to make sure it was an even trade.

I'll spoil the ending and let you know that it wasn't really an even trade

My sister has managed to grow a marrow. It's got to be at least two foot long and for girth I can't quite reach all the way round it even if I'm using both hands. I had to put a plastic bag over the end after I cut it for its first use and it was alarmingly akin to applying a condom to the Incredible Hulk.

HULK TRUST YOU, BUT PREFER TO GET MUTUAL STD TESTS DONE BEFORE SMASHING BAREBACK!

Apparently the plant itself has taken over the bed and is bullying the brussel sprouts, who are normally the big kid in the playground. It also defends its bounty by hiding the fruit in thick leaf cover and spikes that are verging on thorns. Needless to say, next year she plans to take my advice and grow in pots, while I'm already working out which bed I can set to one side to grow my own monster.

I plan on chopping up, blanching and freezing as much of it as I can, in the same way I described last month. It won't store to be used as a standalone vegetable, but frozen courgette will go great in stews and soups. It'll be a useful addition to the winter arsenal, especially since the beans supply has now dried up without me ever getting around to really saving any of them. Slightly worried about running short come January...

PJW

*Yes, it's a fruit. The eaty bit is fleshy with seeds in the middle. Bit of wisdom for you - don't put it in a fruit salad.

How to play along at home, part 2 - Carrots

When I was writing up about the vertical garden, one of the comments that I got about it was that it was a brilliant idea, but completely impossible for that person to copy. I launched in with my patented zeal of the converted to point out that it was simple, easy and fun, only to get the response that they were in a first floor flat and they didn't think it would go down well if they strapped the plastic bottles to somebody else's wall.

Never deterred, I decided to try some experiments to see just how small and cheap an indoor space one could grow vegetables in, to see whether I could lure them in via another route. Which leads us to:

Five reasons to grow carrots at home:
1) They require almost no space, not a huge amount of light and are very forgiving plants
2) They taste loads better than supermarket carrots.
3) They cost £0.69 for a packet of 500 seeds in Homebase/Sainsburys/Aldi.
4) Store bought carrots go manky very quickly - if you grow your own, they'll keep for months just in the ground.
5) You can grow a range of funky colours, which are healthier for you than just eating monochrome carrots. This year, I'm growing red, orange and purple carrots and have had to talk myself out of white, yellow and marbled ones too.

Not pictured - Any photoshopping. That's actually what they look like.

Carrots grow vertically, so they're excellent for gardening in small spaces. All they need is space for the root to grow down and form the long carrotty-root that's the eating bit. Usually, I grow them in plastic plant pots outside, and if you've got a garden, that's what I'd recommend. You can get a 40cm pot in Sainsburys for £3.50 at the moment, which is enough for around 25-30 carrots at a time (you can replant every time you pull one, so you get a constant supply).

However, for those who haven't a garden or haven't the space, or just fancy a small-scale tinker, the best pot is to recycle a plastic container. I'm experimenting with a 2l plastic coke bottle and a 4 pint plastic milk bottle.

Obviously the first step is to cut the top off to leave an open pot. Stab some reasonably-sized water holes in the sides near the bottom with scissors or a sharp knife and then fill with compost (£2.50 from Sainsburys for a small bag).

Carrots grow from tiny seeds, which is the one thing against them for a novice gardener - they're fiddly little bastards.

Most guides to growing carrots say to sprinkle them lightly over the area where they're supposed to be growing and then thin the seedlings out when they come up, which is to say to pull up any seedlings that are growing too close together. However, I don't like doing that for a few reasons: it's more work, I'm paranoid about pulling up the wrong one and ruining it and I feel crap about putting my efforts into making too many things grow and then killing the spares.

So I follow an alternate route, which is to plant one seed for each intended carrot. This has the major advantage of allowing me to space the carrots perfectly, so that I don't end up with stunted, overcrowded carrots. However, it does mean that if a seed fails to germinate, then that spot doesn't get a carrot as there's no redundancy built it. That's not a huge problem though, as I can just put another carrot seed into that empty space when I see it's not coming up and get that carrot a few weeks later.

In the coke bottle, I planted three seeds in a triangle shape and in the milk bottle I planted four in a square. They need to be about 3-4cm from each other - picture the fully fledged carrot that you plan to get out of this and make sure it's got room enough to grow to that size without bumping into its neighbours.

Then cover with a very thin layer of compost and water thoroughly. Carrots need quite a bit of water to grow (being roots and all) and inside carrots obviously don't get the benefit of rainfall to help them along. The best and easiest way to water inside carrots is from the bottom. Put your ersatz pots on a vaguely sunny windowsill in old Chinese takeaway boxes which you fill with water. The holes you stabbed in the bottom will allow water to be drawn up into the dirt (as long as they're underwater, obviously) and the roots will reach down to get it, resulting in nice big carrots. Keep filling up the takeaway box until the water stops disappearing and then just keep it topped up when you notice it's dropped below the water holes.

Now all that's left is to wait for your carrots to grow. They take anywhere from 2 to 4 months, depending on the variety and also how good the conditions are - the more sunlight the better. You can pull them early for baby carrots or wait longer for bigger ones, but waiting for monster ones will lose you some flavour. The green fuzzy bit on top does give you a bit of a clue to how big the root will be, but sometimes you can get massive leaves and a pathetic carrot only for the spindly leaves next to it to be hiding a huge carrot. It's pot luck and you won't know till you pull one up, which is part of the fun.

PJW

PS. There are still some free strawberries going if anyone wants some. I thinned out the bed a little bit more today and now have 13 spare!