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

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

Strawberries and option paralysis

After rebuilding my strawberry patch last year, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the results. It didn't provide a huge number of strawberries and those that were produced weren't great shakes in the taste department. After having gone through the effort and worked hard to keep pests away, this was slightly disappointing.

However, a little bit of research came up with a few reasons why and a lot of them were very easily fixed. I recently acquired the new James Wong book, Grow for Flavour (which I would thoroughly recommend to all and sundry), in which he's done research, experiments and read a lot of scientific papers to find the tricks and techniques to get the most out of growing your own. Like LifeHacking for gardening.

One of the major issues is sunlight. I got unexpectedly excellent results from a pre-made hanging basket of strawberries that I picked up from a garden centre and after a bit of thought, I realised why. The strawberry bed was against the 4ft high garden fence to next door, which is north-facing, whereas the hanging basket was south-facing. Now, I know plants like sunlight (I'm an expert, you know), but I hadn't realised a few extra hours sun could make such a difference to the flavour of a fruit. According to Mr Wong's research, strawberries in full sun are up to 7x sweeter than those in shade and the difference was noticeable in my garden.

In addition, the quality of varieties available to grow differs wildly. I'd kinda assumed garden centres would only sell nice varieties, but the majority of ones available were Elsanta or Sonata, which are the ones that supermarkets use. They're not terrible, but they're cultivars that are optimised for a) durability in transport, b) shelf-life, and c) size, with taste coming a long way down the list of priorities. Apparently they sell from garden centres because people want to buy what they're used to seeing in the supermarkets, which strikes me as a bit weird; I like growing my own cause it gets me something different to what I can get in supermarkets.

The varieties in my bed weren't bad ones, but they weren't the best ones out there either. That, combined with the need to move to sunnier climes has led to me scrapping the whole bed and starting again.

I have two distinct sections of garden around my house - the useful garden, where the vegetables grow, and the pretty garden, which is mostly non-functional except for a couple of fruit trees. The agreement with my wife is that the vegetable beds can expand as I like, as long as they don't broach the border into the pretty garden. The only problem is that the pretty garden gets the most sunlight and there was nowhere really in the useful garden that they could go. So my wife has rather foolishly allowed the strawberries to make their home just on the edge of the pretty garden. I don't think she realises what she's done.

The thin end of the wedge. Soon, it'll be all, "Hey sweetheart, you know how strawberries were allowed as an exception? Well, courgettes are a flowering plant too and they're really very pretty in their own right..."

I'm once again experimenting with vertical gardening, after last year's efforts ended in total failure. The above rather nifty wooden planters came from e-Bay and cost £22 each - they hook over and hang from the top of the fence and are just the right size for a strawberry plant each. The plants for these ones are Snow Whites, which are one of the ones recommended by James Wong. They also have the advantage of being white-coloured, which means birds don't recognise them as food, so no netting required.

One thing to look out for when buying strawberries - there are listings on Amazon and Etsy and e-Bay for strawberry seeds for berries of weird and wonderful colours: blue, black, yellow, etc. Unfortunately, these are all scams. You buy a seed packet for £2 a go and by the time you've grown them and found they're ordinary strawberries (or worse, whatever weed seeds were easily available to the vendor), any refund period has long since expired. Be careful when buying seeds online!

Anyway, going back to more normal coloured strawberries, my other varieties are Buddy, Red Gauntlet, and Honeyoye (latter two available from Homebase, whose website is rubbish). These, unfortunately, are visible to birds and so need to be underneath netting if we want to see any of them.

Thoroughly covered in garden netting and thus entirely secure against any birds or Peters who might want to get at the strawberries.

As I've mentioned before, I hate garden netting. It tangles as soon as you look at it, hooks around everything but the thing you actually want to fix it to and has two possible settings - a) fly off in the wind and trip up Peter when he next goes through the garden or b) so tightly secured that it's impossible for me to actually get in when I need to harvest or tend the plants. I'm hoping this teepee thing will work, although history doesn't lend itself to that hope.

The upshot of all this strawberry manoeuvring is that I now have a 2m x 1m vegetable bed sitting empty in the garden and I've found myself a little bit lost for ideas as to what to put in it.

This is very odd for me, as I'm usually complaining about not having enough space, but the bed's not very deep, so it doesn't lend itself to root vegetables or tomatoes. As for brassica, I already have my plan laid out for the space I have, which will give me 7 broccoli, 2 cauliflowers, 7 swedes 3 cabbages and 5 winter brassica, as well as 2 courgettes, 7 sweetcorns, 16 runner beans and 5 broad beans! So I'm a little unsure of what more I could actually need!

Added to this, the very fact of having space is leaving me with option paralysis - I'm just not used to being able to plant more than I planned for. Actually planting more than I planned for is a regular occurrence, but having the space for it is weird.

I've settled on using the space for three more cauliflowers, an extra broccoli, and some more beans and courgettes (sort of a two sisters approach). The first one is because I live in hope of actually seeing a viable home-grown cauliflower one day and the last three because they are massively productive and easy to freeze, so I'm hoping they'll to fill my freezer and enable me to last slightly longer through winter this year.

PJW

Growing up

Working in a relatively limited growing area, I've been interested in the idea of vertical gardening for a while. The idea is to have plants that grow up, rather than along, and use walls and shelving to create several tiers. Most of the really interesting ideas have been either out of my budget or impractical for my garden due to limited angles of sunlight, however a friend linked me to one that I thought was worth a try, mostly because I had all the raw materials to hand.

So far, I can thoroughly recommend it for people who want to play along at home. All you need is a drainpipe on a wall that doesn't point north, some compost and a lot of plastic bottles.

Did I mention my Diet Coke addiction? Plastic bottles were never going to be the limiting factor.

What you need to do:

• Cut the base off all but two of the bottles and wash them out thoroughly. Remove the labels and throw away all but two of the caps.
• Select one bottle to be the bottom of the tower and screw one of the caps on tightly. Take a small, sharp knife and stab two holes on opposite sides, just above where the bottle curves into the neck. These are drainage holes to make sure it doesn't get water-logged.
• Fill your newly created bottom bottle with compost. Make sure to pack it tightly or the whole thing will go slightly wobbly later. Place it at the bottom of your drainpipe, facing as close to south as you can get it. I put mine in a pot full of compost for extra stability.
• Take a second bottle and wedge it, neck first, into the bottom one. Fill with compost. Repeat until you have only the two uncut bottles left.








• Once you've reached your last two bottles, cut them both in half. Drill/bore with a knife a very small hole in the top of the last remaining cap and screw it to one of the bottles. Put the capped bottle inside the other and wedge it in as hard as it can go. You should have something which looks like this:
  
  


• This is the reservoir. Shove it into the top bottle of compost and then fill it with water. The water should drain through the little hole in the cap, dripping through the clear air created by jamming the two bottle halves together and feed into the compost.
  
  
  
• Strap this tower of bottles to the drainpipe to prevent it from falling over and then start making planting holes.






• The original guide recommends herbs and lettuce, but that's boring. So while I am doing some lettuce and some mint and oregano (thyme and rosemary have their own pots, while parsley is in the spinach patch, keeping the slugs away (in theory)), the top half is now filled with strawberry plants rescued from the runners that tried to escape my straw and weed-ridden bed last year.
  
  

Overall, I'm very pleased with the results. There are several major advantages to growing lettuces and strawberries like this, not least of which is that a lateral bed containing this many plants would be at least 1m² of garden space instead of 1 coke-bottle's-width in a space that wouldn't've been used anyway.

It'll also lift the fruit and leaves away from marauding slugs and woodlice and the top-down watering makes it phenomenally easy to keep the soil moist and add liquid fertiliser when needed. Granted, the plants at the top will get first dibs on the nutrients, but that's why the strawberries are at the top and the less hungry lettuces and indestructible mint are at the bottom. My only concern is that I may have tried to squeeze in too many strawberry plants and they may be too squashed up to produce much. I guess time will tell.

PJW