The carrot experiments - an update

Constant readers may remember that I was having a problem with this:

And so I attempted to do this:

To try and achieve this:

The results so far have been promisingish. There was a very long stage where I thought the entire thing would be an expensive mistake. The compost sank slightly and the sand didn't, which meant watering it resulted in the sand washing over the earthy bits where the carrots were supposed to be growing. In addition, water + sand resulted in a lovely greenish tinge, which didn't fill me with hope that I'd be growing anything but mould.

Maybe I could claim to be growing nutritious algae? Or creating my own penicillin? Would you guys buy that?

However, little shoots finally appeared and it looks as though we have full-blown carrot action happening.

In theory. I've been betrayed by promising-looking carrots before, the filthy leafy-headed liars. We'll have to see what's actually underneath when the time comes to pull them up.

The observant among you might notice that only half of the carrots have come up. When I decided to grow my second batch of carrots this year, I bought several different varieties of interesting colours to experiment with, but I also bought a good amount of a nice reliable orange type called Eskimo. It was basically my control group - the weird carrots might fail, but I could rely on Eskimo to come up regardless of weather, watering or whatever.

You can probably guess which seed variety was planted in the blank spaces. Bugger.

By the time I'd realised that the entire packet of seeds was rubbish, I'd already sown about 30 of them in various pots and planters around the garden. Every time a tub came free after harvesting onions, nasturtiums, mange tout or garlic, I'd followed the same plan as with the experiment - I'd bored out holes with the drainpipe, filled them with special compost and stuck some Eskimo seeds in there to provide autumnal vegetables. To say I'm annoyed at wasting my time and effort would be something of an understatement.

To make matters worse, by the time I'd realised that I'd effectively been carefully planting expensive grit, it was verging on too late to rectify the situation. You *can* plant carrots in August, but they have to be the quickest growing variety possible, you have to hope there won't be an early frost and you have to feel lucky. Plus, when the packet says you can sow in August, they really mean the weekend of the 2nd/3rd, rather than the 24th.

Still, I've gone around today and resown all the sites with a variety of carrot seeds that I know do grow very quickly. I used them last year to great success and I've got no idea why I didn't just use them again - I still had half a packet left! I suspect I got overexcited with the January seed-buying fervour and wanted to try something new. Shan't be doing that again.

I also took the opportunity to move some dirt around and built a new bed for carrots, as I've discovered that a lot of vegetables do better in a bed than a pot and want to see if that holds true for carrots. With any luck, the big sowing today should means that we'll be inundated with carrots for Christmas. We'll see.

In one last bit of more successful news, I finally have a confirmed cauliflower head!

It's only one, out of nine, and it is very petite, but I'm still claiming success. With luck, it's still growing and there'll actually be enough for a meal in there when it comes time to slaughter it. Here's hoping.

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.

Beanpocalypse!

This month has mostly been about beans.

This was the first harvest. I've brought in about four times as much since then.

The garden has 10 runner bean plants planted to grow up a bamboo A-frame, another three in a planter by the door and a selection of 5-6 dwarf yellow French beans to go in the Three Sisters bed. I am coming to the conclusion that I have overplanted. For the past fortnight, the question has not been, "What shall we have for dinner?" but, "What are we eating with the beans?"

Still, I'd rather this than be struggling for what to put on the plate like I was in June. The garden is now providing a bit of variety - I've had broccoli and cabbage and courgette and potato and beans of course. We have had two new things this year. The first is onions, which is kinda sad considering that they were one of the first things I tried to grow three years back. I've had sort-of onions in previous years, but they were sad little failures that I only ate because I'd put work into them. This year, they're actually worth the name.

The second new thing is aubergines, which is very exciting. I did try growing my own from seed, but they didn't really get anywhere, possibly because they failed to get repotted during a busy period. The success story has come from a grafted plant, which is quite a nifty idea if you're happy to pay the extra. Basically, the garden centre grow a plant that has a big, strong and sturdy root system and then decapitate it. They then graft a plant that normally had a weedy or temperamental root system (like aubergine, tomato, cucumber, etc) onto the stump and encourage the two halves to bond.

It's a brilliant idea, because instead of having a boring plant that's really good at absorbing nutrients and a useful plant that dies if you cough on it, you have a Frankenstein's monster that's hardy and useful. The idea was taken to it's zenith when somebody managed to create the utterly pointless, but kinda cool, TomTato, which is a cherry tomato plant that grows potatoes with its roots.

Like Frankenstein's monster, but without its creator being a complete emo tool. Note also, the photo-bombing green bean in the top right.

Anyway, the grafted aubergine has produced enough already to make the sole recipe I know with aubergine, which is pork chops with an aubergine/tomato thing. Very nice indeed.

One other thing which has been new this year is coloured vegetables. I've tried before without much luck, but I've already managed to get a whole meal out of them: yellow courgettes, yellow beans and purple carrots.

A carrot of a half-decent size! Not from the experimental pot though - I'll update on that in the next post.

The one major thing missing from that dish is the interesting-coloured cauliflowers that I planted way back in March. I have yet to see hide nor hair of an actual cauliflower head forming so far, even on the ones that I cheated and bought from the garden centre. The grand plan was supposed to have me eating cauliflower back in May/June, but I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if I was just even more over-optimistic than I'd realised. I'm sure last year I had cauliflowers before now, but they were sickly things riddled with caterpillars that tasted absolutely disgusting, so it's entirely possible that the heads were formed in a final doomed effort to procreate before death by pests.

All mouth. No trousers.

The non-production of cauliflower is pretty much solely responsible for the traffic jam of winter vegetables. The orphanage for displaced brassicae is falling apart, pretty much as quickly as you would expect my bodge-work to do, and it's going to be interesting to see if I actually get to transplant any more of the winter veg before they are completely stripped back to the stem by caterpillars and slugs. I may be going hungry come January.

PJW

Harvesting and storing

The broccoli has started coming in across the last fortnight and it's been abundant. The brassica cages have been an absolute, unqualified success so far; I wish I had pictures of last year's crops to show so I could compare and contrast. Shockingly enough, I wasn't particularly keen on photographing the mess that I had last year - I was more interested in trying to spot and pick out cooked caterpillars before I ate them.

My saviour!

They are by far and away the best investment I have made in my garden in my three years of doing it and I'd say they're an absolute must if you're planning on growing anything leafy like cabbages, broccoli or cauliflower, even if you only get small ones for the individual plants. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and keeping the butterflies and snails (and cats) from getting to my beloved brassicae has made my life so much easier.

So, away from the love-letter to the cages, back to the broccoli.

Of course, almost all of the broccoli has come to fruition at the same time. The florets of calabrese broccoli are basically repressed flowers and the aim of the plant is for those flowers to come to fruition. Of course, your aim is to get the head as big as possible before it turns into horrible bitter seedy flowers, which is a delicate balancing act and one made more difficult by the recent hot spell. Broccoli are cold-weather plants, so if they overheat, they think they're imminently about to die and so immediately switch to flowering mode to try and spread their seed before their demise.

Therefore, I've ended up with a mass of broccoli this week. Technically speaking, we could just eat broccoli every day until the glut is gone, but I am both lazy and very poor at managing my eating habits, so that seems unlikely to happen. Instead, I have gone down the route of freezing what I haven't eaten/cooked and stored for daughter.

For those playing along at home, broccoli and other green vegetables are the easiest things in the world to freeze. The trick is to cut it into florets and then blanch them, which is basically scalding the vegetable for 2 minutes in rapidly boiling water before dunking in very cold water. The short time in the heat destroys the enzymes that degrade stored vegetables and also kills off a load of bacteria, while the cold water stops it from cooking through. You can then drain off the water, put in a zip-bag and freeze in the bottom of your freezer. Et voila, instead of having a fortnight of nothing but broccoli and then none till next year, this broccoli will last till November and next month's secondary harvest will do me through Christmas and into the new year.

Of course, I complain about having a surfeit of broccoli now, but this is going to seem like halcyon days once the green beans come in next month.

Yes, every one of those little stringy bits is going to turn into a green bean. No, I don't think scurvy is going to be an issue this month.

PJW

The Three (English) Sisters

While my garden is neither self-sufficient nor organic (and I hate the automatic assumption that organic is best and anything carrying that label is naturally healthier), I am very interested in the natural ways of getting the most out of the land and the space that you have. I've already experimented with companion plants to ward off pests, with using green manure to prepare beds and will be paying a lot more attention to crop rotation this year.

One interesting idea which I came across was that of The Three Sisters growing system, which is an Iroquois tradition of growing beans, maize and squash together. Most companion planting involves a main crop and a secondary crop in the same bed, with the idea that the secondary crop does something beneficial for the main crop without getting anything back (or in some cases, with the secondary crop being completely ruined). The Three Sisters is novel in that all three of the crops are the main crop and each of them benefit the others. The maize provides a support for the green beans to grow up, the green beans put nitrogen into the soil and the squash has large leaves that shade the ground, keeping the roots cool and blotting out weeds. None of the plants compete with each other as they require different minerals from the soil and the result is a better crop for all three.

I wanted to try this myself, but there were a few factors that were holding me back.
  1) South-west England is not north-eastern America. Maize doesn't particularly like south-west England and, if I was to plant all three plants together, the greater rainfall and lesser sunshine would result in the beans growing far faster than the maize, meaning they had nothing to grow up. Even if the maize did grow quickly enough, our climate makes for very leafy beans which would blot out the sunlight from anything they climbed up.
  2) It requires a lot of space to do properly. Every guide I've seen suggests a minimum of a 3m² space minimum - I had 1m² maximum.
  3) I don't like squash.

Minor details aside, I decided to try this out for myself. The plan was to grow green beans (up bamboo canes) in an arc at the back corner of the bed so they wouldn't shade out the other crops. The sides of the bed would be lined with blocks of pre-grown sweetcorn seedlings, while at the front corner, I would grow a pumpkin on a mound of compost. Granted, this loses a lot of the effect of the Three Sisters - the seeds won't all be sown in the same mound and the beans won't be growing up the corn, but it's still three disparate crops growing in the same bed and improving each other.

Things got off to a rocky start - I bought a set of twelve sweetcorn seedlings from the garden centre and planted eight of them in the bed. All eight I planted died within a fortnight, eaten by slugs and other predators. Thankfully, I'd kept the last four from the set and potted them up, just in case, so I was able to plant those and watch them die within a couple of days. Cursing, I bought another set of twelve... only for those to suffer exactly the same fate. At the same time, the green beans that I'd planted had sprouted, grown big and strong and put out thick leaves in order to be stripped back to the stalk by whatever was eating the rest of my garden.

Thankfully the third set of sweetcorn and the second planting of beans survived long enough for the copious amounts of slug pellets that I'd been carpeting the garden with to put a big enough dent in the local parasite population. Which led to this situation at the start of this month:

Which has now developed into this:

I am actually in danger of getting corn out of this, which is very cool. Partly because it's a new and exciting first foray into grains, which is cool, but also because I'm not the biggest fan of sweetcorn and I'm reliably informed that it tastes worse the longer its been picked. So corn that's in the supermarket tastes very different to corn that's just been from its soil untimely ripped, which vindicates my decision to grow my own rather than buy it.

Hopefully I'll like fresh corn, else this will be a bit of a failed experiment regardless of the yield. I'm already putting effort into growing pumpkins that I already know I don't like the taste of. My wife wishes to have one to carve for Hallowe'en and I'm helpless before a mild whim of the lady. Plus I didn't realise until it was far too late that courgettes would've filled exactly the same companion niche and so I could've grown something I actually liked instead. Oh well.

PJW

Vegetable jam

I haven't had a chance to do much in the garden of late due to work, family and other commitments and my to-do list was filling up, so I was very glad to set aside this morning as my day for doing all of the gardening chores.

Thor is angry that people are butthurt about a female Thor!* The sky must be rent!

I quite like rain, so I went out anyway, but only lasted about 10-15 minutes before coming inside as drenched as if I'd jumped in a swimming pool fully clothed.

The one advantage of having a rainy gardening day was that it gave me a chance to plan the garden a little bit better. When I decided that I wanted to try a year without buying vegetables, I sat down and planned out how I was going to get things year-round. I have a schedule which details when I need to plant seeds, when I get to harvest things and which new plants will go in to replace the harvested stuff. This was all painstakingly researched and I thought I had a foolproof plan.

However, either I am too much fool to be stymied by mere foolproof or the interwebs research I made led me astray. The plan tells me that I ate three cauliflowers and two cabbages by the middle of last month, making room for the winter cabbage and the overwintering sprouting broccoli. The reality is that none of my cauliflowers have formed a head yet and I have harvested only my first cabbage today.

Photo not taken in June

Granted, this is much better than last year, in which the Very Bastardish Caterpillars ensured that I didn't get any cabbage and that most of my cauliflowers never formed a head (the only one that I did get, I threw away halfway through eating for being utterly disgusting and riddled with dead caterpillars). So +1 for the brassica nets for doing a brilliant job. However, it has left me with something of a log-jam. The seedlings for the winter and spring brassica have grown up big and strong and are ready to be planted, but there's nowhere to plant them.

This is further complicated by the fact that I can't just put them in any bed that has a space - any bed that I grow spring brassica in won't be usable for brassica next year as there won't be a season in which it can be rested and used for green manure. My grand plan took that into account, as I had set aside which cabbages and cauliflowers would be harvested first so that it would fit perfectly into my crop rotation scheme. Unfortunately nature doesn't appear to've read my grand plan, as the only things close to being harvestable are in the beds that I wasn't planning on rotating!

All things told, it's a mess and has left me trying to fit a quart into a pint pot. I've had to pot up seedlings, then repot into bigger tubs when it became obvious the problem wasn't going to be solved before they became pot-bound, then find a place to put them where the butterflies won't get them. I did have them in the brassica cages inbetween the actual planted cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbages, but the summer vegetables have grown now so there's not enough space.

Thankfully, I got rid of a shed last month and opened up a whole new area of space in my garden, allowing me to create... this thing.

It's like an orphanage for displaced brassicae... in a shanty-town. Made by people who'd never built a shanty town plant orphanage before. Out of inferior materials. Yes, this literally was the best I could accomplish. There's a reason why my wife does the construction in our house.

It's just about sturdy enough to keep the butterflies off, which is the main thing, and has managed to keep most of the winter brassica alive long enough for the first one to be planted into its final position.

Thrive, little sprouting broccoli. And don't let those big kids push you around and steal your lunch sunlight.

The important thing is that I've learned a valuable lesson about trying to cram too many plants into my garden and will learn from this experience next year by reducing my ambitions and growing slightly less. I definitely won't just react to this by trying to build more vegetable beds and expanding the empire further.

Honest.

PJW


*The best stupid comment I've heard about it was someone on Facebook who mentioned off-hand that superhero comics now have an unrealistic and unnatural number of characters as women just to placate 'liberals'. Unfortunately, it was a topic on a friend of a friend's post, so couldn't ask him exactly what percentage of people being women he thought to be "realistic."

Look ma, I'm instagramming!

I hate to be *that* guy, but... well, here are pictures of three meals that I've had this week.

So far, we've had three meals worth of new potatoes, mange tout, nasturtia flowers, some broad beans, spinach and most importantly, carrots that can actually be peeled without halving in weight. We're not quite up and running full-time yet - the portions of vegetables have been minimalistic and the garden is now stripped bare until the next batch matures - but it's the sign of things to come.

I am now planning ahead and replanting for the next lot of food. November to January will require a bit of planning ahead - some of it is going to be winter crops like kale, spinach, chard, leeks and sprouts and some of it is going to be stored vegetables like carrots and potatoes.

Proud as I am of my humungous carrots, I don't think there's going to be too many spares to store if I don't work out how to grow them bigger, so I'm trying a new experiment.

This one comes from the top google result on "growing bigger carrots" and is an allotment diary of someone trying to grow carrots for exhibition for the first time. The idea is that, instead of growing in soil, you fill a box with sand for spacing and drainage, bore holes in it and fill the holes with a special mix of carrot-dirt. It worked for him in that he got some seriously scary carrots out of it, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I'm obviously starting later in the year than the gent on the website, but then again I don't plan on growing carrots big enough to use as truncheons, so I think I should be fine. I bought a big 50 litre tub, filled it with sand and then bored 16 holes using a bit of drainpipe.

I then made up a soil mix for the carrots to grow in. Carrots apparently like loose non-lumpy soil to grow in, so I started by taking some used potato compost and sieving out all of the lumps, twigs, and other bumpy bits. I then added a reasonable amount of bonemeal and some high potassium fertiliser, as these would help replenish what the potatoes had taken and then some. I then sieved in some top soil and some fresh compost before mixing the whole lot in a bucket with some vermiculite (a mineral that aerates the soil and keeps it loose, as well as absorbing water well). In theory, this should be carrot manna. We'll see.

Used a funnel to pour in the mix and letting the whole lot settle down for a day or two before putting the seeds in. I'm planning on having several options to keep myself entertained - orange, red and purple. The amount I've spent on this getup vs the price of a carrot in a supermarket means that I at least need to get interesting colours out of the deal.

Still, if all of them grow to a good size, that'll be 8 meals worth for me, the wife and the youngster, which'll do very nicely indeed. And I guess I can always get another 50l tub or two...

PJW