Winter is coming

I'm always a bit ambivalent about this time of year - it's sad to be throwing away hard-grown plants and acknowledge that there will be no more courgettes this year, but it's also the time of planning for next year and clearing out soil for potential new crops.

Most of the beds have gone from this:

to this:

There are a few vegetables left from this year's planting, mostly the long-growing ones that get planted at the start of the year and don't come up until November/December time. The brussels sprouts, leeks, parsnips and Christmas potatoes are looking very promising indeed, whereas I suspect the swedes and jerusalem artichokes have decided against forming any kind of root in protest at being shoved at the back of a bed and ignored. It's the problem with root vegetables - you can't predict whether you've got a bonanza or bugger all until you dig them up, meaning "What's for dinner?" doesn't really have an answer until Schrodinger's vegetable is unearthed.

Still, even without those two, I'm confident of surviving winter. There is a whole freezer drawer packed full of frozen vegetables, even if half of it is my sister's courgette. Plus almost all of the winter vegetables are now properly planted in their rightful positions (finally!), although whether any of those will produce anything is a different matter altogether: I've never tried growing purple sprouting broccoli before, my cauliflower record is shoddy regardless of the season and my previous attempts at kale and spinach have proven delicious to the slugs and snails. Ah well, it's part of the adventure.

Part of putting the winter vegetables in has been drawing up the plans for next year. My gardening schedule is relatively intensive on the soil, but because I use raised beds that are on a concrete base and have year-on-year expanded my operations by handing over my paycheques to the garden centre for more dirt, it's not proven a problem as it's practically new dirt every year. Next year is going to be different, as I'm reaching the practical limits of how many beds can be fit in the garden and so I need to make sure I'm not overtaxing or building up diseases in the soil. A bed which grows broccoli from April to September, purple sprouting broccoli from September to April and then more broccoli the next year is soon going to run out of the minerals that make broccolis and be full of the germs and pests that like to live off them.

The answer is crop rotation where you grow a different thing each year to give the soil time to recover, but unfortunately a lot of my favourite vegetables all belong to the same plant family of brassicae, which makes it hard to move things around. Traditionally, you're supposed to replace brassicae with root vegetables the next year and put the brassicae into the space vacated by legumes (green beans, mange tout, et al), which wouldn't really be plausible in my garden. I'd have 5m² worth of onions and carrots, with 1m² in which to fit all my broccoli, cauliflower, swede, brussels sprouts, cabbage and kale. Not really going to happen.

So I've decided to set to one side the two oldest brassica beds, as they have grown the same crop family two years in a row, and turn them into something else next year. The other two are going to grow brassicae again next year, but they'll get a green manure of field beans (which are a legume) grown on them over the winter to replenish the soil and also have a top-up of new compost to hopefully keep them happy.

As such, the winter veg is being grown solely on the to-be-retired-from-brassicae-beds, as the others need to be left unproductive to replenish them for next year. Which is hard to remember when I'm trying to find a position to home for all of my kale seedlings.

PJW

Insecure plants

This weekend is the first time in over month that I've been able to get into the garden. September was a month where three weddings and an overseas trip meant that we were not physically in the city for a single weekend and my few weekday evenings were spent recuperating and coping with a fractious and unsettled baby.

Coupled to this was an Indian summer which made the weather unseasonably hot and dry. I came back to pretty much what you'd expect.

Basically, my garden now has abandonment issues. After a long summer of watering, fertilising and regular harvesting, it's panicked at being left alone and different plants have reacted different ways,

- The green beans and courgettes have attempted to buy my love back by putting out as much food as they possibly can, only to realise far too late that I really have gone and the watering is not coming back, resulting in dozens of immature and withered courgettettes and beanlings hanging off desiccated plants.
 - The winter cauliflower seedlings on the other hand just gave up without a fight - they've been dead for weeks, having apparently abandoned all hope the minute I left the house.
 - The fig tree and raspberry plants have demonstrated their pre-existing hatred for me by ripening as much fruit as they possibly could in the first week and then letting it rot while laughing behind my back.
 - Two of the leeks have decided that they don't want to be vegetables anymore, they want to be pretty princesses flowers instead. I have taken measured and fair action, listened to their feelings, tried to understand where they were coming from... and then decapitated them to put an end to that deviant behaviour.
 - The broccoli and brussels sprouts don't appear to have noticed I was gone at all.
 - Two of the cauliflowers saw what the raspberries and fig were doing and decided to try their hand at it because they wanted to be cool. Unfortunately, they must've failed to take into account how incredibly slow they were, as they've managed to produce some perfect cauliflower heads just in time for me to harvest them. Thanks guys!
 - The pumpkins are the clear winner in terms of outward expressions of disapproval at my absence. They have decided that, since there was no more food and water coming at the base, the only solution is outward expansion to go find more supplies. While the base of the plant has withered and died, the vines have kept pressing further outward, forming little pumpkinettes along the way before abandoning them and moving onto fresher ground. In the process, they've been clinging onto any plant foolish enough to be in their way, like a drowning man after a lifeband. In the course of their ramblings they have ensnared a tomato, potatoes, sweetcorn, blueberries, gooseberries, a grape vine, several random pots and a shed.

See that plant pot in the background, nearly 3m away, with the withered plant sticking out of it? Yep, that's where the base of the plant is.

This has basically meant that I've spent the day closing down a lot of the summer cropping section of the garden, which basically means digging up and composting. The courgettes, green beans, cabbage, sweetcorn and most of the cauliflowers are now done for the year, although I have got some frozen and stored for winter. The broccoli is mostly done for as well, although I have a late summer planting which I'm hoping will come to something before the frosts come.

I have also finally taken Bexx's advice and sacrificed one of the crap cauliflowers (actually the one in the picture on that link!) in despair that it would ever produce anything more than leaves.

All mouth...

Although on breaking it down for composting, I did discover the fruits of its 6 months worth of squatting in my brassica cage...

...miniscule trousers. 

PJW

Finally, cauliflower!

Only two and a half months late cauliflowers, but never mind.

I finally got head! Wait, let me rephrase. My cauliflowers have finally produced something edible and I have eaten it!

This is a major first for me - I did plant some cauliflowers last year and did technically get something onto my plate, but it could by no stretch of the imagination be called edible. It was yellow, riddled with holes, infused with a dozen horribly invasive pest-killer sprays, covered in the mucus of a thousand pests that apparently didn't care and it looked like it had partially rotted. It tasted like despair. I tried eating it anyway - it was my garden dammit and I was at least going to eat as much of it as the pests did - and I only stopped trying to choke it down when I realised I was physically retching after every mouthful.

Have I mentioned how much I love my brassica cages? There's no way I would've got a successful cauliflower this year without them. Life becomes a heck of a lot easier when all you have to defend against is ground-based pests and even they have trouble getting in.

As if this two-portion head of cauliflower wasn't enough reward for my work, a couple more have decided to get in on the act and start creating heads. I don't think I'll have enough to freeze some for the winter, and sadly none of the interesting coloured ones seem to be producing, but it's a hell of a lot more success than I had a few weeks back!*

A lot of my gardening thoughts are going towards the plan for next year already, as harvesting creates spaces that will either need to be filled or protected from weeds. While I can't purchase vegetables until next June in order to complete the challenge, I don't think I'll be keeping up such stringent rules after the challenge is over, so I'm looking at my plans for next year with an eye to whether it's better to grow something or buy it.

I like cauliflower as a vegetable, but it's taken up a phenomenal amount of space in my garden for an awfully long time and so far has produced two portions of vegetables. The stuff that I ate was nice, but I couldn't really say it was a significant amount nicer than one from the grocers or farmer's market. And while it's relatively expensive to buy in the shops, one can't say that my garden produce is in any way designed to be thrifty, especially with the amount of dirt I have to buy each year.

The major merit of growing cauliflower at home is the chance to get interesting colours and types that are rare and/or expensive in shops, but so far this year those varieties have produced sod all. So, right now, cauliflower is sitting right on the line of "Can I be bothered" for next year, especially since crop rotation and better planning for winter veg means I'll likely have less space for summer brassicae next year. Maybe I'll just try the interesting colours and not bother with any white ones.

This eventual cauliflower harvesting has allowed another sprouting broccoli to finally take its place in the ground, probably just in time. The orphanage for displaced brassicae was an utter failure and I eventually gave in, dismantled it and attempted to squeeze the potted denizens into spaces inside the brassica cages (after, of course, having made sure that they'd been thoroughly deloused. Didn't want to go to all of the trouble of protecting my brassicae all year only to introduce a Typhoid Mary at the last minute).

It provided as much protection as an out of date condom that's been attacked by a porcupine. This is what happens when you don't have a brassica cage!

I harvested the last of the onions that had been in a bed next to the orphanage, topped up the bed with spare compost from the harvested potatoes and then inverted the orphanage netting to create a new covered bed.

It's covering a smaller, squarer and shallower shape than the orphanage was and is naturally given shape by the trellis that lines the bed. All things told, I'm hopeful that this will actually be fit for purpose this time.

I give it a week.

Although there is one definite winner in this debacle. When I inverted the orphanage netting, I discovered that, not only were there two butterflies under it (whom I swear mocked me as they flew away, but they didn't come back when I challenged them. Yeah, you'd better flutter, you loud-mouthed punks!) and a veritable colony of snails, but there was also tangible results from my devoured sprouting broccoli.

I was going to kill it out of revenge, but realised how churlish that was. Far better to take it like a man -  well played caterpillar, good game, I was well beaten, I'll get you next time (Gadget).

At least someone's going home happy because of my poor construction skills.

PJW

*And to think you wanted me to sacrifice them Bexx! For shame! Actually, you were probably right, but hey - edible cauliflower!

The purpliest potatoes and other adventures

One of the major aims of this home growing malarky is to achieve things that I couldn't get in the supermarket or grocer. And what better example is there of that than PURPLE GODDAMN POTATOES?!

It's possible that I'm more excited about this than is rational, but I think these are awesome. They're a variety called Salad Blue, which were bred in about 1900 as a Victorian novelty. Despite the name, they're not a salad potato in the slightest: they're a maincrop rather than an early, all but the smallest have to be peeled to be edible, and they fall apart if they're cubed and boiled. And they're not blue. Apart from that, great naming work Victorian gardeners!

Leaving aside the excitement of "Holy crap, purple!", the allure of purple potatoes is that they are in theory healthier. The purple colour comes from anthocyanins which research shows to have an unproven correlation with improved health and neural development (or as the Mail no doubt put it, "NEW RESEARCH SAYS POTATOES CURE CANCER"). However in terms of the taste, I wasn't blown away. They were very bland, which is weird considering you expect brighter coloured things to taste stronger.

I'm torn as to whether I'll be planting them again next year. On the one hand, purple, which is very important. They also appear to've been very prolific croppers - I've not even harvested a full potato bag yet and I've got three and a half meals out of them. And perhaps the taste issue was just this one bag and they'll improve. We'll see.

The plate of purplish chips (not as impressive once cooked. The mash that I made the next day was a bit more grey than purple too. Maybe I'll just boil them next time. Or add some food colouring) aside, there's two more interesting things about that plate. Three if you count the sous-vide perfect steaks.

The first is the end of the beans-rush. The torrent stopped as abruptly as it began; all of a sudden there were just no more beans, like someone turned off a tap. The plants are still green and still trying to grow outwards, but it looks like they're pretty much done with providing me food, bar a couple of stragglers. It's a bit of a shame actually - I spent so much effort making sure that we would eat all of the beans that I think we actually succeeded in eating all of the beans. Practically none have been frozen for the winter, so I hope we don't find a recipe that urgently requires them!

Secondly is a brand new adventure for this year's growing - corn! This came from my Three Sisters experiment, which has so far held up its end of the bargain on two out of the three vegetables. I'm not usually a lover, or even a liker, of sweetcorn, but I was told that freshly picked is a completely different flavour to canned supermarket toot and it was interesting so I thought I'd give it a go.

Corn is viable to eat when the top tassels turn a chocolate brown, but it's impossible to tell from the outside if you've got anything or not as the actual eaty bit is concealed inside the green bits. So I harvested a few likely looking husks and carried them into my wife, who was declared expert on the grounds that I didn't know what I was doing and she didn't say "Not it" quickly enough. Plus, she's admitted to liking shop-bought corn before - that's plenty expert enough for me and frankly she should know better by now.

The husks felt light and I wasn't a hundred percent convinced that there was actually going to be anything inside. I thought we were going to peel away layer after layer of husk like an organic pass-the-parcel before discovering that nothing had actually grown. Imagine my surprise to find that we ended up with something that looked like you see on television!

 Before...

And after - wait, did I make that? That looks like real food! My wife used to do magic; I wouldn't put it past her capabilities to sneak in some professionally-grown corn and switch it out with some legerdemain to save my feelings. Thanks sweetie!

The corn was wrapped in aluminium foil with pepper and melted butter and oven cooked for about 10 minutes to my wife's expert instructions.

The results? Interesting more than delicious. It was very sweet and the taste was a concentration of all of those times I've eaten sweetcorn in the past and thought, "This is okay actually," without any of the bitter disappointment, aftertaste or horrible texture that ruins that thought a milisecond later. Fresh really does make a massive difference - it removes all of the nasty bits of the taste from it.

However, with all the nasty bits gone, I was left with a taste that was just okay without ever blowing my mind. It was nice enough, and I'll eat the rest of the crop this year with pleasure, but I'm not sure if I'll grow it again next year, especially given how much of a pain in the arse it was to get viable plants going without dying or being devoured. Not to mention the money I spent on constantly rebuying seedlings. Plus, since the whole point of it is that it tastes different and nice when fresh, there's very little point in trying to store it, which leave me in the situation I am now - there's two husks ready to go, but I don't fancy it right now.

It will entirely depend on if I have a spare bed in the garden once everything else is planned out, rather than being something which I will actively make space for.

PJW

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