A surfeit of cauliflowers

Speaking of not liking to throw viable plants away, my order of 21 cauliflowers seedlings was delivered today.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I made the decision to just buy cauliflower seedlings to avoid the debacle of last year and was kind of narked that I could only buy interesting colours in a quantity sufficient to cover 3m2 of nothing but cauliflowers. I have room for 5 cauliflowers in my vegetable plot according to my plan and I reckon I can probably squeeze in a sixth if I harvest a cabbage next week. This means that I now have I now have 12 cauliflower seedlings in various-sized pots, taking up the patio space in the pretty garden, with another 4 still in the packet because I didn't have enough spare pots of sufficient size.

I told you - strawberries were just a red herring the thin end of the wedge,

I'm telling myself that I'm keeping spares in case of the ones I planted out dying, but I can't see myself needing 15 spares, even with my cauliflower-growing skills. Don't suppose anyone wants some cauliflower seedlings? They're in funky colours? Anyone? Bueller?

Anyway, amidst all the shocking waste, those cauliflowers mean that I've just about finished planting for the year. The only things left to go are the climbing beans for the Three Sisters (atMFWTWKLitA) and the winter vegetables - kale, purple sprouting broccoli, over-winter cauliflower and perpetual spinach.

On the subject of over-winter vegetables, I've decided against planting more broad beans for next year. The ones for this year have been a phenomenal success, providing massive plants, loads of veg and doing exactly what I expected of them. The only downside is that I've realised that I don't really like broad beans. Only a minor drawback, I know, but probably enough that I won't try and grow them again next year.

Probably.

Finally, does anyone have any idea what purslane is meant to look like? It's one of my exciting new vegetables for this year and it's supposed to grow really well as ground-cover under broccoli, but I'm having a little trouble.

See the four big things in the corners? Those are definitely broccoli - I know this because I planted the seeds in deliberate locations and marked where I planted them. See the green bits in the middle? Yeah, they could be anything.

I may have improved a lot from my days of categorising every plant as "probably a nettle", because it stood as good a chance of being right as any other guess I made, but I apparently still can't tell the difference between a weed and something I want to grow. Usually, I rely on just murdering with a hoe everything that's not in the precise location where I know I planted something, but that doesn't really work when the sowing instructions for a vegetable are "chuck on ground and eat whatever comes up."

Hopefully none of the weeds in my garden are nightshade.

I think I might just plant some more broad beans.

PJW

The Ocaey-Cokey

So, anyone remember the new experimental tomato/oca bed, that was based on top of the bones of the failed carrot experiment from last year? The theory was very simple - a ring of tomato plants, which would grow big and tall, with a bushy oca plant in the middle that would spread out and provide ground cover without shading the tomatoes overly.

I'm beginning to think that pot's cursed.

Big and tall.

This is the problem with growing odd vegetables - it's very easy to get information on how a broccoli plant grows and what to expect of it, but more difficult to find what an oca does without growing one. I think it's safe to say it doesn't play nicely with tomatoes in that close a proximity.

I did consider trying to rescue the experiment - I turned the pot so that the shaded tomatoes would get their time in the sun, I fed them special tonics to encourage them to grow and I gave thought to trimming back the oca bush, as that allegedly wouldn't hurt the yield with the actual eatey bit being the roots. However, I quickly came to the conclusion that that was just shifting the deckchairs around on the Titanic - the pot either had to contain oca or tomatoes, not both. I had four other oca plants growing in various places in the garden, so that made my choice for me.

What was surprising was that the oca plant came out in one piece. I expected to have to hack it to pieces to get it out, but the root ball was compact enough to fit through the hole in the plastic mulch. I was left with a relatively undamaged plant and the sheer amount of crap that fills my sheds and attics testifies to my waste-not-want-not proclivities.

Thus, the Three Sisters bed has now been transmuted to "The Three Sisters and the Mad First Wife That We Keep Locked in the Attic."

Hannibal yams. Definitely not allowed out to play with the other children.

When I first started planning the garden for this year, I considered planting an oca in this bed on the basis that it would a) need harvesting far later in the year, b) have deep roots and thus not interfere with the sweetcorn or beans and c) is supposed to be low and bushy ground cover that's perfect for keeping weeds out of the empty soil that the sweetcorn and beans have between them. I originally decided not to, on the basis of getting the Three Sisters themselves to work properly before I tried fiddling with the theory and introducing something that could potentially fuck up three other crops. However, it turns out that I'm really bad at throwing away fully grown and viable plants, so here we are - another experiment, this one fenced in to try and keep it from eating the other children. Let's see how well this one goes.

PJW

Overwinter vegetables and first meal of the growing year

Yesterday, I ate my first full meal from the garden, a good two weeks earlier than I did last year. I was very pleased with this. It was horrible. I learned a lot.

The meal was this:

Invisible chips!

Steak, chips, early broad beans and carrots, with the latter two coming from the garden. In theory, fairly simple.

The broad beans came from a November sowing to survive over the winter and provide first vegetables in March/April time. They did the surviving thing great, but failed to produce anything more than leaves and some very nice flowers in April, upon which point, I promptly forgot about them. April's a very busy time as just about everything wants sowing then and my wife and daughter occasionally want attention too, they were right down the bottom of the garden and they kinda... well, fell out of the back of my head.

Until yesterday, when I spotted there were beans aplenty and harvested some of the bigger ones for dinner.

Now, broad beans can be harvested at two stages - either really early, when you can eat them whole like a French or runner bean, or quite late, when you remove the seed pods and just eat the beans inside. Yesterday, I thought I was eating them early. Turns out I'd missed that point by about a week or so. Bugger.

Still, my incompetence aside, there are other beans developing on the plant, and I have now learned to pick them before they look like the above picture. The bitter horrible taste has helped me grow as a person and as a gardener. I'm not sure what my wife gained from the experience. Perhaps nausea.

Still, that was only one vegetable on the plate. Surely the second vegetable could make up for it. Not as though it's my nemesis or anything...

You may remember last year that, in the midst of the great carrot experiment disaster, I had a problem with non-sprouting seeds late on in the planting season and subsequently planted a quick-growing variety in the hope of trying to get them up before the end of the year. I failed utterly at that, but decided to keep the pots going in the hope of overwintering the carrots and getting something useful in the spring. You're not really meant to overwinter carrots, but I thought, if it's good enough for the broad beans, it's good enough for the carrots.

It worked:

Holy crap, actual carrots!

Sort of. These carrots were perfectly edible, if not particularly well sized - that little collection up there was worth just under one adult's portion and I ended up scrubbing them rather than peeling them for fear of them disappearing on me. However, planting in August and harvesting in May has ended up with some very confused carrots.

Carrots are a biannual plant, that we treat as an annual. Basically, they're designed with a two year lifecycle - they grow first year, survive the winter and then use the second year to turn into pretty flowers so that they can spread their seed. The tasty bit is where they're interrupted halfway through, when they've stored up enough food to survive winter, but before they've put any of that into being a flower.

These ones have survived the winter, started thinking about turning into flowers and then have been yanked up and eaten. As a result, they ended up being neither one thing nor the other. The outside was nice, but each one had woody cores that just had to be eaten around. Considering that they were too skinny to peel, that didn't leave much actual eatey-bit.

Tasty. I don't think my wife's forgiven me for cooking her dinner yet.

However, overwintering carrots is still a partial success story, and I think there's options to improve. People on the interwebs have tried this before me and a bit of research suggests that I want to plant them a month earlier and harvest them at least 2 months earlier, in order to give them a bit more time to prepare for winter and a bit less time in the spring to think about flowering.

Basically, overwintering beans and carrots is great and could feasibly result in me getting first meals as early as March. I've just been slightly incompetent this year.

In other garden news, I am very close to my first functioning cabbage, which will no doubt be used to further my 1 year old daughter's education in her Polish heritage with glomkis. I think that'll be ready for next weekend. We had also had our first five strawberries from the clay pot, which I made the mistake of harvesting while carrying said daughter. She took one out of my hand, decided it was nice, and then demanded the rest. Wife and I shared one between us.

The strawberry plants that were involved in the accident appear to have mostly survived, although they're still a bit too traumatised to produce fruit yet. Lots of flowers and leaves, no fruit.

And finally, as I'm sure you've all been waiting for, the results of the final two Ruby Queen sweetcorn sowings:

Guess it wasn't the plastic root-trainers that caused the last 52 seeds to fail, huh.

Nothing from another 5 seeds. Quelle surprise. Also, bollocks.

Still, I have planted out my three successful Ruby Queen plants and hopefully they are enough to be fertile with each other and not too inbred.

Cletus, the slack-jawed sweetcorn husk, in the making

PJW

My mind is going... I can feel it.

Always label everything in the garden. You always plant seeds and you're so enthralled by the idea of what you're planting that you're convinced it's burned into your memory. Then you go away for a week or two and do real life stuff, only to end up with this:

I have no idea what these are. They're definitely intentional, but that's pretty much all I've got. Courgettes, maybe? Asparagus peas? I don't think they're dwarf beans, but I can't rule it out. What really bugs me is that I distinctly remember being pleased about planting them, about having found a place where they'd fit, because I was worried I wouldn't have room. But nothing besides remains - it's been eaten by mortgage broking.

I don't even remember if there's actually meant to be three of them or if there's only meant to be one and I was going to weed out the weakest two seedlings.

It's made worse by the fact that this is one of a set of two identical planters in my garden, which I normally plant identical crops in. The second one also has something unidentified growing, but it's clearly not the same thing.

Don't drunk-garden, kids.

Chard? Parsnips? Beetroot? Spinach? Could be anything. Vegetable surprise.

What hasn't been a surprise is the winner of the sweetcorn race of last week. Bloody Butcher produced seedlings in 7 of the 9 pots planted and actually produced 2 seedlings for 4 of the pots. That's 18 seeds, 11 germinations, resulting in 7 successful seedlings that are now thriving in the Three Sisters bed.

The second batch of Ruby Queen, on the other hand...  has been slightly less successful.

ONE!?

One damned seedling, again growing at a ferocious rate yet surrounded by barren earth. That's 1 from 26 seeds in this sowing, bringing us to a grand success ratio of 3 from 55 seeds. Radioactivity be damned, that's a shitty strike rate. Unfortunately Ruby Queen is very difficult to get in this country, as it's not a popular cultivar (no idea why!) over here, so I can't even change supplier and blame the seed.

My only thought is that the Ruby Queen has been planted in the plastic root-trainers, while the Bloody Butcher has been solely planted in the little degradable fibre-pots. Technically speaking, the root trainers are supposed to give better performance (which was why the Ruby Queen got in there, being first-sown and the preferred crop), but I suppose it could be a factor. I've planted the last five kernels of Ruby Queen into two fibre-pots, in an attempt to get one more seedling to at least allow me to plant a block of four plants.

Soon to be 3 from 60

That picture is everything that's growing under the artificial sun at the moment and represents the tail end of the indoor planting season. On the left are my new sweetcorn disappointments, the middle is swede and the right are replacement courgettes for the one casualty of the garden so far, which was either squashed by cats or hamstrung by slugs.

This weekend, I'm sowing the beans for the Three Sisters, a couple of rounds of dwarf French beans and the winter vegetables and then that'll pretty much be it for sowings for this year's crops. Next up - the actual eating.

I hope.

PJW

Sweetcorn racing

One fact which I was interested to learn recently was that modern sweetcorn is entirely impractical and mostly nuclear in origin. Wacky American scientists in the 1940s put lots of different seeds and plants in the path of atomic radiation, as they believed that nuclear war was inevitable and the best thing to do was research which foods would survive the radioactive fallout and be available to the post-apocalyptic survivors. Most plants, unsurprisingly, didn't take very well to irradiation, but a random mutation in corn resulted in a multitude of new varieties that decupled the amount of sugar of ordinary corn.

Since this discovery, people have been breeding these new varieties to try and get sweeter and sweeter corns. Nowadays, you'll struggle to find a variety of sweetcorn that isn't "super-sweet" (and, incidentally, less nutritious), signifying its nuclear origins. However, like the bulldog, cross-breeding in search of a few characteristics has left us with a poor fragile cripple that can no longer reproduce on its own. Corn kernels are supposed to be fat and puffy, as they store starch that keeps the seedling going through the long and drawn out germination process. Modern super-sweet varieties have nice tasting sugar where the blah starch used to be - quick energy that doesn't store well and doesn't last long. So the kernels look like this:

The now traditional teaspoon for scale in the background

The above picture is the super-super-sweet Ruby Queen that I've been trying and mostly failing to grow this year and the above theory explains a lot - they're just running out of stored food before they've managed to germinate properly.

2 from 18 isn't a winning strike-rate

This has left me in a bit of a bind though, as I need more than two plants to run my planned Three Sisters bed and it's not possible to mix-and-match varieties. I've planted some fresh Ruby Queen kernels in the hope of getting some more, but there's a fairly good chance that I'll get the same result again. Plus, even if I do manage to get another 2-3 viable plants from this new sowing, the two that have succeeded won't bloody stop growing and any new plant may not mature in time to fertilise the first duo,

Yep, the bloody thing's outgrown the seedling root-trainer before its fellows have even broken the surface. Strikes me as somewhat rude.

When it's good, it's very, very good. When it's bad, it's indistinguishable from a bag of Swift potatoes.

So, plan B has now come into effect. Still a red sweetcorn, but this time less sweet and more savoury and with the bonus of an awesome name - Bloody Butcher. The difference in the kernels is clearly visible.

See the results that you get with the Charles Atlas home bodybuilding DVD. Now only £9.99 for all three discs! The planting that made a seedling out of Sid!

And it seems to be paying off. I sowed nine pots last week and I've already got five seedlings poking their noses above the soil.

The pots on the left are the chard plants to replace those arbitrarily decapitated by the tortured brassica cage last month and which totally aren't my fault for killing.

It's possible that they may not taste quite as good as the Ruby Queen, but if I can get at least six viable plants (enough to do the 3 sisters), then I'll count it as a win. And hey, maybe it'll taste better? I wasn't overwhelmed with the super-sweet sweetcorn that I grew last year - it was nice enough and better than any sweetcorn I've previously had, but as someone who didn't like the sweetcorn he'd previously had, that's damning with faint praise. Maybe something a touch more savoury will hit the mark?

Alternatively, the Ruby Queen has 25 new seed sowings and about two weeks in which to impress me and produce another 4-5 plants. The race is on.

Yes, there have been more boring races than pitting two varieties of sweetcorn against each other; I just can't think of any right now, cause I don't want to. Because shut up, that's why.

PJW

Internet fame and other setbacks

I was at a wedding party the other night and someone, in the middle of normal conversation, made a reference to "Fuck carrots, eh?" It confused the fuck out of me; I was under the impression that only a couple of friends read this, possibly out of pity (and my wife, of course, who's contractually obligated).

It turns out that it's more popular than I thought. At a party mostly full of people who I know and like, but don't get to see very often, no less than 6 people came up to me specifically to say how much they enjoyed reading about my vegetable garden online. Not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with an audience. Hi guys - I'll try to keep doing whatever it is that makes you read this and not do the other things.

This time of the year is where the garden work switches, from sowing and cultivating seedlings, to planting things out and letting them grow and spread. I now have most of my major summer/autumn vegetables planted out in the ground and thriving.

Brussels sprouts 

Broccoli 

Experimental tomato bed and oca 

A plethora of beans - French, runner and broad from left to right. 

More oca, more French beans, some mange tout and a nasturtium

I have also planted out my leeks for the winter. If you remember last year, I learned a valuable lesson about leeks - despite being a leafy plant, the actual eatey-bit needs to be buried underground. Those who plant their leeks on the surface get lots of inedible green leaves and not very much in the way of an edible white stalk. I'm actually following the instructions and planting them in deep holes this time, so that they can be buried as they grow taller to elongate the stalk.

Thinking of things which need to be buried, I'm attempting something new with my potatoes this year, which may or may not work. In order to get the best harvest of maincrop potatoes, you're supposed to "earth-up", which basically means burying the leaves in dirt to encourage the plant to produce more potatoes higher up the stem. With the quantities of potatoes that I grow, this requires a lot of expensive dirt and a lot of backbreaking effort to apply it.

STRAW!

I did some research on the interwebs and found a lot of people claiming success with growing potatoes in straw. The idea is that the straw blocks out the light as well as dirt, fooling the plant into thinking it's underground. It's quicker, cheaper and requires a fuck of a lot less effort to apply. Plus, it has the added advantage of being easy to lift away and compost once harvesting's begun. No more digging for potatoes; now I just have to lift away the straw et voila.

At least, therein lies the theory. I'm willing to give it a go because it'll save me so much work, but I'm not convinced that it will block out the light well enough to not affect the harvest. Plus I've got trust issues with straw due to previous bad experiences. This time, I bought the straw from a local farm shop instead of pet straw, which brought its own issues. A bag was £2 and a bale was £3. I'd be a fool not to buy a bale, right?

Turns out that bales are very good value for money, as they are very heavily compressed and contain a lot of straw. The tied bale just about fit in the boot of my estate car. I put it in my shed and then cut the pieces of string that were holding it together so I could get some out. And then it just about fit in the shed. I used as much of it as I could, but I still have this much left:

Let's hope I don't need anything towards the back of that shed for another year or so.

Not a clue what I'm going to do with it.

The other disaster recently was not self-inflicted, but was instead the actions of the bloody winds that will not stop whistling about. My beautiful vertical gardening strawberry planters survived everything that nature could throw at them. Unfortunately, the fence that they were hanging from did not.

 Before

 After

After repairs. I was too upset to take a photo of what they looked like when I found them.

Thankfully, they all appear to have survived their faceplant to the concrete and I've managed to replant all of the ones that were thrown free. Whether they'll produce anything this year or be too traumatised is in the balance. I've also got my nifty vertical gardening planters, that are supposed to lift the strawberries into the sunlight and away from slugs and other pests, sitting on the ground, which is far from ideal. At some point, I'll look at finding somewhere else to hang them, but at present I just don't want to risk them going for a burton again.

Still, to end on a cheerful note, here's a picture of the vegetable garden in all its glory, lovingly stitched together from several different photographs.

PJW

Pint into a quart pot

The first lesson I learned when I started gardening was that there were many things that wanted to eat my vegetables more than I did and were nowhere near as picky about waiting until things were ripe as I was. It wasn't possible in the slightest to "share" - everything I grew would be stripped down to the bones or riddled with slimy holes long before it was in any edible state.

I also learned that it was well nigh impossible to "encourage" them away in a back garden environment. Home-made remedies like garlic or chilli infusion sprays were completely ineffective, commercial pest killers or repellents were completely ineffective and awful for the environment, and companion plants achieved fuck all, while taking up space not doing anything.

The only answer appears to be physically walling away the plants with netting to stop the pests from getting in and, as I've mentioned before, netting and I do not get along, mostly because netting is waiting until I let my guard down so it can try to break my neck again. So I've had to invest in a series of specialist pop-up Brassica Cages in order to survive my own garden.

Now, overall, the cages have been phenomenal. They spring open like a pop-up tent and keep their shape perfectly, without the need for my usual wonderful constructions of bamboo, netting, wire and hope.

For those who didn't missed the tale of the vegetable orphanage the first time around, I'll spoil the ending for you - it was less than perfectly successful.

Plus, they have zipped doors, which means that I can't pull my usual trick of perfectly securing insect protection around a plant before realising that I need to get to something underneath it.

There are only two major down-sides to them. The first is that they struggle in high winds, which, being on top of a hill, we have a *lot*. They have to tied down 15 ways from Sunday and require so many stakes for support that I'm actually giving serious consideration to growing a bamboo plant, just so I don't have to keep handing over money to the garden centre.

This arrangement fell apart, two days after this photo was taken, in a light breeze. Because I built it.

The other downside is that they cost a bomb. I justified it to myself originally on the basis that I grew all my brassica and leafy things in four beds that were exactly the same size. So while buying four nets would cost a lot of money, it was an investment and I would never have to buy any more, unless of course I decided to strip out all of my strawberries and take the opportunity to rotate some of the brassica away from the 1.25m2 beds to let the soil recover. And what are the odds of me deciding to do that?

Pretty high, as it turns out. You'd think I'd remember I was a phenomenal idiot, wouldn't you?

So, I was left with a 1.25m2 brassica cage to fit on a 1m x 2m vegetable bed. "Shouldn't be a problem!" I thought. "I'll just split the vegetable bed in half and make it into two 1x1m beds and then the cage can cover one of those. 1m is less than 1.25m, so it'll be fine!"

So far, so hoopy, until I came to actually trying to accomplish this and realised that the whole point of the cage is that it fits snugly without gaps, so that no butterflies can get in. This includes at the bottom, because butterflies are tenacious little buggers and aren't against going to ground level to get into somewhere. It also turns out that 25cm is quite a big gap to make just disappear.

Still, I went to my task with abandon and proceeded to try and make a quart pot fit snugly around a pint, using only heaps of gardening wire, ground staples, imagination, hope and a lot of swear words.

Nailed it

The snapping noise as I tied part of the net to itself and forced it into position was all part of the plan. I'm sure it'll be fine - it's probably designed to taper down from full size at the top to 4/5th size at the bottom and the fact that one of the straight bits now hangs limply at right-angles is a feature, not a bug.

It's also completely self supporting, apart from the stakes on every corner and 15 bits of gardening wire attaching it to the chain link fence behind. I did try using only 14 ties to the fence, but it attempted to break free and go back to 1.25m2 wide instead of squeezed into just 1m. There used to be a nascent chard plant on the left hand side before that. Now it's tied to the fence in 15 places and I'm digging out the chard seeds again.

Notice also the pots down at the bottom - they're actually vital structural components. They're pinning the bottom of the net to the wooden frame of the bed and, in the case of the one on the left, it's pinning the net to itself to take up some of the slack. To demonstrate the complete success of my genius design, I thought I'd take some pictures from the side view:

Go home brassica cage, you're drunk.

Oh for f... Anyone got the number of the local taxi?!

In the interests of not having the next breath of wind contort my broccoli plants into an integral part of an Escher-esque abomination of nets, sprung wire, leaves and chain link, I have now decided to buy a new brassica cage of the correct size. Hopefully I haven't unalterably buggered my £44 cage in an effort to avoid spending £29.

In other news, check out our pear tree!

The dandelions are also a feature.

Quite apart from being very pretty, that is a significant amount more blossom than last year. I hope that this is the year we finally get edible pears. Sure, we did eat the ones that grew last year, but that was more out of a sense of duty than out of any belief that they were actually fit for human consumption.

PJW