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Self-seeders

This is tree spinach, Chenopodium giganteum, an amazingly beautiful edible plant that I grew for the first time last year. I didn’t grow it this year, but it self-seeded itself up by the compost bin and survived being transplanted into a pot. I have a second plant that also self-seeded – in gardening parlance they’re ‘volunteers’.

As the hot weather wears on and my plants and I both wilt, I am dreaming up a new plan for the garden next year that will mean it won’t suffer quite as much in hot and dry weather (which no doubt means that next year summer will be an endless succession of dreary and wet days, but that’s a temperate climate for you!). I’m also hoping to cut down on the mad rushes that the garden sometimes presents – times when there’s more work than can reasonably be done.

Self-seeders are going to play a part. Many of the flowering herbs in the garden are already taking care of their own propagation. A couple of days ago I potted up thirteen lemon balm seedlings (and left more in place); as well as the tree spinach I have potted up wonderberry seedlings as well. I haven’t sown borage or calendula or violas for years but they are gradually spreading throughout the garden. Nasturtiums also pop up here and there. I also have potatoes, oca and lavender that I didn’t plant.

Allowing plants to self-seed is one way to cut down on work in the garden, but it does mean that you need to be able to recognise seedlings so that you can weed out the ones you don’t want and leave the ones you do. I’m reasonably good at picking out seeds I have sown before (and improving) but I quite often get stumped when things arrive in the garden unexpectedly.

Take this beautiful little flower, for example:

It has taken up residence with my garlic chives, but I don’t know what it is!

Kathy Brown's Garden

We’re experiencing a few days of unusually hot weather here in the UK, with glorious sunshine and high temperatures that cause me to wilt faster than the plants. It’s hard to spend much time in the garden (for me, at least, the neighbours don’t seem to suffer the same problem!) and so there’s a tendency to stick to doing the bare essentials – mainly watering.

But today I have already spent an hour in the garden, repotting sunflower and nasturtium seedlings that won’t survive another scorching day in tiny amounts of soil, and giving everything a good soak with the hose before the heat of the day.

Despite the heat, yesterday Pete and I went to visit Kathy Brown’s garden in Stevington, Bedfordshire. It’s about 1.5 hours drive from here, but I particularly wanted to see it as Kathy is the author of a book on Edible Flowers and has one of the few open gardens where edible flowers are a real feature. (My copy of Kathy’s book arrived on Friday, so expect a review in due course!)

As I am consciously incorporating edible flowers in my garden for the first time this year, I just had to go. But actually, with the odd weather we’ve been having, gardens are a few weeks behind schedule this year, and in retrospect yesterday wasn’t the best day to choose to see the edible flowers – they just weren’t blooming.

Kathy & Simon (her husband) have obviously put a lot of time and effort into their garden for many years. Their 4.5 acre plot is a design showcase, divided up into garden ‘rooms’ with different themes and feels. This room, inspired by painter Mark Rothko, was stunning – great slabs of colour created just by hedging.

There are plenty of lovely container displays around the garden. This one, created in a disused fish pond, was particularly impressive:

Amd behind the fish pond a lovely, shady ‘grotto’ type area had been created using reclaimed telepgraph poles, some of which even still had their identification numbers on:

If I had the space then I would recreate something similar here, as my garden is pitifully short on shade in this weather and shade-tolerant plants are even less at home out there than I am.

What I most liked about the garden (beyond its edible plants) was the way that quirky and recycled touches were incorporated everywhere. You can see more photos in my Flickr set, and as well as her website Kathy keeps a blog. Her garden is open for several days a year, including several under the NGS scheme. Check Kathy’s website for more details.

Cold Weather

The unusually cold weather at the moment (particularly at night) is slowing down gardening progress. I have trays of tender seedlings that can’t go outside, which is causing a backlog. I am awaiting herb and vegetable seedlings (mostly salads) from Rocket Gardens, who I am trying for the first time this year, but they have been delayed by at least a couple more weeks.

In an attempt to make some progress, yesterday I potted up my caper seedlings which I sowed from seed last year. I have three varieties from a seed swap with Michelle at From Seed To Table. As the capers we eat are pickled flower buds, these plants are one of the new things I’m trying for my Edible Flowers project this year.

I have also potted on some nasturtium seedlings. I have three kinds – tall, dwarf and trailing/ climbing.

Doing that freed up three plug plant trainers, so I could sow some more seeds. Yesterday I sowed cornflowers, opium poppies and lemon marigolds. I also made the first comfrey cut of the season, and packed the leaves into my old bokashi buckets to rot down for comfrey liquid feed later in the season.

Today I have sowed the other two sets of modules. In the first are Abutilon x Suntense, Honesty and Marshmallow.

In the second are seeds that may not germinate until they’ve experiences fluctuating temperatures – which they may get in the next couple of weeks, or they may not! If they don’t then they can stay in those modules until the winter. Those are rosa rugosa (alba and rubra), malva moschata, viola odorata and daylilies.

I have also sown a tray of clover, to see how it grows – the clover is actually for my Herbal Tea project – an idea I got from Subsistence Pattern. And a tray each of calendula and dwarf french marigolds, thickly sown to use up seeds well past their use-by-date (I have home-saved supplies that are fresher).

And it was time to brew up the chamomile tea as some of the seed trays and pots were getting a bit mouldy. A weak solution stops fungus in its tracks and makes for a healthier growing environment for seedlings.

International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day 2010

1st May is the day when guerrilla gardeners in the northern hemisphere take their neighbourhood into their own hands and sow sunflower seeds to make it a more beautiful and more wildlife friendly place.

All you need to take part is a handful of sunflower seeds and somewhere to sow them. For more details check out the Facebook event page.

And don’t forget that there’s an episode of the Alternative Kitchen Garden show devoted to sunflowers :)

Signs of Spring

The nice weather this week means that I have been able to spend some time in the garden. I have spent most of the time moving things about and repotting plants. It is still hard to see the difference, but there are changes afoot in the garden.

These lovely catkins are from a couple of weeks ago, on my Webb’s Prize Cobnuts:

Catkins are the male flowers of hazels; the female flowers are hard to spot in comparison – they’re just tiny red tufts:

Other tiny splashes of red in the garden come from the ladybirds, which are just starting to emerge. This one is a native British seven spot ladybird:

Hope Springs Design Competition

It has been a hard winter here in the UK and winter is often a difficult time for gardeners, stuck inside during the bad weather and with very few signs of growth to keep them going. If your garden is an important part of your physical or mental well-being, then winter can be especially harsh.

And so I would like to plant a container garden that brightens up the winter days and/ or contains early spring flowers that signal that winter is finally coming to an end. However, as you know, ornamental gardening isn’t my area of expertise and so I thought I would run a design competition and leave it up to those of you who are much better at it :)

Design Brief

I have a large half-barrel container that I can use (it’s 1 1/2 ft or 45 cm in diameter). I will accept entries from anywhere in the world, but the garden has to be able to grow in the UK climate and be hardy outside for the winter (USDA zone 7/8). Ideally it would need minimal attention once planted and would look good for several years.

The plants should be evergreen, winter- or spring-flowering. I can amend the potting mix to keep them happy, but they will all have to thrive in the same mix. Even though this is primarily a kitchen garden, there is no requirement for any of the plants to be edible :)

How to enter

To enter the design competition, send your design to me in an email. If you’re good at drawing by all means send a plan; if you’re not then you can simply send a planting list. If you have already designed and planted such a container then you send a photo!

The closing date for entries is midnight (BST) on 30th April 2010. The winner will simply be the container which I think best embodies the spirit of the brief, and the prize will be a signed copy of my book The Alternative Kitchen Garden: An A to Z. I may publish any or all of the entries here on my website.

If you have any questions about the brief or the rules, then get in touch!

Chrysanthemum tea

If you’re an AKG listener then you may have seen the link for Dig It Down Under over on the show homepage. Dig It Down Under is Riley Jordan’s gardening podcast from Australia, and it’s well worth a listen. I got behind on my episodes last year and am slowly catching up. The first one I chose to listen to was episode 11, the herbalicious special. Not only does it cover edible flowers like crysanthemums and saffron, but it takes you travelling back through time!

I sent Riley an email after I listened to the show because she mentioned chrysanthemum flowers being used for tea – previously I had only encountered Chrysanthemum coronarium being used as a stir-fry vegetable. As 2010 is the year of edible flowers and tea plants, I was intrigued :)

Riley has responded with some lovely links to more information. There’s a pdf file with information about the medicinal uses of chrysanthemum flowers, a Wikipedia article about chrysanthemum tea and an Amercian webshop that has a lovely bit about flowering teas that involve chrysanthemum and other flowers being stitched together into little bundles that unfold while your tea brews – a sight that you need a glass teapot to appreciate!

It looks enchanting, so I’m glad that we can get them in the UK as well, via Exotic teapot, who also sell a range of glass tea pots and a lovely looking glass infuser mug. I’ve got a birthday coming up, so I might be lucky enough to unwrap a flowering tea set. If not then I will have to save my pennies and buy my own!

An evening with Bob Flowerdew

Bob’s fish are safe from herons

At this time of year the Oxford Botanic Garden runs its Winter Lecture Series. In previous years I have been to see Ken Thompson and Jekka McVicar. I’m signed up for two of this year’s series, and went to see Bob Flowerdew yesterday evening.

Bob is well-known for being a devout organic gardener, and for attempting to grow all kinds of unusual things, so I was hoping he would be the mad-cap version of himself rather than the slightly watered-down version he often is in the mainstream press.

He spent the first few minutes on his organic soapbox, which was a bit dull for anyone already converted; had he not done so he may not have overrun, but it didn’t really matter.

Bob is a big fan of using grass clippings as a mulch, since they’re free and you’d have to dispose of them in some manner anyway. He also uses raised beds that are more like mounds – they have no sides, since the materials we use to make sides have to be bought, and have a tendency to harbour pests anyway. Mind you, he has the space to make it work, which is a luxury many of us garden without.

He made a good point about green manures – although he’s a big fan of using green manures to add fertility and protect the soil structure over winter, most common green manures are the ones that farmers use. And while they’re easy to plough in with a tractor, some of them can be quite hard work in the vegetable patch. So instead of common green manures he uses the poached egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii), of which he is a great fan – as you will know if you’ve read any of his books), claytonia and corn salad. The latter two provide edible greens and fodder to his chickens. All three are much easier to kill off and dig in, making them more suitable for garden use.

He reminds us to make good use of our microclimates. Many of the common vegetables and fruits are marginal in our climate (especially further north in the UK) and will benefit from being grown in the warmer sections of the garden. Growing plants on ridges angled towards the sun can make them feel much more at home as they’ll catch more rays and be warmer. And small fields (and hence gardens) can be several degrees warmer when surrounded by a hedge as it acts as a windbreak.

You can create artificial microclimates in your garden. Bob uses semi-circular walls of used tyres as a heat sink behind his peach tree. It absorbs heat during the day and lets it out at night, and yields can be up to 5 times higher. He says he’s never had any problems with chemical run-off from the tyres (and he uses a lot of them in his garden).

Log piles around your garden pond will provide homes for beneficial wildlife and also prevent herons from landing and wading into the pond to eat your fish – apparently they don’t like landing directly on the water.

Bob doesn’t recommend that novice gardeners get caught up in companion planting as it can be a difficult technique to master, but he does like growing scented flowers in his garden. He has a thornless rose (he was speaking too fast for me to catch which one, but I will see if it’s mentioned in his books) with a lovely scent and eats the petals in his salads. He loves night-scented stocks and the treacleberry (Smilacena racemosa) which has lovely scented flowers followed by edible fruit.

He mentioned another flowering plant that had a lovely scent in the evening, a South African annual with a name beginning with Z that I didn’t quite catch – which is not surprising as it turns out to be Zaluzianskya capensis, the Night Phlox.

Oh, and he’s very fond of strawberries. Bob says grow more strawberries, you can never have enough of them.

According to the lady who introduced Bob, the Oxford Botanic Garden has been developing a large collection of edible plants (vegetables, fruit and herbs), so I will have to pop along later in the year and see what has changed since I was there for FoGroBloMe ’08.

Courgette flowers

A female courgette flower…

…and its attached fruit

A male flower from the same plant

Courgette flowers are either male or female. The female flowers are easy to spot because they have tiny fruits forming behind them, which swell when the flower has been fertilized. What I hadn’t really looked at, until this morning, was the different structure inside the flower.

And my first courgette is growing :) This one is an Albarello, but there’s a tiny Sunburst F1 squash nearby, too.

Broad bean flowers

Broad beans are one of the unsung beauties of the kitchen garden. They don’t grace the lists of edible plants that are pretty enough to grow in your flower borders, but I’m not sure why.

For one thing, they are very pretty. And they have a beautiful scent, although you have to be pretty close to smell it.

They flower early in the year, giving the bees something to eat when there’s not much around – and brightening the place up while other plants are still sleeping – and then give you a harvest of protein-rich beans during the ‘hungry gap’ when not much else is available. And the flowers themselves are edible, too.

If you want to grow your own then broad beans are usually sown in the autumn, or early spring. The normal varieties are beautiful in their own right, but if you want something even more spectacular then see if you can hunt down seeds of the heritage crimson flowered variety.

Flowers and fruit

The sun was shining this afternoon, so I went out into the gardens with the chickens. They amused themselves while I pulled up the sweetcorn stalks (they are the last cob this morning) and chopped back the lemon balm bushes. When they were back in the run I got the hose pipe out and gave the raised beds in the grow dome a good soaking so that I can plant out my winter salad seedlings soon.

There’s plenty going on outside still:

And tomorrow I’m off to the Food Growing Bloggers Get Together.

Sunflowers and leeks

The first sunflower has bloomed – this is a dwarf yellow spray, and it will bear more flowers in time. This may well be the first sunflower I’ve ever grown – I don’t remember any others!

It has been a busy day here. I started off by penning a chapter of the book (if you’re interested, that was V… the end of the first draft is in sight!) and doing some housework. Then hubby and I tackled our latest decorating project, getting the spare room ready for repainting.

Then we had lunch, then we went for a walk to the post office (it’s about a mile round trip) and then I realised it was sunny and went out into the garden to transplant the leeks.

I had planned to cut the hedge before I did the leeks, because it’s over-hanging the bed, but I couldn’t find the hedge trimmers so I just lopped off the worst offending branches. The majority of my leeks are Bleu de Solaise. I also sowed the contents of a free packet of Hannibal, but there weren’t many seeds and germination was poor… and I ended up with 5 seedlings. So the leek bed is all Bleu de Solaise, barring 5 Hannibal in the bottom left corner.

After trimming the leeks, dibbing holes, dropping the leeks in and then puddling them in, I had intended to come inside. But then I noticed things that needed doing. I refilled the chicken’s food and tied the vines (which are doing quite well) into their support as necessary. Then I remembered I had been meaning to remove the grease bands from the fruit trees, and check their ties to make sure they had room to grow. So I did that.

And then I remembered that I had been meaning to feed the Tromba squash that’s growing in a container, because it’s leaves are yellowing… so I did that.

And then I remembered that I wanted to take my Winter Salad seedlings (still no lettuce!) into the Grow Dome, so I did that I had to water them at the same time.

And then I came inside to collapse in heap, before I remembered anything else! ;)

Potato flowers

My potatoes (Vales Emerald, a first early) are starting to flower. Once the flowers die back I will have a root around and see whether they’re ready to be dug up. It’s nice to have a photographic record of things like this in the garden, because they’re so fleeting. There’s only a few days this year when the potatoes will be flowering.

If you’re also a keen garden photographer, and you’ll be in the north east this summer, then pop along to the Alnwick Garden. I’ve somehow ended up on their mailing list, and it looks like a really fun place, but it’s a long way north from here and I’ve never been (and currently have no plans to go).

Together with the Guardian, they’re running a garden photography competition this year. Not only are they giving free entry to photographers on certain days (June 14 – 15, June 21 – 22, July 5 – 6 and August 2 – 3), but the competition winners will get a lifetime family membership to the garden.

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