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Scorzonera

Part of my plan for next year’s garden is to concentrate on plants that don’t have to be tended to (sown/ potted on/ planted out and so on) in spring and summer. That means more perennials, and self-seeding annuals, but it also includes sowing things outside the main sowing season. Ornamental hardy annuals are often sown in autumn to put on an earlier show in spring, and there are vegetables that can be treated the same way – one of the main ones being broad beans.

So when I read in the current edition of Grow Your Own that scorzonera can be sown now, to harvest next autumn, I dug out a packet of seeds that was kicking around in my seed box and had a go.

I sowed them into long rootrainers, and let them germinate inside. As I’m going to have more self-seeding plants, I also started a new project – photographing seedlings so that I can learn to recognise the ones I want to keep. The photo above shows scorzonera seedlings three days after germination.

As you can see, they look like grass. Nine days on, they still look like grass. I have just planted four of them out in the garden, but I think it is too soon – they don’t have substantial root systems yet. And they look so much like grass that it was hard enough for me to find them again to water them in, let alone check on them later in the week! I brought the rest back inside to get a bit bigger.

While I was outside I also trimmed the lavender (I now have a very fragrant compost heap!) and ended up brushing past the burred seeds of the wild geum weeds that crop up all over the garden. The easiest way to get rid of the seeds is to stand in the chicken run and let the chooks peck them off my trousers. This was a new thing for Chewie and Cluck, and Princess had to show them what to do :)

Dobby

My new perennial – Daubenton’s Kale

As previously mentioned, my mind has turned towards more perennials for next year, so that the garden takes care of itself a bit more. My research uncovered a perennial kale – Daubenton’s Kale, or Chou Daubenton – it appears to be much more common on the continent than here in Blighty. It rarely flowers, and so can’t be grown from seed, but is easy to propagate vegetatively if you know someone who has a plant.

A little more research showed me that an online friend of mine – Alison Tindale from the Back Yard Larder – was offering plants for sale, and soon one of hers was winging its way to me. I don’t know why I didn’t blog about it sooner; it arrived at the beginning of the month. But with all new arrivals I am a little wary of announcing their presence until I’m sure I haven’t killed them. I did name my new kale, though – he’s called Dobby!

As you can see from the photo, Dobby is settling in to his new home. He’s in a pot for now, until a suitable permanent location opens up in the autumn.

Perennial brassicas are subject to the same pests and diseases as their annual relatives – pigeons, whitefly, caterpillars. Pigeons aren’t a problem in my garden (they’re too well fed!) and for the most part the cabbage whites have been kept busy elsewhere this year. Dobby has developed some whitefly, but that’s not too serious.

Scorzonera seeds

In other news, the scorzonera seeds I sowed on 13th August have started to germinate. They are such an unusual shape that I conducted a little (and thoroughly unscientific) experiment – I sowed half of them horizontally and the other half vertically. The early birds were all sown vertically, but whether they were all sown the same way up is another matter….

Sputnik

I am not well this week – Pete brought back some lurgy or other from a recent road trip and thoughtfully passed it on to me. It has been nearly a week since I was last outside, making my new herb bed. I am feeling slightly better today and might venture out to collect some of the bulbils that have formed on my Welsh onions.

I still don’t know why these plants have formed bulbils while the others formed the more familiar allium seedheads. It’s a big mystery.

The only suggestions have come from Alison Tindale, of the new perennial edibles nursery ‘Back Yard Larder’. She doesn’t have a website yet, but you can email her if you’d like to know what she’s got in stock. I bought a plant from her a couple of weeks ago, and it’s an exciting one, so I must go out and take a photo of it before I blog it.

Anyway, this is what Alison has discovered:

“I knew I’d read some strange things about the onion family but when I went searching again it turned out to be about potato onions: plant a big one and it will split, plant a small one and it will grow into a bigger one.

But then I found on Google books “Onions and other vegetable alliums“ by James L. Brewster (p147). Looks like, at least in ‘normal’ onions, Allium cepa, a period of warmth can encourage bulbils to form and the stage of flower formation that has been reached when the warm period occurs affects what form these take and whether it affects the whole flower head. Is it possible one lot of your Welsh onions have got a lot warmer than the others?

As you’re keen on perennials you might like this great article too, about growing garlic as a perennial.”

In fact, it was Alison’s email that reminded me I’d read something about growing garlic as a perennial before, and prompted me to post Sam’s lovely article about Everlasting Garlic, which is well worth a read if you’ve got a couple of minutes.

IWOOT: Jaboticaba

I’ve been a StumbleUpon user for years now. I used to get bored and stumble a lot, but I haven’t done it for a while (for those of you who haven’t encountered it, StumbleUpon is a cross between social networking and bookmarking – you rate sites you visit and it suggests others you may like).

This morning I resurrected my login and the first page it showed me was about Jaboticaba, a tree that fruits on its trunk. And not only does it have this unusual fruiting habit, but the fruit is edible as well. Of course, I want one.

According to Wikipedia, the Jabotica (Myrciaria cauliflora, AKA Jabuticaba and the Brazilian Grape Tree is native to South America. It seems unlikely to survive in my climate (boo hoo), although there are some suggestions it could tolerate a couple of degrees of frost. Apparently it makes a nice bonsai specimen, if I ever have the time and patience to take that one up.

It doesn’t sound like a good prospect for my garden – slow growing (no doubt large when not a bonsai) and a bit on the tender side. And there don’t appear to be any UK suppliers of seeds or plants. I still want one though ;)

Five Easy Unusual Edibles

Pretty foliage, flowers and fruit – achocha is an ornamental edible

I love growing unusual edible plants – not only are they potentially useful and easy to grow (because the pests and diseases they suffer from are not widespread), but they can be beautiful too. I’m even looking for like-minded people to feature in my latest book project.

But if you’ve never grown something unusual before, it can be a little daunting. These plants don’t appear in regular gardening books, and although you may be able to find growing information on the internet you may also find that many of the growers are in a different part of the world and have a different climate.

So if you want to start growing unusual edibles but don’t know where to start, you may find the following short list of easy candidates helpful:

1. Achocha, Cyclanthera species. Achocha seeds are fairly easy to find – Real Seeds sell them and Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library offer them to members. They also regularly appear in seed swaps and on eBay. Once you have your seeds then achocha is an easy plant to grow – it’s a climber, and it’s grown like beans. You can sow your seeds indoors early in the season or sow them outside once the risk of frost has passed. Given something to climb up, achocha plant rapidly form a leafy screen. Small flowers are followed by plentiful teardrop-shaped fruit that can be eaten raw when young or cooked when more mature. The big, hard seeds are easy to save from mature fruits.


2. Oca, Oxalis tuberosa. Oca is a tuber crop, grown a bit like potatoes. You can chit tubers on the windowsill, and plant them out in early spring. They make small clumps of pretty foliage, which is tinged with the tuber colour – of which there are many varieties. Unlike potatoes, there’s no need to earth up your oca, and the plant is not susceptible to blight. Simply leave the plants in place until the first frosts kill the foliage, and then dig up your harvest of colourful tubers, which have a lemony tang but can be used just like potatoes. Again, it’s easy to save tubers for next year, and you can buy tubers from Real Seeds.


3. Japanese wineberry, Rubus phoenicolasius is a perennial plant in the same family as raspberries and blackberries and grown in the same way. The difference is that the plant is much prettier and the fruits are kept covered until they ripen, which means far fewer problems with pests. They’re tasty too, but you won’t find them in supermarkets. Plants are fairly widely available, and easily propagated by layering.


4. Sorrel, Rumex species is a perennial herb that produces large amounts of green leaves with a lemony flavour. There are many varieties, including a pretty red-veined one, and sorrel will be one of the first green leaves available in spring. Easily grown from seed, with seeds widely available, and it’s easy to save your own seeds as well.


5. Welsh onions, Allium fistulosum is a perennial clumping onion. The leaves can be harvested almost year-round, and make a good substitute for salad onions and chives when those aren’t available. The plant does make small bulbs, and you can dig those up and use them as onions – any you replant will grow into a new clump. Easily grown from seed (which is easy to source) and it’s easy to save your own seed from them on.

Those are just five of the unusual plants I have in my garden that are easy to grow – there are plenty more. Do you have a favourite easy unusual edible?

New Plan

Claytonia sibirica, Pink Purslane, an unusual salad plant that loves dappled shade

It is finally raining, and both the garden and I are sighing with relief, but for some plants the long days of relentless sun have proved fatal. Every year there are casualties in the garden – drought, pests, a complete lack of sunshine, diseases – and that is an inevitable part of being a gardener. But there is often guilt that life and a lack of time spent in the garden means we have allowed plants to die that could have been saved.

I love being in my garden and I wouldn’t want to replace it with a ‘low maintenance’ horror that meant I had nothing to do outside except sit, but I am useless in hot weather and even watering is sometimes beyond me – so I have come up with a new garden plan for next year.

The idea is to have a productive garden which is never overwhelming, but still holds plenty of interest for me and our occasional visitors. I would like to cut down on the work during the busy seasons – sowing less seeds during the spring would mean less potting up and planting out later on. I would like the garden to need less watering in the summer and to avoid common pest and disease problems like the blackfly which attached themselves to my broad beans and have now spread to the oca.

And so the new garden plan for 2011 (which I am currently putting into effect out in the garden) is as follows:

• Concentrate on perennials, self-seeding annuals and biennials and ‘easy’ crops that give a good yield for minimum effort.


• Cut down on the number of plants in containers, particularly small containers


• Limit the number of plants that require TLC due to being marginal in my climate


• Look into different ways or places for growing plants that need TLC to cut down on the amount they need


• Split the load. Many plants (particularly flowers) can be sown in autumn rather than spring; other crops can be sown outside of the busy spring sowing period


• Experiment with unusual edibles that are easy to grow

So, that’s the new plan. I have already made a few changes, and bought a few new plants, and I will talk about those in coming posts. I also have a to do list of things to get around to once the weather cools down :)

Welsh Onion Weirdness

In previous years, the blooms on my Welsh onions (Allium fistulosum) much loved by bees) have always looked like this:

with the occasional one that did something slightly different:

This year the ones around the edge of one raised bed look the same, but around the second raised bed they are doing something very different:

I took that photo a couple of weeks ago; since then the little bulbs have developed more fully, and they look like walking onions. I was trying to remember whether those onions were, in fact, something different. They are not labelled, and I don’t remember planting them, which means they’ve probably been there for a while and they’re almost certainly Welsh onions – anything more unusual (by my garden’s standards!) I would have labelled; but my recollections of last year’s garden are a little fuzzy.

Then I went to CAT and saw that the plants they labelled as Welsh onions were doing the same thing:

So, the question is – is this a normal growth stage of Welsh onions that I simply haven’t been seen before, or is it something they do occasionally in response to something like the weather? I will certainly have lots of little bulbs to plant out and/ or pass on, but the bees have missed out on half their banquet this year. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Forest Garden Friday: 25th June 2010

Last week I paid a visit to CAT, the Centre for Alternative Technology, in Wales. It’s somewhere I’ve wanted to go for a long time, but it’s a hefty trip from here so it required some planning. But this summer seemed like a good time to go as they have just opened their new WISE education centre, which has a newly planted forest garden outside.

CAT is built into a lovely wooded hillside. It’s tranquil and quiet (when it’s not heaving with visitors) and the way up is via a fascinating water powered railway, one of the steepest in the UK with a 35° slope. Water is pumped into a tank in the top carriage, which when released descends to the bottom and pulls the bottom carriage up.

The CAT forest garden was only created this year, but it has plenty of advice on offer for anyone wishing to make their own. With a forest garden, the most important thing is to do your planning, before you get stuck in.

Forest gardens are mainly planted with perennial plants, but they take time to grow and the garden will look bare (and bare soil encourages weeds) in the meantime, so why not fill up the space with some fast-growing annuals? (Click through for bigger photos, so that you can read the signs!)

Not all of the plants in a forest garden have to be edible, but they should all be useful in some way. The string plant, Phormium tenax, will come in handy if you’ve left your string back in the shed.

An established forest garden mimics a natural forest and uses nitrogen-fixing plants, together with mulches and the effects of the microbes that thrive in undisturbed soil, to fertilize the plants.

The end result is a beautiful, productive and low maintenance forest garden!

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I’ve said before that forest gardens are all the rage next year. Not only have they started a one at CAT, but there’s a new one at the Eden Project too! I may not be able to get down to see that one this year, but if you do then please take photos and blog it or send them to me for inclusion in a future Forest Garden Friday! :D

Do you grow unusual edibles?

Ripening goji berries

I am working on a new book project which is all about people who grow unusual edibles. I would like to include profiles of several growers (some famous, some not). I have some people in mind, but I also know that there are plenty of growers out there that I don’t know by name and it would be interesting to see what they’re up to!

So, if you do grow unusual edibles (i.e. things that are out of the ordinary in kitchen gardens in your part of the world) and you would like to be considered for inclusion, then please send me an email with the answers to the following questions (or leave a comment):

1. What unusual edibles do you grow? If you only grow a few, then by all means list individual plants. Or perhaps you grow a lot but are interested in specific plant families or plants from specific geographical regions, or heritage/ heirloom varieties.
2. How did your interest in unusual edibles develop?
3. How do you track down your unusual seeds and plants?
4. Do you have a favourite (commercial) supplier?
5. Do you have books and/or websites (or other sources of information) that you recommend?
6. Do you have a favourite garden to visit that grows a lot of unusual edibles?
7. What are your hints and tips for sourcing unusual edibles?
8. Do you have a book/ website/ project etc that you would like mentioned in the book?

Please bear in mind that I may have to edit your responses for inclusion, and that I may not be able to include them all. Thank you!

Forest Garden Friday: 18th June 2010

Japanese wineberries

In this edition of my Forest Garden Friday round-up I thought I would catch-up with what Alys has been doing in her forest garden on gardener’s world. It first came to light that Alys was creating a forest garden in a back garden-sized plot in episode 5, first broadcast on 2nd April. Alys looked at how forest gardens are multi-layered systems that mimic the natural way a forest grows, but are filled with productive plants. And she planted her first one – a Japanese wineberry, which not only produces delicious fruit and copes with partial shade, but adds winter interest to the garden as well with its red stems.

My Japanese wineberry is still quite young, but I have already propagated (by layering) two offspring, who have gone off to new homes this year. I have a third new plant that I will find a home for here. You treat wineberries like summer fruiting raspberries for pruning.

In episode 6 (from 9th April, about 20 mins in) Alys shows how a forest garden, once established, is a self-sustaining system. The undisturbed soil is home to microorganisms that can move nutrients between plants. Nutrients are made available by nitrogen fixing plants such as the autumn olive (Eleagnus umbellata), which also produces fruit for jam and ‘dynamic accumulators’ such as comfrey and sorrel (which is a good early salad plant if you like the lemony flavour).

Both of these episodes will be available on the iPlayer (unfortunately only to those in the UK) until 10th July. So far those seem to be the only segments on Alys’ new forest garden, but she’s managed to cover quite a lot of the basic principles very quickly (including using plants with more than one use). Personally I’d like to see a lot more, but Gardeners’ World is frequently a disappointment.

Sowing New Seeds at Ryton

On Thursday I went up to Garden Organic Ryton for their afternoon course ‘Biodynamics for Beginners’. I’ll have to tell you about that another day, because my notes are in the car, which is in Sussex with Pete, but I went up during the morning so that I could meet up with a couple of people who I knew online but not in person.

The first was Sally Cunningham, who is heading up the Sowing New Seeds project I mentioned a few weeks ago. The idea behind the project (which is based in the midlands) is to collect seeds and plants of exotic edibles and grow them on to find out the best ways to grow them in this country – and then disseminate that information more widely.

The latest news from the project talks about the plants that you can see when you visit Ryton. The weather wasn’t good, and I didn’t manage to photograph them all, but I did see the ‘Red Noodle’ yard-long beans (Vigna sesquipedalis var ungicularis), eddoes (Colcoasia esculenta) and Polenta maize (Zea mays), among others.

Sally also gave me a behind-the-scenes tour, which was fascinating. She really knows her plants, and constantly brings out little snippets of information.

This plant:

I thought was a big patch of nettles, but it’s Korean Mint (Agastache rugosa). According to Sally it has a flavour like a cross between mint and lavender, but is hot. Two or three of the flowers, served with ice cream, are delicious. You need something to counter the heat!

Tree spinach (Chenopodium giganteum) self seeds – this one is a volunteer from my garden, which came up by the compost heap this spring and which I have since potted up. The photo doesn’t do the bright pink centre justice – it is covered in little crystals that shimmer in the sun, like glitter. Sally says that if you shake it, the pink colouring comes off, and that it was used as a cosmetic, particularly in Japan.

I was also lucky enough to meet the lovely Vicky Love Thy Space. They sell classy garden stuff and have an office at Ryton, which must be a lovely place to go to work, but I imagine it must also be very distracting! How much self-control must you have not to keep popping out into the gardens? Vicky and I had a good chat and she showed me her allotment in a bucket (plants which need taking home and planting out!). I met Vicky on Twitter, and it’s always nice to be able to put names to faces.

Planting Out

Flowering broccoli looks like yellow fireworks

During yesterday’s hour in the garden I took advantage of the warmer weather and planted out some of the plants I have been hardening off on the picnic table. The purple sprouting broccoli plants had bolted – producing a shower of bright yellow flowers that the bees loved, and then a meal of tasty leaves and flowers for the chickens. I did intend to harvest some of the flowers for my meals, to see what they were like, but didn’t get around to it.

In their place I have planted three courgettes – Tromba d’Albega – that grow lovely trombone-shaped fruits. I have also planted one Friulana in a half barrel pot with some nasturtiums. I have two or three more courgettes to find homes for, and a couple of climbing mini-pumpkins. Which sounds like a lot of squash, but the chickens will help us eat them and I’m also going to try eating the flowers this year.

Another bed has become a haven for South American plants. There was a potato volunteer already growing, so I have left that in peace and given it a yacon for company. An achocha plant is going to try growing up my handmade willow obelisk and I found space at the front for half a dozen oca plants (having given away all of my other oca tubers at the seed swap).

Several more achocha plants are dotted around the garden, wherever there is something for them to climb up. When my neighbour removed his hedge over the winter, it revealed a low chain link fence, and I am hoping to smother it in plants this summer. So far I have climbing nasturtiums and achocha in place; the Hooligan mini pumpkins should also scramble.

High Hopes 2

At the end of 2008, an Alternative Kitchen Garden Show listener offered me some medlar seeds in a seed swap. I potted them up, put them outside, and duly noted that they could take two years to germinate. I left the pots on the patio, and quickly learned not to bother looking at them too often. They grew the occasional weed, but that was it.

But this spring, a seedling has emerged. It’s almost in the centre of the pot, which suggests planting rather than self-seeding. I do not recognise it; it has rather pretty toothed leaves and a red stem. The leaves don’t look entirely like medlar leaves, but the juvenile leaves could be different, it’s not that unusual.

Could this be a medlar seedling? I can’t find an image on the internet to compare it to – medlars are usually grafted onto a rootstock for propagation, as they take so long to germinate.

I asked the supplier of the seeds what he thought – he trundled out to look at his tree and came back to say that the leaves were similar, and his tree does indeed have a red tinge to its foliage.

The timing is right – the seeds have been through two winters and could be ready to emerge. Is it a medlar seedling? Has anyone seen one, and so can confirm or deny?

Forest Garden Friday:21st May 2010

This week I have been potting on some new arrivals in my garden, all of which are good forest garden plants. But what makes a good forest garden plant? Most of them are perennials, or self-propagating annuals and biennals – which is one of the reasons why a well-planned forest garden is low maintenance.

One of the underlying principles of a forest garden is that each plant should have multiple uses. The golden hop shown above is a gift from Maddy Harland from her forest garden (of which there was a sneak peak in the first episode of Alys Fowler’s Edible Garden tv show).

Hops are climbing plants, which mean they make use of vertical space – one of the ‘layers‘ in a forest garden, and also a great way to make the most of small gardens. Climbing plants can also form temporary screens for privacy or shielding something ugly – although the golden hop will die back in the winter.

Plants are either male or female, and it’s the female plants that bear the flowers used for flavouring beer and for making hop pillow to guard against insomnia. The hop also has edible leaves and shoots, can be used as a tea, is a dye plant and can provide coarse fibres for clothing or paper.

And it’s ornamental and the flowers are scented (and no doubt it has some wildlife value), so I think it has earned it’s place! There’s a lovely article about golden hops over at Paghat’s Garden with more details and some interesting history.

If you click through to the larger picture of my new hop then you’ll be able to see ‘weeds’ growing at it’s base. They’re not weeds at all, they’re self-seeded pink purslane seedlings that have hitched a ride – making this a two-for-one gift! Pink purslane is a woodland edge plant, meaning that it is adapted to cope with shade. It has edible leaves and medicinal uses, and also makes a good ground cover. There’s not a lot of shade in my garden, and it may not like this sunny spot on the patio, but as I repotted the hop I separated some of the seedlings and have potted them separately, so I can find a more suitable home for them elsewhere in the garden.

Gardeners who like the unusual may have been seduced by a new item in the catalogues this spring – the Aronia ‘Viking’. I was, and my two plants have just arrived. This Aronia is sold as a ‘superberry’, with high antioxidant values. Apparently it’s fruit is unpalatable raw, but lovely cooked – I’m going to have to wait a couple of years to find out! There’s a lovely saying I found over on the gardenweb forums that explains how it works with new perennials. In the first year they SLEEP and do very little, in the second year they CREEP and get a bit bigger, and in the third year they LEAP and really get the hang of growing and fruiting. So don’t forget to be patient with new plants :)

Details about the new Aronias are a bit sketchy, but I think ‘Viking’ is a purple chokeberry. This family of plants will be more familiar to readers from North America, and according to ISUE the edible berries are also considered to have medicinal uses (much like cranberries) and the plants themselves are good in hedges and windbreaks, ornamental in their own right, and have a wildlife value.

Back when I started looking into unusual edible and useful plants, I thought it would be cool to collate them into a Top Trumps game. But now that I’m a little older and wiser, I realise that the deck would be so large as to be completely unwieldy :D

Plant Wishlist

I was catching up on my Edible Garden episodes yesterday afternoon, which put me in a thoughtful mood. There are plenty of things I would like to try growing in the garden, none of which will fit this year as I have already chosen far too many. And people are always asking me what I would like in seed swaps, and I never have an answer.

And so, here for my benefit as much as everyone else’s, is the list of plants that has caught my eye and which I would like – eventually – to try. I will add a ‘last updated’ date at the bottom, and put a link to this post in the sidebar, so it is easy to find. As and when I add new things I will attempt to put in the link that inspired me, if there is one.

In no particular order:

• Chayote (Sechium edule)


• Chinese artichokes (Stachys affinis)


• New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides)


• Sharks fin melon (Cucurbita ficifolia)


• Ulluco (Ullucus tuberosus), which I have tried once but not succeeded with


• Kabocha (Japanese squash, a Cucurbita maxima)


• Root/ Hamburg parsley


• Salsola


• Fiddleheads. I love ferns, but just don’t have a shady spot for them.


• Lemon verbena


• Calvolo nero I have just received some of this from Rocket Gardens, so it is in the garden this year after all!


• Curry plant Helichrysum italicum for cat defences


• Morning Glory Ipomoea aquatica, aka water spinach. (Currently available from Nicky’s Nursery)


• Jaltomato Jaltomata procumbens


• Turkish rocket, Bunias orientalis


• Daubenton’s Kale, aka Chou Daubenton, a perennial kale. Arrived 4th August 2010.


• Monkey Puzzle Araucaria araucana, available from Nicky’s Nursery


• Caraway, Carum carvi


• Purple hazel, Corylus avellana maxima Purpurea

Last updated: 1st June 2010

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