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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.

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?

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.

Sorrel Supplies

We’ve had sorrel in the garden for a couple of years now. It’s a variety called Schavel, from the HSL, and there are three plants that for the most part take care of themselves. Pete and I tried a few baby leaves in a salad last year, but it was far too sour for our tastes and its main use has been to provide the chickens with some greens.

Since the arrival of Cluck and Chewie, it has been under pressure. They love it – they think it’s the best thing ever. Chewie, in particular, would eat her own weight in the stuff every day. Princess Layer has succumbed to peer pressure and now eats more than she used to as well. If I let her free range, she jumps up in the raised bed and browses the sorrel directly.

I’ve given the plants a feed, but I have also sown some more seeds. And I’ve been in the garden for an hour or so today and I have sown another batch of sorrel seeds – this time blood veined sorrel from the OGC.

The rest of the hour was spent sowing flat leaved parsley, Sub Arctic Plenty and Tumbling Tom tomatoes (for a new project, of which more later), potting on my basil seedlings and two new peppermints (one orange, one lavender) and rearranging the seedlings that are living indoors.

I managed the foliar feed I didn’t get around to last time; this time the item bumped onto the next to do list is earthing up the potatoes :)

May Day

There’s always a lot in the media (especially at this time of year) about how you can save time in the garden, and about how you can have a beautiful and productive plot without spending your life outside tending it. And to a certain extent it’s true – there are plenty of techniques you can use to cut down on the time you need to spend outside to make your garden presentable.

But it’s also true that gardening is one of those activities where you get out what you put in, and that spending time outside in the garden has physical and mental benefits as well as being useful. The more time you spend outside, the more likely you are to be able to nip potential problems – pests, diseases and weeds) in the bud before they become real issues.

The picture above represents my gardening activities over the winter – I spent a lot of time on Facebook playing FarmVille and turning a virtual farm into a beautiful food forest. I enjoy seeing which unusual crops and trees they come up with on a regular basis, but once the weather improved this spring I decided it would be a better use of my time to go and play outside in the real garden instead. Last year’s garden was mediocre for various reasons; this year I want one packed with productive plants.

The plan is that I will try and spend a couple of hours outside each day, pottering in the garden and getting things done. It’s not a draconian rule – if I’m needed elsewhere, or don’t have the energy, then it won’t matter if I miss a day or too. The weather (which is very wet today, for which the garden is grateful) won’t be too much of an issue at this time of year when there’s lots of sowing to do that can be done indoors.

And so, hopefully, this blog will be more about work that I’ve done – and less about gardening in general – for the rest of the growing season.

Yesterday, for example, I sowed mixed salad and peas for pea shoots in containers for windowsill growing, as well as plenty of sunflowers. I sorted out a lot of old plant pots that I am intending to take to the Hampshire Green Fair and offer them as freebies to people who take part in my seed and seedling swap.

I layered the jostaberry, as it had a low-slung branch that was too good an opportunity to miss. I potted on 3 citrus plants and my new feijoa (a lovely, large plant I bought from the National Herb Center a couple of weeks ago).

And I moved several sets of seedlings outside to harden off (including my Petit Posies flower sprouts, which are looking well).

The next item on the list was a seaweed foliar feed for the fruit bushes, but I was too whacked to get that far, so it’s top of the list next time. Phew! I’m quite glad it’s raining today, so I can do some les intensive stuff :)

Not dead

One of the joys of spring is watching perennials come back to life after the winter. There’s always some doubt that they will – they look so dead – and there’s always one or two that (for whatever reason) don’t make it.

These are plants that I am particularly glad to see have survived the winter, despite my doubts:

Two sea kale plants, grown from seed last year. They spent their first year in pots, which they didn’t like, so as they have survived I have planted them in the ground.

Proof that Jerusalem artichokes are indestructible after all – I thought the dry autumn had killed all of mine off last year.

I have two honeyberries, in pots on the patio. They weren’t very happy last year, and looked dead all winter, but have sprung into exuberant life this spring.

And last but not least, my lovely kiwi Jenny is again producing her rosy, furry leaves. And as this will be her third summer she may well even fruit this year, fingers crossed!

That’s the good news. Of course, there is some bad news. It looks as though my beautiful manuka dried out too much in the grow dome and won’t be joining us this summer. None of the passionfruits made it either, nor did the samphire.

Grow your own luffa

Mrs Green has set herself a new challenge this spring – she’s aiming to grow her own luffa (or loofah) to use as zero waste pan scrubbers. Never one to shy away from new plant experiences, I’m going to join her!

Luffas grow in a similar manner to cucumbers, and are more successful in the UK with a bit of heat and protection. The young fruits are edible, probably tasting more like courgettes, and it’s the skeletonised interior of mature fruits that are cleaned up and used for bath and kitchen scrubbers.

For more information about growing your own luffa (Luffa aegyptica or L. cylindrica) check out Luffa.info or Sally Cunningham’s book Asian Vegetables.

Seeds aren’t too hard to come by here in the UK. It looks like Mrs Green got hers from Nicky’s Nursery, and mine came from Victoriana Nursery. Chiltern Seeds have three different luffa species and Jungle Seeds have one, as do Suffolk Herbs.

Sally Cunningham also sites tropicalfruitandveg.co.uk as a source, but I have no experience of them.

I sowed my seeds yesterday and I’m going to put them on the bedroom windowsill where they’ll warm up nicely. If you decide to join in the fun, then do let me and Mrs Green know how you get on!

Oca surplus

Last year was the second year I grew oca in the garden. In year one they were moderately successful in containers. Last year, in a raised bed and with a long autumn they were very productive.

The bucket of oca tubers sat in the kitchen all winter, waiting for me to do something with them, but now it’s planting time. I don’t have space for them in the garden this year, but if you’re in the UK and you’d like to try some then drop me an email with your address and I’ll send a handful out.

I have two colours (both originally from Real Seeds) – Pure White and Scarlet with White Eyes. If you’d like one or both then let me know.

New veg for 2010

There’s a nice slideshow in The Telegraph today, showcasing some of the new vegetable varieties that Gardening Which? tried out last year.

My initial thoughts were that the selection wasn’t very exciting – it starts out with a new slow-to-bolt coriander variety and carries on through a cucumber (which we don’t eat) and a bountiful runner bean. But then there’s Autumn Crown, a cross between a butternut squash and a Crown Prince, which sounds interesting, and Brokali ‘Apollo’ which is a cross between Kailaan (an Oriental broccoli) and calabrese, which grows really quickly to give you calabrese florets rather than a big head.

There’s also Moonlight, a cross between a French bean and a runner bean that is self-pollinating and can therefore be grown undercover.

But my personal favourite has to be Brussels Sprout ‘Petit Posy’, which is odd because we don’t eat sprouts. But it’s a cross with kale and produces tiny little kale ‘posies’ down the stem in true sprouty fashion and looks adorable. I may have to find some space in my winter garden for this one! In fact, if you look at the T&M site it gets even more interesting, as it’s a seed mix, with purple, green and bicoloured plants!

Are you trying something new and exciting in your garden this year?

Progress

We were waiting in for a man to service the boiler this morning, which always sets me on edge, so I left hubby inside (he’s happiest indoors) and went outside for some horticultural therapy instead. It’s a reasonably nice day and I’ve been outside for three hours and have made considerable progress on the mountain of work that needs doing in the garden.

First up I emptied the rather stagnant ex-rice paddies onto the compost. Well, I emptied three of them onto the compost. They’re rather heavy and I dropped one and emptied it mostly on myself, but I didn’t let that deter me (and I’ve now had a wash!).

Then I cleared two small raised beds and sowed crimson flowered broad beans, complete with Bean Booster to help them fix nitrogen. I’ve covered them over as best I can to try and keep out mice and the cats that have been digging over the garden all winter and leaving me smelly presents.

And I repotted the mint that had been in a terracotta pot until it completely shattered in the cold weather, and mulched the garlic bed and mulched half of the onion bed and then cleared out the front windowboxes and replanted those with broad beans – The Sutton, this time.

That meant potting up 4 little box bushes and finding them a new home, and then I did the two elephant garlic, so that they have more root space. Then it was all about clearing up after myself and coming back inside for lunch before I collapsed in a heap. It does look as though I’ve had the best of the weather outside today – it’s overcast now.

Onions and garlic

It’s a lovely day today, and the sunshine tempted me out into the garden to do some of the things that have been on my To Do list for weeks. I don’t think I have ever planted Japanese onions this late in the year, or the garlic, but to be fair I was ill for most of November and the Incan vegetables were reluctant to give up their hold on the raised beds until we had the first frost, which was only a week ago.

So this morning I dug over the Yacon bed and composted the remains of the Ulluco plants – which completely failed to produce any tubers. Then I emptied out one of my compost bins and put the finished compost onto the bed, raked it over and planted up the onion sets that have been growing in Rootrainers for a few weeks (I planted most of my Radar sets straight into my largest raised beds a few weeks back, but ran out of space for them all).

Then I dug up the oca (I’ll take a picture of my oca harvest later), dug over that bed and planted it up with the garlic. Three rows – Porcelain at the back, Thermidrome bulbils in the middle and proper Thermidrome cloves at the front.

So that’s a good chunk of the To Do list crossed off, but there’s still plenty to do. At this rate there won’t be much of the winter left by the time I can put the garden ‘to bed’ ;)

It’s now time for lunch and a good sit down with the Heritage Seed Library catalogue, which arrived while I was outside.

First Frost 2009

It has been a long, mild autumn here in the UK but I suppose it is fitting that the first frost finally arrived (about 6 weeks later than scheduled) on 1st December. It’s the only one so far, though – this morning all we had was fog. It does mean that I can get on with some jobs in the garden that were still pending:

Wonderberries are supposed to be nicer after a touch of frost

The yacon was not only still growing, it was about to flower

The yacon is much less happy after a frost!

It will soon be time to dig up the oca – you have to wait until frost has killed off the foliage, which causes the tubers to swell

The nasturtiums have been providing some autumn colour, but their year is over now too

Dratted drought

Throughout the summer, my Jerusalem artichokes were thriving. One was really tall – I think it had rooted through the bottom of its container into the ground underneath. Then there was a really windy day and it was uprooted. Then all the top growth died.

When it was really dry in September, the others followed suit. And when I came to dig them up to see what the harvest was like, I found that it had failed. Some tubers had formed, but they were tiny and not worth separating from the root. It may be next to impossible to kill Jersualem artichokes, and they may be very drought-tolerant perennials, but none of mine will make it into the kitchen this year.

I have salvaged two of the roots and planted them (intact) in new compost with a chicken manure pellet feed. I hope that they will grow next year and provide me with enough tubers to plant some more pots next time. If they die off over the winter it will be disappointing, but not the end of the world. Gardeners all over the country who plant their Jerusalem artichokes in the ground will be handing out spare tubers like candy come spring :)

Bye bye taro

Remember the eddoes? (aka elephant’s ears). I planted them in pots in April 2008 to see how they would grow. They overwintered in the grow dome and spent their summers outdoors. This year they were troubled by drought, and when it came time to clear the garden up I decided their time had come.

I tipped them out and they hadn’t grown much in the way of new roots. It’s not surprising, and hence not disappointing. I never did try the leaves. They did look very tropical when in leaf though, if you like that sort of thing :)

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