Seedlings Update

When I first started growing things, March was the month of frenzied seed-sowing, but now, having had a few years experience, I've chilled out a bit and a lot more happens in April. That way I don't have so much trouble looking after young plants and protecting them from frost, and plants don't get pot-bound and unhappy in their containers. So yes, with those digging and structural tasks out of the way, April has been largely about seed-sowing and caring for baby plants.

At home I have several trays of tomato, pepper, squash and cucumber plants to look after. They live outside on sunny days and all over the kitchen table and floor overnight. It's a bit of a chore but hardens the plants off thoroughly and allows them all the light they desire, and it's only for a few weeks.

The raised bed is looking great, full of salad veg seedlings including lettuce, mustard, spinach, watercress, komatsuna, kohlrabi, carrots, radish, turnips and spring onions - it'll be a salad bar all summer, and there'll be space for pepper plants here too. Despite my fears and the poor performance last year, I'm seeing no growth problems at all so far - hooray!

The plastic greenhouse is full of seedlings too; chard and perpetual spinach, kale and cauliflowers, dill, leaf celery, achillea, cerinthe, stock, snapdragons, cosmos and marigolds.

The cerinthe seedlings are so pretty!

On the plot, parsnips, beetroots and turnips have germinated and I gave them a good hoeing between the rows yesterday to keep the weeds down. Soon I'll sow swedes and calabrese in this bed too, and plant out young celeriac, leeks and cauliflowers.

The bindweed in this bed and our perennials bed is bad, but all I can do now is keep pulling it and hope it gives up eventually! You can see below there are a few gaps among the broad beans. Not sure why... But I think I'll resow them next time I'm down there - it's not too late! I'm a bit ashamed to say I forgot to put insect-proof mesh over my carrots again, having failed last year too. I couldn't bear to see the carrots split and deformed from carrot fly again, and carrot fly are no doubt laying eggs by now, especially thanks to this mild spell! So I've hoed out all the seedlings and will resow them in a new location at the weekend and put the mesh in place straight away!

We've sown the flower bed with hardy annuals now too (cornflowers, vipers bugloss, ammi majus, bupleurum), though loads of tiny weed seedlings are coming up too and it's going to be a job to know which seedlings to weed out and which to keep!

April has rushed by but I'm glad it's nearly May - the month of planting-out! By the end of May the house will be seedling-free again and I should be able to stop worrying about cold nights and spring hailstorms!

Busy, busy!

Winter and early spring are great times for gardeners to do all sorts of non-growing jobs, like developing new areas and working on paths or buildings. I had a long list of these this year, and a long session on the allotment on Monday finally allowed us to finish up all but one of them. Just in time I'd say - 'early spring' is most definitely over now we've hit April!

We finally finished digging over what was previously our strawberry bed, which will be our flower patch this year and hopefully bring looooads more beneficial insects to the plot, as well as giving us flowers to cut and give away. I planted out the corncockle, calendula and clary sage I raised at home over winter, and I'll sow lots more here in a couple of weeks...

We've also planted up the herb patch round the pond and fruit trees. The focus here isn't on culinary herbs, as they're much more useful grown at home where you can grab them easily as you need them, but on flowering perennial herbs for insects and some herbs which I'd like to try drying for tea - lemon balm, camomile and peppermint. I've also popped a few perennial and self-sowing flowers in; some poached egg plant and primroses, an oriental poppy and an echinops. Maybe I should call it my 'companion plants patch' instead of my herb patch.

There's still a bit of work to do to get rid of the last of the grass in that corner by the pond... But it's so good to have this area looking nice again after it got swamped with grass and then we mulched it with manky cardboard over winter!

When we moved our compost bins last summer, there was a lot of good compost in the bottom that we just couldn't use at the time, so it's been heaped up in the place where the compost bins were ever since - we even grew our beans late last summer on the temporary raised bed it created...

...but now we've levelled the ground and moved the pile to this year's potato bed, where it will help build the soil. Our greenhouse will go in this spot this year. I hope the people on the next plot sort out their compost pile soon - it's a bit of a battle to stop it falling onto our plot, and there are brambles growing in it which keep finding their way into this bed.

While we were on the plot I also took the opportunity to sow some more seeds: I scattered some dill and parsley seeds in some carefully-chosen corners, and sowed beetroots, turnips and parsnips in rows in our roots bed, a foot apart, and covered with sieved compost.

 

Do you like my new plant labels? They look a bit industrial, but I was desperate to find something that would last for years, instead of perishing in the sun or rotting in the rain or just getting kicked about and lost in the dirt, and I hope these are the answer. They're from Amazon - I tried to find another supplier but couldn't - by a company called GardenMate. The permanent marker is supposed to last all season, and I'll be able to clean it off with a solvent cleaner to reuse them. That's the theory, anyway...

I'm happy that we have some broad beans on the plot at last, after a bit of a battle against mice eating the seeds! These were actually sown at home in a big seed tray at the beginning of March, and planted out this week. There are a few more sown direct here too, and covered with the same mesh to try to keep the rodents off this time. I have half a feeling I'm going to go down there and find little holes chewed right through the netting one of these days!

At home, I've sown lots more seeds, including celery, basil, dill, perpetual spinach, pea shoots and some more flowers; sunflowers, achillea and cerinthe. After a manic March, I think I've just about caught up with myself. The only things remaining are to clear and dig over the old asparagus bed, which is small and shouldn't take too long, and plant out my poor sweet peas which are getting desperate for some space and some support! Poor things!

I'm glad it's April now and the weather must warm up a bit more soon. I feel like I've got a bit of a holiday coming up over the long Easter weekend, and I'll probably get stuck into some more sowing: courgettes, squashes, brassicas and beans are next, as well as the bulk of the flower patch, getting the greenhouse sorted - and it'll be time to plant potatoes before we know it!

2014

It's easy to think that winter is a quiet time for gardeners, but there's plenty to be done. Between harvesting winter crops, checking fleeces and stakes, winter digging, construction projects and maintenance, nurturing overwintering plants and looking after little seedlings in the greenhouse, there's also plenty of planning to be done, and it inevitably involves a good look back over the past growing season to see what worked and what didn't.

2014 was a pretty bumper year for us, but there are always lessons to be learned. Our plot was under a couple of feet of floodwater for a week early on in the year, but thankfully it didn't do any real damage or set us back - we just had some extra clearing up to do, and to be patient in waiting for the soil to dry out again. We've settled on a new 'structure' for our plot, with three main beds in a rotation plus a number of perennial areas, and we made several new paths. We failed to cultivate the difficult far corner of the plot or our old strawberry bed, but we did clear them and cover them up to stifle the weeds and make the job easier later. We planted a new perennials bed with asparagus, artichokes, strawberries and herbs - hopefully some perennial kale will go in here too. We built new compost bins in a new area, and grew beans on the super-fertile patch where the old bins were. We also upped our growing game in the garden at home, converting a shrub bed to grow vegetables and adding three raised beds - more on all that in another post.

2013, compost bins. 2014, French beans. 2015 greenhouse!

We tried a new way of adding fertility to our plot; the 'Complete Organic Fertiliser' recommended by Steve Solomon for rebalancing soil nutrients for maximum plant health and nutrition. Though I can't quantify the results or compare to a 'control' area, I have to say everything on the plot just grew better than ever with virtually no problems, and I am quite sure the COF helped that happen. I will be going one step further this year: sending some soil samples off for laboratory analysis and creating a custom mix to balance it even better.

Another thing we trialled was 'Rootgrow' or mycorrhizal fungi, endorsed by the RHS; a mix of natural fungi that forms symbioses with plant roots and gives plants access to more nutrients and water. It's primary recommended use is in planting trees and shrubs, to help them establish quicker and more easily, but it is supposed to help any plant so I used it under every single crop to see what happened. In theory it should drought-proof plants and help fruits and roots to swell more steadily and evenly. In practice, though we had great growth almost everywhere and the new asparagus and artichokes established without a hitch, my container potatoes gave identical yields whether I used the Rootgrow or not, the newly-planted strawberries didn't establish well for some reason, squashes and swedes came in a huge mix of sizes, and my celeriac completely failed to swell, so I'm not entirely convinced...

Potatoes did wonderfully - we managed to grow a kilo for every week of the year. (If only I had somewhere better to store them - they are now sprouting and turning soft). Scab was very bad on our old favourite Kestrel, but we also tried Pentland Crown this year, which makes a much better baked jacket spud, seems to store slightly better, and doesn't suffer as much scab, so we will be growing more of these in 2015! On reflection I wondered if I should have left the lime out of the COF applied to this area, as it probably made it worse.

Carrots were our best ever, even though we couldn't find our enviromesh in time to protect our first sowing so we lost some to carrot fly - our later sowings did brilliantly and they even won a first placing in the allotment association show! We have only succeeded with carrots since we added lime to our soil - perhaps they need the extra calcium.

Pumpkins and squashes did brilliantly too; we brought home 18 lovely fruits and many are still sitting around happily on windowsills and doormats waiting to be eaten. Arguably we might have expected even more squashes from our eight plants - some plants only gave us one or two fruits - but they suffered from quite a lot of weed competition... Turns out it wasn't such a good idea to undersow them with clover; clover actually gets quite big and unruly when it wants to!

Leeks, parsnips, swedes, broad beans and beetroots all got along just fine. Beetroots really are just THE easiest vegetable to grow - nothing seems to stop them. I only wish Eddie liked them better as I'm eating them mostly by myself. The leeks are suffering from some allium leaf miner and I think we should cover them with mesh next year. We only grew one variety of French beans - a local heritage variety called Ryder's Blue Coco - and I sowed them rather late due to a lack of space earlier on. They were delightful - really tender - and we were eating them long after our neighbours' beans had finished, but we couldn't save any seeds from them because they didn't have time to mature before the first frost, which was a great shame. I do have just a few seeds left so I MUST do better at this next year!

Our chard and winter spinach, planted out in late summer, suffered a bit of neglect due to an extremely busy autumn, but though we lost a few to slugs and snails, they grew superbly and we really should have harvested more from them before the winter. We will still be able to pick from them when growth starts again in early spring though. Our first attempt at fennel suffered the same neglect but also grew very well indeed, and again we failed to harvest it in good time. It's certainly one to try again this year though. We also have a few spring cabbages nearly ready which have done really well - a nice compact variety called Pixie which, assuming it tastes good come spring, I will certainly grow again.

2014 was our first year growing both celery and celeriac. The celery did okay, though it was a bit thin and stringy (I don't usually eat it raw much anyway - just use it for soups, stocks and stews - so that doesn't really matter). The celeriac was a huge disappointment; no root to speak of at all, and I'm not sure why or what to do differently next year...

The importance of beneficial insects really, properly hit home to me last spring when scores of ladybirds descended on our blackfly-infested broad beans and cleared the whole lot up for us. I'm pretty sure there were more ladybirds around than before because I'd grown phacelia in the next bed over winter - ladybirds seem to be attracted by lacy foliage and as we cleared it up in the spring there were loads of them among it. I always grow a few flowers here and there, but now I will grow more!

In the home garden, our courgettes and tomatoes were just fabulous and kept me busy finding new ways to use them! The tomatoes succumbed to blight in the late summer, as they always do. We tried a local heritage variety of tomato - 'Ryder's Midday Sun' - but sadly didn't find them up to a good standard; the plants grew slowly, the tomatoes were watery and lacked flavour, and they were first to succumb to blight! Maybe they'd do better in a greenhouse... But while I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to try them, I'm not sure I have the space to persist with them. Cucumbers and salad greens in our new raised beds did not do well at all and I'm sure there was a problem with the soil - more on that in another post... Peppers did okay but gosh, they take so long to ripen! We were disappointed in a new variety we tried - 'Hebar' - which had very thin flesh and not much flavour at all. The seller described it as "particularly sweet and tasty" so I'd love to know what anyone else thinks of them! We have bought a plastic greenhouse to put on the allotment this summer, which should be just big enough to grow a few tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in. This way we hope to have blight free tomatoes and earlier peppers! We'll still grow some at home too though...

Kaibi Round, Ancho Grande, Hebar, Lipstick

The enviromesh over the kale bed got torn in high winds early in the year, and by late summer caterpillars had stripped the plants as I was too lazy to do anything about it... Thankfully some of the plants made a surprisingly good comeback though! Another mistake I will not repeat next year is planting French beans behind courgette plants. After the courgettes had been growing a month I couldn't reach the beans at all, and had to leave them all to pick for drying instead! The mangetout was great - we could hardly keep up with it - and we were really impressed by variety 'Carouby de Maussane' with giant pods! I have never grown ordinary peas, as frozen British peas are extremely good and convenient, and all the podding seemed like too much of a faff, but last year we did grow a multipurpose mangetout/podding pea - 'Ezeta's Krombek Blauwschokker' - and when they got too big to eat as mangetout I was forced to pod a few... They were so lovely that I might just add a few real podding peas to my garden this year...

Carouby de Maussane mangetout - still gorgeously sweet and tender at this size!

The 'perennial salad mix' from Suffolk Herbs turned out to be a mix of chicories and radicchios, which have grown well but... I just don't really like the taste. Admittedly I should have read the back of the pack more carefully, but this picture is a bit misleading I think!

All in all, we will do much the same this year as last, but here are the things we plan to do differently:

• Grow more flowers - to include a cutting-flower patch!
• Do even more to balance our soil nutrition according to Steve Solomon's great book 'The Intelligent Gardener'
• Add a plastic greenhouse to the allotment to grow a few summer veg under cover.
• Don't plant anything behind courgettes!
• Improve raised bed soil.
• Buy more enviromesh, to replace torn piece and cover leeks too.
• Keep squash bed weed-free - perhaps mulch beneath plants - and grow fewer plants so they don't get so tangled.
• Grow some proper peas, perhaps.
• Try harder with celeriac.
• Grow more Pentland Crown potatoes and less Kestrel - and try another new variety too.
• There are always new varieties to try; this year new ones for us include oyster leaf, beefsteak plant, pink banana squash, skykomish tomatoes (supposed to have some blight resistance), marconi rosso peppers, and we're going to attempt to grow cauliflowers for the first time, since we buy them quite a lot...
• We also plan to plant a new fruit patch on the long-neglected and difficult far corner of the allotment, and clear and replant our overgrown herb bed.

Frosty radicchio

Pickling

I've had another tentative go at pickling this year; first, sliced beetroots from the allotment, and then some of the more diminutive specimens from my onion and shallot harvests.

Pickling beetroot is really easy - just cook the beets in their skins, peel, and cover with vinegar. It's important not to cut or pierce the beets in any way before cooking - cut the stalks to a couple of centimetres and wash them gently, then boil or roast until just soft. (I boiled mine, but I think I'll roast them next time as a lot of colour and aroma seemed to escape into the water even with their skins intact.) Allow them to cool enough to handle comfortably, then rub the soft skins away. Have plenty of paper towel at hand - this is a messy job! Slice the beetroots (or you could leave them whole if they're small) and pack into sterilised jars. Bring the vinegar to the boil with a few spoonfuls of sugar and some pickling spices (mustard seeds, allspice berries, peppercorns, mace, coriander, cloves, etc. to taste) and then pour into the jars, to cover the beets, and seal. I won't share my recipe here because I'm not quite happy with it - less spice, more sugar next time, for me. But I'm enjoying my beetroots all the same, usually in sandwiches with ham, mayo and lettuce. Yum!

Pickling onions and shallots takes a bit longer - they must be marinated in a handful or three of sea salt (or a strong salt solution) overnight first. They'll smell just like pickled onions after marinating! Then they are packed into sterilised jars and covered with vinegar in just the same way. Again, these are a bit punchy for my taste, and I'll use more sugar next time, but Dad loves them so they're still going to good use!

I'm rather sad I didn't get to pickle some courgettes too - I really enjoyed these last year - but the courgettes haven't been up to much this year and the usual glut never happened. Ah well, maybe I can get some more beetroot chutney made with the winter crop soon...

First Sowings

I know, I know, I'm way behind. The good news is MOST of the things I'm about to tell you about were actually sown a few weeks ago - I just haven't had the time to tell you about it yet.

First, leeks. The past few years I've bought leek seedlings, because of some early catastrophic failures, but this year I decided to grow them from seed again and I'm pleased to report that so far, it's going well.

I've got three varieties on the go for maximum chances of success; Autumn Giant 3, Malabar, and Musselburgh. In the background above you may also be able to make out some very tiny Winter Gem lettuces.

This year I'm growing mostly Angelle tomatoes from the seeds I saved from a supermarket tomato last year. The plants are really compact (straight up, few leaves, not much support needed) so I figured I could grow a lot in a small space. However, they've been rather sickly from the word go and a lot have 'damped off', so now I only have half as many! I'm planning another sowing tomorrow...

I've sown a couple of Hundreds and Thousands (from saved seeds) and Sub Arctic Plenty too, and they're doing fine...

As always, I'm having terrible trouble geting any peppers to germinate - I just don't know what I'm doing wrong! The Jalapenos are okay...

...but my King of the North green peppers, Dedo de Mocha Sweet Aji peepers (smoky flavoured but heat-free, the packet says!), Kaibi no 2 sweet red peppers and Doux Tres Long Des Landes long sweet peppers are showing few signs of life (twenty seeds, one shoot so far...). Perhaps I'll have to invest in one of those heated propogator things after all... Anyone recommend one?

We've been busy sowing on the plot as well, with four rows of broad beans (Bunyards Exhibition and Aquadulce) just about ready to pop up I reckon. In our two raised beds, I've sown a mass of salady veg. In one, French Breakfast radishes, Giant Radishes, Boltardy beetroots, and assorted carrot seeds. (Am I the only one that accumulates bazillions of half-packets of carrot seeds, then still buys new ones each year just in case the old ones don't work? Well this year all the old ones have gone in, all mixed up, and even if half of them don't work I'll still have PLENTY of carrots.) In the other, three varieties of spinach, Bull's Blood beetroot (for leaves), land cress and some Little Gems. These are the beds the foxes like to dig in for some unknown reason, so we finished the job by covering one bed with a spare piece of plastic mesh, and the other one (rather hopefully) with zigzags of string. Fingers crossed...

Survivors

It was a particularly harsh winter for most of us, and sadly some plants on the plot that should have overwintered seem to have bitten the dust.

We have just one Purple Sprouting Broccoli plant left, and not looking particularly enthusiastic about it:

And one of the 'Everlasting' cauliflowers is gone, while the growing tip of the other seems to have rotten away to leave a dead crater at the top of the stem. Not sure what this means... Luckily we have a couple of these plants spare, safe but pot-bound at home, so I have replaced the dead one and we'll wait and see what the other does.

It's not all bad though - we were surprised to find some leftover beetroots that withstood the winter in perfect condition! Time to make more chutney! And our parsnips and leeks (which we're still harvesting!) have done stupendously well, and continue to be reliable crops on our plot. I should have photographed the leeks before we ate all the biggest ones! But these are still very reasonably sized, healthy and delicious.

I was pleased to find one of my primroses popping up in a corner. I planted a few but last year they seemed to be losing the battle against the grass. There's no sign of the others.

I thought my perennial sweet peas had lost against either weeds or slugs too, but here they are, struggling away. They were sown last year and never got very big. As soon as I can I will set up some decent support for them and hopefully it won't be too long before we have gorgeous flowers climbing up our compost heap! They don't look like much at the moment though...

Finally, here's our chard making a valiant comeback - hopefully I'll get a few more handfuls of leaves before it goes to flower.

 

But that's enough about last year's plants... Next, this year's new sowings!

Nome makes Chutney

My Nanna used to make the most incredible beetroot chutney. Whenever we went to her house I always hoped it would be on the lunch table, and ever since those days I've tried every beetroot chutney I've seen, looking for one as good. I've always been disappointed. So when I started growing my own vegetables, I promised myself that one day I'd have a go at making my own beetroot chutney, and this year we've finally produced enough beetroots to give it a go!

I found a recipe by Rick Stein (in fact it's been pinned to my noticeboard for a couple of years now) and edited it a little (I don't like raisins!). Unlike my courgette pickle, I decided to bottle it up properly this time so it would keep for a good long time, so I headed out to a specialist kitchen shop to get some jars. There are so many different types, I didn't know where to start! I ended up buying a selection, so I could find out which ones I preferred for next time! In the end, I reused a couple of old jars I found at home as well.


Beetroot Chutney

• Peel and coarsely shred 900g beetroot, 450g onions and 675g apples. (The original recipe said cooking apples but I used ordinary eating apples.) I used the julienne blade on my mandolin.
• Place into a heavy-based pan with 2 tbsps ground ginger, 1 tbsp mustard powder, 1 or 2 tsps chilli powder, 900g granulated sugar, 40g salt, 1.2 litres malt vinegar and the juice of a lemon.
• Heat gently, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved, then bring to the boil and simmer gently, UNCOVERED, for about two hours, until it's well reduced and quite thick. (I missed the 'uncovered' part at first, and then had to simmer for much longer to reduce it!)
• Meanwhile, sterilise jars by washing well then placing them in a cold oven, heating it to 140C, then turning the heat off. Boil the lids/rubber rings in a pan of water for a few minutes.
• Spoon the warm chutney into the warm jars, seal, and label.
  

Having heard how messy dealing with raw beetroot can be, I carefully made sure I had everything I needed to hand, wore black, rolled up my sleeves and prepared it in the sink. But I really don't know what all the fuss is about! My plastic mandolin came through the experience unstained, as did my worksurfaces, my hands and everything else.

The verdict? Well, I don't know if it's quite as good as Nanna's, but oh it's good. I've been eating loads of it in ham sandwiches. A teeny bit too sweet perhaps, but that probably serves me right for using the wrong kind of apples. I will certainly be making it again next year. In fact, there are still a few beetroots in the ground to use this year too...

Beetroots - and an imposter!

Today we harvested beetroots! This is another NomeGrown first - previous attempts have yielded beetroots too small to be worth the hassle of preparing them. Some of these, on the other hand, might even be too big and woody!

Can you spot the odd one out? I'm guessing there was a stray seed in the pack, but heck if I know what it is. The leaves are the same as beetroot leaves (though taller), but with white veins instead of red.

Answers on a postcard please!

UPDATE: A bit of poking around on Google reveals that it's not uncommon for a white root or two to pop up in a line of Boltardy beetroots - which mine are. BUT... they are usually still beetroot shaped. Weird...