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!

Sowathon!

March has been a busy month for many reasons, and I've been way behind with seed-sowing for the new season, but in the last week I've squeezed in a few hours in the garden and taken the opportunity to catch up!

This time last week was the spring equinox, when the days become longer than the nights again (hurrah!), and it seemed like a good time to sow my tomato seeds. I potted up all the pepper, chilli and aubergine plants from the propagator - they're looking big and healthy and have been spending daytimes out in the plastic greenhouse (pic above) - and I sowed five varieties of tomatoes in their place: Amish Paste (a good cooking tomato, but tasty sliced as well), Dr Carolyn (delicious heritage variety!), Angelle (my favourite, from seeds saved from supermarket toms), Skykomish (a blight-resistant variety) and Indigo Rose (the 'black tomato', super-high in antioxidants). They all popped up in just four days and are growing away on the windowsill now. The electric propagator is a real help in getting warmth-loving seeds to germinate!

They look a bit leggy - I guess we've had some gloomy days lately - but they'll catch up with themselves and I'll plant them deep when I pot them up.

We spent a couple of hours topping up the big raised bed in the garden, with the last half-bag of the compost we bought for the purpose last year, plus a layer of new multi-purpose compost. I treated the bed with sulphur before sowing to try to begin lowering its high pH (see previous post), but I decided it might be overcautious to limit what I sow in it this year - after all, growth did seem to improve quite a lot during the course of last season, and the layer of fresh compost should help a bit too - so I'm trying a bigger variety of veg in it than I originally planned. It won't take long to see whether they grow well or not, and I can always resow something else later... The bed already contains some parsley, chives, garlic and perpetual spinach from last year, and I filled up the rest of the space with rows of carrots, turnips, lettuce, spring onions, komatsuna, watercress, spinach, kohlrabi, radishes and mustard.

I also sowed some more celeriac seeds. I had been hardening off my young celeriac plants, but then I read somewhere that if celeriac gets too cold in its first spring it can think it's in its second year, and go to flower rather than producing a good root. Last year's celeriac didn't actually go to flower, but it was a terrible failure and I wondered if my early-hardening-off could possibly be why... So this new set of seedlings will be coddled indoors until the temperatures are higher out there, and we'll see if it makes a difference!

The corner garden bed needed a good clear-up - it had quite a few weeds, last year's bean poles and old bean and pea plants, and some honeysuckle and snowberry invading fast. Once tidied, I sowed some peas and mangetout against the fence, and scattered mint leaves and chopped up dry mint stems over them to keep the mice away - it works a treat!

 

Finally, I sowed some chard, leaf celery and flowers (cerinthe and achillea) in cells in the plastic greenhouse, and planted some early 'Accent' potatoes in sacks. The potato shoots could be harmed by frost after they appear, so I'll need to keep an eye on them and keep earthing them up or throw fleece over them on cold nights. I've got six of these bags so I'll sow two more in two weeks, and two more two weeks later, to spread out my harvest a bit.

I'm nearly caught-up but there's still plenty more to do, and it'll be April in just a few days... In fact, I'd better get back out there!

Patience...

Despite having a long list of jobs I need to get done before the growing season starts again, very little is happening on the plot at the moment; a week or two of bitterly cold and wet weather has made digging unpleasant at best and impossible at worst. I wouldn't mind so much if it would just snow properly, like it has in much of the country, and make the place look pretty for a while! But all we've had is yucky icy sleet and lots of rain.

I've also been very busy with preparations for our first FoodSmiles AGM last week, and the FoodSmiles seed order this week! If you think figuring out what to grow on your own allotment can take a while, try figuring out what you need for a giant veg plot for 25 families using strictly organic seed only!

There's still plenty to harvest from the allotment and this week we brought home these carrots, leeks, parsnips and the last two (very small!) swedes.

We have made some progress on what is to be our new 'alternative' fruit patch, shown above. It's always been a tough corner of the allotment, this, and the couchgrass has really colonised it again, so we've dug it over once and we're halfway through a second go to pick out remaining roots. I was hoping to finish it off tomorrow and start planting it up, but if the weather is as cold as forecast I won't even be able to get a fork in the ground, and we'll have to settle for a trip to the garden centre instead - I think I have finally sated my seed-buying urge now, but there are still seed potatoes and compost to buy. Now it's February I'll be counting down the days to sowing my first seeds in the middle of the month... Better get the propagator out and clean up some pots!

It's National Vegetarian Week...

I'm not a vegetarian, and despite my fussiness about the meat I eat, I don't aspire to be one. I believe we humans are meant to eat meat and animal products - that it is an important part of healthy nutrition. (This account from a young vegan forced to realise that not everybody can survive on a vegan diet is fascinating and eye-opening.) I also believe the replenishment animals provide to the soil is vital to farming; that the healthiest way to produce food is in a polycultural system where animals and plants support and feed off each other, and that a wide variety of produce reduces the need for chemicals and treatments and encourages a healthier, more natural ecosystem where 'good' and 'bad' organisms are in balance.

But I also believe the amount of meat many are accustomed to eating these days is far too much. The amount we eat can be detrimental to our health, and too-often takes the place in our diets of other essentials such as vegetables. The amount we eat forces producers to farm animals intensively, which compromises animal welfare as well as the quality of the meat we eat. The amount we eat necessitates vast monocultures to feed the livestock, which deplete the soil, interfere with natural ecosystems and are detrimental to the planet. The amount we eat is ultimately unsustainable, and if we all ate less meat - perhaps just two or three times a week - the world would undoubtedly be a better place.

So this week, why not try a few meat-free recipes and cut down a little? I don't mean baked potatoes and beans, or macaroni cheese, or a mushroom pizza - vegetarian food can be far more exciting and nutritious than that; if you're stuck for ideas, try here or here for inspiration. Or check out Meat Free Monday - a campaign to get everyone eating meat-free at least once a week, with lots of recipes to tempt you to join in! (I was thinking of feeding my lot meat-free all week this week and seeing if they noticed, but planned badly and have half a pack of mince in my fridge to use up, and I promised I'd do steak one night... but five nights out of seven still ain't bad!)

And here's a simple offering to get your mouth watering; a beanburger recipe I've been working on recently (loosely based on a standard recipe that's all over the internet in various forms) which my family loves. (Not exciting enough for you? You haven't tasted it yet!) It's not quite seasonal right now, I confess, but summer round the corner means burgers on my mind. It's seriously tasty, family-friendly, and couldn't be much healthier either. Give it a try!

Mexican Beanburgers
(makes eight large burgers)

• Finely chop a large onion, a green pepper and a red pepper, and fry gently in a teaspoon of olive or rapeseed oil.
• Peel and chop a large carrot, and steam/boil in a little water until soft. 
• When the onions are translucent and the peppers soft, add a small can sweetcorn (160g), a clove or two chopped garlic, 2 tsp ground cumin, 2 tsp ground ginger, 1 tsp chilli powder (or to taste), 1 tsp dried oregano, 1 tsp dried coriander leaf, a tbsp lemon or lime juice, a good grinding of black pepper and a pinch or two of salt. Stir in and cook for a couple more minutes, then turn off the heat.

• Mash the carrot (or puree in the food processor) and add it to the pan.
• Drain and rinse two cans beans (I use one can cannellini, one can kidney), pulse half in the food processor until finely chopped, then add the rest and pulse until coarsely chopped for texture. Add to the pan.
• Add 100g plain flour. Mix everything together really well.
• Separate the mixture into eight balls and flatten them into patties about 2cm thick. It's messy, but stick with it!
• Place on an oiled and floured baking tray, and bake at 200C for around 20 minutes, turning halfway through, until the burgers are lightly browned and firm.
• Serve in bread rolls, with guacamole (or avocado), salsa (or sliced tomato), salad and a little cheese.

Chicken Noodle Soup

I am enduring day eleven of intense sore throat, swollen glands, stiff neck and upper body, exhaustion and misery. Apparently antibiotics won't help me, and nothing else is either - rest, plenty of fluids, vitamins, garlic, throat sprays and gargles, high-antioxidant tea... I've been eyeing the fancier immune-sytem-boosting supplements in the health shop too - Manuka honey, bee pollen, elderberry extract, echinacea, special probiotics, beta-glucan, colloidal silver... One person swears by one and another swears by another, and it all seems rather a gamble when each is so expensive (I've been disappointed by echinacea once before - do I really want to spend £15 trying it again, however many people say it works?)

But healthful foods are, happily, easily available to us all here, and there's one flu-busting food which is supposed to boost health and healing more than any other. Chicken noodle soup.

Huh? Which chicken noodle soup? Made by what recipe, with what ingredients? Surely the instant packet stuff can't be that great for you? Are the noodles essential? Can't I just eat chicken? I have long been suspicious of this claim, but in fact, studies have shown that eating chicken noodle soup can cut the duration of flu or similar illness by half, and another study even compared commercial brands to show that Knorr's instant chicken noodle soup was the most healing! So, well, seeing as I've had plenty of time on my hands, I've been thinking and reading about this a lot, and actually it really does make a lot of sense.

The base for most (if not all) chicken noodle soups is, of course, chicken stock, plus onions, garlic, carrots and celery. Onions and, particularly, garlic both contain anti-viral and anti-bacterial compounds, and strengthen the blood and the lungs. Carrots are rich in beta-carotene which assists production of infection-fighting cells in the body. Celery is packed with vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fibre and, unusually, stands up well to cooking, keeping most of its goodness when other green vegetables would lose it. Add chicken to the mix for a rich source of protein, which promotes healing, as well as zinc, which supports the immune system by helping the body to make better use of vitamin C, and cysteine, which stimulates the immune system. Noodles serve to fortify the dish, adding extra energy when it's most needed, and egg noodles provide even more protein. Add some chilli - the capsaicin which makes chillies hot is a powerful decongestant which loosens and liquefies mucus - and you have a cocktail of great nutrition ideal for someone fighting illness. Furthermore, making this into a soup means that it's easy to eat and digest, especially for the sick and those with agonising sore throats, and the (largely) liquid delivery makes the nutrients super-accessible, meaning they're fast-tracked into the system. Genius!

Of course, it doesn't stop there, either. It's easy to add extra vegetables, such as tomatoes perhaps for their many antioxidants, red peppers which contain many of the same health-boosting compounds as garlic and chilli, or chopped leafy greens for iron. Many people extol the medicinal properties of certain herbs when fighting colds, and you can, of course add herbs to your heart's content too.

Does an exhausted sick person want to stand in the kitchen cooking up soup for ages? No, of course not. But thankfully this is quite quick to make (about half an hour), and when I sat comfortably at the table to do all the chopping I actually found it quite therapeutic. And luckily a large batch keeps well in the fridge for a good few days, and would freeze well too ;)

Nome's Chicken Noodle Soup (not just for sick people!)
(makes five big bowls, or eight little ones)

• Bring 1.5 litres chicken stock to the boil. (Beware the high salt level in some stocks - choose low-sodium if possible, dilute with water to lower the salt, or use home-made.)
• Add one large onion, two large carrots and four or five sticks of celery, all chopped, plus 2 teaspoons mixed herbs and a generous grinding of black pepper.
• Simmer for 10-15 minutes, until soft.
• Blend with a stick blender (use your judgement and make it as chunky or smooth as you like).
• Add a red pepper and a chilli (or less, or more, depending on your taste), finely chopped.
• Break up two nests of dried egg noodles (to make the noodles shorter and easier to manage) and boil in a separate pan according to the instructions on the pack - usually about 4 minutes. (It's important that they're cooked before you add them to the soup, as they absorb so much liquid.)
• Add two chicken breasts, chopped up small, to the soup, along with 2-4 chopped cloves of garlic (adding it near the end like this means it is less cooked and its health properties will be stronger, but the taste will be stronger too so watch out!)
• When the chicken is cooked (only 3-4 minutes if you've chopped it really small), check seasoning, drain the noodles and stir them in, and serve.

I opt sometimes to sprinkle mine with nori - a widely available seaweed - for extra iron-rich goodness too.

Well, I've been eating chicken noodle soup for lunch for several days now, and no, I'm not better. I am improving slightly and slowly, I think. But well, it's delicious, I do feel good eating it, and I know I'm doing the right thing by my body by nourishing it with loads and loads of goodness - it's got to be helping at least a little! Forget the expensive supplements - these basic building blocks of health are accessible to us all and are the very first thing we should turn to when illness looms.

Where Did I Go Right?

Last week we harvested the first of our broad beans and baby carrots - and what a pleasant surprise!

In contrast to last year's dismal broad bean harvest, this year's crop is entirely pest-free, healthy and gorgeous! In fact, there's not a single blackfly on the plants (sssshh!), and I didn't pinch the tips off. This is unheard of!

Similarly, while our carrots usually struggle and end up ridden with carrot fly (despite religiously planting them between rows of onions as companion planting gurus would advise) these are unmunched and in perfect health. In this case, though, I know what did it - we grew them in one of the raised salad beds this time, so the soil is finer, there's far less weed competition, and the carrot flies, which fly low along the ground, haven't found them. Hurrah!

I put this lot in a summer chicken stew (recipe here), as has become customary with the first of the broad beans. This dish is a joy, mixing beans, peas, carrots and new potatoes in chicken stock with mint and lovage (pictured above) - the herbs are fragrant and lovely and the sweetness of all the veg really comes through. I love it.

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...

Summer Chicken Stew

So this is the amazing stew I made on Monday out of our haul from the allotment. I make this every year with the first of our broad beans, potatoes, carrots and onions; it's becoming a bit of a tradition - although it is later this year than usual. The recipe is by Tamasin Day Lewis, seen on Market Kitchen, and I have mentioned it before, but this time I will share the recipe - though I'll leave quantities up to you as really you can just use however much you've got. It's the lovage and mint that makes it really special!

Summer Chicken Stew

• Roughly chop an onion and saute in a little oil until just translucent.
• Add chicken pieces (bone in, skin on) to the pan, skin side down, and brown. Turn them over and briefly brown the flesh side too, then remove from the pan.
• Add new potatoes to the pan (washed, skins on) and coat in the chicken fat. Then place the chicken pieces back in, on top of the potatoes, and add chicken stock to cover.
• Add baby carrots.
• Bring to the boil, then reduce to a bare simmer.
• Boil or steam the broad beans, and pop them from their skins if you like (I don't bother).
• After the stew has been simmering for 50 minutes, add peas and a few chopped lovage leaves.
• After 10 more minutes, add the cooked broad beans.
• Check the potatoes are cooked through, check seasoning, add chopped mint off the heat, and serve.

Allotment Update

We spent some time at the allotment today, for the first time in a good week and a half, and we were dismayed to find it looking rather sorry for itself. The hot dry weather has left everything looking a bit droopy...

...the pond terribly dry (spot the frog - I don't think he minds!)...

...and most of the lettuces and some beetroots threatening to bolt. The potato plants are rather small and pathetic, and the strawberry patch looks like this:

Do strawberries just attract weeds or what?

The brassicas - despite their cage - have managed to develop a serious aphid infestation...

...although there are plenty of ladybirds doing their best to deal with the problem, and we relocated more while we weeded and watered.

The runner beans, too, are suffering from the dry atmosphere - thanks Matron for clueing me up to what's going on here!

The flowers don't set beans when the air is too dry - misting with water regularly can solve the problem. I won't get the chance to do that, what with the plot a bus ride away, but I watered the foliage and flowers generously today in an attempt to help a little.

Of course, it's never all bad news. Here are some young squashes which are doing well despite the dryness:

We also managed at last to plant our 'everlasting' cauliflowers, protected by a cage of strings and canes, although this won't keep the butterflies off and I'll have to keep a close eye on them. We won't expect anything from these until next spring, but I can't wait to see how they do!

We got our first harvest of potatoes too - though they were just bite-size - a few little carrots, some broad beans and some diminutive onions which looked like they had given up for the year.

Ooooh, I feel a stew coming on...

The weeding begins...

The hail and freezing rain showers have eased off again, and we've managed to get some good weeding done over the last couple of days. Yesterday I weeded and earthed-up the potatoes (a tricky task in such small beds), and Eddie made a good start on the onions and carrots.

That onion/carrot/parsnip bed is a nightmare - there are loads of potatoes popping up! And there was me thinking last year's potato harvest was a disaster - looks like we just couldn't find them! But it's good to see, under all the weeds, that the carrot seedlings and the parsnip seedlings are coming up nicely.

Today I dug over another of the flower-beds too. This is where we planted the volunteer hazelnut tree last month, which is doing well, and I have planted some borage seedlings here too. I think I will seed the rest with poached-egg plant and marigolds, and plant out another bee-balm.

Gosh; look how weedy the raspberries are already, on the right! Must turn my attention there soon... I am painfully aware that this is just the very beginning of the weeding season...

The 'red spur' apple tree is in full blossom now, and it's gorgeous:

Makes me wonder if there's something wrong with this one; 'gold spur':


Remember my wasp trouble last week? I have removed a new wasp nest almost every day since - she just wouldn't give up. But today I finally caught and killed the wasp. I felt pretty bad about it, actually, but sometimes it's us or them, right?

Anyway, it allowed me to finish giving the bench a clear-out and tidy. We have no shed so this is where we keep everything. Trouble is, 'ventilated' also means 'damp' and 'lets all the bugs in', so we recently bought a couple of plastic boxes to make our lives easier. A big one for the trowels, other hand tools, gloves, string and other gardening essentials; and a small one for tissues, sun cream, wet wipes and plasters. No more will spiders nest in my tissue box! No more will ants infest my favourite gloves!

A Quiet Week...

Progress has been slow on the plot this week, and we haven't achieved much except for regular watering trips. I was beginning to think the warm sunny weather had spelled the end for my direct-sown seeds, and that the compost I sowed my salads in was perhaps too coarse despite all the sieving, and that maybe I'd have to sow everything again, and I was getting pretty depressed...

But today, in a general maintenance visit between rain showers, I was overjoyed to find a few radish seedlings and some tiny lettuce seedlings popping up! Hurrah! (They didn't photograph well, sadly, so you'll just have to believe me.) I also found a row of carrots coming up...

And some swede seedlings, under their little protective net tunnel...

The first strawberry flowers...

And the first potatoes appearing...

The onions are doing nicely, as are the shallots...
And the apple tree is about to burst into bloom. I didn't expect the buds to be this colour!

Hastings, our 'allotment cat', has been back for a couple of weeks after a long absence, and enjoyed lying about in the sun close to wherever I was watering and weeding.

And I picked these chives and asparagus spears for dinner.

I guess the plot has been busier than I have!