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!

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!

Storing Parsnips

I love parsnips - they're one of those few veg I can virtually ignore from the day I sow the seeds to the day I dig them up, and still get a reliable crop every time. We grow 'white gem', sprinkling a few seeds every six inches or so in April, then as long as I remember to thin them to one plant per station at seedling stage, they get along just fine by themselves for the next eight to ten months. A few low-maintenance back-ups like this somehow help make up for the failures and the fussier, tricksier crops I struggle with sometimes!

We usually leave our parsnips in the ground over winter, where they keep just fine, but of course we can't get to them when the ground's frozen hard or covered in several inches of snow, so we usually don't get to eat them until the spring, when we have to catch them before they put on too much new growth and start getting woody. This year I thought it was time to try storing them at home.

Here they are - all six kilos! A variety of sizes but all useful and all healthy. It's important to leave them in the ground until the first few frosts, as it's the cold that makes them take on their sweetness.

Parsnips need humidity and cold to store well - ideally temperatures 0C-4C. I've read that you should be able to store them in the bottom of the fridge for up to six months, but this has never worked for me, and I don't like the idea of blanching and freezing them. So the only other thing to do is store them in soil (or sand, or coir, of leafmould) in a cold place, just as if they were still in the ground. I've packed ours into a box of soil, covered them over and put them in the shed to keep them from freezing - and I must remember to check the mice haven't got in every once in a while!

Here's looking forward to lots of parsnip bread, parsnip soup, and roasted parsnips on Christmas day! And I'll be sending a photo of some choice specimens for Matron's Christmas veggie blog post too.

Two Lovely Chestnut Recipes

I promised I'd cook more with our native chestnuts this year while they're in season, and in the last week I've made not just one, but two spectacular chestnut dishes.

First up, we enjoyed this beef and chestnut stew as a welcome-home dinner for my parents last week when they returned from their narrowboat for the winter, with roast potatoes, parsnips and sprouts. I confess I read a few chestnut/meat stew recipes and decided it was fair play just to use my signature beef-stew-and-dumplings recipe, which always goes down a storm, and simply throw in chestnuts too - they're a lovely seasonal addition that add rich, earthy nuttiness and succulence. It's great hearty winter food, and a nice alternative to a Sunday roast. The dumplings use oil instead of the traditional suet and are really tasty!

Beef, Guinness and Chestnut Stew with Dumplings
(serves 6)

• Dice 600g or so beef and sear in hot oil in small batches in an ovenproof pan until sealed and browning on all sides. (I usually use quite a high quality lean steak, but you can use cheaper stewing beef and simmer it for longer if you prefer.)
• Remove beef from the pan and throw in 6-8 rashers chopped bacon and a handful of whole, peeled shallots. When the bacon's cooked, add the beef back in and stir in 3 tbsps plain flour.
• Add a bottle and a half of Original Guinness or other stout. That's... let's see... 750ml. You can sip the rest ; )
• Add a generous sprinkle of mixed herbs, half a teaspoon of mustard powder, a beef stock cube and some white pepper. Stir and simmer a few minutes.
• Add two or three large carrots and a small swede, diced. Add around 200g roasted chestnuts (optional).
• Now cover and let that simmer gently for half an hour or so - no need to be precise - while you prep veggies and make the dumplings...
• In a bowl, mix 250g plain flour, 1 tsp salt and 2 tsps baking powder. (You can also add a pinch of dried thyme or other herb if you like.)
• Gradually add 150ml milk and 2 tbsps olive or rapeseed oil, bringing the dough together with a fork. You might not quite need all of the milk - stop when the dough comes together (if you add too much your dough will be too sticky to manage and you'll end up with crazy-shaped dumplings like mine above - whoops!) Knead briefly, roll into walnut-sized balls, and arrange on top of your stew.
• Put the lid back on the stew and place in an oven at 180C for 35-40 minutes. Remove the lid for the last ten minutes of cooking, to let the tops of the dumplings turn golden-brown.
• Serve with your choice of winter veggies. Yum!

Chestnut Cookies

These are a delicious and wonderfully Christmassy treat, dusted with icing sugar on the outside, moist and buttery in the middle, with a hint of spice. They're perfect with tea - or a tot of something stronger - and certain to please at parties, I reckon.

I used Smitten Kitchen's recipe here so I won't reproduce it, but I will heartily recommend it! The cookies needed a slighter cooler temperature in my oven - I had better results at 200C for 14 minutes. I also experimented (can't help myself) by taking half the dough and adding 2 tbsps cocoa powder and 2 tbsps brandy, and they were really good too (probably even better with rum - and best served cold, while the plain ones are awesome served warm), but you know, I don't think this recipe can really be improved upon - the flavour of the chestnuts shines through and really doesn't need any more help than the touch of cinnamon and nutmeg provided. Delicious.

Winter Growings

Well, the temperatures are dropping at last, and I'm glad to say our garlic, onions and shallots have put on some decent growth despite a late start.

 

I had some pepper plants still going on the patio, hoping the little green fruits would get larger, but now one or two have started to show frost damage so I've finished off all those remaining.

Meanwhile, the chilli plant we brought indoors has decided to make up for its pathetic summer crop by flowering again. We will have Christmas chillies!

The plant seems to have a problem though, with several leaves turning yellow and dropping off, and traces of cobweb around the leaves. Looks like spidermite, methinks. (If anyone knows better, do tell...)

 

I'm reluctant to spray the plant while it's fruiting, but misting daily with water is supposed to help so I must get myself a new spray bottle (my old one doesn't work anymore) and start this a.s.a.p!

Half of the summer's chilli harvest...

The outdoor sowings I made in early autumn have had mixed results - the spinach has all died, the perpetual spinach has mildew and is being eaten by snails, the Nero di Toscana has been munched, the winter gem lettuce never came up... But the spring onions, radishes and claytonia are doing marvellously, and I've tucked them up in the plastic greenhouse for winter. In fact, the claytonia has self-seeded prolifically and is coming up everywhere... 

I'm not sure exactly what happens from here; will my salad crops keep growing slowly and steadily throughout winter, or do they stop completely and give me an early crop in the spring? I'll soon find out, I suppose... It would have been ideal to start them a month or two earlier so I could pick some during the winter - must try harder next year!

The purple sprouting brocolli and kale are still battling on and, barring any disasters over winter, should be ready to give me a great crop as soon as the weather warms up for spring. Not every plant has put on satisfactory pre-winter growth, but as long as I get them through the winter I'm sure they'll catch up.

Next task, now we've had a few decent frosts, is to get back to the plot and dig the parsnips up to store in a box of soil in a sheltered spot at home, safe from frozen ground, snails and flooding!

Winter Sowing

Okay, I really should have done this at least a month ago, but I was behind as usual and the weather's still so nice... It can't be too late yet, can it? Not if the volunteer salad plants I keep finding all over the garden are anything to go by. I've got claytonia in the seed-grown rosemary I gave up on and forgot about...

...and I've got rocket (or is it mizuna?) in my broccoli.

In fact, there are a lot of leafy greens that will grow over winter with a bit of shelter, and with night temperatures still not dropping below 8 or 9 here (with just one exception last week), a new cover on my plastic greenhouse, a quick study of Charles Dowding's great book 'Salad Leaves for All Seasons', and a sowing-spree in the sunshine on Monday, I have high hopes for at least a few overwinter greens this year. I've sown two types of spring onions, 'Winter Gem' lettuces, claytonia (love the stuff!), lamb's lettuce/corn salad, 'Bright Lights' radishes and some 'Nero di Toscana' kale (similar to the popular narrow-leaved 'Cavolo Nero'). They're outside hopefully being warmed by the sunshine for now, but if and when it turns cold they'll go straight in the greenhouse. Oh, and I've got some spinach and perpetual spinach going too, which I started some weeks ago, and of course the leeks and parsnips on the allotment, and some purple-sprouting broccoli and curly kale in tubs. With a bit of luck and care, this could just be my most productive winter yet...

Today we finally got round to sowing some winter turnips on the plot as well, and scattered the ex-potato beds with some out-of-date Phacelia seeds (fingers crossed...) to protect the soil over winter and provide some extra organic matter to dig into the soil in the spring. My mail-order onions, shallots and garlic haven't come yet, but I'm ready for them when they do.

And as a testament to how mild the weather still is, here's a very late-flowering feverfew I spotted poking up through my patio yesterday! Good job there are still flowers about - there are certainly still plenty of bees and butterflies enjoying them!

A Funny Old Business

Germination's a funny old business, isn't it? They say seeds need three (or four) things to wake from 'quiescence' (that's sleepy-time to you and me) and start growing:

• Water - well that's the obvious one. All life needs water.
• Warmth - although while peppers and squashes need a good warm room to do their thing, radishes and lettuces can germinate around 4 C. While we often associate higher soil temperatures with good germination, some seeds require a period of cold first. In other climates, some require a forest fire!
• Air - yup, they need to breathe just like us, so soil mustn't be waterlogged, and seeds too deep won't grow. Some seeds have a hard outer shell that excludes air, and need a bit of wear or a hard frost to split the shell before germination can begin.
• Light - not all seeds require light, but some do; for example woodland flowers which grow in very early spring while the trees are bare and the sunlight reaches the forest floor.

But is this a formula for success? We should be so lucky.

I've always thought myself quite fortunate when it comes to parsnip seeds (which have a particularly poor reputation when it comes to germination) but when I think about it now, it's not so surprising. I tend to plant a whole pack of seeds in a row - that's 150 or thereabouts - after all there's no point saving them for next year as they lose their vitality so quickly. Then later I thin them where they're too close together, but I'm hardly thinning 150 parsnips - maybe half that. It's just that I sow so thickly I seem to do well.

This year I station-sowed my parsnips in a grid, and though I have lots of healthy seedlings, several of the 'stations' are still empty. If only I hadn't used the whole pack... At least parsnip seed is cheap; I popped to Wilko's yesterday and (after weeding all the fat hen out of the bed) filled in the gaps with a second sowing.

My sweetcorn came up last week - every single seed I sowed, and within just a few days! Thank you Real Seeds!

Yet I am still waiting for any action in the summer savory pots (old seed, but still just about in date)...

...or from the poppies (brand new seed, and not cheap!). These were sown way back in March. Actually look - that one in the middle is doing something. Has that one had more water than the others? More light or air? A different temperature? Nope.

And germination's been really patchy (about 35%) from the 'Bright Lights' chard (three righthand rows) - just one year old - while the brand new perpetual spinach seeds (lefthand row and very closely related) have all come up without a problem.

My 'Baby Bear' pumpkin seeds from Mr Fothergills have been in the soil for weeks, and they're my second attempt - I was just getting ready to have a good old rant about it... Then suddenly, and in perfect synchrony, up they popped. (The first sowing still hasn't done anything, despite getting exactly the same indoor temperatures.)

Am I going somewhere with this? Sort of, I suppose...

If you're the kind of person that needs to be in control, don't try gardening. Like the grinding of tectonic plates or the power of the wind or the frost that probably turned my unfleeced strawberries to mush on the allotment last night or the snail-that-got-away munching down your brand new cucumber seedlings, we're at nature's mercy and we have to roll with the punches. In all things, it pays to be adaptable and flexible and to work with nature wherever possible, because one thing's for certain: it's not going out of its way to work with you!

A Parsnip Feast

I love parsnips and grow lots every year, but I may be accused of being a little unimaginative when it comes to eating them... With two recipes this good, though, I don't care.

There's a recipe for 'Spicy Parsnip Soup' you'll find all over the internet and in loads of cookbooks. This is very similar, but roasting the veg instead of boiling them really brings out the flavours better, I think. This was passed on to me by a friend - I don't know where he got it from - and makes about six servings.

• Mix 1tsp crushed coriander seeds, 1tsp crushed cumin seeds, 1/2tsp turmeric and 1/2tsp mustard seeds with 2tbsps olive oil.
• Cut a large onion, 700g parsnips and two large tomatoes into chunks. Put them all in a bowl with the spiced oil, add 2 whole garlic cloves, and mix well.
• Spread out on a baking sheet and roast at 200C for about half an hour, until soft but not too coloured (or the soup will end up a murky brown instead of lovely yellow!)
• When cooked, liquidise the veg with about 500ml veg or chicken stock until smooth. Return to the heat and simmer gently, adding more stock until the soup reaches the consistency you want (I recommend about a litre in total).
• Season to taste.
• Just before serving, add a splash of lemon juice.

It's soooo parsnippy!

Of course, any good bread is great with a soup like this, but why not go the extra mile...?

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Parsnip and Thyme Bread is a dead easy soda-type bread (recipe here) that combines grated parsnips, grated cheese, fried onions, thyme and black pepper in a gorgeously stodgy and moist loaf that's frankly fabulous all by itself, and goes great with soup or stew. If, like me, you're still using up the winter's parsnips, you must try this.

Parsnips... How do you eat yours?

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!