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.

Pruning Tomatoes

Pruning tomatoes began as quite a mystery to me, but it's easy when you figure it out. Not all tomato varieties need pruning, of course; bush or tumbling types (determinate, producing their crop all at once) can be left to their own devices, but to keep cordon or vining types (indeterminate, producing throughout the season until first frosts) in check and to focus their energy on fruit production rather than leaf production, a little help is needed.

At each point where a leaf branch grows out from the main stem, another shoot will grow, usually at about a 45 degree angle. Like this:

If you let these extra shoots, or suckers, grow, you end up with a sprawling and unwieldy plant requiring elaborate staking (trust me, I know this from experience!), and far more leaf than the plant really needs. So just pinch each extra shoot off at the base, and you'll have a much tidier plant, not to mention more, bigger fruit!

Easy. In fact, you can make new tomato plants by replanting these! If you want to do this, let them grow a few inches long before removing them, cut them off carefully so as not to damage the hairs on the stem (which will turn into roots), plant them with their stems deep in good compost, and take good care of them for a few days while they get settled.

We had quite a wet bank holiday weekend here (hurrah!) but that didn't stop me pruning the tomatoes and getting down to the plot to plant out the sweetcorn and some squashes. In fact, drizzly weather's ideal for planting out, as the roots don't get dried out or exposed to sun and the young plants settle in quicker to damp soil.

I planted out fifteen sweetcorn plants (Double Standard Bicolour from Real Seeds) in a block of 3x5 to assist pollination, plus two Baby Bear pumpkins, two Astia F1 courgettes, two Crown Prince squash (highly recommended to me many times but this is the first time I've tried them), one F1 butternut, one Waltham butternut, one Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato squash and one Sweet Dumpling! Phew! As usual I've planted them closer together than I probably should have, so I'll have to be careful to keep the plants in check and give them plenty of food and water. Now there's just the Atlantic Giant pumpkin to go, when I manage to dig over that last patch... Oh, and the brassicas, late as usual...

Can you believe we've harvested very nearly 2kg of strawberries already, and it's only the first of June?! I wasn't too impressed with this one though.

Anyone know what these beasties are? They look like earthworms but since when did earthworms eat strawberries? They're eating their way in, not out, right? Right?? If I ever bit into a fresh juicy strawberry and found that I think I'd be put off for life!

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!

I Can Grow Carrots!

And they're SO delicious!

As you can see by the variety of sizes, I can't thin carrots, but one step at a time eh?

I was disappointed to find a couple had carrot-fly holes in them, and several more had little white eggs round the tops. This is from a row planted amongst nine rows of onions, leeks and shallots! This companion-planting lark seems a bit hit and miss to me. Ah well. Won't stop me trying...

Thank you for all your kind words, encouragement and advice after the last post - I knew I could count on you guys : )


You'll be pleased to know we did get the sweetcorn, pumpkins (above) and summer brassicas (below) planted out before Glastonbury (and we had a great time too!), and the brassicas have all been safely netted (although it was a bit of a rush job - don't laugh!).


This is our lettuce patch.

Oops. If I had time, I'd pull it all up and start again, but I just don't. I wonder if I can save seed from all the mustard, mizuna and cress which has bolted... In fact a lot of what you see here is bolted crops, presumably from the stress of weed-crowding (and lack of thinning, of course).

But who wants to talk about weeds? What's important is that the eating part of this whole enterprise has really got going now.

Tonight I cooked this amazing summer chicken stew, from a recipe I saw on Market Kitchen yesterday (which you can find here, if you like, and I highly recommend it) with Nome-grown potatoes, carrots, broad beans, onion, peas (the mangetout and sugar snaps have been getting huge under all those weeds) and lovage and mint! I have yet to master the art of food photography - the picture below looks rather anaemic - but WOW, it was well worth trudging to the plot in the rain after work for!

Foiled!

Well I hope so anyway... I recently read a letter in a gardening magazine from a woman who swore that putting tin-foil round her plants kept the slugs off them. So I have made brassica collars out of foil for my newly-transplanted winter cabbages, brussels and broccolis, as well as the swedes I sowed direct here back in April. We'll see what happens...

In this bed I have also sowed kale seeds, and left some room for spring cabbage which will be sown later on in the summer.

There's so much to transplant now, I don't know when I'm going to get it all done. I held off planting out the tomatoes last weekend when I heard we were due a few cold nights, but I think I'll take the plunge on Friday when I have a day off. I'm really fearing for their health now; some have developed tiny black spots on the leaves, which is surely a sign that I'm doomed to fail yet again. Perhaps next year I'll skip the toilet rolls and go for good old-fashioned flower pots, where there's less risk of fungus developing.
Then there's the cucumbers and squashes. We're going to grow the cukes, butternut and spaghetti squashes up obelisks, so we've been busy building them and seiving bucketloads of compost to mulch the bed.
And I got home this evening to find my 60 young leeks and 16 free sweetcorn plants had arrived from Mr Fothergills! I've bunged them all in a trough in the garden temporarily, but I'll have to plant them out on Friday too.


And then there's the beans! I've had mixed germination success - I think I let one half of the tray dry out at a critical moment during the hot weather - so some will have to be resown, and I don't have any more space at home but I know the slugs will get them if I sow them direct, and anyway the bean patch is covered in self-seeded borage and last year's leftover potatoes sprouting, which I'll have to sort out before I do anything else there! Aaargh!

I thought it was high time I took the final step with mushrooms (a month after leaving the grains to spawn), and when I checked under the damp newspaper I found the manure was covered in these mould-like strands, as it should be.


It's covered now with a good layer of sterile soil, well firmed down, and with a few criss-crossing sticks over the top to try to keep the cats off! Can't wait to start picking my very own mushrooms...

And on a windy day over the weekend I noticed how much the asparagus is beginning to suffer (we're only picking a little this year - its second year - so some has grown into quite tall ferns already, and the wind damaged it quite badly last year) so I set up canes at the ends of each row with string running between the two to try to give it some support.


As you can see we're still fighting the weeds in the asparagus patch, but it's doing pretty well otherwise, with still no sign of any asparagus beetles yet (sssshh)!