Category: Growing stuff

Wrap it up or start again – November in the edible garden (with Worzel Gummidge figs)

grapes

The last grapes of the season, wonderful either squished into juice or popped out of their skins and fired into the mouth of my one-year-old son – like feeding a ravenous baby bird. But who are we kidding? Autumn, and harvest time are nearly over, though if you’re growing chillis you may still have something to do…

chillis

Chilli peppers should be traffic-stoppingly red by now. Either eat them all at once, in which case, remind me never to come round to your house for dinner, or get all crafty and impressive with thread and a needle. I’m not usually one for a craft project, ever since an unfortunate incident with a wrap-around skirt in needlework in the lower fourth (‘This is the worst day of my life,’ the teacher actually said), but try this, it’s really easy and looks fantastic.

Simply cut off all your chillis then thread a needle and pierce each chilli near the top (below the green bit though).

piercing

Keep going with all the chillis until you get a lovely string of them. Hang up in the kitchen and accept admiring comments from visitors.

lineemup

But however much one wants to pretend otherwise, winter is coming, as ever bringing out my siege mentality. It’s time to batten down the hatches in the garden, cover the precious and feeble with fleece, straw and bubble wrap plastic – ie make your garden look like a recently fly-tipped layby. But the alternative could be plant casualties of a very upsetting order, especially if this winter is as Arctic as the last one. As Orange Juice nearly said, ‘Wrap it up or start again.’ But come on, it’s worth it when you could be having a bumper harvest of fragrant soft figs and globe artichokes next summer, not to mention crunchy salad over the winter months.  Isn’t it?

This year I’ve gone for a rather Worzel Gummidge-style approach to protecting my two potted Brown Turkey fig trees. I’m erring on the side of caution since am fed up with seeing my figs shrivel and drop off – presumably frosted to oblivion as tiny figlets over winter.  Last summer I enjoyed a grand total of one July fig (savoured while standing next to the tree with an expression of near religious ecstasy, naturally), and two October ripened ones. So this year, I’m raising my game. Not only am I draping the trees with fleece as usual, but also protecting the growing shoots where the teeny baby figlets are (squint and you’ll see them) with bunches of straw tied nice and tight.

spectralfig

The tree now looks like a scarecrow with multiple straw hands, seen through an eerie white gossamer of horticultural fleece. Spooky, it is. Attractive, I can safely say, it is not. But needs must. If I don’t get a decent crop next year after all that, then I shall consider figs in a British climate as just not being very worth growing at all. So the stakes are high, my friends.

It goes without saying that citrus trees must also be protected by now. Unfortunately, my orangery is being renovated so I a forced to plebbily cover my Lemon Meyer with a fleece jacket and hope for the best for its little lemon babies. If your citrus tree is light enough to move, you might want to put it in an unheated greenhouse or, even better, a cool conservatory.

Meanwhile, I’ve been blanching endive like a proper French person. It’s pretty much my only salad crop to have survived the mega slug onslaught of London SE10, presumably because not even slugs like it. But putting pots on top of it and blocking out the holes should turn the leaves white and less palate-stripping bitter – or at least that’s the idea. I’m thinking plenty of lardons and a creamy mustardy dressing…

endive

I’ve also been wrapping my prized globe artichoke in a tiny picket fence-like sleeve and stuffing it with straw. You may think the picket fence (ok, a hastily customised bamboo screen) a bit over the top, but how else does one stop straw blowing all over the garden at the slightest breeze?

artichoke

OTHER THINGS TO DO IN NOVEMBER

Put out traps for slugs – I use ramekins filled with beer pushed into the ground and dotted in among the winter salad. It’s so satisfying when you find one filled with the little horrors – just throw the bodies in an out-of-the-way place and refill.

Prune blackcurrants, cutting the darker (ie old) stems off right at the base. You can also prune red and whitecurrants around now, cutting back the main stems by about half. Sideshoots coming from these main branches should be cut back to one bud.

Protect peach trees with a polythene screen to avoid getting the dreaded peach leaf curl, a disease that has afflicted my Peregrine tree for two years running. Result: no peaches. Nil. Zilch. Niente. My response to this is very mature. Rather than get all DIY with timber battens and polythene – a prospect that renders me weak with horror – I ‘m going to pull up the tree and replace it with the new ready-trained fan one I have ordered from Blackmoor nurseries. It’s called Avalon Pride, and is apparently  resistant to peach leaf curl. The proof will be in the, er, producing of peaches next year. Watch this space.

There’s a greenhouse and then there’s… this

petersham greenhouse

I’d love to say this is my greenhouse, but it’s of course that west London den of horticultural chicdom Petersham Nurseries. I was there on Saturday morning to lead a Grow Your Own Veg Gardening Clinic – which, thankfully, despite its name didn’t involve latex gloves or surprising rashes. if you squint you can see me babbling and slightly ruining the earth floor-mismatched garden chair degagee scene.
display

The crowd were lovely – keen gardeners one and all – and I hope I was vaguely useful to them. Lots of questions about how to get rid of slugs, snails and cats, those nemeses of the urban gardener. Also how to ripen green tomatoes and how to grow potatoes in containers. I can’t think of a nicer place to be on a rainy Saturday autumn morning.
petershamme

Afterwards I was given a lovely personal tour of the gardens by Petersham Nurseries owner Francesco Boglione. Particularly interested to see their fab veg garden, complete with chickens and yet more gorgeous greenhouses, just completed but made entirely from reclaimed materials so positively groaning with charm. One day my part brick, part glazed, vents opening in the roof greenhouse will come. Until then, it’s back to Greenwich and my 6 foot by 4 foot aluminium beast.

blackboard

Don’t ignore my aubergine tortoise

Damn, I have missed the deadline to the Emsworth Online Village Show This is a terrible thing because I never enter competitions and this time I actually had something worth entering. Namely this aubergine that is a dead ringer for a tortoise with very tiny shell and elephantitis.  I hope the venerable committee of judges will look on this small offering as a latecomer to the Most Misshapen Vegetable Category where it might perhaps jostle for position with a carrot that looks like Omar from The Wire. Or similar. Or not.
very-fat-tortoise-with-a-tiny-shell

Confounded by a tomato

black-krim

I like to think I’m a woman of the world. I can make crackling. I’m on series 3 of The Wire. But rarely has something confounded and perplexed me so much as the Black Krim tomato. I bought these seeds from Sarah Raven for purely showing-off purposes – the same reason I grow yellow dwarf French beans (Rocquencourt – actually very delicious and prolific, one for next year), stripy beetroot and blue potatoes (Vitelotte, utter disaster, ants would have struggled to see them).

But I didn’t realise growing ‘black’ tomatoes would be so complicated. It’s not the actual growing – they couldn’t be easier, romping away in grow bags with ne’er a care, producing vast tomatoes, even if most of them have got corky bases that need cutting off. It’s the conundrum of when to pick the things. Do you wait until they’re proper black? Reddish black? Or greenish reddy black with green shoulders? It’s a colour chart minefield worthy of a Farrow and Ball paint shade, and certainly not one for the colour blind.

I haven’t had such harvesting anxiety since I managed to grow two whole sweetcorns and spent so long jabbing my fingernails into them to test whether the kernel juices ran milky, clear or pasty (ah, the charming language of sweetcorn harvest) that I missed the critical moment altogether and might as well bought them from the supermarket and left them in the bottom of the fridge for a week.

So far, I have picked reddish blackish ones without green shoulders and found them a bit mealy. And ones with green shoulders and found them not ripe enough. They all taste strangely salty and the blackish flesh inside also has something of the compost bin about it. But then yesterday, a revelation, one that was sweetness itself. Trouble is I can’t remember what it looked like before I chopped it up in my pasta.

My extensive research (10 minutes on Google) reveals that the worldwide gardening community is divided on the Black Krim subject. This person’s positively fervent about them. ‘Dark brownish red tomatoes with darker gel in the locules. They look almost rotten, but have a wonderful smokey/sweet taste totally unique to the variety, ‘ says another fan, not entirely convincingly. One advises that you have to pick them before they are ripe though doesn’t say how you identify this critical moment. This blog has a helpful picture. Or maybe it would be easier  just to give up on them like this cross gentleman from Texas.

There’s nothing for it, Sarah Raven is going to have to come round to my house and supervise.

Crawling babies, raspberries and white T shirts don’t go

tomatoes1

Back from holiday and, no sooner had we got in the door than, obviously, I’m outside, bags unpacked in the hall, two small children running wild at my feet as I find myself tying in errant squashes, pinching out sideshoots of tomatoes and cutting back the vast jungle of foliage that has proliferated in my absence. So effective has my mother’s watering regime been that I’ve returned to the Lost Gardens of Heligan – before they found them.

blackberries1

To assuage the guilt that I’m largely ignoring the children as I teeter on a garden chair, secateurs and twine in hand, I pass them down blackberries, plums, tomatoes and raspberries which they cram into their mouths and smear over their white T-shirts as if they haven’t been fed for weeks, clearly forgetting the desperate Ryanair Pringles-fest of hours earlier – an attempt to stop mid-air tantrums and hence death stares from everyone else on the plane.  Within minutes it’s an orgy of fruit juice, sand and discarded prunings with children somewhere in among.

plum1

The toddler’s learned to feed himself, can strip a raspberry cane in seconds and has now largely learned not to eat the green tomatoes (anyone who’s thinking, how amazing, a toddler who loves fresh fruit should know that fresh fruit is all he eats. He has never eaten anything normal, like shepherd’s pie).  Speedy crawler baby, however, has a lot to learn – as I swoop down to remove half a rotten – proper rotten – windfall plum from his mouth I’m not sure whether I should get points for feeding my children home-grown produce or be reported to social services.

redkuri1

Never mind, look at this Red Kuri squash. It’s beautiful though I’m slightly scared of it because one day I’m going to have to eat it and have no idea how. Maybe if I leave it long enough I can just make it into a Halloween pumpkin.

Take two garlics into the shower?

Just when everything was going so well in my perennial quest for Marie Antoinette -style self-sufficiency… I’m not exactly shampooing cattle, but there is something about the sight of a rustic wigwam draped with just-dug garlic that warms the soul. And yet, no sooner had I dug up my Solent Wight and hung it out to ‘cure’ when the English July did its usual thing and started raining. If garlic doesn’t dry properly, it won’t keep and what’s the point of buying the longest-lasting garlic variety if you’re chopping spongey, rotten bulbs come autumn?

garlicwigwam

This man seems to know what he’s talking about when it comes to harvesting garlic, though it does all sound a bit complicated. Usually I just hang it up on the pergola for a week or so and then move it into the kitchen where I hang it up in a loose bunch (never could plait) where everyone hits their head on it when they bend down for a bottle of wine.

Heading out of town for the weekend, with more rain forecast and no convenient barn with drying racks to immediate hand, I dump my precious bulbs in the shower where they look less like a charming Mediterranean scene and more like something you’d see crawling out of your plughole had you gone to bed after eating a large Stilton.

garlicbathroom

Much as I love garlic, the smell of 40 or so heads of the stuff mingling with Tresemme quickly loses its novelty value. They have now been stuffed into the few inches of greenhouse not currently colonised by the triffid Costuluto Fiorentina tomatoes where they will remain until these unpredictable showers stop. This is yet another reason why I should be living in Provence, or at the very least a show farm in Versailles.

A plum job I hate

It’s that time of year again, the time when I have to do something that goes against every thread, every iota of my being. So reluctant am I to approach this task that I have to do it in stages, over several days, to make the pain that little bit easier to bear. But it’s not just time to try to get a press pass out of the RHS for the Hampton Court Flower Show – a disheartening process that involves having to prove you are a real journalist and not just a tryhard hack imposter desperate to travel all the way across London so they can stand in a muddy field, drink warm Pimms and then buy some plants that will get squashed in the train on the way home.

No, it’s also time to thin your plums. I love plum trees – their weeping habit and their pretty early white blossom, but most of all the lush melt in the mouth that reminds me of my country childhood when we would ransack my farmer dad’s plum orchards, then get freaked out by the jelly stuff we sometimes found inside. What is that stuff by the way?

In my little London garden my Victoria tree is a gem, though so very generous with itself that I have to thin it ruthlessly in July. It’s really worth doing this because otherwise the tree will exhaust itself and you’ll end up with nothing to pick next year. The heavy crop can also break the branches. Thin the plums so that you end up with a pair of fruits every  15-16cm or six inches (approximately a hand’s breadth). It’s devastating I know, but well worth it, even if you do get left with this dispiriting handful…

plums

Beware the Victorian-style Potato Barrel

barrel2

My suspicions should have been aroused by the catalogue. Describing itself as ‘A unique and brilliant Victorian style design in a decorative terrocotta finish.. made from durable polypropylene’ this faux terracotta pot was clearly not going to fool anyone.

But I closed my ears to my doubts and, seduced by talk of its ‘lift-up sides for ease of harvesting’, bought one of these hideous plastic tubs three years ago and have been trying to hide it from view ever since, while duly putting my five chitted potatoes near the bottom and then gradually adding a quantity of compost rarely seen outside a municipal heap.

Come ‘harvest time’ and, instead of a bounty of white hen’s egg-sized potatoes, I found five edible ones, a handful of teeny marbles and some slimy, rotted stems. It’s always a nice bonus when you poke your hand straight into the mushy original seed one too, isn’t it? Like Paul Burrell putting his hand into a hole. Meanwhile my bog-standard terracotta pots were full of 30 or so perfect specimens. This has happened three years in a row now so I think this counts as a scientific experiment.

All that compost just starves the poor little tubers of air as they try to develop. Potatoes like to be earthed up, yes, but they don’t want to have to claw their way endlessly up to the light like desperate pot holers lost at the bottom of a big, er, pot hole.

The nice gentlemen from the council took the useless thing away this morning in a big black bin bag. As a gardener, I know I should have turned it into a clever watering system or shredded it for squirrel bedding or something, but sometimes, you just want rid. Say no to faux-terracotta polypropylene, you know it makes sense.

Watering costs… and right here’s where you start paying

… in cat feeding. I love living in south London via Trumptonshire – my road where neighbours unaccountably talk to rather than knife each other. One of the greatest assets is my neighbour who is so outstandingly nice that she’s not only agreed to water the garden every day for 3 weeks while I’m away in France but actually claims to ‘enjoy it! (I know, weird…)

But here’s the tricky thing. How do you brief a non-gardener (for, despite her efforts with lettuce, she is one) on the intricacies, skill and exact levels of water required for each of your precious plants to make it to fruition without sounding like you’re mad? You may start well, affecting nonchalance and simple gratitude – ‘Oh, just wave the hose over the raspberries, the salad is in the shade so doesn’t need much…’ – but it’s not long before you’re agonising over whether your instructions have been sufficiently detailed. You invite them over for a ‘watering briefing’, jabbering, pointing at things like a maniac and demonstrating how to hold a garden hose. This is to stop yourself shouting in the middle of a Ryanair flight ‘THE POTS!!! WHAT ABOUT THE POTS!!!!’

No doubt she’ll have similar anxieties when she goes away later this month. She might say ‘Oh just feed the cats twice a day and give them fresh water’. What she probably wants to say but won’t for fear of sounding like a loon is ‘that one likes his ears tickled and that one will only eat her food if you arrange it in a pyramid formation. And they both like The Today Programme.’ I wouldn’t really care but I suspect she may have installed CCTV.

PYO slugs here

Look, I’m not really complaining. It’s great that my 21-month-old is eating fruit, particularly when it’s from the garden and therefore comes with extra smug ‘Meet my child, he’s 100 per cent organic’ brownie points. It’s just a slight shame his pick-your-own technique is so thorough. It’s not the little white unripe strawberries heading towards his mouth that bother me so much as the rotting hollowed-out ones that come with their own side order of slugs. Hopefully not coming soon, ‘Meet my child, he’s in A&E.’

Still, at least I have strawberries. News came this week of an acquaintance who has left London for the whole Cornwall smallholding knit-your-own-yoghurt lifestyle thing. Anyway, the news is that she’s already boasting of having a glut of courgettes. On her first year of growing vegetables! Obviously mine haven’t even flowered yet and I now hold her in a mixture of envy/contempt.