Okay - that’s enough rain now. No really, it’s starting to get tedious. I mean day after day after day after… it really is too much. On our visit to Heligan (Lost Gardens of) last weekend (in the rain, obviously) I happily scoffed at the so-called experts’ shallots which were nothing more than rotting, soggy mounds (as illustrated in the photo). But lo, I visited mtp this weekend and to my horror I was confronted with the same sight. So, I’m not more clever than the wizened gardeners at ‘H’ after all. Rats! And my shallots last year were so beautiful too. As a gardener I guess you have to get used to the game of roulette we call the weather. It can make or break you, it can certainly make or break your harvest. Recently, I’ve been researching which varieties of apple trees to buy for my new garden and I like what Monty has to say about that, which really can be applied to anything, “There will always be good crops and bad crops. Scab, bitterpit, moths, wasps and earwigs will all have their day. I don’t see it as a war to be waged against nature. Even the bad years will be good enough.” So I guess I’ll just put up with the rain and accept that my shallots will be rubbish this year - who knows, maybe something else will love this ’swamp-like’ climate and shine through!
Potato salad is such a great little meal. You can make it, chuck it in the fridge and be eating it for days. We took ours to Cornwall on our weekend roadtrip and had a picnic at Roadchef (not the most idyllic of settings but hey it’s the best the M5 had to offer at that point). This is the basic version plus some (usefully in-season) Broadbeans.
Broadbean & New Potato Salad
Ingredients:
- 4-5 new potatoes (more if they are small)
- 6 Broadbean pods
- 3 spring onions
- 3 eggs
- 3 tablespoons good quality French Mayonnaise
- salt/pepper to taste
Method:
- Wash the potatoes and cut into bite sized chunks
- Remove beans from pod and also remove their ‘chewy’ jackets too (time consuming but so worth it!)
- Boil potatoes until tender and throw in the beans for the last minute of cooking
- Hard boil the eggs peel and chop
- Throw everything in a bowl with the chopped spring onions and mayonnaise - give it a good stir and season
- Eat warm or chill in the fridge
It’s time to start thinking about how mtp will look in the winter months. Bad planning now will result in empty beds (and tums) in winter. My first year on mtp I didn’t sow any veg for winter - I just didn’t think about it. And when it came around to September / October when the last of the sweetcorn and pumpkins were harvested I was left with nothing but bare earth. Since then I’ve been building up my winter repertoire. Last year I successfully grew Broccoli, Leeks, Perpetual Spinach and winter lettuce. This year I’m going for broke and hoping to grow lots more. My Broccoli plants are already a foot high as I sowed them months ago. My Leeks are still in seed trays but ready to go in any week now. I sowed some winter hardy Carrots, Kale and some Spinach last week, while today I got on with sowing the rest (Endive, Radicchio, Corn Salad, Swede, Cauliflower). Unfortunately I totally missed the boat on Parsnip. The row that I sowed just didn’t germinate and now it’s too late. So my (hopeful) winter veg list looks like this:
- Broccoli
- Leeks
- Spinach
- Kale
- Carrots
- Endive
- Radicchio
- Corn Salad
- Swede
- Cauliflower
- Winter Lettuce (to be sown in September
I’d be interested to know what everyone else is growing this winter and if you have any suggestions for some good croppers?
Even though Dill flowers are delicately beautiful, remember to nip them off in order to encourage the plant to produce more leaves. Oh and nip off those onion flowers too if they appear. You’ll probably get the odd onion that decides to bolt but if you let them flower they’ll be no good for storing.
Today our new house was finally connected to the internet. Honestly, why is ‘getting broadband’ still such an issue. It seems like nothing has changed in the last five years. Back then it was painful to get the internet installed but I found it easy to forgive because we were all new to this ‘Web thing’ and you had to cut them some slack. But now I have no sympathy - it should be as easy as switching your utilities from one owner to another. I found this rose in my garden, it’s called Chapeau de Napoleon (because the buds look like his hat). Here’s to happy thoughts and the fact that now I can post to my blog from the comfort of my own home rather than the local Starbucks. Yeyhaa!
Holy heck, I’ve actually managed to harvest some carrots that are not either so small you need a magnifying glass to see them, so forked that they’re impossible to eat or so infested with carrot fly that err… you wouldn’t want to eat them anyway. This is the batch that I sowed direct in the old cold frame back in March. One of two things is happening here: either I sowed the carrots so early that they missed the first wave of flies or that my cunning plan of using the cold frame two-thirds full really did act as a barrier to the vertically challenged carrotfly. It’s anyone’s guess which one was working for me here but by the next harvest I should be able to tell as they were sowed much later. So it’s time for celebration here at mtp - after 3 years of trying we finally get to taste home grown carrot. Who said growing your own was easy?
We just moved house (last week infact) and I’ve started work on bringing the garden back to life. Our new house is pretty cool, bigger, better, quieter, now featuring a garage - the usual. But it was the garden that really sold it to me. The minute I stepped foot into the garden I knew the house had to be ours.
One of my favourite books when I was growing up (okay, one of my favourite books now) is The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It’s not the story that I love, which is good, it’s not the characters in the book either, even though the old gardener is a dude - it’s the part where they find the garden and start working on making it beautiful again. The bit where they find rose bushes underneath years of weeds and scrape away the leaves to reveal tiny flowers. It’s the best!
So when I saw this overgrown walled garden, with its cherry tree being choked by nettles, the plum trees struggling under the weight of an overgrown tree and wild strawberries growing in the cracks between the paving stones I knew that I had to rescue it. So surely if I’m Mary Lennox then that means that the Undergardener is Dickon, no?
