My Tiny Plot

It dug up my Chicory plants yesterday and put them in storage in preparation for forcing them later on. The plants were getting quite large but it’s best to lift them at this time of year before the frosts get to them.

I lifted about seven or eight but not all of them were big enough to use. They need to be between 2.5cm and 5cm wide at the crown. Any smaller and they won’t produce good chicons (the pearly white chicory that has that lovely subtle, bitter taste). Any bigger and they might produce two smaller heads instead of one large one.

I cut off the green tops and filled a box with wet sand. Then laid about six out, making sure they were not touching each other. And finally covered them with more sand and stored them in my dry, frost-free shed. I also made sure to put a wooden tag in the sand to remind me what was in there. I’m storing carrots too so I don’t want to get them mixed up!

Part 2 comes in Feb when I’ll be digging them up and forcing them in pots.

I’m so excited about doing this. Every year I try to do something in the garden that I’ve never done before. Well, otherwise I get a bit bored to be honest. Last year it was growing Seakale which I did without a hitch (although I’ve yet to force it). This year it’s Chicory.

I do grow things year on year and I’m happy when I know exactly what I’m doing with a certain vegetable or fruit but the excitement comes from learning a new technique and figuring out how to do it well.

I’m not sure if I’ll produce any edible Chicory from these. But if I don’t I will spend many a happy hour figuring out how to do it next year!

Tags: chicory

This year I grew some Sweetpea Currant Tomatoes, a not-so-little bush variety that produces Tomatoes no bigger than a pea. They were beautiful. Not only did they taste very, very sweet but their tiny jewel-like fruits looked amazing on the plants and produced bucket-loads of Tomatoes. They were a real hit. The only problem is that the seed is quite expensive. If my memory serves me well they were £2.45 for ooh… about 15 seeds. In seed terms that’s quite a bit. So I have determined to save my own seed, since I have so many Tomatoes I might as well!

The first thing to do is to pick some nice, ripe Tomatoes (check). Cut them in half and scoop out the seeds. Put these into a jar and place in a warm cupboard to ferment – or get mouldy in plain terms. After about a week the jelly-like substance will have err.. rotted off. Nice huh?

Next fill the jar with water and skim off any bad seeds that float to the top. Wash the remaining seeds with fresh water.

Finally, turn them out onto a towel to dry thoroughly and store in a dry, frost free place until next year.

As I understand it you can save seed from any Tomato in this way. But, you have to be careful which Tomatoes you save seed from as some will cross pollinate in certain situations.

Tomatoes are self-fertile which means they don’t need insects or wind to pollinate them. But… some are pollinated by insects if the anthers on their flowers open up and allow insects inside. Or if the stigma sticks out beyond the anthers and insects can get to it. This can happen on the first flowers that beefsteak Tomatoes produce and currant varieties.

Aha, you say, but you have just saved the seed from a currant variety. Yes, you can do that if you are only growing one currant variety. Also if you discard any plants that do not produce Tomatoes that are true to type in the future.

So, if you have a bunch of ripe Tomatoes still hanging on for dear life, don’t bin them. Save yourself some money by saving the seed.

Tags: Seed Saving, Sweetpea Currant

We are really lucky to have a Sweet Chestnut tree at the end of our driveway. It’s not strictly our tree but the tree is so big that there is a carpet of chestnuts there every year and you can almost hear the squirrels rubbing their hands.

So when my friend came around the other day and the kids needed some ‘outdoor play’ we decided to go do a little ‘cleaning up’ under the tree.

Having foraged enough for both of us we brought them home to roast. I’ve never done it before so I looked it up and here’s how:

Oven on 200c/400f/gas6. Score a cross into the skin of each chestnut, put into a roasting tin and roast for 30mins.

Eat!

Preferably from a brown paper bag, while taking a walk on a blustery Autumn day. Or… infront of the TV. Your choice.

Tags: sweet chestnuts

I have been collecting Ridway Homemaker crockery for about two years now and my collection is almost complete, so I thought it was high time I took a few photos of it.

You can find more about the history of Homemaker here. But for my part I just love the black and white vintage furniture icons, the simple rounded shape of the items and their overall durability. I have dropped a cup and it didn’t break! I kid you not.

I don’t have every single Homemaker item and probably never will. Some of the rarer items swap hands for 1000s of pounds. The most I have paid for an item was £215 (teapot above) but some items were as litte as £7.

But I also don’t have every single item because I just don’t need it. There are three different sizes of coffee cup available, but I only need one size (big!).

Above are two recent additions, the coffee pot (Metro) and the Scottish sandwich plate. The coffee pot is fast becoming one of my favourite items as it’s perfect for making large batches of tea!

Confusingly there are two Homemaker designs Metro and Cadenza. Most of my collection is Metro except this little milk jug that was just too stylish to pass up.

I currently have only four soup bowls so I’m on the lookout for two more to complete the set. They are quite rare and only pop up maybe once every six months.

I have two vegetable tureens, great for those family Sunday dinners.

And not forgetting the gravy boat, essential kit for a Northerner like me.

These are my dinky fruit bowls complete with rims for the stones.

And lastly here you can see my 10 inch plate, with 7 inch side plate and bowl. And that completes my little trip down vintage crockery lane. The big question is, when the collection is finally complete what shall I collect next?

Tags: Ridway Homemaker

At this time of year I’m pulling up the last of my Beetroot. Some of them, however, are not quite big enough to eat.

With these you can plant them up into their own little pot and either place them under a cloche, or in the coldframe. Just nip off the existing leaves and give them a good water. They’ll soon start to sprout and give you baby Beetroot leaves for your salad bowl well into the Winter months.

Tags: Beetroot

It’s been oooh roughly three and half years since myself and my husband have been away without the children. And while we love the little blighters to pieces we thought it was high time we had a break. So we booked ourselves into Babington Houe for the weekend – a rather nice country house hotel near where we live.

While we were there I took some photos of the gorgeous old walled kitchen garden that they have there.

As you walk in you’re greeted by a row of pyramids that have Sweetpeas growing around them. They are very interesting as apart from the upright canes that hold them together the gardeners have bent smaller, more pliable canes, through each one to make an arch. Putting several of them side by side makes a wonderfully decorative introduction to the garden. It’s a great idea and I might try it next year in my own garden.

I soon realised that there were lots of great ideas in this kitchen garden that I could steal borrow. Take this little patch of Thyme that has been planted in a block and left to grow into each other. It makes a lovely, undulating and visually interesting herb bed.

I also liked how there were impromptu seating areas everywhere. Kitchen gardens can be very work-a-day and often there is no invitation to sit down. I can imagine sitting underneath this climbing rose with my latte and good book – after all the work is done, you understand!

I was heartened to see some winter Lettuce doing very well in the garden. Mine is somewhat smaller but I’m hoping the forthcoming good weather will help it attain this size before the cold weather sets in. The mesh, I think is more to keep the bunnies out than to protect them from weather. I’m sure I saw a cotton tail disappear behind an espalier.

While some of the planting is evidently new, others were maybe as old as the walls themselves. The garden was filled with espalier Apples and Pears. They didn’t, as in some kitchen gardens, relegate them to the wall either. Most of the older trees where in the middle of the garden and used to mark out pathways or edge the beds.

The sheer numbers of Apples was clearly proving too much, even for a busy hotel. And many of the trees where happily feeding the wasps.

But it’s the wall that gives the kitchen garden its soul. Its deep orange hue gives the garden an almost Mediterranean feel and once within its confines you can feel the temperature climb up a notch or two and the wind disappears. For me there is nothing that compares to the tranquility of a walled kitchen garden.

It’s so nice too to see an old garden being so well looked after.

Tags: walled kitchen garden

Oooh! Get me, growing Mini-Sweetcorn. I bought the seed as a bit of an afterthought really. I saw it for sale on a seed website and as I was buying some other things I threw it into the basket with a view to maybe having a go.

And this year I did! My normal sweetcorn came to nought (something ate the seedheads). But then, from nowhere, came the dark horse. The small, insignificant (in truth, half forgotten about) little seedlings from the Mini-Sweetcorn seeds started to romp. And boy did they grow. They ended up about a foot taller than my regular Sweetcorn.

In my mind I had expected some sort of miniature plant sporting miniature cobs. In reality, Mini-Sweetcorn turns out to be the same size as regular Sweetcorn with more cobs that are smaller but also longer and thinner than usual.

The difference comes when you open them up. Inside, you’ll find what looks like small, unpolinated corn. Infact this is Mini-Sweetcorn. Ready to eat and ever so slightly more buttery than the ones you buy in the shops. Coool.

There is a downside. The plants are, well, huge and I only managed to harvest two or possibly three cobs from each plant. That means a grand total of (drum roll please) 12 Mini-Sweetcorns. Yey!

Hang on…

So I dedicated a whole swathe of my tiny plot to growing err… 12 Mini-Sweetcorns. Right, okay. Well I’m glad I grew them at least once. Now I can say I’ve done it, I just won’t be doing it again.

Tags: Mini Sweetcorn

I don’t know about you but I’ve had hardly any Tomatoes this year. Most of mine are still green and sitting on the bush in the rain – booh! The only success I’ve had with outdoor Tomatoes this year was with my clutch of teeny-tiny Tomatoes, my Sweet Pea Currants.

I lovingly raised them from even teenier seed and planted them out in the sunny corner, under my Peach tree. Once they were in they began to romp away, and just as Coopette said they soon became ‘vigorous and sprawling’.

So much so that I had to deploy the Pea sticks to keep the plants and what seemed like millions, (okay thousands) of fruits off the ground. Soon the little pea-sized Tomatoes were ripening. The teeny-tiny trusses had 14 maybe 16 fruits on each. The top ones ripened first, while the middle ones were orange and the smaller ones on the end were deep green moving to pale green – very pretty visually.

And the taste? Well, the name says it all, Sweet! And they certainly were. Too tiny to slice they are really more like Tomato candy – just pop them in your mouth one by one, no salad required.

I’d definitely recommend growing them. They seem to do fine as an outdoor crop here in the UK and even though I did feed them with Tomato feed (when I remembered) I’m sure that their flavour would still be very good without. You will need to plan in some support to tame the plants once they get to their mid-Summer craziness otherwise you’ll have a lot of very dirty, very small Tomatoes. And nobody wants that.

Tags: Tomatoes

I’ve been harvesting my small round Carrots (I think the variety is Paris Market) over the last week or so. They have been a great success. I sowed them underneath my Apple espalier in a situation that is part shaded, by my tall Raspberry canes, and also quite dry since it’s right next to the wall.

It was really a shot in the dark since I didn’t know if the Carrots would grow well there. But I figured as they’re only small roots they wouldn’t need as much light or water as regular Carrots.

It paid off. All the Carrots I harvested are full sized and mega tasty. I’m really pleased and will certainly try the same thing next year.

Tags: carrots, Paris Market

My Autumn-fruiting Raspberries are pumping out the fruit as usual this year, which is all very nice. But next year I might do something a little different.

Autumn Raspberries are described as ‘primocane’ because they fruit on this season’s wood. Usually, I cut the canes down to the ground in Feb and the new season’s growth will flower and produce fruit around about September the same year. I’ve been doing this for years and thought that was the only way to do it. Until…

I came across a technique called double-cropping (sounds like my kind of cropping!). So I investigated further. What happens is this:

Instead of cutting your Autumn Raspberries to the ground in February you leave the canes to grow into Spring and Summer. At some point the existing canes will flower and give you a crop. At which point you slice them down to the ground and leave the newer, greener, springier canes to crop at the usual time. Sounds crazy but it just might work.

I noticed that Which? Gardening have also done a trial to compare how many kg of fruit you can get from the same canes by cropping normally and double cropping. The results are very interesting.

Most Autumn varieties tested produced significantly more fruit when double cropped. Only one variety, Brice, produced less. Here are the results:

Joan J
Conventional – 5.75kg
Double – 6.5kg

Autumn Treasure
Conventional – 3.5kg
Double – 8.0kg

Polka
Conventional – 4.75kg
Double – 5.25kg

Sugana
Conventional – 2.0kg
Double – 7.75kg

Brice
Conventional – 3.75kg
Double – 3.5kg

Fall Gold
Conventional – 3.5kg
Double – 6.5kg

Autumn Bliss
Conventional – 2.5kg
Double – 5.75kg

Clearly it depends which variety you have. But as I have Autumn Bliss I think I will be giving double cropping a go.

Tags: double cropping raspberries