Garden Tool Set: onions

Showing posts with label onions. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2015

Grow Your Own Curry

MsMarmiteLover's aubergine curry

Think of curries, whether an Indian dhansak or jalfrezi, or a hot and sour Thai jungle curry, or a Malaysian laksa rich with aromatic flavours, and we think of exotic ingredients. A curry made with all-purpose curry powder will never taste as good as a bespoke curry in an authentic Indian restaurant. Ready-made pastes for specific dishes – like a Mussaman, or a Tikka Masala – are convenient but to me at any rate they all taste rather too alike to be seriously credible.

Before I grew my own curry ingredients, I knew that on the occasions when I’d planned ahead and bought fresh ingredients to make my own curry powders and pastes that the resulting dishes were streets ahead. But there are ingredients that are very difficult to get hold of, even here in London where we’re lucky enough to have food shops of the world on our doorsteps. So you leave out the curry leaves, or the kaffir lime leaves, or the holy basil and the curry still tastes great, but is missing something.

Ingredients like lemon grass, ginger, turmeric, cumin, etc, are invariably imported and so by the time they reach even a high turnover oriental supermarket they will have lost a significant amount of freshness. But what many people don’t know is that it’s perfectly possible to grow many of these supposedly exotic ingredients here in the UK, here on your patio.

Make a curry from ingredients you have grown yourself, that can come straight out of the ground into your pestle and mortar and the flavours will sing out loud. No longer will the curry be simply hot with a vaguely warm spicy taste, it will be aromatic and you’ll taste all the sweet-sour, hot, salty, mustardy, clovey, aniseedy flavours as they should be.

There’s a convenience factor as well. I have cobbled together a Thai green curry paste from scratch, added coconut cream from the store cupboard, some rice plus whatever was lurking at the bottom of the fridge and made a fantastic fresh curry in less than half an hour, no shopping needed. It takes a bit longer than using a packaged paste, but it’s much nicer and much more satisfying.

Let’s start though with some core ingredients of any spice paste. Onions and garlic form the basis of many curry and curry pastes and these are two ingredients that grow very happily here in the garden.

Onions
Onion sets can be planted out either in autumn or spring. The advantage of planting onions in autumn is that they will get a head start in spring next year as soon as the weather warms up and you should be lifting your onions to eat in May. There should be just enough time to plant overwintering onions now, but don't leave it any later. We planted Senshyu onions in the Secret Garden, a type specifically bred for autumn planting, spacing the onions evenly and planting them just deep enough to leave the tips slightly exposed above the soil - not too much top showing or else they will be dug up again by birds who appear to enjoy tossing freshly planted onions around the garden.

In the summer we ran a workshop on companion planting – the beneficial effects of positioning certain plants close to each other. Onions and garlic are well-known companion plants – the onion smell and garlic smell are said to deter some insect pests. Onions are good for repelling carrot fly - the onion odour masks the smell of carrots - while garlic is good to plant under roses as the smell deters greenfly.

Garlic

Now is the optimum time to plant garlic. We would always recommend a UK-bred variety such as Solent Wight for best results here. Check the weather forecast and aim to plant just before a cold snap: garlic cloves like to be chilled after planting to stimulate growth. Separate the garlic bulb into individual cloves and push each one into the ground, closing the soil over the tip so they are covered.

Fennel

Another spice ingredient suitable for growing outdoors is fennel. Fennel seeds are an integral part of a number of spice mixes and this herb fennel (this isn’t the type that grows a swollen bulb at the base) produces edible leaves, edible flowerheads and then of course, after flowering, the seeds. These seeds are mature right now - try biting into a fresh fennel seed and see how pungent the flavour is.

There’s one other thing I like about growing hot chillies, ginger, turmeric and so on. There’s something a bit subversive about it. You’re not supposed to be able to grow these plants here in Britain, which makes it all the more fun to try and all the more fun when you get a half-decent crop.

Chillies

Chillies are a great example of a plant that is ridiculously easy to grow. I’ve been raising chilli plants for 10 years now, and I can’t remember the last time I bought a chilli pepper in the shops. There’s something incredibly satisfying – almost addictive - about growing chillies.

Not only are they easy to grow, but they mature into extremely attractive plants laden with fruit. In the Secret Garden we've grown Jalapenos, which are piquant and which are also traditionally smoked to make the Mexican chipotle sauce, and also the miniature Basket Of Fire variety, which we picked and used in the curries served at the Grow Your Own Curry afternoon. Basket of Fire is a very hot, birds-eye style chilli – ideal for Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese dishes.

Ginger

Ginger is a tropical plant, but it’s perfectly possible to grow ginger in a pot, indoors, in a conservatory or on a sunny windowsill. First you will need to find a piece of ginger root with small yellow nodules (see picture) protruding from it - these will develop into shoots. You may have to hunt around in your local mini-market and greengrocers to find suitable roots for planting.

Plant up in rich moist compost and keep the soil moist, but not wet. Keep temperature as constant as possible: bright windowsill against a double-glazed window is good, heated conservatory is good. They prefer not to be in direct sunlight. Anything above 20 degrees is workable, above 25 degrees better. The root will take up to a month to sprout but will then grow quickly throughout the summer before dying back at the beginning of autumn - anytime from October is a good time to harvest. Do not expect to become self-sufficient in ginger unless you have a lot of pots.

There's a step-by-step guide to how we grew our ginger plants here.

Turmeric
Growing turmeric in the UK is very similar to ginger: you need to plant a piece of rhizome with a nodule on it that looks as though it might sprout. However, turmeric will withstand slightly lower temperatures than ginger – down to around 18 degrees Celsius is OK, and also its leaves are edible and can be used for flavouring.

However, don’t imagine that you can just snap off a leaf and start chewing on it. The leaves tend to be used either in the same way as banana leaves, for wrapping food in, or ground up into a paste, or pickled. Or the leaves are picked and soaked to get some of the sourness out of them – then the soaking water is used in the recipe and the leaves thrown away.

The picture here shows part of the fresh root which can be cut from the plant and used fresh, or dried and then ground into powder.

Curry Leaves

Pictured left is a Murraya koenigii, or curry leaf tree and it’s one of those times when Latin or botanical names comes in handy because this is a very different plant to the curry plant which you find on sale in garden centres all over the country.

Murraya koenigii is the plant whose leaves are used throughout Indian and Malaysian cooking, usually quickly fried in oil and then added to a curry as a finish or garnish.

I find fresh curry leaves practically impossible to find over here, and dried ones seem to me to have lost much of their flavour. They do freeze well, but again, I don’t have much luck finding even the frozen versions.

So instead I have my little curry tree. And it is very little –this is a young plant and in its natural habitat it will grow into a full-sized tree, over 10ft tall.

I bought this plant from Plants4Presents and they’re also sold in the UK by Poyntzfield Nursery up in Scotland. The two things to remember about keeping a curry leaf tree happy is that 1) they’re not frost hardy so you will need to grow them in a pot, outdoors in summer, indoors in winter; 2) in their natural habitat they grow on the forest floor, so don’t put them out in the sun. Put them under a tree.

Lemon grass

Lemon grass is well worth growing in the UK – even outside. Once established, the plants will grow vigorously, giving you fragrant leaves for flavouring, for making herbal teas, or scenting your bath. It will also grow offshoots, which the close-up photo here shows clearly at the base of the plant, which you can use as the classic lemon grass stalk in Thai curry pastes.

There are three ways you can get a lemon grass plant going. You can buy seeds fairly readily from garden centres and nurseries. Sow these in a seed tray in February and keep warm – cover with clear plastic lid or polythene bag until the seeds have germinated. When the seedlings are big enough they can go into a big pot, a number of smaller pots, or, once the danger of frost is over, outside in a sunny sheltered spot in lots of good rich compost.

The second way is to find some very fresh-looking stalks either in the supermarket or more likely an Asian supermarket. Trim the stalks lightly then sit them in water – stuffed into the neck of a cleaned-out Coke bottle or a plastic water bottle that supports the stalks is a good idea. Change the water daily and you should see white roots begin to appear. The time taken for the stalks to develop roots varies enormously: it can be a few days, or it can be several weeks.

Thirdly, you can divide your own established plants once they’ve developed side-shoots. Instead of using all the side-shoots for cooking, select some for removing from the mother-plant and planting up separately.

By September you will need to harvest your lemon grass – any that isn’t used at the time can be sliced and put in the freezer, where they will keep very well.

Otherwise, bring your pots of lemon grass in over winter. They will not survive temperatures of less than 5 degrees. Give them a haircut, trimming them down to about six inches, then continue to water them sparingly, just enough to prevent them from drying out, and they should come back to life in the spring.

One other point to be aware of, if you have cats, is that the cats love lemon grass. Mine regularly likes to sit on the kitchen table and chew away at the leaves. Not great if you’re planning to harvest them later.

Kaffir Lime

The kaffir lime is a member of the citrus family which produces highly fragrant leaves used in Thai cooking, and also knobbly-shaped limes with, again, highly fragrant zest. I’ve had a Kaffir lime bush for five or six years now and while it isn't very prolific in terms of producing fruit, it earns its keep by giving me a hassle-free supply of Kaffir lime leaves 365 days of the year. I find fresh leaves practically impossible to find in the shops, and the dried versions have lost much of their flavour.

Citrus trees have quite a precise set of requirements to keep them healthy. If you’re able, either by luck or design, to provide a suitable environment for a citrus tree then it will appear to need very little maintenance. If your conditions aren’t ideal then they’ll prove troublesome.

In summer, in the UK, they’ll like to be outdoors, somewhere sunny and sheltered. A south-facing patio is ideal. They don’t however like frost or wet winters so you will need to bring your tree indoors in winter. They do, however, like to be kept cool in winter, somewhere between 7 and 13 degrees. I move mine to an unheated loft bathroom under the skylight – it’s not too cold because of all the heat coming up from the floors below and it’s nice and bright with the big skylight window. If you have a light, bright conservatory that’s ideal so long as you don’t turn the heating up in winter.

In summer, keep the soil moist; in winter keep it dry and water very sparingly. However, it may well be worth standing the citrus pot in a tray of gravel which you keep wet, to raise the overall humidity around the plant – they do tend to find the air in our centrally heated houses very dry. (Another reason why the unheated bathroom works well.)

We’re doing a citrus workshop next month with lemons, limes, oranges, and kumquats when we’ll go into specific detail. However, I usually say that if your citrus looks happy: plant looking perky, leaves nice and glossy, then it is happy. A characteristic of any citrus plant that is struggling, whether too wet, too dry, too hot or too cold, is that all its leaves will fall off. A bald plant is one that is in trouble.

Coriander

Coriander can be grown both for its leaves - and roots and stems, which are often used in Thai dishes - and also for its seeds, which are commonly used in spice mixes and powders.

When growing for its leaves, I find I get the best results by sowing the seeds thickly in a seed tray, keeping the tray warm and harvesting as microleaves - snipping off the leaves when the seedlinsg are just a couple of inches high.

Growing for seed is almost easier as coriander is a notorious 'bolter' - the plants often to seed. Simply collect the seeds as soon as they turn brown on the plant and let them finish drying on a plate in the kitchen before storing in an airtight jar.

You may often see what looks like coriander referred to as cilantro. I used to think it was simply that cilantro was the American word, but since I’ve started growing it as well as eating it I keep coming across cilantro in a British context. I have seen it suggested that coriander is grown for seed and cilantro for leaf but also that coriander refers to the whole plant: roots, stem (which are also edible and much used in Thai cooking) and all, while cilantro is the leaf only.

Thai basil

Until about six weeks ago I would have been recommending these wholeheartedly as the kind of herb which is not only easy to grow but also impossible to buy in the shops. Then my local Waitrose started stocking it in the fresh cut herbs sections. Thai basil is the variety that gives Thai curries that sweet licorice scent, and ordinary basil leaves just don’t work the same way. It’s incredibly easy to grow Thai basil in a pot on a sunny windowsill and one medium-sized pot will keep you in basil all summer long.

I grow lots of different types of basil, all in the same way. Get a medium pot with drainage holes and fill it full of good compost – multipurpose will do but it needs to be fine rather than rough-cut. Water it well. Sprinkle the seed over the surface – be generous, but keep the seed in a single layer. Cover very lightly with a layer of fine compost, so that the seed are just covered. If you’re sowing before April, cover the pot either with a fitted cloche, or a clear polythene bag stretched over the lip of the pot. April or after, you can leave the pot uncovered.

Put the pot in your sunniest windowsill: basil likes lots of light. The seeds should germinate by the end of a week – just three or four days at the height of summer – and once they’re through you can remove the polythene covering.

Keep them growing on the windowsill and start cutting when the leaves are big enough. Try to snip leaves from all over the pot: if you completely denude one seedling down to a bare stalk it won’t grow any more leaves. But if you pinch out the leaves at the very tip of the plant it will regrow quite happily. Water regularly to keep the compost moist and your pot should last all summer. Thai basil will start producing purple flower buds which can be snipped out and used as well as a garnish and flavouring.

After much experimentation I have come to the conclusion that here in the Uk, basil is an indoor plant. Outdoors, they fall prey too easily to aphids (greenfly), they get watered too irregularly and blown about in the wind. A warm sunny windowsill with still air and not so much temperature fluctuation will give you much more succulent leaves.

Holy basil

Often confused with Thai basil, this has smaller, more rounded leaves which are a matt green (or flushed with red, if it’s holy red basil) and slightly hairy. It looks frankly a more nondescript plant than the striking Thai basil. The flavour of the leaves is spicier, hotter, less sweet. Holy basil is also associated with Thai cooking, in stir fries, stews and rice dishes.

You can grow holy basil in exactly the same way as any other basil, but I’ve found it less prolific than the other basils and slower to grow.

Fenugreek
Like coriander you can grow fenugreek, or methi, for the leaves or seeds, both of which will give your dishes a distinctive mustard flavour and aroma. You can grow fenugreek from the seeds you buy in the supermarket. You can grow as separate plants or, a better solution at this time of year, is to grow as microleaves (pictured, left). Soak the seeds for about eight hours or overnight in clean cold water, then spread them evenly over a seed tray filled with compost. Cover the seeds very lightly with compost, and place a clear lid or polythene bag over the seed tray. Place somewhere light, bright and warm and the seeds should germinate in just two to three days.

There are two distinct types of fenugreek. The more common large-seeded variety has white flowers, and can only be cut once so once you've harvested, you'll need to sow some more. The smaller seeded variety has slightly smaller leaves, yellow flowers and will regrow after cutting.

If you're growing to raise single plants to maturity, soak the seeds first as above, then sow directly in a well-drained sunny spot. Sow the seeds thinly and just cover with soil, any time between April and August. Fenugreek will survive a light frost so is worth sowing sowing successionally throughout the growing season.

Cumin

There’s no reason why you can’t grow your own cumin plant in a sunny sheltered spot in the garden or in a patio container, or on a windowsill if you have the space. It’s an umbellifer, so related to caraway, fennel, and also carrots and parsnips. However, most of the world’s cumin is grown in the Middle East – it prefers daytime temperature consistently in the mid-20s Celsius.

If you’re going to try them outside, sow the seed indoors and keep warm until the seeds germinate. Once the seedlings are large enough to handle, transplant to pots, about three to four seedlings per pot. These can be then be kept indoors to grow on, moved outdoors once all danger of frost is past (say, late April), or the plants can be transferred to an outside border. Then pray for a long hot summer.

Simpler is to sow the cumin seeds directly in the large pot you plan to raise them in. Sow indoors as above, thin the seedlings once they have all germinated and decide whether to keep it indoors or move it outside depending on how the weather pans out. Last summer, for example, they would have stayed in.

It’s an attractive plant with feathery leaves, but you will be growing it for the seeds – another reason for needing a long season. The flowers are white (sometimes pink), after flowering you should see the seeds form. Pick them off the plant when they turn yellowy in colour and let them dry somewhere sunny – on a plate in the kitchen, say – until they go brown. Then they’re ready to be stored in a clean airtight jar and used as you would use the shop-bought version. Cumin seeds mature at different rates – there won’t be one single day when you can go and harvest all the seeds – so you will need to keep an eye on the plants and pick off the seeds as and when and add them to the kitchen plate.

I think it would be going some to grow enough cumin to become self-sufficient, but you should get enough for a few special occasion meals.

Fancy a challenge?

The plants listed above are all relatively easy to grow, whether indoors or outdoors, and should give you a decent harvest in favourable conditions. The spices and aromatics listed below present far more of a challenge - often because even if you managed to raise a tropical plant in the UK climate, you would have to wait many years for the plant to mature and produce its edible seed. It's not too surprising, therefore, that spices have been so highly prized and priced throughout history.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is grown mainly for its bark, though its leaves are used in curries as well. It has been a much-prized spice for hundreds of years - there is a fascinating history of the trade in cinnamon here .
You won't be able to grow cinnamon for its bark in the UK, but you could grow it in a pot in a conservatory and use leaves in teas and curries.

To use as a garnish, try growing cinnamon basil – a basil variety whose leaves have a definite cinnamon aroma. This can be grown exactly as Thai or ordinary basil.

Cardamom

Cardamom is a tropical rainforest plant. Best place would be a steamy bathroom, or an indoor heated swimming pool, should you have one. Kew Gardens has some advice on growing cardamom plants here, and Plants4Presents currently has plants for sale.

Don’t sow the culinary seeds that you buy in the shops, as they’re harvested unripe and then dried for kitchen use.

Saffron

Saffron is extracted from the stamens of the saffron crocus. It's a painstaking process which must be done by hand, which is why saffron has traditionally been one of the most expensive spices in the world. I have tried growing crocuses for saffron, with dismal results, but there is a good online guide at Nurseries Online here. You plant in the summer and harvest saffron from the stamens of the flowers in autumn. You’ll need a pair of tweezers and it’s very fiddly.

Star anise

In theory, growing star anise, which is native to China, would be perfectly possible as a pot plant, indoors in winter, outdoors in summer. If only I could find one - and if anyone knows of a star anise plant supplier in the UK, please tell me!

The star anise likes acid soil – it’s distantly related to magnolia – and lots of water. Once you get the plant established, it could be up to 10 years or more before it bears flowers and fruit – the star anise itself is the dried egg-shaped fruit in the star-shaped casing. The star anise ‘flowers’ that you buy here have been picked when immature and unripe and then dried, so you can’t reconstitute the seeds and grow the plant from there, unfortunately: the seeds are undeveloped and empty.

Peppercorns

The peppercorn vine is native to India and grows happily in Vietnam, but temperatures here, even in a greenhouse, are just too low. Peppercorns are the fruit of the vine, which are dried and can then be further treated. Black pepper, for example is cooked and dried peppercorns; green pepper is dried unripe fruit and white pepper is made up of dried ripe seeds. Pink peppercorns, however, are from a different plant: the Peruvian pepper tree, Schinus molle, or its relative the Brazilian pepper tree, Schinus terebinthifolius.

Although conventional pepper can’t be grown here, you can always try Szechuan pepper, which is comparatively easy - see Mark Diacono's guide in his book A Taste of the Unexpected.

Szechuan pepper is botanically related to citrus plants rather than pepper vines, but it will still give you a hot peppery hit along with some more complex citrus notes as well. It’s hardy in the cold and so long as you plant two of them (a male plant and a female plant), they will supply with you fruits – the Szechuan peppers – for a good few years.

Cloves

Originally from the Indonesian spice islands, cloves like it hot and humid. In its natural habitat a clove seed will develop it a full-grown tree up to 12 metres tall and spreading eight metres; it's next to impossible to recreate the conditions it likes in the UK outside a very large heated glasshouse. Bear in mind also that what is sold in the shops is a dried flower bud, not a seed, so cannot be planted, and that it takes 20 years for the trees to start producing flower buds.

Nutmeg

See cloves, above, for the optimal growing conditions, although they are speedy developers in comparison since the first nutmegs, the seeds of the tree, will be produced about 7-9 years after planting.

General tips for growing spice plants

These will tend to be tropical plants; by default in the UK they will have to come indoors in winter;
Many also tend to grow in rainforest conditions; they don’t necessarily need lots of hot sun, but moist warm shade;
Plants which grow on the forest floor are used to lots of organic matter but not necessarily very fertile soil;
Don’t assume that a plant with edible seeds will have other edible parts, eg, cumin. (Although it might have, eg, turmeric);
Choose whether to try to grow your plant from seed – may be cheaper and more obtainable, or whether to buy a plant to nurture – may be the only viable way to acquire;
When searching the Internet for cultivation advice, check whether the site is referring to the UK, US, Australia or indeed anywhere else. You’ll find sites telling you how easy it is to grow cinnamon or talking about the benefits of growing lemon grass as hedging, and then find they are talking about Louisiana and Brisbane respectively.

The Secret Garden Club's ginger harvest

Guests were able to take away a selection of seeds, a handful of overwintering onions and chillies picked fresh from the plant, to try raising their own spice plants.

The roses were still in bloom in MsMarmiteLover's garden last week as we prepared for next week's Secret Garden Club, all about sowing, growing and cooking with the Allium family - garlic, onions and shallots, leeks and other less well-known relatives. Join Zia Mays and MsMarmiteLover next Wednesday for an afternoon in the Secret Garden followed by a special allium-themed afternoon tea - bookings can be made here, or from the link above.

The Secret Garden Club workshop on December 21 discussed planting, growing, harvesting storing and cooking with alliums.

There are approximately 750 different varieties of allium, ranging from ornamental plants grown for their striking spherical flowerheads, to edible crops including chives, garlic, shallots, onions and leeks. The distinctive onion taste comes from sulphurous compounds found in the bulbs and/or stems of the plant.

On the whole, alliums are straightforward to grow and to look after. You'll be rewarded by always having onions or garlic on hand, as they store well, or by being able to snip a few chives from a plant growing in a pot or in the kitchen garden.

Leeks

You can buy leeks as seedlings but they are easy (and much cheaper) to grow from seed. They are usually started off in a seed bed – an area of well-drained, fine soil.

The main benefit of this is that it saves space in the spring and summer when you might need it for other veg. Starting the plants off in fine soil also helps to grow straight, undamaged plants.

Sprinkle seed evenly in the seed bed. Thin as soon as the seedlings are big enough to handle (and use the thinnings in a salad).

Traditionally you plant out leeks on the longest day of the year (ie, June 21), or most gardening books will suggest, when they are the thickness of a pencil.

When you transplant leeks you use a technique called ‘puddling in’. With a dibber, or a trowel handle, make a hole deep enough to take about two-thirds of the leek seedling.

Drop the leek in and fill the hole with water. Don’t firm the soil around the leek, just let the water and soil settle around the plant naturally.

Leeks like rich soils and plenty of water and regular feeding. Seaweed extract is excellent for them. Actually seaweed extract is excellent full stop.

Like other alliums they should be weeded regularly. Because they are tall thin plants, they don’t offer much ground cover.

Weeds compete with your crops for the water and nutrients in the soil. If they get really big they may compete for light as well, so keep the ground around the developing leek plants clear, preferably hand-weeding so that you don't damage the leek stems.

You can start harvesting leeks as soon as they look good to eat. So you can start with baby leeks in late summer and leave some to fatten up over the autumn.

Do not try to pull leeks from the top. All that will happen is that the leaves will break and leave you with a ragged stem still in the ground. Always take a fork and lift them from the bottom.

Leeks are very hardy. You can leave them in the ground over winter and they won’t come to any harm, although if the ground is frozen they will be difficult to harvest.

Here you can heel them in – this means lifting them, then laying them down side by side and covering shallowly with sand or fine compost. They’ll be quite happy like that and it will save space on the plot if you need it.

Garlic

Garlic is grown by planting individual cloves in the ground. These develop and mature as bulbs made up of many cloves themselves. Folklore has it that you should plant your garlic out on the shortest day of the year and harvest it on the longest. The development of the garlic plant is affected by day length - the increasing hours of daylight stimulate the development of the bulb - so it makes sense to plant before the days start to get longer.

It's tempting to simply plant out garlic that you buy in the supermarket – it’s cheaper than buying garlic from a plant nursery and there’s no visible difference.

You can certainly try planting culinary garlic. You’ll probably get good results. There are two reasons why you might not, though:

1. Supermarket garlic may have been imported from Spain, or France, or simply not be a variety that’s bred to thrive in our climate.

2. If you buy garlic for planting from a reputable nursery, it will be guaranteed to be virus-free.

Some soil preparation might be needed. Garlic doesn’t need very rich soil and it doesn't like fresh manure. The Secret Garden Club's soil is sticky clay, it’s a good idea to lighten the soil a bit by digging in sand, or kitchen compost, or leaf mould, or just the multipurpose compost you buy at Homebase.

Take your garlic bulb and separate it carefully into cloves. Don’t peel them.

Push each clove into the ground, upright, with the root end at the bottom. The cloves should be buried about 6mm or half an inch deep.

Firm the soil lightly over the top … and pray for cold weather. Garlic likes to chill for a while after planting before it sends out green shoots above ground. These shoots should start to show about the beginning of February but much depends on the weather conditions.

From now you don’t really need to do anything except keep the garlic bed as free of weeds as you can. Like all alliums, the way the plant grows upright means there is no ground cover to deter weeds. Hand weeding is best: if you're tempted to use a hoe, you run the risk of slicing through your developing garlic bulb.

Don’t water the allium bed either unless you are in the grip of a prolonged drought. A wet crop is more prone to softening and rotting than a dry one.

There is only really one other maintenance job to do: if you see a flower head forming, snip it off. You want the plant to focus on producing a nice big bulb, not flowers.

Have a look at your garlic on midsummer’s day – if the bulbs look plump, they can be harvested.

Shortly after midsummer, the plant will start to go brown and wilt. The leaves will almost certainly develop some rust – orangey brown spots. The collapse of the plant is a god sign that it’s ready to harvest.

Pull or dig the bulbs up straightaway. You can use them in cooking immediately, but if you want to store them to keep into autumn and over winter, they need to be dried first. Traditionally, the plants are left, unwashed, on racks in the open air to dry out and ‘bake’. This is all very well in the south of France, but given the UK's unpredictable climate, you’re better off finding somewhere sunny and well-ventilated, but indoors. A conservatory, or under a kitchen skylight, or in a greenhouse with the door and vents open are all good places. I hang mine in a plastic patio greenhouse with the door open.

After about three weeks, the skins will be papery and the stems dried out. To prepare for storage, trim the roots, and rub off the dirty outer layers – don’t peel or expose the cloves.

Tidy up the stems and leaves and trim to about 8 inches. Now the garlic bulbs can be strung up, or plaited, and hung in a light, well-ventilated place. They should last well into the New Year (if you don’t eat them all by then).

There are some intricate plaiting techniques and nothing looks better than a fat sturdy garlic plait. This website has good photo instructions for making a classic plait - of onions, but it works for garlic (and shallots as well) that looks good and will store your garlic tidily.

Onions and shallots

Much of what we’ve already discussed with garlic also applies to other alliums. Onions and shallots also like a light, well-drained soil. Don’t use manure, but add organic matter such as leaf mould, compost, or sand, to heavy soils such as London clay.

In a domestic garden, we’d recommend shallots over onions. They tend to be more expensive than onions to buy in the shops; also they are more space-efficient. One shallot set planted will split and give you many shallots to harvest. One onion set planted will give you one mature onion bulb.

Onions can be grown from seed, or from sets (miniature bulbs). Most domestic gardeners choose sets:

1. Sets are easier, less time-consuming and less susceptible to pests such as onion fly.

2. Shallots grown from seed won’t split into multiple bulbs.

There are two main advantages of growing from seed:

1. More varieties available.

2. A seed-grown onion is less likely to bolt, ie, to produce a flower head instead of a bulb. In practice you can buy heat-treated sets which are also less likely to bolt.

You can plant overwintering onion sets out in the autumn, particularly Japanese varieties. These will be ready to harvest in early summer, but they need to be used quickly – they don’t store well.

The other time to plant out onion sets is in early spring – February onwards. These onions will be ready in late July/August and can be stored for use over the autumn and winter.

Both onions and shallots should be planted out, base downwards, so that just the tip is visible above the soil surface. Unfortunately, birds seem to find these tips irresistible and will pick them out of the ground. The don’t eat the sets, but leave them lying around.

Experts like Bob Flowerdew says plant them back in again, and I’m loath to disagree with him, but I’ve always found the up-ended sets don’t replant well, so instead I cover newly planted shallots and onions with a net. Once the sets have rooted and sprouted the net can be removed.

Onions and shallots can be harvested like garlic. Leave the stems to dry out in an airy well-lit space. Then clean carefully, separate the shallot bulbs, and string up or plait. You can also hang onions and shallots up in nets if the idea of stringing or plaiting is too daunting.

Onion and shallot problems
These are not usually troublesome, usually a low-maintenance crop apart from the weeding.

If you grow from seed, onion fly can be a problem when thinning or transplanting. Some people suggest planting parsley around onion seedlings can mask the smell.

White rot can be a big problem – it’s a fungus which will persist in the soil. You'll find fluffy white mould around the base of stems and skinny, sometimes non-existent, bulbs. The crop will be unusable.

There are a couple of things you can do to fight white rot.

First of all, as soon as you find you have white rot, wash and disinfect all your tools so that you don’t spread the spores. Remove what remains of your onions and soil around the affected bulbs and incinerate it all.

Then get some Armillatox (patio disinfectant) and following the instructions for diluting it to the letter, liberally soak the affected bed. Leave it for at least three weeks before growing anything in the bed. See the Armillatox website for more information.

A less scary but more long-term possible solution works best when you are in the first few years of cultivation. Where you want to grow onions, dig out the existing compost to a depth of about a foot and start again, either with very well-rotted manure or commercial multi-purpose compost. Create raised beds for your onions and operate a no-dig policy. Avoid using the originally affected bed for onions for a good seven years. (This is what Zia is currently practising with some success on a white rot-affected site.)

Grey mould is a distinctive grey fur, and associated with onion neck rot where the bulbs go soft and brown. Excessive feeding with high nitrogen fertilisers is a strong contributory factor for this – another good reason to practise benign neglect on your onions.

Rust – some rust spots developing on garlic, onions and leeks as the plant matures is very common and needn’t be a problem.

One thing worth mentioning is that alliums don’t like acid soils. If you suspect that your soil might be acid, you can add lime to it or in a raised bed, use spent mushroom compost which has a mildly alkaline effect and is also very good for lightening heavy clay soil.

Problems with leeks

You may have problems with leek moth, which is prevalent in the south of England. The first thing you’ll notice is your leeks look ragged and stop growing. If you look closely you will see what looks like webbing or cocooning in the middle.

The best thing to do is to prevent leek moth damage in the first place. When you plant out your leeks, throw a very fine net such as Environmesh over the crop. This can be safely lifted in November when the moth is no longer active.

If you find a leek moth infestation has already taken hold you can rescue your crop. Cut the plants right down to the ground, so that you cut out all the damaged foliage and remove the caterpillars. Burn the cuttings (don’t compost or the caterpillars will survive to create another generation).

Your leeks will grow again. They won’t win any prizes at the show, but you will get edible leeks.

These leeks were trimmed to cut out evidence of leek moth and regrew quite happily.

Allium folklore - true or false?

You should plant garlic on the shortest day and harvest on the longest.

True-ish. Your garlic won’t come to any harm if you do this. Ideally plant before a cold spell (so, late autumn). Take local weather conditions into account before sticking too closely to any rules.

You should bend over the stalks of onions/garlic to help them mature.

False. Don’t do this – it will damage the stalk and could let in disease, affecting the storage life of the bulb.

You should plant onions around your carrot crops to deter carrot fly.

True-ish. This is known as companion planting and many people swear by it. Be aware though that the distinctive allium smell may also attract its own pest, the onion fly.

If you rub the cut side of an onion over a bald patch, your hair will regrow.

False. No scientific basis for onion as hair restorer.

Placing a cut onion in a room will absorb germs and bacteria.

False, although this legend is very persistent. It was a preventative used in times of plague in both UK and US when they believed disease spread through foul air or ‘miasmas’.

Other types of edible allium

Chives

These grow easily in a pot or on the open ground. Kept near the kitchen door, you will always have chives on hand to snip into salads, or on omelettes or scrambled eggs, giving your dishes a distinct but mild onion flavour. The attractive pink flowers are also edible.

Garlic chives

There’s quite a lot of confusion over plant names in the Allium family, but I’m pretty certain these are the same thing as Chinese chives. They’re certainly multi-purpose in that you can add them authentically to Chinese food but also use them interchangeably with ordinary chives. And the white flowers are also very attractive – and edible.

Egyptian walking onions

Or 'tree onions', but let’s face it, Egyptian walking onions is a much more evocative name. Now these are weird: the bulbs (or more correctly, bulbils) develop at the TOP of the stem. At the end of the season, you can harvest your onions from above ground, then gently bend the stalk over to the ground to plant one remaining bulb. Hence the plant will eventually ‘walk’ around your plot.

Sweet onions
There are sweet onions which can be eaten raw, like an apple. You can buy them in the UK – Sainsbury’s stocks them in their Taste The Difference range - but it is the Americans who are the connoisseurs of sweet onions and who selectively breed many varieties of onion specifically for their high water and sugar content.

One of the most well-known of these are Walla Walla sweets. They look just like an ordinary yellow onion and grow in or near Walla Walla in Washington State. Walla Walla sweets were originally brought to the US from Corsica at the beginning of the 20th century. They’re been selectively cultivated ever since to maximise their sweetness, which is down to a low sulphur and high water content.

Wild garlic (ramsons)
You’ll know the smell of this – it’s that gorgeous green garlic aroma you get in damp woodlands in springtime. Wild garlic has no fat bulb – you eat the leaves which have a distinct but mild garlicky taste. It’s a seasonal treat only and can be tricky to cultivate, although once it’s established it will spread very easily.

Elephant garlic

Not strictly speaking garlic, but a type of leek, elephant garlic looks to all intents and purposes like a huge bulb of garlic, made up of enormous cloves. The flavour is not as strong as 'ordinary' garlic - they are fantastic roasted underneath a joint of meat with the garlic flesh then crushed and creamed.

Garden Tool Set

Monday, August 10, 2015

Grow Your Own Curry

All about alliums - or onions without tears

The Allium family