Garden Tool Set: peppers

Showing posts with label peppers. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2015

The Italian kitchen garden

A plot for vegetables is an essential part of any Italian garden, or indeed any Italian outdoor space. Next time you’re in a major Italian city, look up and you’ll see plants tumbling over the rooftops, bright yellow dots of citrus trees. Window boxes burst not just with flowers but also edibles. Out in more rural areas, everyone keeps a patch in their garden for their kitchen garden or ‘orto’.

Think of Italian vegetables and what springs to mind? Tomatoes, obviously, although as we discussed at the Secret Garden last month, tomatoes are a relatively recent introduction into Italy. Peppers, ditto. Aubergines, which originated in Asia, have been cultivated in Italy since the early Middle Ages. All of these we grow in the Secret Garden.

Tomatoes are easy to raise in the UK, not so easy to get prolific fruit from. We grow them indoors and outside, and the latter needs a warm sunny summer to get the fruit ripening properly. Italians typically grow plum tomatoes: the varieties Roma, and San Marzano, are justly famous, and beefsteak-style tomatoes such as Costoluto and Cuor di Bue.

Both hot and sweet peppers have become staples of the Italian kitchen garden. Chilli peppers are probably slightly easier to grow outside in the UK than sweet peppers which tend to do better in a greenhouse. Classic Italian varieties include the Corno Rosso ('red horns', often known as bulls' horns) which are long, indeed horn-shaped, and sweet, plus the cayenne-style 'Piccante' peppers, and Ciliegia Piccante ('spicy cherry' peppers).

Aubergines will grow well in a conservatory or greenhouse and this year made a decent fist of it outside on our sunny sheltered patio. As with tomatoes and peppers, above, the seeds should be sown indoors early in the year, February is a good time, and transplanted into large pots in mid to late spring. The fruits should be ready for picking about now, September into October.

If you look further afield, you’ll find many other vegetables and also herbs which we think of as typically Italian and which will grow well here in the UK.

Beans – Borlotti beans are an essential for us and they grow very well outside here. Fresh borlotti beans are delicious, podded, simmered and dressed with olive oil – and impossible to buy in the shops in the UK. Having said that, we do tend to dry most of our beans. Leaving them on the plant until the pods are dark charcoal-purple in colour and hard and dry to the touch, the pods are picked before the first frost and shelled. If the beans clatter on to the worktop they’re dry and ready to store. If they land with anything like a dull thud, they need more drying out, before being poured into airtight jars and stored somewhere cool and dark for the winter.

Courgettes and squash for both winter and summer are grown all over Italy. Two of my favourite squash for eating, the dense-fleshed Berrettina Piacentina and Marina di Chioggia, are cultivated up in the north of Italy. I always think they have a flavour somewhere between sweet potato and chestnut. We start these off in pots in April, then when they're ready to plant out, we add lots of well-rotted kitchen compost to the soil - squash and courgettes are hungry and thirsty plants. Squash will scramble along the ground and take over your beds and send long shoots out across the lawn given half a chance, so we train them upwards on to trellises.

With broccoli, another classically Italian vegetable, the clue is in the name. Broccolo refers to the flowerbud which is essentially what the edible part of the plant is. We may think of broccoli, cauliflower and similar as very British brassicas, but there are many varieties cultivated in Italy. Broccoli has been grown in Italy since the 6^th century BC at least and became very popular in Roman times, but wasn’t brought to Britain until the 1700s.

The large-headed green variety we think of as plain broccoli is known in Italy as Broccoli Calabrese, or Calabrian broccoli. You’ll also find red and purple headed Sicilian broccoli sold as cauliflower, and the beautiful pale green Cauliflower or Broccoli Romanesco, below, with its spiral whorls and crisp clean taste.

Italian Kale, or Tuscan kale, black kale, or cavolo nero, is the currently fashionable variety with slim straight leaves in an inky green-black, or even a bluish tinge to the tops. It grows beautifully in the south of England and is a long-lived crop. Black kale sown in the spring will be ready to start picking from August and will keep growing throughout winter. Even under snow or when the ground is frozen, you’ll still be able to cut some of this kale which makes it a good winter stand-by.

Salad greens are widely grown in Italy, especially rocket (rucola) which is ubiquitous as a salad leaf in restaurants and easy to raise in a garden or pot. The plant grows quickly and self-seeds freely, so, once sown, you will probably always have some rocket, you just might not know exactly where. Also popular is radicchio, as in the conical chicory called cicoria di Treviso and the round red radicchio Palla Rossa (see top picture), and in Rome, a particular delicacy called puntarelle, a dandelion-like plant. Puntarelle is harvested whole in autumn, then the leaves are sliced into thin strips and submerged in ice-cold water until they curl up. After drying off, the leaves are served as a crisp, slightly bitter-leaved salad.

Italian Cicoria Rossa di Treviso, harvested in November. It needs a period of cold in the ground to develop the deep red colour.

Puntarelle: the fresh-tasting, crunchy inner leaves will be welcome as a salad in wintertime.

And then there's root veg, perhaps surprisingly, including beetroot, carrots, and turnips and of course, for the Italians, turnip leaves. Some turnip varieties, such as cimi di rapa, are grown expressly for their tops and for a famous dish with oriechette pasta.

A part of the orto will be given over to herbs. Flat-leaved parsley is an easy and inexpensive way to add an Italian note to many dishes. Oregano is grown to lend that distinctive Mediterranean note to pizzas, and rosemary always seems like a quintessentially Italian flavouring to me. Don’t be afraid of the cold with rosemary, it’s perfectly hardy and I always find you get the best flowers in the spring after a cold winter. It’s sitting in the wet that rosemary dislikes. Make sure your soil or pots are well-drained.

As befits a fairly new country – Italy only became a single nation in 1870 and some parts of what is now Italy didn’t formally join up until after WW1 – each region has its own food specialities. We are familiar with the differences in regional cuisine in Italy, it’s only logical that this extends to growing the food as well.

Italian vegetables often trumpet their provenance. Roma tomatoes come, unsurprisingly, from Rome. Genovese basil is the classic succulent-leafed version we buy fresh in supermarket pots, while basil from Naples has much larger, frillier leaves. Florence fennel is named for its city of origin. Neapolitan flat-leaved parsley comes from Naples, courgettes Romanesco from Rome again, and the long, slim, pale green squash called Serpente di Sicilia (Sicilian Snakes) are indeed from Sicily.

And this is useful when it comes to choosing varieties to grow, because while our climate is nothing like the climate in the south of Italy or Sicily, it isn’t so dissimilar to the growing conditions in the north of the country in the hills and mountains, where the temperatures are cooler and the rainfall more akin to our own.

Even this summer, which has been a cause for celebration in the UK, has seen us feeling lucky that outdoor tomatoes have ripened before the blight arrived. In Italy, any suggestion that tomatoes might not ripen would be greeted with astonishment.

If you want to grow specifically Italian vegetables, one very good place to start is Franchi Seeds, aka Seeds Of Italy. A family-run company for over 230 years, Franchi is based in Bergamo, with a UK operation in Harrow, and sources its seeds from local growers across the regions of Italy, often with the precise provenance named on the packet. You'll find their seeds online at http://www.seedsofitaly.com. Look out for their open days in the UK about twice a year when you can explore the warehouse and get plenty of good growing advice.

Spring at last

It's been a cold start to the year at the Secret Garden Club. Although we had some glorious spring days in March, the nights were chilly with the threat of frost never far away, so tender plants were kept tucked up indoors.

Once the hosepipe ban came into effect, the heavens opened and April turned out cool and wet. With March's sunny head start, growth turned lush and very green, as we wait for the milder temperatures of May to warm the soil up and heat up the suntraps.

Courgettes, peppers, and tomatoes will all be planted out soon - they are already bursting out of their indoor pots.

We'll also have sweetcorn, climbing beans and squash ready for the Secret Garden Club workshop on companion planting on Sunday May 27th, where we'll be explaining how the Native Americans grew these three plants, the Three Sisters, together so that they could support and nourish each other. We'll have other companion planting ideas to share as well, followed by a Cherokee-themed tea created by MsMarmiteLover. Click here for details and to book tickets.

A young Gunnera manicata covered in blossom from the tree above.

Daffodils in the front drive surround a new bay tree

Rosmarinus officinalis 'prostratus' - rosemary in the herb garden.

Pansies in the window boxes.

The camellia tree started flowering in January and was still going strong at the end of April.

Transplanting sugar snap peas to climb up a willow wigwam.

Even if the Med diet wasn’t being held up as healthy and life-extending, it would surely be hard to resist the fruit and vegetables that make up the bulk of the diet. Brightly coloured peppers like toddlers’ toys, the deep red of ripe tomatoes with the promise of a burst of sweet-sharp juice when you cut into them, the deep velvet plush of aubergines ... there is a sensual delight here that you just don't get with parsnips, say, or turnips.

The ease with which these raw ingredients can be transformed into a finished dish is seductive too. Some chopped and fried garlic, a dressing of olive, oil, a squeeze of lemon juice and some herbs and you’re done. This is the rough basis for ratatouille, for pasta al pomodoro, for imam bayildi, and many others.

As with so many fruits and vegetables, what is readily available in the shops is only a fraction of the variety which exists. Commercial wholesalers make stocking decisions based on looks and uniformity, on disease resistance, on length of life in storage, which means that only a narrow range will be eligible for the shelves.

In growing your own Mediterranean vegetables, however, you only need to consider which types would taste the best and give you that intense Mediterranean flavour, that burst of warmth and sunshine and memory of thyme-scented hillsides. The idea of bringing a little of the Mediterranean back from your holidays on to the patio at home is very beguiling. These are attractive plants, not too difficult to raise from seed, which grow happily in pots, and so needn’t take up too much space.

On Sunday, the Secret Garden Club will look at the sowing, raising, harvesting and cooking of a wide variety of Mediterranean fruits and vegetables – including some interesting varieties of aubergines, chillies, peppers and tomatoes mentioned above, but also some others as well. If you’d like to find out just how you can bring a bit of the Med back to your back garden, and enjoy MsMarmiteLover’s famous and creative afternoon teas into the bargain, click here for booking details.

Hot lemon chilli peppers, descended through the generations from the chilli peppers grown by the Aztecs since around 3,500BC.

This looks like being a bumper year for tomatoes, peppers, sweetcorn, pumpkins and other popular summer vegetables. We think of these and also crops such as runner beans as being an essential part of our summer eating, yet all of these only arrived in Europe and Asia after the Spanish conquest of the Americas. It's hard to imagine Indian or Thai cuisine without chilli, or Italian dishes without tomatoes, but they are comparatively new arrivals. Especially when you consider that the Aztecs in Mexico or the Mayans in central and south America have been cultivating chillies since at least 3500BC, if not earlier.

Mayan Gold potato plants growing in the UK.

Potatoes for example, originate in the highlands of Peru, and weren't discovered until some decades after the first landfall in America by Europeans. Once potatoes were brought across and planted in the Old World, probably at first in the Canary Islands, before being transported to Antwerp in Belgium and the Spanish mainland, they were planted as a subsistence crop. The climate in northern Europe was colder than normal at this time, thanks to the 'little ice age' and potatoes grew better in the cool conditions than the more traditionally grown grain crops.

Tigerella tomatoes ripening outside.

Tomatoes fared less well on their introduction to Spain, and then Italy, in the early 1500s after the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes found them being cultivated in Mexico. People were convinced they were poisonous, probably because of their obvious similarity to the nightshade plants (also in the Solanum family) and grew them as ornamental bushes rather than edible crops.

In contrast, Europeans took to chillies enthusiastically - perhaps because they were already used to spiced food thanks to the spice trade with India and the East, or conversely, perhaps because many people felt that their bland diet needed pepping up. The Spanish and Portuguese took these new fiery fruits to the Middle East and India via the Silk Road in the early 1500s, where they were embraced and integrated rapidly with the existing cuisines. From Arabia, this new spice was returned in the opposite direction to central Europe, where it became central to Hungarian cuisine as paprika.

Tomatoes have been variously named as the 'edible wolf peach' - this is how its original botanical name, Lycopersicon esculentum, translates, or 'golden apple', pomo d'oro. It was also known as pomme d'amour, the love apple, in France where the fruit was thought to have aphrodisiac properties.
Although tomatoes came from the East to Europe and Asia, ketchup is of Chinese origin. This pickled sauce came west with sailors in the 1600s, and a tomato version was first created in Europe in the 1700s.
Tomatoes were discovered in Mexico and south America and not grown in north America until the 1700s, and even then probably as ornamentals at first. The British and north Americans were slow to realise that the fruits were edible, while the first Italian tomato recipe - for a tomato sauce - was published in 1692.

Hubbard Large Blue pumpkin

Nearly every vegetable and fruit originating from the Americas has a fascinating story behind it. If you'd like to find out more about how we started eating and learning to love peppers, squash, pumpkins, beans, sweet potatoes and even more exotic produce such as tomatillos and melon pears, come along to the Secret Garden Club on Sunday September 1st where we'll be discussing Food From The Americas. Tickets are just £30, and this will include the garden tour plus a delicious American-themed meal created by the award-winning MsMarmiteLover.

Food From the Americas starts at 2pm on Sunday September 1st - more details and booking here. Bring your own alcohol.

Clockwise from top: Black Russian and Tigerella tomatoes, Pimientos de Padron,
Lady Christl and Salad Blue potatoes, borlotti beans - developed and cultivated in Europe, but
descended from varieties from central and South America.

A sunny day in February brings hope and a promise of spring to come like no other. The days are getting longer, the light is higher and stronger ... and it always reminds me that it's time to sow my Mediterranean vegetable seeds.

Compared to the Mediterranean climate, our English summers are cool and wet. But by starting early and waiting patiently until the end of the season, we can raise a fine crop of Mediterranean produce such as tomatoes, aubergines and peppers, both the hot and sweet varieties.

These are extraordinarily satisfying vegetables to grow: the plants are attractive and the colourful fruits bring the patio to life as they ripen. Being able to pop out to pick a chilli to spike up a supper dish (not hot enough? Just go and get another one) or to eat a tomato straight from the bush like an apple is immensely rewarding.

In the UK these vegetables are ideal for people with limited outdoor space, as they do well in containers. There's not reason why you shouldn't grow tomatoes and chilli peppers in the open ground, but in a nice big pot you can choose exactly the right place to put. Aubergines and sweet peppers definitely like somewhere warm and sheltered: the hot spot on the patio, perhaps, or better, one of those soft plastic grow-houses with the door left open once summer is underway.

In April, the Secret Garden Club will meet to discuss all aspects of growing Mediterranean vegetables: focusing on tomatoes, aubergines, chillies and sweet peppers, but with a nod to courgettes, beans, and leafy greens as well. We'll explain how you can make sure your Med crops grow and fruit successfully, and look at the possibilities of grafting the plants to make them stronger and more fruitful. The afternoon finishes with a Mediterranean-themed meal created and prepared by MsMarmiteLover: in the past, guests have enjoyed homemade sourdough with tomato butter, chocolate aubergines, peperonata, and tomato confit with vanilla cream.

Growing Mediterranean veg: how to start

Now is the ideal time to start off your Mediterranean plants if you are growing from seed. Tomatoes, peppers and aubergines will not withstand frost, so you need to find a warm sunny place indoors for them. A south-facing windowsill is ideal.

Take clean 3-inch pots and fill with seed compost (available from garden centres) to about 1cm below the lip of the pot.
Use a watering can with a rose (diffuser) to water each pot well.
Place two seeds on the surface of the compost per pot. Cover very lightly with more compost.
Label the pot carefully: either use a marker pen on the pot itself or a plant label in the pot. While tomato seedlings are quite distinctive, aubergines and peppers are easily confused when they're tiny and chilli seedlings look just the same as sweet pepper seedlings!
Put the pot in your warm and sunny place to germinate. You can place the pots in a larger seed tray with a clear plastic lid, or cover each pot with a polythene bag to help speed up germination.
You should see the first tomato leaves emerge after 3-4 days, aubergines 4-5 days and peppers in about a week, maybe even longer.
Once the seedlings appear, remove any plastic covering and leave them to grow on.
Water gently and try to get as little water on the new leaves as possible.
Keep seedlings indoors until all danger of frost is past. Then they can be planted out into the open ground or into containers.

Join us for Mediterranean Food at The Secret Garden Club, Sunday April 26th, starts 2.00pm.

Tickets £40 for workshop and lunch. Bring your own alcohol.

To book tickets, go to http://www.edibleexperiences.com/p/69/The-Underground-Restaurant/210001/garden-tool-set-Med-Veg.

Take up smoking - again!

Sunday’s Secret Garden Club afternoon sees us return to the subject of smoking. Adding smoke to food gives it a delicious flavour and aroma, redolent of barbecues and the great outdoors. It doesn’t need specialist equipment: if you barbecue, you can smoke.

We’ll look at three different ways to smoke food - from delicate tea-smoked fish, to a range of vegetables hot-smoked over wood chips, to cold smoking and how to rig up a cold smoker in your own back garden for a very small outlay.

MsMarmiteLover has promised to mix her acclaimed smoked lemon cocktails again to kick-start the afternoon, and we’ll finish with an afternoon tea inspired by our smoky ventures.

There will be plenty of time to chat and discuss the best way to set up a smoker and various techniques and foods to try.

Some of the food we’ll be smoking include:

Aubergines – hot-smoked for a distinctive char-grilled flavour;
Cheese – different varieties can be smoked with some very distinctive effects;
Garlic –smoked garlic can be used in place of ordinary cloves to add smoky notes;
Jalapeno chillies – smoked and dried chillies are known as chipotles and are used in Mexican cuisine;
Lemons – you haven’t lived until you’ve tried one of MsMarmiteLover’s smoked lemon cocktails;
Peppers – smoking brings out their sweetness;
Salmon – once you’ve tried your own home-cured, home-smoked salmon, you’ll never want shop-bought again;
Salt - gourmet seasoning;
Sweetcorn – marinaded and hot-smoked for a barbecue style dish;
Tofu – marinaded first for sweetness and to retain its softness, then hot-smoked ;
Tomatoes – tea-smoked to bring out their essential flavours;
Trout fillets – smoked over leaves of Lapsang Souchong tea for a delicate, elusive taste.

Join us on Sunday March 18th, starting at 2.00pm. Booking details are here.

Beat the hosepipe ban

If, like Secret Garden Club HQ, you live in an area under a hosepipe ban, you may be wondering how your plants are going to survive the drought. We're putting our own measures in place and we'd be interested to hear from anyone who has any other water-saving tips and strategies to share with us.

1. Concentrate on drought-resistant plants. It may be a little too soon to be thinking about a cactus garden, but plants that like a Mediterranean lifestyle won't mind a bit of drought. In our Secret Garden Club session next Sunday, we'll be looking at Mediterranean fruit and vegetables - such as aubergines, chillies, tomatoes, courgettes, grapevines and figs - and discussing ways to beat the drought. (Click here for booking details).

2. Mulching. Spreading a layer, either of organic material such as straw, or manure, or bark chips, or inorganic such as plastic sheeting, or gravel, is a great way to conserve the moisture already in the soil, since you greatly reduce or even eliminate water loss through evaporation.

3. Water plants in the evening: again there will be less loss due to evaporation than if you water during the heat of the day.

4. Use a watering can with a long nozzle rather than a rose and target the water precisely at the roots of the plant rather than splashing the leaves. That means more water goes where the plant can use it best.

5. Another way to ensure the roots get all the water is to cut the bottom off an empty 500ml plastic water bottle. Unscrew the cap and remove, then push the bottle, cap-end down, into the soil next to the plant. Fill up the inverted water bottle from your watering can and the water will be directed straight to the roots. This is an excellent way to water leafy plants like tomatoes, which do get thirsty in summer, and aubergines.

6. Install a water butt, if you don't already have one.

7. If you can, divert your 'grey' water: water from the bath or shower, from the washing up. The amount of detergent in a normal bath or shower won't be enough to harm your plants.

Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, and courgettes - the best of Mediterranean vegetables

To encourage the British to eat more healthily, one of the most persistent recommendations has been that we should adopt a more Mediterranean-style diet. People living in (particularly) southern Italy, and Greece have historically lived longer, with lower rates of coronary heart disease.
I'd hazard a guess that the foods most closely associated with a Mediterranean diet would be tomatoes, garlic and olive oil. In fact, it goes wider than that. Most often quoted is Dr Walter Willett of Harvard University's School of Public Health, who described in the 1990s, the emphasis on "abundant plant foods, fresh fruit as the typical daily dessert, olive oil as the principal source of fat dairy products (principally cheese and yogurt), and fish and poultry consumed in low to moderate amounts, zero to four eggs consumed weekly, red meat consumed in low amounts, and wine consumed in low to moderate amounts..."
Those abundant plant foods would certainly include tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, aubergines, courgettes, and beans and pulses, the last often preserved by drying. The fresh produce on this list are of course readily available in shops all the year round, although this loss of seasonality seems to be accompanied by a corresponding loss of flavour. Even in season, we appear to prefer to source our peppers and aubergines from Holland rather than the heart of the Mediterranean itself.
You can of course, try recreating a little corner of Greece or southern France in your own back garden by growing your own Mediterranean vegetables. They may not be ideally suited to the UK climate, but with a little care and by making the most of our comparatively short season, you can grow your own Med produce. And there are plenty of reasons why you should:

The fruit and veg themselves are delicious. Your own tomatoes, sweet peppers, etc, will taste better than those you buy in the shops …
... and so they will remind you of holidays and travels to the Mediterranean region. To me they are always redolent of summer and sunshine. That sweet tangy burst of tomato juice, the fragrance of thyme, a squeeze of lemon juice over a salad … it all says summer.
I think there’s an element of wish fulfilment in growing fruit and vegetables that should really do better in warmer climates. We’ve had a succession of mild but wet summers in the last 5-10 years, but if you can raise a crop of aubergines, perhaps you can kid yourself that our weather’s not so bad after all. There is definitely a sense of achievement to be had in growing these tender crops.

As a grower, you can make things easier for yourself in a number of ways. The Secret Garden Club met last Sunday to explore ways in which the cornerstones of the Mediterranean vegetable diet could be adapted to grow on the British patio.

Individual foods are discussed below, but there are some general principles that hold true for all:

Choose a suitable variety. There are varieties of tomato from Siberia, chillies from Poland, aubergines that have been bred to thrive on northern Italian hillsides rather than Sicilian glades. Bear this in mind when browsing the nursery catalogues.
Mediterranean veg like warmth and light. Give them as much as possible. Don’t expect them to do well on a north-facing slope. Try a south-facing patio instead; against a sunny wall; in a greenhouse, even if it’s a soft plastic version.
Don’t overwater them. They won’t like being drowned in a wet English summer. This of course is good news as we labour under a hosepipe ban. But not even tomatoes like too much water: it will make their skins split.
Do give them a long season. I sow my Mediterranean vegetable seeds in February, and I don’t expect aubergines before September, peppers before August (usually) or tomatoes before August – with a few exceptions that we’ll come on to later.

Tomatoes

Sungold tomatoes, freshly harvested.

The UK climate is not really conducive to growing tomatoes. Too cool, too humid, too short. Tomatoes are prey to a number of disorders and diseases which are beyond the gardener’s control.So a lot of the work involved in raising tomatoes is done to combat the effects of growing them in a hostile climate.

But every time I eat a really ripe, flavoursome homegrown tomato, it’s worth all the trouble. There is no tomato on sale commercially in the UK that tastes as good as one you have grown yourself.

Tomatoes can be grown in London both in a greenhouse and outdoors; either way you can start sowing seeds as early as the end of January or as late as April. I usually sow a batch in February and a late batch of Sungold tomatoes about now. The plan is to give myself as long a season as possible, and I’ve found from experience that Sungold still taste good when they ripen late – in autumn sun rather than summer sun.

Sow in modules or pots, two seeds to a pot. Place indoors or under glass until the seeds germinate. If you sow in January or February, keep the pots indoors in a consistently warm and light place. By March and April, in an unheated greenhouse should be fine.

Don’t transplant to the final planting place until all danger of frost is past. You can grow tomatoes in pots, in a grow-bag or in the open ground. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, but in practice it will probably depend on the space you have available.

In pots, you can position the tomatoes in the best place to get the best of the sun. They will need regular watering, perhaps daily in the height of the summer.
Grow-bags are an easy option: buy the bag, cut a top in the top, plant the tomato and off you go. They can also be positioned where you want them. But staking and supporting the tomatoes can be a problem with grow-bags if they are placed on a patio or a deck, and they will also need very regular watering in summer. Grow-bags are also, to my mind, rather unsightly.
In the open ground, the tomato plants can send down roots to find moisture. They won’t need as much watering – which is good news in this time of drought – or as much support. However, this assumes that you have a bed free in a sunny sheltered position, otherwise it may be too windy for your plants. You may also get more in the way of soil-borne pests.

Reluctantly, I’m going to recommend growing them indoors. In a conservatory, under a skylight, or in a greenhouse. I say reluctantly because in a good year, outdoor grown and ripened tomatoes taste amazing. But I think we don’t have enough good years. Tomatoes will more reliably ripen under glass, and it is also easier to protect them from blight, the most common problem to affect tomatoes grown in the UK. There's more about blight further down this post.

Use fresh dedicated tomato compost. I think it’s a valuable precaution against soil-borne diseases. You can always re-use the compost as a mulch on non-tomato, (and non-potato) crops afterwards.

Water regularly. Irregular watering will lead to blossom end rot. A good soak once a week, plus feeding once the fruits start forming should keep the plants happy.

When watering, don’t splash the leaves. Deliver water directly to the roots. One very good way to feed tomatoes, whether they’re in a pot, a grow-bag or in the ground, is to lop the bottom off a plastic water bottle, remove the cap and push it, cap end down, into the soil next to the plant.

Pinch out side shoots. If you have what is called an indeterminate tomato plant, that is, one that grows tall and straggly, you are advised to remove the shoots that grow between the main stem and the leaf. If you don’t, you’ll get a very vigorous green plant but not many fruits.

As the trusses, ie, the stems bearing fruit, form, remove the leaves around them to let the air circulate.

In any case, shop around, in nurseries or online, to explore the wide variety of tomatoes available. The plants sold in garden centres, such as Alicante, Tumbling Tom, Gardeners Delight and Moneymaker, tend to be those that can withstand manhandling, rather than those that taste best.

You can buy cherry tomatoes in brown, red, yellow or green, or striped, or beefsteak tomatoes, in small bushes or huge vine-like cordons.

At some stage during the summer, your tomatoes will almost certainly get blight. Greenhouse tomatoes may be protected to a certain extent, but all tomatoes grown outdoors in the UK will get blight sooner or later.

Blight is a fungal organism. It lives in the soil and is activated on cool humid days, typically in July. The spores are then carried on the air. Blight can sweep through an allotment, or an area where lots of plants are grown close together, like wildfire. So one preventative measure is to grow your tomatoes a considerable distance away from other tomatoes.

From July onwards, check your tomato plants regularly. The first signs of blight will be a blackening of the edges of the leaves, so that they look almost sooty. Remove any leaves that look like this immediately and ideally burn them. Don’t put them in the compost.The other tell-tale sign of blight is black patches on the stems. Again, try to remove these as soon as you see them – difficult if it’s the main stem.

If the fruits are near to maturity, you can try removing them and ripening them on a sunny windowsill indoors. Heart-breakingly, green fruits that look OK often develop brown blight patches and rot while ripening.

There are blight-resistant varieties – Ferline, Legend, and also a heritage tomato called Broad Ripple Yellow Currant. They’re not always the best-tasting.

If you grow a very early-ripening variety such as Red Alert, First In The Field or Glacier, you should get fruits before July which is usually the earliest time for blight to appear.

One very interesting way to stack the odds against blight and other disorders in your favour is to consider grafted tomato plants. This is a plant where the fruiting plant has been grafted on to a disease-resistant root or rootstock. You get the disease resistance from the roots, plus the good fruiting characteristics of the top half of the plant. Grafted plants are becoming available in the larger garden centres and nurseries but are considerably more expensive.

You can also try grafting your own tomato plants - we included a grafting session in Sunday's Secret Garden Club and guests were surprised by how uncomplicated an operation it is. See here for a step by step guide to grafting tomatoes.

Peppers

Caldero peppers, a hot-but-not-too-hot variety.

Sweet peppers and hot peppers, or chillies, are varieties of the same species, Capsicum annuum. Like many other vegetables that we think of as Mediterranean, peppers came to Europe from the Americas.

The heat in chilli peppers derives from a substance called capsaicin (and related compounds), and the heat of a particular variety can be measured in Scoville units.

A sweet red pepper has a Scoville rating of 0.
A jalapeno, quite a mild chilli, is between 2,500 and 5,000.
Habaneros, some of the hottest peppers, are around 300,000 Scoville Heat Units.
Recently, there has been much interest in developing the ‘hottest’ chilli, and giving it a suitably macho name. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the hottest chilli in 2011 was the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper, at nearly 1.5m SHU.

Peppers used in Mediterranean dishes are either sweet or mild to moderately hot. As well as flavour, and colour, there’s another good reason to grow your own peppers: they are easy to grow.

Indeed, if you have somewhere light and consistently warm indoors – under a kitchen skylight for example – you can bring them in at the end of summer and grow them as perennials. Chilli plants seem to do better over-winter than sweet peppers.

However, when you start off sowing pepper seeds, there are some things to consider.

Do shop around: check the catalogues and online. There are 100s of sweet and chilli varieties available.
The seeds will need to be sown early in the year, in January or February.
They will also need heat. If you have a heated propagator, that’s ideal. If not, then identify a sunny warm windowsill where the heat will be fairly consistent.You can start your peppers off in seed modules to save space, or in 3-inch pots, which will save you one potting-on stage later on.
Fill the module or pot with seed compost, soak it well and let the water drain.
Sow two seeds per module on top of the compost, then sprinkle with dry compost so that the seeds are only just covered.
Cover the pots – with the clear propagator lid or a polythene bag attached firmly to the pot with an elastic band.
Then leave them be. They should germinate after 10-14 days, after which you can remove the covering and the bottom heat if you used a propagator.

If you started them in modules, they will probably outgrow them in about a month and will need to be transferred to a small pot. Don’t pot on until they have four true leaves.

They will also probably be looking a bit straggly and long-stemmed from being raised indoors. This is OK: when you put them in a pot, bury the stems in deep to make them sturdy. The potting-on stage is also the time to discard the weaker seedling of the two sown together.

If you’re growing more than one variety, be meticulous about labelling them. All peppers, sweet or hot, look exactly the same at this stage.

Your peppers will need to stay inside until the risk of frost is over. Even here in London, I’d be cautious and say that’s the end of April. Once the days are warm – and especially when the nights are no longer truly cold, generally in around mid-May – the peppers can be transferred to their final pots and moved outside. Or you can grow them in the open ground. Either way, you need to find somewhere sunny, and not too windy and they should do well.

They will need to be hardened off before going outside permanently. Hardening off just means getting the plant accustomed to being outdoors gradually, over a period of a week or so. Indoors there’s no wind, and much more gradual fluctuations of temperature, so for a plant, going outdoors all at once will put it in a state of shock.

Most plants will recover but it will check their growth. Hardening off properly makes your plants much sturdier.

As the plants grow, they will probably need some support. They’re not climbers, but they will appreciate the main stem being tied to a stake, as many varieties will grow to about 60-75cm tall.

They will, of course, need watering and this is topic of some concern in the current drought. The good news is that they don’t need masses of water. Sweet peppers need more than hot peppers. Peppers grown in the open ground will need less water than those in pots.

Water them when they look thirsty – the leaves may start to look a little limp or lose their gloss.

Your peppers will self-pollinate. You should see the delicate white flowers in late May and into June and July. The flowers point down like an umbrella and as the blooms fade, you’ll see the green fruit beginning to swell behind them.

You can start picking and using peppers when they are green. However, with sweet peppers you won’t get the full flavour or the benefit of the rainbow colours. Where possible I think you should let the fruits mature.
Green chilli peppers won’t be as hot as the ripe versions, whatever the variety. Chillies also develop heat as the summer wears on, so that an early red chilli picked in August will be milder than one from the same bush picked in October.

Harvest your peppers before the first frost – which could be as early as October, so keep an eye on weather forecasts. If you’re overwintering your plants, bring them indoors in October as the nights get colder.

The one other thing to do with your peppers to keep checking them for pests. They are not prone to pests and disorders and thankfully don’t seem too attractive to slugs. If they are in a greenhouse, there are the usual greenhouse pests to look out for: red spider mite and whitefly. Look for a sticky residue on the leaves, or a fine white webbing between the leaves and stems.

Outdoors, pepper plants do seem to be something of an aphid magnet. These look like tiny green discs on the underside of leaves and it’s worth checking regularly for them. Again, they leave a sticky sheen on leaves and stems; also look for tiny white flakes on the surrounding soil.

Now, my bespoke solution for aphids and red spider mite, etc, on mature plants (not seedlings) has always been to blast them with water from the jet nozzle on the garden hose. They either get blasted off the plant altogether, or they drown in the deluge. I’m not sure this method is allowable during a hosepipe ban unfortunately.

The classic anti-aphid treatment is to spray with mild soapy water, and I stress mild. Neat washing-up liquid is more likely to kill the plant off.

In either case, make sure the plant is clean before bringing it into the house for winter. I’ve had many aphid outbreaks after bringing pepper plants into the cosy warmth of the house.

Aubergines

The white aubergine variety Tango is firm-fleshed and sweet.

Aubergines are a little trickier in the British climate. While I’m happy to grow peppers outside, I prefer to keep aubergines under cover. Even in high summer, I’ll have them in a soft plastic greenhouse with the door open.

And this makes them prey to greenhouse pests, especially aphids. I do quite a lot of spraying and wiping with the aubergines.

Sowing and raising them is very similar to peppers. Start them off in February in the warm, sowing two seeds to a pot or seed module and keep moist without soaking them.

Once they have true leaves they can move to a pot from the seed module, but keep them indoors until after all danger of frost has passed, and harden them off before planting out in big pots, in a grow bag, or if your garden is very sheltered, a sunny patch of open ground. Aubergine plants like reasonably high humidity, so the plants can be sprayed with a mister regularly to keep moisture levels up.

This is another plant that likes to be well watered when the fruits are forming in July and August. I also feed them at the same time as feeding the tomatoes. Here, being forced to use a watering can could be a good thing. Aubergines are so leafy that a lot of water just runs off the leaves on to the ground if sprayed with a hose.

The fruits should be ready to harvest in September and October. Make sure you’ve picked them all before the first frost, which will kill off the plant.

Courgettes

Courgette Romanesco ripening in the sun.

It seems perverse to talk about courgettes as a Mediterranean vegetable and not pumpkins and squash, but while there are lots of recognisably Med things to do with courgettes, pumpkins seem to belong to a more northern European and American tradition.

Courgettes, however, go in ratatouille, or are simply stewed with tomatoes, or best of all, the flowers are stuffed and then deep-fried, which always seems to me to be a very luxurious dish even though it’s almost a free by-product of the plant.

Courgettes are fast growers. You don’t need to think about sowing them until April, and since the plants and fruit won’t really grow until it’s properly warm you won’t gain much by sowing earlier. I have tried growing them early under a cloche, but the fruit was very small and had a tendency to shrivel before it matured.

Courgettes have big seeds and would outgrow a seed module very quickly, so start them off indoors in 3 inch pots.

Nearly all gardening books and experts say you must sow them on edge, or on their side, to reduce the chance of the seeds rotting. I’ve never had any problems with germination or rotting, despite being lazy and simply laying the seeds on the soil. However, in the interest of accuracy what it means is pushing the seeds into the soil vertically, pointed end first.

Sow two seeds to a pot, and remove the weaker seedling once they’ve germinated and produced true leaves. Incidentally, whenever you remove the weaker seedling, don’t yank it out. You may damage the root structure of the other, stronger seedling. I snip out the seedling to be thinned, at soil level, with a pair of manicure scissors.

Courgettes – and squash – are greedy plants. They like lots and lots of feeding. Many books suggest growing them on the compost heap with good reason. If the top of your compost heap looks at all plantable (rather than being a pile of eggshells, avocado skins and teabags), this is an excellent space-saving idea. Transfer them to the compost heap, or open ground, once any danger of frost is over and the nights are no longer cold. You might want to give the plants a little slug protection: put a copper collar round the plants or scatter a few slug pellets.

You can pick the male flowers to stuff and eat. Pick the fruits when they’re small. Leaving them to grow into marrows will stop the plant producing any other courgettes, so only let them grow on into marrows if you really want marrows.

At the height of summer you’ll find you have a glut of courgettes. Don’t despair: grated courgettes can ‘disappear’ into casseroles, spaghetti bolognaise, soups, and they also make lovely fritters. There is a recipe for a chocolate cake here on my Gourmet Gardening blog which incorporates two grated courgettes - the same principle as the carrots in carrot cake.

Herbs

Many Mediterranean dishes are unthinkable without the accompanying herbs to flavour them. Basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano and bay are all herbs we associate with the warmth and sunshine of the Med.

Herbs are probably the easiest of plants to raise, especially if you don’t have much space. They will do well in pots or even a window box on the balcony.

Rosemary, thyme and oregano are similar in that in the wild they flourish in poor, even stony, soil. So don’t treat them too kindly. They will survive cold, but not prolonged wet.
Basil, on the other hand is much leafier, and likes a rich, moist soil. I prefer to grow basil indoors where it can be cossetted and produce lush emerald green leaves.
There's more on Mediterranean herbs and herbs in general elsewhere on the Secret Garden blog.

Garden Tool Set

Monday, August 10, 2015

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Take up smoking - again!

Beat the hosepipe ban

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, and courgettes - the best of Mediterranean vegetables