Showing posts with label blueberries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blueberries. Show all posts
Monday, August 10, 2015
Harvest - the highs (and lows) of the season
This wasn't the easiest year to create a kitchen garden: a warm spell in March brought many plants to life, only to be soaked by the wettest April on record, followed by a equally rainy June and with temperatures below normal. In the Secret Garden, we struggled with globe artichokes, which we hope will finally produce some fruit next year, and our heritage potatoes, although tasty, were very low yielding. We raised some good sweet peppers, but the jalapeno plants never really got going; our tomatoes succumbed to blight.
Even in the worst of years, you can count some successes. Elsewhere on this blog we have already documented how happy we were with a bumper crop of Mexican tomatillos, and on Sunday, our Secret Garden Club session concentrated on harvesting those crops which have come good in this mellow autumn.
Pumpkins and squash
Even in the worst of years, you can count some successes. Elsewhere on this blog we have already documented how happy we were with a bumper crop of Mexican tomatillos, and on Sunday, our Secret Garden Club session concentrated on harvesting those crops which have come good in this mellow autumn.
Pumpkins and squash
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| Spaghetti squash, ready to be picked. |
The squash plants didn't give us a glut, but we harvested good-sized spaghetti squash, Connecticut Old Field, the Italian Berrettina Piacentina with its dense orange flesh and chestnutty flavour, and Futsu, a compact Japanese variety. The courgettes were planted elsewhere in the garden and gave us a steady of not particularly prolific supply (it's not often you can say that: usually one courgette plant is not enough, and any more than one is a glut).
Courgettes and squash seeds should be sown indoors in pots: two seeds to a pot and then the weaker seedling thinned out once they’ve germinated. Once they have true leaves, they’re ready to be moved outside to be hardened off, ie, the plants are allowed to become gradually accustomed to the colder, windier air outside. Then they can be transplanted to the open ground. They like a rich soil so if you have manure or, better still, fully composted kitchen waste, dig that in before you plant out the squash. They do have a tendency to ramble all over the garden – if you don’t have the space for this, you can train them up a fence or trellis. The stems of pumpkins and squash are remarkably strong and will bear even very large fruits without them falling.
If you have a particularly rampant squash plant, nip out the growing tip after it has produced 3-4 fruits, then it can concentrate on growing these fruits to a decent size, instead of lots of little ones at the stem which probably won’t make it to maturity in our - comparatively - short season. Rest fruits on a tile to prevent damage by damp, slugs, woodlice, etc. Courgettes should be picked regularly, otherwise they will grow into giant marrows and the plant will stop growing more courgettes while it’s putting all its energies into the marrow.
Squash should be lifted before the first frost. You can tell they are ready by tapping near the stalk – you should hear a hollow sound. Try to keep a long stalk attached to the plant when you pick them and store somewhere warm, dry and light to finish ripening before you eat them. If you eat them immediately after picking, they will taste very green and raw, particularly the orange-fleshed varieties. The flavour won’t sweeten and deepen until they have ‘cured’ for 6-8 weeks. Check them regularly as some store better than others – I have kept squash for up to eight months before eating them.
Borlotti and other beans
We sowed climbing borlotti beans in May as part of our Three Sisters plan, and harvested a small but tasty crop last month. Most of the plants managed to entwine themselves around the corn stems satisfactorily, although several made for the fig tree and climbed up that instead.Borlotti beans do well here in London, the bean pods are spectacularly beautiful, as are the beans themselves. The fresh bean pods are bright crimson, housing creamy beans splashed with purple. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick borlotti bean pods to cook and eat fresh. They’re delicious, especially served with a squeeze of lemon, some salt and a drizzle of olive oil.
But leave at least some on the plants to keep for use later in the year. As summer wears on into autumn, the pods will change from bright pink flecked with cream, to a dark purple papery husk.
Pick the pods once they’ve turned dark and dry, but before the first frost, usually sometime in October. Thread the pods together and hang them up somewhere airy until all the pods are dried out. Then shell the beans. They should be dry already and clatter when dropped on the work surface. If they land with a soft thud instead, they need more drying.
Finally, freeze the shelled beans in a bag for about 48 hours - this quick freeze just ensures that if the beans were harbouring any bugs, mites or insect eggs, they are killed off.
Beans, whether you grow them for green beans or to dry the mature beans for use in the winter, are a fast crop. They don’t like the cold and should be sown when the soil warms up in April or even May. They will catch up very quickly.Pick the pods once they’ve turned dark and dry, but before the first frost, usually sometime in October. Thread the pods together and hang them up somewhere airy until all the pods are dried out. Then shell the beans. They should be dry already and clatter when dropped on the work surface. If they land with a soft thud instead, they need more drying.
Finally, freeze the shelled beans in a bag for about 48 hours - this quick freeze just ensures that if the beans were harbouring any bugs, mites or insect eggs, they are killed off.
Once out of the freezer, spread the beans out briefly on kitchen paper just to check they’re dry again, then pour into a jar with a tightly fitting lid.
Keep in a dark cool place and they will last for months – until your next bean harvest, in fact, if you haven’t eaten them all by then.
You can buy seeds for dwarf bushy plants or climbing plants. While the bushy plants are less work – you can reach all the beans easily when harvesting and you don’t have to build a frame for them to climb up – the climbing plants are better croppers. You’ll get much better yields and beans over a longer period of time from a climbing plant.
Like squash, beans like to be fed well. Before planting, choose the spot where you want to grow your beans and mix lots of kitchen compost into the ground. If you don’t have kitchen compost, use commercial compost and feed such as seaweed extract.
Figs
Figs are surprisingly easy to grow here in the south of England. In fact, trees can become very vigorous, but you will see many spreading leafy trees with very little fruit on them.
The trick to making your fig tree bear fruit is to restrict its roots. Find a sunny sheltered site for your newly-bought fig tree, and plant it in a pot sunk into the ground, or line the planting hole with stones, so that the roots are contained and you get a bushier tree with more fruit. Our summer season isn’t really long enough for a full crop of figs. When the frosts come, remove any immature fruit left on the tree. It is the very tiny pea-sized fruit which will develop into mature fruit the next year.
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| Brown turkey figs harvested in London. |
Once your fig tree grows multiple branches, you can prune it in spring, removing any old, dead, crossing branches so that the tree is nice and open.
Cavolo nero
This is also called Tuscan kale, or Black kale, and has become very fashionable in recent years. By fashionable, I mean that not only will you find it on the menu in Clerkenwell restaurants, but also that you can buy it in Waitrose for about £3.99 for a few stems.
This implies that 'cavolo nero' is surely imported specially from Italy, where it is best grown, but in fact cavolo nero is simply a form of kale (a member of the brassica family), and grows extremely well right here as you can see. It’s also highly decorative, with these distinctive indigo leaves, and so the plant looks good in a mixed border.
Cavolo nero is best started off as seed in modules in April or May and left to germinate indoors or in a greenhouse. Once the seedlings develop their true leaves they can be hardened off – like the pumpkins and squash they need get used gradually to being outdoors after being indoors. The cold nights, winds, rain, and strong sun will all be terrible shock to the system of a seedling that has been in a warm settled, windless spot all its life.
When you transplant cavolo nero, space the seedlings about eight inches to a foot apart. They will need protection against slugs and snails – in the Secret Garden Club we use home-made copper rings, made with copper tape and sections cut from plastic water bottles. This is extremely effective – slugs and snails won’t cross copper. And it’s better than using pellets.
Brassicas are also vulnerable to whitefly – you’ll see clouds of them like tiny snowflakes whenever you disturb the plant. They’re not terribly damaging, but it’s not nice when you get your leaves home and you’re rinsing them off at the sink. We’ve had good results this year with planting marigolds around the cavolo nero plants – the marigolds exude a chemical which repels whitefly and it’s worked very well.
Apart from this, birds, especially pigeons, like the leaves. Consider throwing a net over the cavolo nero if they’re a problem. Garden plants shouldn’t be so affected since there’s usually a relatively high cat population keeping birds off the veg, but on an allotment site you may have to net your brassicas.
Once you’ve protected against whitefly, slugs and birds, your cavolo nero should grow very happily. It will need watering in a drought and when the seedlings are turning into full-grown plants, but from seeds sown in April, you should be eating cavolo nero from August, throughout winter and into February-March the next year. Worth a little bit of care and attention.
Blueberries
Blueberries need an acid soil (lower than pH5.5) and our London clay on its own isn't nearly acid enough. So each plant occupies its own 30cm pot, and each pot is sunk into the soil so that the tops are at ground level. Sinking the pots reduces water loss, which is helpful since blueberries like plenty of water. A yearly topping up of ericaceous (acidic) compost keeps them fed, and I also like to spread the shredded needles from the Christmas tree around the foot of the plants as a slightly acidic, weed-suppressing mulch in January.
Jerusalem artichokes
I always think Jerusalem artichokes are great plants for anyone growing vegetables for the first time, so long as they like Jerusalem artichokes, anyway. If you do like them, and you’re not too bothered by the after-effects – not for nothing are they known as 'fartichokes' in our house - then they’re a rewarding crop to grow.
For a start, they’re indestructible. Not noticeably bothered by pests. They’re reliable: dig up the plant and there, underneath, will be the artichokes. They also pass the shop test: they’re not widely available in supermarkets and they’re stupidly expensive when they are. They are bountiful: a dozen tubers planted in March-April will begin producing artichokes to feed you in November/December all the way through the winter and into the early spring.
Finally, they’re economical: you only need to buy artichoke tubers once. The following year, select 8-12 nice plump tubers from the current crop and plant these in March-April to provide the next year’s crop.
The only care notes I can really think of are 1) when the seedlings emerge you might want to look out for slugs and snails. As soon as they produce their true leaves which are tougher, the slugs lose interest, but at the very beginning the growth might be slow if your plot is very sluggy. And 2) round about August-September, the plants will grow very tall and may even flower – and when they do you’ll see that they are related to sunflowers. However, if they’re flowering, they’re expending energy on producing flowers rather than fat tubers, so it’s a good idea to cut the plant down as we have here, otherwise high winds can blow them over and anyway you don’t want them putting on top growth any more.
And if you do like them, they’re very versatile in the kitchen. They make a lovely creamy soup; I always make a Jerusalem artichoke gratin as part of Christmas lunch; you can roast them under the Sunday joint like roast potatoes and they also make tasty chips. You can whizz them up with aromatics to make a kind of Jerusalem artichoke houmus, you can use them to make JA pancakes – like a potato pancake – and I’ve also had them raw, shaved very finely in a salad.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Fruits for summer
However big or small your outside space, growing a fruit bush or two will, with care, repay you year after year with delicious produce, all for rather less fuss and pampering than the inhabitants of the vegetable patch.The simple joy of eating fruit straight from the tree (no scrubbing, or trimming of roots) never palls. Fruit also tends to be more popular with children (sugar snap peas excepted), so it’s easier to get them out and helping with the harvest.
The Secret Garden is situated on land which was an orchard before the houses were built, and is overlooked by very tall trees at the back of the gardens - pear trees, grown in the days before fruit trees were grafted and bred to grow smaller, making the fruit easier to reach. The pears that grow here are liable to go to waste unless they drop as windfalls – though we do get a lot of windfalls.
Types of fruit
You can broadly talk about two main kinds of fruit: tree fruit, such as apricots, cherries, and, later in the summer, peaches, plums, damsons, and greengage. Then, into autumn, we get apples, pears, and quinces.
Then there's cane and bush fruit, including berries: Strawberries, raspberries, black, red and whitecurrants, gooseberries, blackberries, blueberries. We're also going to include rhubarb here, even though it isn’t a fruit at all, since we eat it as though it were. In this post, we're concentrating on bush fruit, much of which is just beginning to ripen now.
Then there's cane and bush fruit, including berries: Strawberries, raspberries, black, red and whitecurrants, gooseberries, blackberries, blueberries. We're also going to include rhubarb here, even though it isn’t a fruit at all, since we eat it as though it were. In this post, we're concentrating on bush fruit, much of which is just beginning to ripen now.
Strawberries
Everyone should have a strawberry patch. They are easy to grow, they can be grown in a pot, and the strawberries your plants produce will be far superior to anything you buy in a supermarket. The ubiquitous Elsanta is stocked in shops because it will keep for a long time once picked, not for any reason to do with flavour or sweetness.
You should be able to buy other more delicious varieties – Gariguette, perhaps, or Cambridge Favourite - to plant in the ground. However, strawberries send out runners, which when planted up will readily root to create a new strawberry plant. Ask around your gardening neighbours or at a local allotment and you may well find someone only too pleased to offload some plants from runners. You may get them in a pot, or as bare roots. If the latter, keep the roots moist and plant up as soon as possible.
If you’re growing in the open ground, find a nice sunny patch, dig it over and mix in some organic matter, plus if you like, some bonemeal – strawberries like that. Water the strawberry pants thoroughly about half an hour before you plant them out.
Dig a hole, drop the plant in, disturbing the roots as little as possible, fill in and water well to settle them.
Your main challenge with strawberries is to stop other beasties from eating them before you do. Slugs, snails, woodlice, ants and birds all love strawberries.
Keep slugs and snails at bay. My usual solution – using copper rings around plants – won’t work here as strawberries are naturally trailing plants. I’ve had good results using slug-resistant matting under the strawberry plants. Slug-resistant usually means the fabric has been impregnated with copper, which slugs and snails dislike as the metal reacts with their mucus and gives them a sort of electric shock. When using the matting, I lay this over the bed after digging over, then cut slits or small circular holes in the fabric and plant the strawberries through this.
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| Strawberry plants growing through copperised fabric to deter slugs and snails. |
Woodlice and other creepy-crawlies will do much less damage if the ripening fruits are kept off the ground. This is one reason why planting strawberries in elevated troughs or bespoke planters – high-sided bins with openings up and down the sides to take the plants – is so popular. These also save space and will grow a decent crop of strawberries so long as you remember to keep the plants well-watered.
To ward off birds, you can try bird scarers – hanging CDs from a cane to produce a kind of flashing mobile effect is popular – but maybe the birds in my locality are particularly bold as this doesn’t seem to bother them, hardened urbanites as they are. The only reliable way I’ve found to keep them off is to net the crop as soon as the first fruits start to ripen. It’s bothersome, but better than having all your fruit eaten.
In a wet summer you may find some of your fruits develop grey-ish brown fur all over. This is a mould called botrytis, very common in strawberries and raspberries. Just eliminate affected fruits and leaves as soon as you can, and try to keep the plants tidy – removing brown and yellowing leaves promptly, not letting fruit trail in the dirt. Planting them spaced well apart helps too, since it means the air can circulate more efficiently around and between the plants.
You should move your strawberries and replenish the plants every 3-5 years or so. In the open ground, you can ‘walk’ them over to the next bed, by training the runners to settle in the new bed, fixing them with a peg to encourage them to root on that spot.
Alpine or wild strawberries
Less prolific than their bigger cousins, the tiny fruits from wild strawberries have an intense, honeyed flavour if you pick them when they're really ripe. Readily available from garden centres, these small plants, once established, will spread across semi-shaded parts of the garden, fruiting throughout the summer.
Alpine or wild strawberries
Less prolific than their bigger cousins, the tiny fruits from wild strawberries have an intense, honeyed flavour if you pick them when they're really ripe. Readily available from garden centres, these small plants, once established, will spread across semi-shaded parts of the garden, fruiting throughout the summer.
Blueberries
My other must-have soft fruit is blueberries. The plants are very attractive, with foliage that turns golden-red in autumn, and soft pinkish-white blossom in spring. They don’t need pruning, in fact they need very little special care apart from one vital requirement. Blueberries like acid soil; at least they hate lime. Here in London, the soil tends to be slightly acid, but it’s not acid enough for blueberries. So I always grow them in pots and fill the pots with ericaceous compost. This is compost formulated for lime-hating plants such as blueberries, cranberries, azaleas, rhododendrons, and others.
So, they’re good for a patio and good for where you only have pot space. Our Secret Garden blueberry plants are sunk into the ground – this is partly for aesthetic reasons and partly also because blueberries like to be kept very moist. They crop best in a wet summer and when growing anything in pots, it’s all too easy to let them dry out through evaporation. Sinking the pots helps keep them cool and moist as well. I find blueberries practically pest-free, apart from the birds wanting to eat them even before they ripen. I have lost an entire crop of blueberries to birds while they were still green before now. These days, I grit my teeth and throw a net over the lot before the birds realise they are even there.
Blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants
Currants are another fruit high on my list, if only because they are difficult to find in the shops. Apparently the reason you can’t find blackcurrants is because 95% of the UK crop goes to make Ribena, but that doesn’t explain the dearth of the red or white variety. And they grow very happily in our climate, giving you long strings of fruit in July. Better in the open ground, than a pot though.
Gooseberries
I find people either love or hate gooseberries. We love them at the Secret Garden Club and we’ll be planting gooseberry bushes later this year. The best time for planting is late autumn, in a sunny but not windy spot. We'll dig the ground over thoroughly beforehand, removing any weeds and roots, and we'll dig in some organic matter - manure, compost, leaf mould, before planting as well, to lighten up our clay soil.
There are two types of gooseberries: tart fruits which stay green when ripe and which really need to be cooked, and dessert gooseberries which ripen to a gorgeous maroon mahogany colour when ripe and are sweet. In practice, I find you can cook with these perfectly well too, so prefer to grow dessert gooseberries and get the best of both worlds.
They are fairly low maintenance: mulch around the base of the plants to keep them as weed-free as possible, and prune in the winter to tidy up the bushes and keep them open. They should reward you with fruit in June/July. Be careful when picking them because the bushes are very thorny. Needless to say the thorns don’t deter the birds and yes, it’s probably wise to net the bushes when the fruits start ripening. Gooseberry bushes tend to stay smallish and so rather than buying a specialist net and training it over a frame you may well get away with throwing an old net curtain over the plant.
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| Dessert gooseberries ripening under a protective net. |
Rhubarb
Another love it or hate it taste, and something of an interloper in this blogpost, since there is no way that the stalk of a large leafy perennial plant can be described as a fruit. But we mostly eat rhubarb as if it was a fruit. So we’ll include it as a guest.
Rhubarb is indestructible once you get it going. It’s one of the first of the new season veg to be ready – usually you can start cutting in April and you can make it come even earlier by forcing it. Forced rhubarb stems are a beautiful bright pink colour and more tender than the conventionally grown stalks that come later.
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| Forced rhubarb stems uncovered. |
We’ll be forcing our Secret Garden crop next year. Rhubarb dies down overwinter and you need to wait until you see the first signs of new growth coming in January. Then cover the tiny shoots with an upturned bucket to exclude all light from the plant. Make sure any holes in the bucket are plugged – cover with straw – and put a weight like a half-brick on top as well as pegging the lip of the bucket to the soil to ensure it doesn’t blow away in the wind.
The stems will take around 4-6 weeks to shoot up in the dark, although this year in the prolonged cold they took nearer to three months. Once you’ve cut the forced stems, uncover the plant and let it rest – don’t cut that particular plant over spring and summer.
One other bit of rhubarb maintenance needed is to cut out any flowering stems – you want the plant to put its energy into producing leaf stalks, not flowers.
And bear in mind that the leaves and flowers on a rhubarb plant are poisonous. Only eat the stems.
Raspberries
I love raspberries but I wouldn’t include them as a must-grow plant for a few reasons: 1) they are an open ground plant and need space, not suitable for growing in pots; 2) once established they can be invasive and shoots will pop up in neighbouring beds and pretty much anywhere you don’t want them; 3) following on from (2) if you ever want to move your raspberry bed to somewhere else, tough, and 4) they can be temperamental and fail to establish in what appears to be perfectly suitable ground.
Having said all that, happy, established raspberry canes in the right spot will reliably give you fantastic fruits year after year. All they really need in the way of maintenance is to have the old canes cut down after fruiting, the new canes tied in during spring, and a good mulch in February or March.
There are some interesting new varieties available from specialist nurseries as well, if you fancy it, Try golden orange fruits, such as the autumn-fruiting Allgold. If you want something more unusual, try some of the other less well-known berries like loganberries, or the sweeter tayberries, both of which are blackberry x raspberry hybrids.
Physalis (Cape gooseberries or Chinese lanterns)
Now these are a bit of a luxury since they take up space and need a nice long summer to ripen in enough numbers to make them worthwhile, but home-grown physalis are something of a revelation compared to the imported shop-bought fruits. Much tangier and fresher-tasting.
Physalis will germinate very readily from seed from March onwards on a warm windowsill. Once they'll about the size of the seedlings pictured here you can transplant into bigger pots and then into a nice sunny spot in the open ground once there's no danger of any more frosts.The fruit develops inside the lantern-shaped papery husks and should be ready for eating in September.
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