Garden Tool Set: borlotti beans

Showing posts with label borlotti beans. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2015

The Three Sisters and other companion planting ideas

At the Secret Garden Club last Sunday we looked at different types of companion planting – putting plants together that will help each other in some way - and how these can benefit your garden.

You can grow certain plants in close proximity to each other for various reasons:

Some plants will ward off pests, either by their smell, or secretions from their roots, or simply because they have sharp thorns. You can grow these plants close to those that are vulnerable from such pests in order to give them protection.
Conversely you might use plants that are particularly susceptible to a pest as a 'decoy', to draw them away from another more valuable or delicate plant.
Some plants will attract beneficial insects, such as lacewings, hoverflies or ladybirds, to the garden. Place these close to plants which need pollinators to set fruit.
Some plants, notably legumes (peas and beans), will enrich the soil for other plants.
Tall sturdy plants can be used to provide support for other plants, such as climbers.
Trailing plants might act as ground cover, suppressing weeds and acting as a mulch, reducing water evaporation from the soil surface.

We discussed in some detail one very traditional companion planting method from the Americas, widely known as the Three Sisters and practised across North America from the midwest plains to Mexico from pre-Columbian times.

The Three Sisters themselves are the staple ingredients of the traditional Native American diet: corn, beans and squash. In America, the three are sown together and provide sustenance and support for each other.

The corn provides a strong upright stake for the beans to climb up, winding their stems around the main trunk of the sweetcorn. These bean plants also act as 'guy ropes' for the corn, keeping it stable in the wind.The squash plants are trained to trail around the foot of each corn/bean combo, their broad leaves shading the soil, keeping it moist and suppressing the weeds.

A further benefit of the Three Sisters scheme is the ability of the beans to nourish the soil. Peas and beans are all able to fix nitrogen from the air through their roots in the soil. As nitrogen is one of the main nutrients required by plants, especially leafy plants, this means that the soil is left enriched after the Three Sisters crops have been harvested, ready for the next year's planting. It's a highly sustainable planting scheme.

Three London Sisters

The UK climate is not the same as the American plains or the semi-tropical climate of Mexico. It’s more unpredictable, and so the Three Sisters method has to be adapted. We can’t sow each seed at the same time, as the beans will grow much faster than the corn and will overwhelm it.

So we need to start when the corn is already about 4-6 inches high.

Sweetcorn is very easy to grow from seed, or you can readily buy seedlings from garden centres. Beware sweetcorn sold with a number of plants in each pot. They dislike having their roots disturbed too much and if you are having to tease seedlings apart to separate them when you transplant them you are liable to damage the roots. Better to buy those which have a single plant in a plastic or polystyrene module, or to grow your own from seed in coir pots, one seed per pot. With coir pots, you don't have to turn the seedling out when you transplant it, you just dig a hole the same size and shape as the coir pot, drop the pot in, and firm the soil around it. No root disturbance at all.

The best beans to use for Three British Sisters are ones which you leave to dry on the plant, not runners or French beans which need regular picking. These should be sown when you plant the corn seedlings, when the soil has warmed up and all danger of frost has passed. We used the climbing borlotti beans Borlotto Lamon from Seeds of Italy at the Secret Garden Club - borlotti beans are easy to grow in the UK and are flamboyantly beautiful: bright crimson seed pods flecked with cream, which you shell to reveal creamy-pink beans flecked with crimson. With a dense floury texture and good flavour, they're a delicious and versatile bean in the kitchen too.

For the squash Sister, any squash with a trailing habit will work well. So don't use a courgette, which grows as a bush. Butternuts, spaghetti squash, Crown Prince, or a Halloween pumpkin - all these will do very well. We planted specimens of all these at the Secret Garden Club, plus a Japanese variety, Futsu Black (from The Organic Gardening Catalogue) and a sweet, dense-fleshed Italian variety, Marina di Chioggia (Seeds of Italy, again).

Squash seedlings after planting

Start squash off in small pots, either indoors or in a greenhouse. Sow two seeds to a pot and keep the pots covered until they germinate, which should only take 5-7 days. Snip out the weaker seedling before transplanting.

Once the squash plants start to spread, try to train them in a circle around the foot of the corn/bean plants. I say 'try' because squash seem to have a wanderlust and will grow three feet in the wrong direction as soon as your back is turned. Many times I have returned from two weeks holiday in August to find that the squash have run rampant in my absence.

Planting out

The Native Americans built up mounds in the soil about 45cm across and 10cm high and planted the Three Sisters in the mounds. Creating similarly-sized square or circular mounds using a mix of manure, kitchen compost and commercial compost makes sense in the UK too: all three of the Sisters are hungry plants and need lots of nutrients to get going. Giving them a specially enriched mound should get them off to a good start.

In dry areas, the Americans would traditionally make a shallow depression in the centre of each mound to hold water. We could do well to copy this in our drought-ridden, hosepipe-banned times.

The minimum viable size for a Three Sisters plot is 3.5m x 3.5m. It's a considerable space commitment, but remember you are growing three crops in the area. Less than this and the corn may not pollinate properly. Corn is wind-pollinated, which is why you should always plant corn in blocks - plant in a row and the wind may not blow in the right direction to ensure pollination.

Plant corn in blocks to help
ensure pollination

Each circle above represents one 45cm diameter mound. The corn and bean plants will grow together on a mound; alternate mounds are left to squash which will need more space.
In the mounds shown here as yellow circles, plant four corn seedlings in a square shape. There should be at least 15cm between the plants. Then, plant four bean seeds, one between each corn seedling - you should be able to simply push the bean seed into the ground with your thumb or forefinger. Close the soil above it and firm the surface.
In the mounds shown here as orange circles, plant two squash, as far apart as possible on the mound.
Water all the seedlings well.

The beans should germinate within two weeks, by which time the corn should be about 30cm high. As the beans grow, they may need to be tied in initially to encourage them to grow up and around the corn. The squash plants may take a while to get going, but will grow rapidly when they do. They will need training to keep them to the Three Sisters growing area.
When squash fruit begin to form, place a clean tile underneath the fruit for them to rest on to protect it from the dirt and creepy-crawlies. Once a single plant has produced three fruit, stop the growing tip - this will help the plant concentrate on growing really good-sized fruit.

Depending on the variety, the sweetcorn should be ready to harvest from late August or September. Borlotti beans and squash can be left to mature on the plant. Make sure you lift them before the first frost.

The harvested squash should be taken indoors and leave to finish ripening in dry warmth and light. During this process they may well change colour from green to orange or yellow. Stored properly, they can be stored for 4-8 months.

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 in winter. As summer wears on into autumn, the pods will change from bright pink flecked with cream, to a brown papery husk. Pick the pods as late as possible, but before the first frost, usually in the middle of October.

Thread the pods together and hang them up somewhere airy until all the pods are completely dried out, about 2-3 weeks. Then shell the beans. They should be dry already and rattle when shaken together and clatter when dropped on the work surface. If they land with a soft thud instead, they need more drying.

Finally, put the shelled beans in a freezer bag and seal. Place in the freezer for about 48 hours. This quick freeze just ensures that if the beans were harbouring any bugs, mites or insect eggs, that 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.

More on nitrogen fixing

Because legumes (peas and beans) fix nitrogen from the air through their roots, they nourish the soil. This means that the soil maintains its own fertility without you having to add large amounts of fertiliser.

However, they fix nitrogen for the next crop. So if you are planning to plant your legumes with a view to feeding the soil for another crop, choose something that will carry on growing after the peas or beans have finished.

It’s also good to follow peas with something that likes nitrogen, some thing leafy, eg, brassicas, squash.

At the Secret Garden Club, we've planted cavolo nero, or black kale (or Tuscan kale) in the middle of the sugar pea wigwams. Cavolo nero is a slim-leaved version of kale, more tender than curly kale and very flavoursome. (It also makes great 'seaweed', of the type you get in Chinese restaurants!)

Once the peas have died down in July-August, we’ll leave the plants in the ground to fix nitrogen through their roots for the benefit of the cavolo nero which will carry on growing throughout the winter.

At Sunday's workshop, guests created a smaller version of this wigwam with cavolo nero seedlings and young runner bean plants. These were planted up into 15cm pots which can be transferred into the open ground in a couple of weeks or so when the beans get too big for the pot.

Insect repellents
Carrots and onions make excellent companions in the vegetable bed. Many gardeners find that they need to protect the carrot crop from carrot fly, a dull-looking brown fly which flies low to the ground and can detect the smell of carrots from half a mile away. The female will lay her eggs in the soil close to the carrot roots, and when the larvae hatch, they start to feed on the growing carrots in the ground. When you dig up the crop, you'll find tell-tale brown streaks and tunnels boring into the carrot itself.

Grow garlic or onions around the
edge of beds to repel aphids.

However, you can protect your carrots to a certain extent by sowing them in-between alliums (garlic and onions, mainly, although you could try leeks as well for a late-growing carrot crop - leeks don't really get going until late summer). The smell of the onions is said to mask the scent of the carrots, so that the fly doesn't realise the carrots are there.
In return, the carrots are said to mask the allium scent for the onion fly, which preys on onions and also garlic and shallots.
Garlic and onions are good for repelling many different insects, including aphids. The sulphur accumulated in their roots may also act as a natural pesticide. Some people plant alliums all around the edge of their plot or patch for this reason. Of course, you need to be sure that you don’t have any of these pests inside the plot already or else you will trap them in instead of keeping them out.

Specifically, however, garlic and onions can be sown around roses or in the rose bed to help deter greenfly and blackfly. Chives are also excellent for this: their low bushy habit and mauve pom-pom flower look attractive among the roses.

Garlic can also be used directly on plants to deter aphids. Jekka McVicar of Jekka's Herb Farm recommends crushing 3-4 cloves of garlic and bringing to the boil in a litre of water. Let the garlic cool in the water and strain. This spray can be used on the leaves of the plant. I find it works best as a preventative rather than a cure.

The magic of marigolds

Marigolds are well-known for their insect repelling properties. They are especially associated with brassicas: plant marigolds around your cabbage and cauliflowers to ward off the whitefly. Furthermore, the roots exude a substance which are toxic to nematodes, including those which attack tomatoes. So plant marigolds around the tomatoes as well.

It can be confusing to buy marigolds and to know which is which. French marigolds are actually Mexican. African marigolds are also American in origin. Pot marigolds are a different thing again.

This is where the Latin or botanical names come in handy. Tagetes is the name to look for. French marigolds are usually varieties of Tagetes patula. African marigolds are usually varieties of Tagetes erecta – and often used as food colouring.

The botanical name for pot marigold is Calendula. Extracts from Calendula are used a lot in cosmetics, and also useful for repelling insects but they don’t have the same root secretions.

Insect attractants

Having talked at length about insect-repelling plants, we also looked at growing plants for their insect-attracting qualities. Not all insects are pests - far from it. Some, such as ladybirds, hoverflies and lacewings are known as beneficial insects.
We think of bees as being the main pollinators of plants, but hoverflies also feed on nectar and are excellent pollinators. Plants which need a pollinator, such as squash and courgettes, and fruit trees will benefit.
Hoverflies are doubly welcome in the garden because their larvae will chomp their way through massive numbers of aphids. Ladybird and lacewing larvae are also enthusiastic consumers of aphids - a very good reason to attract them to the garden.

Plants such as achillea (yarrow), as well as borage, the poached egg plant and comfrey are good examples of plants which will attract beneficial insects, while lavender and roses are well-known for buzzing with bees during the summer.

The beauty of companion planting

Companion planting will help your garden to look attractive. It encourages you to consider a greater variety of planting, which is always good for biodiversity, and different layouts and arrangements of plants within the plot.

It helps your garden to sustain itself – with well-selected companion plants, your garden should be humming with life, not sterile and formal.

Adopting companion planting methods should mean you can greatly reduce or eliminate any use of pesticides. It should help you to raise better crops and improve the sustainability of your soil. At the Secret Garden Club, we're aiming to create a harmonious combination of edible and ornamental plants and companion planting has found its way into the heart of that plan.

Useful links
For more about companion plants and specific plants which work well together, there is plenty of information on the following sites:
Golden Harvest Organics - plant lists and benefits of growing together.
Victoriana Nursery Gardens - the Three Sisters - growing the Three Sisters in the UK climate. We followed many of the suggestions here for the Secret Garden Club's Three Sisters plot.
Renee's Garden - US site with the story behind the Three Sisters tradition, plus Three Sisters planting diagrams.
National Vegetable Society - Good overview of companion planting principles plus plant lists.
Laura's Organics - page on attracting beneficial insects to the garden.

Happy guests at the Secret Garden Club

To find out about the Native Indian inspired food that MsMarmite served go here.

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.

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

Spaghetti squash, ready to be picked.

We raised our squash this year following the 'Three Sisters' planting methods of the Native Americans. There's more detail about the Three Sisters here, but the general idea is that sweetcorn, squash and climbing beans are grown together, the beans providing anchorage for the corn, which provides the beans with a climbing frame. The squash ramble at ground level, providing cover which suppresses weeds and keeps the soil moist underneath.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We planted our first blueberry plants in the Secret Garden just a week ago in anticipation of harvesting our first fruits next July. We have four 'Goldtraube' blueberry plants, which have a reputation for being heavy croppers and highly flavoursome.

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.

With the harvesting season well underway, we're choosing which of our produce to eat immediately and which to put by for winter-time when the garden is less productive. We can freeze our vine leaves, dry the chillies, pickle the garlic, steep the pears in alcohol, and dry the beans.

Our favourite beans for growing are the beautful magenta and cream borlotti beans. Beans can take up a lot of space, even when trained up a trellis, or wrapped around a sweetcorn plant in a traditional Three Sisters planting scheme. They're easy to grow and look so colourful and lovely in the garden. Then, when they're ready to harvest in August and September, the fresh beans are delicious to eat newly podded and simply cooked.

Even better, though, is keeping the bulk of the crop back to supply beany sustenance throughout the winter. Drying your own beans is a simple process and doesn't take long.

Fresh borlotti beans, left, with their stunningly rich crimson pods, which dry to a
dusky purple colour, right, when left on the plants into the autumn.

Leave the bean pods on the plants for as long as possible. They must be picked before the first frost, but if you can leave them until October, you'll see the bright crimson pods fade to a deep flecked purple and then almost to black. The pods will be hard and dry to the touch. Cut them off the plants, then thread the pods together and hang them up somewhere airy until all the pods are dried out. Or you can spread them out in a net and hang that somewhere. Either way, leave them be for about 2-3 weeks to ensure that the beans inside are truly dry and ready to store.

When you come to shell the beans, they should be rattling inside the pods and will fall on to the worktop with a clatter. If they land with a soft thud instead, they need to dry for a little longer.

Keep in a dark cool place and they will last for months.

Garden Tool Set

Monday, August 10, 2015

The Three Sisters and other companion planting ideas

The Italian kitchen garden

Harvest - the highs (and lows) of the season

Drying beans for winter