Berry Delights

Tags

tayberry 'Buckingham', tyaberries

Glistening, jewel-like tayberries

I really feel for those who have started to grow their own this year. It has been a real baptism of fire, if it would have been possible to have a fire with all that rain. For those of us who have been growing for a bit longer it has been difficult too but we’re a little more used to the vagaries of the weather and the fact that you ‘win some, you lose some’ when it comes to producing your own fruit and veg. I really hope any virgin gardeners out there don’t give up though because it really is so much fun . . . no, really it is. The weather isn’t always this bad and even if it is drought one minute and a deluge the next, there are plants you can grow which will cope.

Bush fruits are one of the easiest crops to grow and, if those on my plot are anything to go by, have loved the weather this year. I inherited some blackcurrants and a gooseberry when I took on the plot and then added a row of autumn fruiting raspberries. It’s quite addictive being able to pick your own super fresh berries. They can be really expensive to buy, partly because they have to be hand picked; they are also prone to fungal diseases and as a result are often covered in chemical residues. Once you’ve had the initial outlay for the plants they will last a good 10 -15 years and will save you so much money, producing enough berries to see you through the summer and fill your freezer with treats for the depths of winter. The other great advantage of having some bush fruits on your plot is the choice available is much greater than anything you’ll find on sale in the supermarkets. There are yellow fruiting raspberries and a whole range of hybrid berries.

Last year I planted a tayberry, a cross between a blackberry and a raspberry. It was, I have to admit, an impulse buy from a local garden centre. Punishment for my impetuousness is being spiked when I try to get my hands on the glistening, jewel-like fruits. If I’d done a bit more research I’d have bought the thorn free variety, ‘Buckingham’.

Tayberries are biennial croppers, producing canes one year and fruiting on them the following year.  This is the first year we’ve had a crop, well we had one tayberry last year, just one. We’d never tasted one before so I halved it to share with Wellyman. It was like a scene from the ‘Good Life’. It tasted good, looking like a darker version of a raspberry and with a definite flavour of blackberry. So, this year, when I saw lots of flowers appearing, I could feel the excitement growing for our first real harvest.

I’m happy to say the tayberry has been a great success. In such a wet year I would have expected possible fungal problems or rotting of the fruit but they’ve been fine. I have had to net them to keep off the blackbirds. One of their great advantages has been their steady cropping. Unlike the blackcurrants, which all ripened at once and led to frantic freezing sessions, the tayberries have been cropping steadily for nearly 2 months now.

Tayberry netted against those pesky birds

Once they have finished fruiting in the next week or so I need to prune out the fruiting canes and tie in the new canes it has produced this year which will then produce fruit next year. And, other than this pruning, a good spade full of manure in autumn around the base of the plant and a sprinkling of seaweed meal in spring is all they really require. The one difficulty, is how to train the old growth and new growth so that access to the fruit is easy and pruning out the right canes is possible. The text books show neatly arranged branches in a variety of forms. The reality is somewhat different with canes that can grow up to 12ft and that have a mind of their own.

If you have the space you could train it so the old canes are growing to the left and the new canes are trained to the right or vice versa. This could work against a long wall or fence. I didn’t have the space for this so in the next couple of weeks will be faced with an interesting wrestling match with this year’s wayward canes which at present are flopping about in front of the plant. Bearing in mind my clumsiness, 4 10ft long bendy canes, covered in vicious thorns, and not wanting to become one of those embarrassing A&E statistics, ‘injured by fruit bush’, I plan to wear Wellyman’s DIY goggles, gauntlets and scarf wrapped around my face, which will make for an interesting sight in August. Wellyman has said he wants me to do this on a day he works from home, not so he can help, but so he can record the scene, and yes, he is open to bribes for photographs of the attire! Of course, if only I hadn’t been so impulsive and had bought the thorn free version none of this would be such a problem.

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Flowery Friday

Tags

edible flowers, garlic chives, nasturtiums

Sweet peas at last

At last we’re having something that passes as summer. Temperatures into the eighties, unbroken blue skies and baking sunshine, for nearly a week now, have made an incredible difference on the plot. Plants that have been sulking have suddenly perked up and it looks like I might actually start to get a courgette crop. It’s not just the fruit and veg that are loving the weather, my flowers are blooming. It’s a little late for some plants such as my rudbeckia, which have never recovered from the incessant rain but, at last, I’m actually able to pick enough sweet peas to have some on my desk and some by the bed. It wouldn’t be summer without some sweet peas.

The cut flower beds seem to be going through a bit of a purple patch at the moment with the tall spires of larkspur, some sweet peas and my annual asters just starting to open. The larkspur are my first attempt and I’m so pleased with them. I’ve never managed to grow delphiniums, simply because they were just slug fodder but the larkspur were quite substantial plants when they went out and, despite plague-like proportions of the mollusc enemy this year, have remarkably remained untouched. They last ages once picked as well.

The asters are another newbie. They haven’t looked quite so good and got off to a very slow start and even now look quite weedy but they’ve started to flower and are looking much healthier in the sunshine, so fingers crossed they’ll keep going for a good while.

The real stars of the show at the moment are my scabious plants. A mix of white, pink, an almost black colour and my favourite of them all, this gorgeous plum colour.

Scabious

It’s not just flowers for the vase though. I love having some edible flowers in our salads and the first nasturtiums have opened in the last couple of days. With a beautiful, rich, velvety texture and a reddy-orange colour, they look and taste great scattered in with some salad leaves. Add in a few calendula petals, pink chive flowers and white garlic chive flowers and you’ve got some unusual, tasty and very pretty additions to the plate.

Edible flowers

So, despite the fact that I appear to be allergic to summer, with hay fever, a touch of sunburn, insect bites, rashes from contact with borage and now prickly heat, all my flowers are making me smile.

The Mind Boggles!

Tags

Alan Titchmarsh, Monty Don, The Anxious Gardener

A while ago now I read a very funny post, ‘Anxious Hog’, by David at The Anxious Gardener. He had been keeping a note of some of the strange and funny search terms that people had used and, by doing so, had ended up at his blog. The statistics page is a fascinating element of writing a blog. Something I had never given any thought to when I first started writing Wellywoman. It’s intriguing to see people from far flung parts of the globe such as Pakistan, Burma and Mongolia visiting my blog. I have no idea what has brought them here, does my name confuse, if not,  I’m sure my ramblings do!

After reading David’s post I noted down a few of the more unusual search terms that came up on my own blog but then I got distracted and a million and one other things got my attention instead. That is, until the other day. A quick glance at the search terms for Monday revealed someone had come to my site using the search words ‘alan titchmarsh crotch’. Well I have to say it did make me giggle. In fact, I’m smiling now. I happen to have mentioned Mr T’s name a few times in my posts and I did write about having a hole in the crotch of my jeans when talking about the scruffy attire I can be found in when gardening. However, I don’t think I want to know why someone was specifically searching for more info on the gardening guru’s groin.

Anyway, it was my lunch break and, rather than do something useful like sorting through a pile of paperwork, I started to go through all the search terms wordpress had stored for my blog. And what an intriguing world it opened up. When I was trying to come up with a name for my blog I really didn’t give any thought to those out there with a welly fetish. It never crossed my mind, why should it? Very early on the search term ‘I’m turned on by wellies’ appeared, much to my surprise and concern. I did worry that Wellywoman had been a bad choice and I was going to attract the wrong sort of attention. Fortunately, those worries haven’t materialised. It’s quite amusing to think though, that there are some seriously disappointed people  out there, who have no doubt thought my site will offer all sorts of titillation and instead it’s me writing about my seeds not germinating and marauding slugs. There seems a particular interest to see ‘women in muddy wellies’, note the ‘muddy’ element. Well, each to their own. There have also been various searches for a selection of female gardeners, who shall remain nameless, posing topless. The page 3 gardener or lads mag equivalent of Gardens Illustrated are concepts, as yet, untried. Clearly a disappointment for some.

I was particularly fascinated by the person who felt the need to search for ‘should postmen cut across peoples gardens instead of using paths’. My imagination suggests someone seething every morning when their mail is dropped off by their garden philistine of a postie. I’m not sure what they were looking for, some piece of legislation that they could threaten he, or she with, maybe.

There was the plaintive ‘why have I got so many slugs in my garden’. It conjures up a picture of someone at the end of their tether, feeling as if they must be being punished for something in a previous life to have been subjected to plague-like proportions of slugs. I just want to give this person a virtual hug and say it’s not just you.

In one post I wrote about leaf mould being like a duvet and in another a passing mention was made to Prince Charles, who’d have thought there would be someone out there who would then come through to my blog searching for ‘prince charles doesn’t like duvets’! Why, why why?

I’m not sure whether ‘wellies in bed’ and the cryptic ‘wifes wellies filling’ are touching on the unseemly again. I’m guessing so.

And finally, my misspent lunch-break uncovered a particular fascination with Monty Don’s attire. I did write a post entitled ‘Gardening Attire’ in which I mentioned Monty and his signature blue uniform which he wears whilst gardening. Well it seems, if my blog is anything to go by, that Monty clothes generate a lot of interest, with search terms including ‘monty don smock’, ‘monty don’s blue shirt’, ‘shirts worn by monty don’, ‘monty don clothing’ and ‘where does monty get his clothes’. Maybe Monty is missing a trick. His own clothing range for gardeners, perhaps?

So, I just want to say thanks to David at The Anxious Gardener for his initial post on the subject and for a diverting way to spend a lunchtime. If you don’t already follow his blog, take a look, for witticisms, garden and wildlife related musings and ace photos.

Gardening Tips

Tags

slugs, wellies

A vase of Viola cornuta rescued from the garden tidy up this weekend.

I can’t be the only untidy, slightly disorganised and clumsy gardener out there, can I? Here are just a few musings and tips you probably won’t read in a gardening book.

Occasionally, I end up at the plot with no receptacle in which to put the few raspberries I’ve spotted. I recommend not putting them in your coat pocket thinking they’ll be ok until you get home. Firstly, if you’re like me, you’ll forget and only realise once you’ve squished them or secondly, you’ll forget completely, only to discover them, several weeks later, as you produce your purse at the shop as a mouldy mess congealed in the bottom of your pocket.

I’ve discovered it’s not a good idea to put on your wellies on a hot day without any socks. The combination of hot rubber and sweaty feet creates a strange sticking action which makes it nearly impossible to remove them. Cue hopping about, straining and yanking until they finally come off with a squelching noise and the feeling that you’ve left behind a layer of skin.

Rose ‘Shropshire Lad’

Never pick up a slug with bare hands. Their slime has powers of stickiness, as yet, untapped by science. You’ll wash your hands and think they’re clean but, oh no, that goo has staying power.

Don’t forget to open your cold frame on a hot and sunny day when your shallots are drying inside it. I did, last summer, and the onion aroma that greeted me at the front door was the smell of my shallots, literally, cooking under the glass.

Standing on a rake doesn’t just happen in comic strips and silent movies. And yes, it does hurt. Particularly if you’re the same height as the rake and it smacks you right on the face.

Don’t call in at the allotment on the way back from somewhere, in smart clothes, thinking, ‘I’ll just pick something up for tea’. You won’t. There’ll be the weeds you spot that need pulling out, sweet peas that need tying in and before you know it you’re covered in mud and are those blackberry stains on your sleeve?

Heleniums bringing a touch of heat to the garden

The time you think you’ll spend on the plot, at any given time, is always a massive under-estimation of the time you’ll actually spend there. I either need to become more disciplined or adjust other commitments accordingly, so that people aren’t greeted by a slightly frazzled, dishevelled and soil encrusted individual shoving a basket of vegetables at them as I disappear off, desperate for the loo.

No matter how well I plan for a visit to the plot, with lists and post-it notes I will always forget to take something vital with me. With no shed for storage there, I increasingly look like a pack mule with my bucket for cut flowers, my trug for vegetables and a collection of containers for the harvest of various soft fruits. A bag with suncream, sun hat, raincoat, hat, scarf (delete depending on weather), tissues, my mobile, gardening gloves and the various tools such as trowel, snips, plant labels, pencil and twine that I don’t leave up there. Add in a camera for some quick shots and the liquid seaweed, possibly some fleece or netting. Well you get the picture.

Maybe it’s just me. I do hope not.

Getting on with the Job

My first apples, looking nearly ready

So far, this year, it has felt like I haven’t actually done much gardening. I must have done something, to be picking flowers and harvesting produce but most work has been snatched in between the torrential rain or with me huddled in my shed sowing seeds. There have been very few completely dry days and two rain-free days in a row have only existed in my imagination. But what’s this, the clouds have parted and a golden glowing orb that I believe is the sun is actually there, in the sky.

It appears, for now at least, that the jet stream, responsible for the worst summer in the UK since anyone bothered started to record these things, is on the move. With the first predictably dry weekend coming up it will no doubt mean a flurry of barbecue activity and the baring of inappropriate amounts of flesh, despite temperatures struggling into the low twenties. For me, it finally means the opportunity to get out and tackle all those jobs that have been building up. I’ve already managed to clip my yew cones in the front garden, that had started to look a bit too shaggy, with fresh, new growth, resembling octopus arms, reaching out into the garden. The box balls in the back garden need a similar trim.

The list of jobs feels a little overwhelming but at least I know I can spread them out over several days rather than frantically trying to get lots done in the short dry spells between the longer periods of rain that has been gardening so far this year.

Leeks and dibber

Yesterday, I finally got round to moving my leeks to their final growing positions. Fortunately, harvesting my Charlotte spuds has freed up some ground, so they’ve gone in there. It was my first opportunity to use the wooden dibber that was in my stocking last Christmas. Thank you Wellyman, it worked a treat!

There is some debate as to how to plant up leeks. The traditional way is to trim the roots and then trim the green shoots before placing in a deep hole. Some believe this method is used to make it easier to get the leeks and their roots into the hole and if you’ve cut the roots you need to reduce the stress on the leek by reducing the green growth, too. Others think that root pruning like this encourages the formation of more roots allowing the plants to search for more nutrients and become healthier plants. Last year was my first year growing leeks and I just plonked them in the holes with no trimming at all and I produced perfectly good leeks. The RHS doesn’t recommend any trimming and suggests that if you have problems getting the leeks’ roots into the hole then dipping them in water first can help. It does. Once the leeks are in the holes it’s important not to back-fill but to water in around them instead. The water will pull down some soil into the hole to hold the leek upright. This is how the long blanched stems are achieved without getting soil into the core of the leek.

A mixture of seedlings for autumn crops

There’s more seed sowing to do for crops to take us into the autumn and I need to pot up all the seedlings on my window sill. If your harvest has been disappointing so far this year due to the weather it’s not too late to give some crops a try. If we do get some good weather between now and November it’s still possible to resurrect something from the growing year. Dwarf French beans, cavolo nero, endive, carrots and lettuce will all produce well into September and beyond.

In August, I’m sowing some spring greens and various packets of salad leaves, such as orientals, that would bolt if sowed earlier in the year. Thanks to a great tip from Charles Dowding, that I picked up on his salad growing course, I’ll be sowing chervil and coriander in August. I always thought coriander needed warmth but then never managed to grow it as it always ran so quickly to seed. Apparently it, and chervil, much prefer this later sowing time. And, if you sow an early pea variety that can cope with cooler temperatures, you can have a ready supply of peashoots up to Christmas.

Drying shallots

I harvested the shallots on Wednesday and they’re in my cold frame so their skins can dry, ready for storing. In their place went my pathetic florence fennel plants. This is my second year of trying. Last year, they were all got by slugs. This year I’m left with 5 plants, which isn’t a great haul and at the moment they’re looking decidedly weedy. I love fennel but it’s notoriously temperamental, bolting at the slightest opportunity which doesn’t fill me with confidence, especially with such topsy-turvy weather but I’m determined not to be defeated by them, well not yet anyway.

My weedy Florence fennel

All this and I haven’t even got round to thinking about tackling the back garden which has taken on a dishevelled billowy appearance and I really need to look into how to prune my new espalier apple tree, since July is the best time to do this job. I’m feeling a little exhausted thinking about it all. Tea and a biscuit I think, first, before the wellies go back on and I embark on some topiary.

Rainbow Food

Tags

French bean 'Roquencourt', Holt Farm Organic Garden, More Veg, Sarah Raven, Seedy Sundays

Sometimes the choice in seed catalogues is so daunting and tempting it’s hard to narrow down my list of potential purchases to a vaguely sensible, and affordable, order. One thing I did have in mind this year was a desire to grow really colourful varieties. It has been suggested, in recent years, that eating a wide range of different coloured fruit and vegetables is good for us, as they are packed full of anti-oxidants, important for fighting disease and slowing down the ageing process. I do like to eat healthily but I have to admit my desire to grow a rainbow of vegetables had more to do with them looking so good on the plate and the feeling of achievement, that I’d have some crops I couldn’t even get at my excellent local farmers’ market.

Carrots are impossible to grow on the plot, as carrot fly are just too much of a problem. A fellow allotmenteer has an impressive wooden and enviromesh construction, in an attempt to keep out them out, which seems to work but as he said, ‘they’re damn expensive carrots’. The soil on the plot isn’t ideal either, so I decided to give them a go at home, away from the carrot fly ridden allotment, in containers. Back in April, I sowed half a packet of ‘Bambino’, a baby, orange coloured carrot with some ‘Yellowstone’, a lemony coloured variety. About 6 weeks later I sowed another pot with ‘Cosmic Purple’. I’ve been picking from the first container for a couple of weeks now and pulled the first purple ones last night.

I certainly won’t be self-sufficient in carrots this way. It’s more about providing some small, super fresh, carrots for adding to salads and eating raw with dips. So far, it’s worked well. The idea with growing carrots like this is to sow quite densely and as you harvest them you thin them allowing those left to grow a little bigger. I’ve just sown a couple more containers so I should have carrots to pick into the autumn.

The gloriously, and intriguingly, named ‘Ezeta’s Krombek Blauwschokker’ purple mangetout pea was another purchase. I’ll admit I picked this one simply because of the name. Not the best reason, I know, rather like picking a car because you like the colour. It’s a tall growing pea which I have climbing up a wigwam at the allotment. It produces very pretty pinky-purpley flowers and the pods are a gorgeous colour which they retain once cooked. I’ve found it’s best to pick the pods when they are quite small, about 5cm long, smaller than I would pick my green mangetout, otherwise they are quite tough. If they do get too big you can let the peas inside swell, and pod and eat the peas instead. As plants go, it so far hasn’t been the most prolific of croppers so I’ll probably seek out another purple variety next year.

Despite the weather, in the last few days I’ve started to pick my first French beans. They’re a dwarf variety called ‘Roquencourt’ which produce slender yellow beans. I’ve grown these before and they’re great for an exposed site like my own plot, as they don’t grow much taller than a foot. I’ve also grown them in containers and had great yields. Then tend to crop more quickly and over a shorter period of time than taller French beans, so it’s worth sowing some every 6 weeks to have a successional crop.

I’ve also got a tall wigwam of climbing French bean ‘Blauhilde’, which produces dark purple, almost black, pods. I noticed some flowers on it yesterday which I find quite incredible considering the wind, lack of warmth and incessant rain, not ideal French bean growing weather.

Beetroot this year has been the usual, ‘Boltardy’ and the stripey, ‘Chioggia’. I’ve found the beetroot has struggled this year. Chioggia is now bolting which is no great surprise. I may be tempted to try beetroot in containers next year, like the carrots and see if I have more success.

And finally, I’m eagerly awaiting the appearance of pods on my ‘Yugoslavian Black Bean’, dwarf French beans. A purchase from the Seedy Sunday event at Holt Farm last autumn, I’ve put them in a containers as I’ve run out of space at the allotment. I bought them because they sounded quite exotic and I spent some time in Yugoslavia as a child and have a soft spot for the place. I’m fascinated to see what will appear. I just need to keep the slugs off them.

I’d love to hear about any other colourful veg varieties you would recommend.

I bought my seeds from the excellent More Veg and Sarah Raven.

A Northern Delight

Tags

Duncombe House, Helmsley Walled Garden, Horticultural therapy, Landshare, North Yorkshire

Helmsley Walled Garden

I’ve just come back from a few days visiting family in the north east. It’s unusual to head back there and experience better weather than at home in Wales. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination what you could call summery. As Wellyman observed at one point, ‘it’s July, I really shouldn’t be wearing a shirt, jumper AND coat’ but hey, it didn’t rain for 2 whole days, so that was something at least. The sun even popped out occasionally. So making the most of the dry spell we thought we’d visit somewhere that has been on my list for a while now.

The Display Glasshouse

Helmsley Walled Garden in North Yorkshire is an incredibly inspiring place, in so many ways. The red brick walls enclose a five acre garden that dates back to 1758 and which lies next to the ruins of the Norman castle. The garden was created to supply the nearby Duncombe House, owned by the wealthy Duncombe family, with food and flowers. It was during the Victorian period that the gardens were in their prime. The abolition of the tax on glass   meant that it became so much more affordable and this, coupled with improvements in the production process, allowed large scale glasshouses to built all across the country. At the same time, the burgeoning empire and intrepid plant hunters brought about a demand for interesting and exotic flora from across the globe. Vines, figs and pineapples were all grown at Helmsley. At the peak of their productivity the walled gardens employed 20 gardeners but, as for so many large estates and their gardens, it was the First World War that would bring an end to this idyll. The Duncombe family moved to London and over the subsequent years the garden was used to provide food during the Second World War for the local area and was then run as a market garden but from the early 1980s weeds took over and the glasshouses fell into decline.

Then, along came a remarkable woman, Alice Ticehurst. In 1994 she embarked on a project to restore the space with the idea that it would become a haven for all but especially those who would benefit from the restorative powers of a garden. With a group of friends and volunteers, weeds were cleared, the original paths uncovered and the old dipping well discovered, where gardeners in the past would have dipped their watering cans. Within only two years Helmsley Walled Garden had opened to the public but sadly, Alice died suddenly whilst in the gardens in 1999. However, those at Helmsley shared Alice’s vision and 13 years later it shows the incredible potential of places like this.

The gardens themselves are stunning. The double herbaceous borders stretch for 120 metres down the centre of the garden. They were such an amazing vision of colour with large blocks of flowers such as heleniums, achilleas and salvias, intermingled with grasses and towering spires of Verbascum olympicum. Running off this main path were other smaller gardens such as the white garden and a gravel garden. There’s a physic garden grouping plants together in raised beds depending on the areas of the body there are used for healing. And then, there was the cottage garden, a sheer riot of colour. There were colour combinations there that would probably make some garden designers and arbiters of taste turn pale and have palpitations but I loved it and it’s exuberance. It made me smile.

The Cottage Garden

A couple of areas had been sown with different wildflower mixes and along the entire length of the east wall is Lindsay’s border. Designed and planted by the assistant manager, Lindsay Tait, it is packed full of bulbs for spring and pastel coloured herbaceous perennials throughout the summer.

If anyone from the National Trust is reading, this is what you call a salad.

Unlike so many walled gardens, where the Victorian glasshouses remain unloved and unused, here at Helmsley they are integral to the gardens. Reconstructed using the original iron frameworks, the Vinery is now the location for an excellent vegetarian cafe, with vines still growing inside and the display house contains a collection of tender plants, including succulents, pelargoniums and Brugmansia.

Brugmansia

It’s not just the beauty of the plants that makes this such a special place, it’s the ethos of serving the local community and helping those in need that means it has a real sense of purpose. Following Alice Ticehurst’s vision, Helmsley Walled Garden now employs 2 horticultural therapists. It’s become a place where people with disabilities, learning difficulties and those who have been long term unemployed can come to learn new skills, to interact and make friends and ultimately to feel secure and relaxed. I can understand why a walled garden makes such a great place for such an enterprise, with the walls giving a feeling of protection from the outside world, a safe cocoon from the pressures of modern life.

And, if all that wasn’t enough, there is an area of the garden that has been given over to allotments. As part of the Landshare initiative raised beds were created and made available to budding allotmenteers. Surrounded by well established heritage fruit trees, it’s an inspiring place, even in a summer as bad as this one.

I really don’t know what else to say about this place, other than it’s BRILLIANT. The only problem with it, is it’s too far away for me to volunteer there. If you’re in the area or passing by, it’s only 30 minutes from the A1 at Thirsk, please do visit, you won’t be disappointed.

For more information about the gardens at Helmsley.

Flowery Friday

Tags

Antirrhinum 'White Giant', Bupleurum rotundifolium, cut flower patch, Scabious 'Black Cat', sweet williams

So far, the cut flower patch hasn’t faired too badly in the almost continuous rain we’ve had this summer. I fear my late summer and autumn cut flower plans though, may not be so successful. With rudbeckias rotting in the ground and my pathetic zinnias which, I swear have not grown since I planted them out at the end of May, I’m really not going to have much to pick from. The zinnias are no more than a foot tall. One of them has produced a flower but it’s on such a small stem it’s no use for cutting, unless I get a request from any allotment elves, for a teeny tiny bouquet.

A mix of Antirrhinum ‘White Giant’, Sweet williams, Scabious, Sweet rocket and Alchemilla mollis

It’s incredibly frustrating that all those plans I had back in February and March will not come to fruition but at least I don’t depend on it for a living. I have so much sympathy for those who work so hard to produce food and flowers for us and whose crops have suffered this summer. Anyway, I thought I’d share a few photos of my cut flowers whilst I still can.

Scabious

My scabious plants have just started to flower. It’s the first year I’ve grown them and they seem to take an inordinate length of time to open their buds or maybe it’s just a combination of my impatience and the lack of sun. They have been well worth the wait though. I’m loving these white ones that look like a fluffy pom-pom and I just spotted some dark Scabious ‘Black Cat’ today which are the most sumptuous dark plum colour.

Scabious ‘Black Cat’

I’m growing Bupleurum rotundifolium ‘Griffithii’ for the first time this year to provide me with some foliage to add to my arrangements. Similar in appearance to euphorbia, its big advantage is no poisonous sap, unlike its lookalike.

Bupleurum rotundifolium ‘Griffithii’

There’s the signs of some larkspurs about to open too, another new one for this year. So for the moment, at least, my cut flower patch means I can fill the house with beautiful blooms.

Something a little bit different

Tags

A Taste of the Unexpected, Lippia dulcis, Mark Diacono, Otter Farm, RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, River Cottage, Yacon

Mark Diacono’s Hampton Court Stand

One of the highlights of my visit to Hampton Court last week was the chance to visit Mark Diacono’s forest garden stand. Mark has a smallholding in Devon called Otter Farm, where he grows the more unusual and a few forgotten plants. Experimenting to see what he can get to grow in the British climate, he has a vineyard, orchards planted with quince, almonds and apricots and a variety of plants most of us have never heard of, let alone contemplated eating.

He has written several books for the River Cottage Handbook series and in 2011 A Taste of the Unexpected won the Guild of Food Writers Food Book of the Year award. I can vouch for all the books being great reads but it is the latter that I found the most fascinating, challenging my ideas about what I should grow on my own plot. Mark believes that it makes more sense to grow the exotic and unusual, the food that tastes great but is expensive to buy and that is often transported half way around the world to reach our kitchens rather than the staples of our diet like onions and potatoes that are so cheaply and readily available from the supermarket. As a result the fields of Otter Farm are filled with mulberry trees, Asian pears and white cherries, Szechuan pepper trees and Egyptian walking onions.

One area has been established as a forest garden with plantings of mirabelle plums, dwarf peaches, mints and bladdernuts. No, I hadn’t heard of them either. Forest gardens are a form of permaculture which mimicks nature and the upper, mid and lower storeys of vegetation in a forest but uses edible crops instead.

Mark used his stand and his talent for cocktail making at Hampton Court to educate his audience a little to his ideas. Was it his cunning plan to get his audience tipsy and then get them to buy plants? Well I came away with 2 plants, a yacon and a Lippia, so it wasn’t a bad plan.

Lippia dulcis

Lippia dulcis or Aztec sweet herb from the verbena family is a tender perennial from Central America. It’s a low growing and spreading plant, with pretty foliage and small white flowers on stalks. It’s not for its looks that you grow it but for its incredibly sweet leaves which can be used as a natural sweetner. Mark used it, and the yacon, to sweeten his strawberry and thyme syrup cocktails.

My yacon waiting to be moved to the plot

Yacon originates from South America and its name ‘water root’ in Inca, alludes to the juiciness of the tubers which, according to Mark, resemble a jacket potato when dug up but taste more like a pear. A tender perennial, it produces large tubers which should be ready to harvest in late autumn and smaller tuberous roots which you can lift and store for planting next year, just as you would with dahlias. The sugars in yacon are indigestible to humans and, as a result, they have attracted the attention of scientists, particularly in America where they are increasingly being grown to provide natural sweetners for diabetics. For more information about yacon take a look at this fascinating article Mark wrote for The Guardian.

Well, it was dry enough this morning for me to get out and plant up the Lippia in my herb planter and take the Yacon up to the allotment where I managed to find a home for it. Growing your own means many things to many people. Some, like the plot holders next to me, simply grow potatoes, carrots, cabbages and leeks wanting to be self-sufficient in the crops they eat the most. I prefer a mix, with some staples that I know will have been produced organically, with a variety of the more unusual such as purple mangetout, yellow french beans and tayberries. I might not be ready to give up on growing new potatoes, peas and broad beans but I do like Mark’s ideas. As humans we tend to be very conservative in what eat, preferring to stick to a quite narrow selection of crops. Who knows how climate change will actually affect the weather and crop production in the future but we will probably need to be more open to new ideas about what we grow and eat. Bananas, for instance, the world’s fourth most important food crop, are at risk from extinction due to their narrow gene pool and vulnerability to pests and diseases.

A Szechuan pepper tree on Mark’s stand

Mark’s ideas about growing Asian pears, Chilean guava and blue honeysuckle may seem a bit out there but most of us think nothing of adding a few blueberries to our cereal or a fruit salad and they were only introduced to the UK in the 1940s. As a child of the seventies and eighties I don’t think I ate an aubergine or peppers until my late teens and yet now I can’t imagine not using them in cooking. And, although we are more adventurous with our food, trying different cuisines when we eat out, many of us have yet to take the leap to growing the more unusual on our plot. But I’m determined to be a bit braver on my own plot. With recent purchases of myrtle, lemon verbena and French tarragon for the herb planter and plans to add a dwarf quince to the plot this autumn, I just need to dig out the recipe books for some inspiration now.

To find out more about Mark Diacono and Otter Farm go to otterfarm.co.uk where you can sign up to his blog, which I can highly recommend for posts as varied as, the opening of his own wine, to close encounters with Kylie’s bottom.

A Summer Produce Celebration – Lia and Juliet’s Supper Club

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Gardens Illustrated magazine, Lia Leendertz, supper clubs

Saturday night saw us make the journey across the River Severn to Bristol for an evening of delicious food and great company at Lia and Juliet’s Supper Club. This might seem a little off-topic, especially since I ditched the wellies for some heels but we were particularly drawn to this night out because of the focus on celebrating food produced from the allotment of the hosts.

Lia Leendertz is a writer for Gardens Illustrated Magazine, The Guardian and author of several books including The Twilight Garden and the Half Hour Allotment. Her own blog, Midnight brambling, which I’ve followed for a while now, combines stories from her garden and allotment with snippets from her life juggling gardening writing with a young family. I love her relaxed writing style and the passion she conveys for gardening. So the opportunity to meet her and taste some of her allotment produce was just too good to miss.

Along with her friend Juliet, the editor of Gardens Illustrated, they decided to set up a supper club which would celebrate seasonal food at it’s best. Supper clubs, for the uninitiated, are an intriguing concept. Neither a restaurant nor a dinner party, the host opens up their own home where they cook a meal for their guests, some of whom know each other but mainly they don’t. They seem to have originated in London several years ago and have become increasingly popular in urban areas. I have to admit I hadn’t really heard of them until I came across Lia and Juliet’s. Living in rural Wales has many advantages but ‘hip and happening’ movements like supper clubs is not one of them. Do people even say ‘ hip and happening’ any more or would that phrase elicit a look of disdain from my teenage niece?

Baby roast vegetable tarte tatin

As a celebration of the seasonal, Lia and Juliet decided to have 4 supper club events through the year, one each for spring, summer, autumn and winter. We missed the first but were lucky enough to bag ourselves a place for the summer evening. We were greeted by Juliet and Lia looking delightful in their floral dresses and little white aprons. Mint julep cocktails and broad bean crostini on the verandah gave us the opportunity to see Lia’s lovely garden. I have to admit to being more than a little nosey when it comes to other peoples’ gardens. I’m always looking to see how others design their spaces and Lia’s was lush with greenery and two statuesque Paulownia trees flanking the garden path give it a tropical feel.

Allotment Salad

We were then shown into the dining room which was beautifully presented with fairy lights, candles and greenery adorning the table. We had already had a preview of the menu so our taste buds had been tantalised. I’ve written in previous posts about being a bit of a foodie and seeking out great food and I was not disappointed on this occasion. The rain may have been falling in torrents outside, on a decidedly unsummery July evening but the food inside conjured up everything that is great about produce at this time of year; from the chilled cucumber soup and allotment salad to the delicious roast baby vegetable tarte tatin. Oh, I’m starting to drool at the thought of it all again. To top it all off were impressive gooseberry knickerbocker glories which elicited oohs and ahhs from all the guests.

mmmm… gooseberry knickerbocker glory

It wasn’t just the food that made for such an enjoyable night though, the company too was excellent. I do like how food has the ability to bring people together. So I’d like to thank Lia and Juliet for their hard work at producing such gorgeous grub and going to so much trouble to make such a special evening. I do however, have to apologise for my pretty dreadful photos which is all the more embarrassing as 2 of the guests were professional photographers!

For more information on Lia and Juliet’s Supper Club and to follow Lia’s blog take a look at Midnight brambling.