Shrinking violets and dahlia shrieks

Tags

Barnhaven Primulas, Bodmin Plant Nursery, broad beans, heated propagator

Buds on my crab apple

I’ve been feeling a little bit grumpy of late. The weather has been preoccupying me somewhat. With my book deadline looming and photo shoots booked I’ve been anxiously looking at a garden and allotment that should be springing into life. Instead I’ve got bare soil and plants that are sulking, sitting there waiting for some warmer weather. The first photos of the year have already had to be postponed and now it’s a waiting game with me wondering whether spring and summer will arrive in time.

Over the last week or so I’ve started to write a post but I’ve heard my words as I type and I just sounded pretty fed up. I don’t like writing when I feel like that. Sometimes it can be cathartic but most of the time I find it just compounds my thoughts rather than relieving them. I promised myself I would only post if I could write something more positive, rather than inflicting my rants and frustrations on you all. So today I bring you flowers to cheer, green shoots and seedlings galore.

Heartsease

Last week I finally managed to plant up my purchases from my break in Cornwall. My run-in with some ropy seafood and a spell of decorating indoors has meant that they have languished in my cold frame for nearly a month now. I’d chosen a selection of shade loving, spring-flowering plants. a pretty little heartease and a sweet violet which was in bloom when I bought it in mild Cornwall, but a spell in colder Wales has made it a shrinking violet and there are no flowers to be seen at the moment.

My gold-laced primulas don’t seem too perturbed by the lack of warmth though. I’ve developed a bit of a primula addiction recently. Lynne Lawson from Barnhaven Primulas recommended a book to me, ‘The Polyanthus’ by Roy Genders. Written in the 1960s I managed to track down a copy on the internet and I’m now hooked. Hence my other purchases of Primula ‘Francisca’ and P. sieboldii ‘Snowflake’. Francisca has really unusual green, ruffled flowers which are tantalisingly close to opening and ‘Snowflake’ has small, white flowers with intricately cut petals which are held on tall stems above the foliage. My P. denticulata are just coming into flower. This is my first year of growing them and I’m intrigued to discover that they have quite a strange way of producing their flowers. Rather than sending up a stem and then the flower buds opening, the flowers are opening in a tightly packed rosette nestled in amongst the leaves, instead. I had thought it was something I had done but in the last few days I’ve noticed the stems are starting to elongate, carrying the globe of individual flowers upwards. Apparently this is perfectly normal and what these drumstick primulas do.

Primula denticulata

The Bodmin Plant and Herb Nursery in Cornwall is one of my favourites and no visit to the area is complete without a trip here. They have the most amazing selection of herbs. I never realised there were so many different types of rosemary and thyme for instance until I wandered into one of their polytunnels. This time I was tempted by a pot of parcel or leaf celery. Celery itself is notoriously hard to grow and I’ve never attempted it but the leaves of parcel taste just like celery and can be added to soups towards the end of cooking to give a celery flavour. I’m also hoping they’ll taste good in omelettes and salads.

My herb planters are otherwise engaged at the moment, planted up with tulips I couldn’t get into the ground last winter because of all the rain. But once they have finished flowering the parcel can go in the zinc baths along with my other herbs which have spent the winter in the greenhouse.

It may have been unseasonably cold so far this spring, and this may have played havoc with plants outdoors but we have been lucky in this part of Wales to have had some lovely sunshine at least. And, behind the glass on my windowsills, seeds have been germinating at a pace. In fact, my seedlings are at the stage I would expect them to be for the time of year. I sowed some zinnias at the start of April and they had popped up within days. The addition of a heated propagator this year has made a difference, certainly with some flowers I’m growing which needed to be started off in February. I’ve also tried to do everything properly, using seed compost for seed sowing rather than just multi-purpose and incorporating perlite. Germination from most seeds has been good but there have still been disappointments and frantic resowing in the hope I don’t lose any time.

Broad beans ready and waiting

In the greenhouse the broad beans have finally started to grow. I’ve potted them on into bigger pots and they can sit in the cold frame for a few weeks now. I much prefer to plant out substantial plants if I can and my February sown broad beans are even a little further on than some of those my allotment neighbours sowed back in November. I’m pleased I ignored the weather and sowed trays of lettuce, peas, beetroot and spinach. We have a fairly short growing season anyway so anything to try to gain some extra time is worth it for me.

seedlings in the greenhouse

My windowsills are pretty much at full capacity at the moment so some milder weather would be welcome, allowing me to move a few hardy annuals into the greenhouse. Oh, and I did get quite excited yesterday to discover the first shoots of a dahlia poking through the compost. I let out a bit of a squeal, loud enough for Wellyman to come downstairs to see what was going on. I think he thought I’d discovered a mouse or something.

So I’m trying to defy mother nature as best as I can but soon my plants will have to go outside. Lets just hope by then spring, at least, has arrived.

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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.