Blagger » Growing food

Reviving the rhubarb

Nik — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:56:20 +0000

We did something at the weekend that was long overdue. We finished cutting down the dead ivy that had been smothering one of our trees, and in the process discovered what a good thing it had been for the rhubarb.

Our rhubarb has never been particularly happy where I planted it alongside the chicken run. I had thought that was because it was a bit too dark there, but it seems now that it was more to do with the fact that the ivy was robbing it of all of the moisture in the ground.

Now this ivy is very old. It was here before I bought the house four and a bit years ago, and probably predates my ownership by a good ten years at least. Down at the root of the tree around which it had wrapped itself it was a good four inches across and more like a trunk than a frond.

So, seeing as it was stripping the tree of all of its leaves I made the decision to cut through the base of it a couple of months ago, and came to regret that decision a few weeks later. The tree seemed to be failing at an ever quicker rate with the leaves falling off all over the garden.

Except they weren’t the leaves of the tree – they were the ivy, which had so completely covered the tree for six feet of its height that there was no tree to see apart from the part that stuck out from the top.

It’s taken two weekends of chopping and trimming to uncover the tree again, and although it’s a bit of a silly shape right now it’s already responding well to the killing off of that horrible ivy. The part that sticks up from the top is flourishing, and there are beautiful red berries appearing all over it, which we haven’t seen before.

The biggest reward, though, is the rhubarb that sits at the bottom of the tree, and which has seemingly come back to life. So late into the season it’s sprouted some good strong stems and its leaves are as broad and lush as we could have hoped. We may get get a crumble this year, and next year holds out great promise, I can feel it already.

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This year’s crabapple harvest

Nik — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:40:37 +0000

The crabapple tree has really come into its own this year. Last year it gave us enough apples to look good when in fruit and to make a small quantity of jam, but this year it really went to town.

The top branches were bent right over with the weight of the delicate pink and green fruits, and as I picked them off and each bough got lighter it slowly straightened itself up, like an old man with an aching back.

I’d never have guessed that such a small tree, which we only transplanted three years ago, and which has only six branches, each no more than a centimetre thick at the fattest point, could have proved so bountiful.

I picked more than 400 apples in all, and more than filled the jam pan. A few wonderfully sweet-smelling days lie ahead as I boil them all into jam.

Crabapples in the jam pan

Struggling to keep the potatoes under control

Nik — Thu, 19 May 2011 07:48:05 +0000

I‘m still digging up potatoes from last year’s crop. They’re giving themselves away by starting to sprout, and shooting long stems and thick green leaves up through the soil.

It’s a bit galling pulling them all up as they would have made good eaters if they hadn’t started shooting, and I can’t help wondering how many new potatoes they’d deliver for us this year if we left them where they are.

We can’t do that at the front half of the plot as they’d interfere with this year’s strawberries and artichokes. The back half of the plot, though, is a possibility. I had earmarked that for French beans, but they’re not exactly putting on a great performance yet. I started them off in the greenhouse a couple of weeks back, but so far there’s nothing peeping up over the surface of the pots.

So, potatoes stay or potatoes go? They should be fine to eat as they were all grown from seed last year, so the left-overs should be as good as the originals when they bare their own offspring and they shouldn’t poison the soil.

The trouble is, by leaving them in there to crop again I’ll no doubt end up with the same problem next year, with the leftovers of the leftovers cropping again, for the third time. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve gone back to growing potatoes in bags this year.

Sadly, then, I’ve resigned myself to digging them out. It feels a bit of a waste.

Eating the first lettuce of 2011

Nik — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:36:20 +0000

We’ve just eaten the first of this year’s crops. Admittedly it was only lettuce, but we celebrated by pulling up three whole baby heads, dousing them with some dressing and eating them with half a lunchtime pizza each.

Sadly no tomatoes to go with it yet.

We’ve transplanted our tomatoes

Nik — Tue, 10 May 2011 07:20:41 +0000

Already, our tomatoes were starting to look cramped in their little 9cm pots. It’s only a couple of weeks since we moved them from the kitchen windowsill out into the greenhouse, so I didn’t think we’d be doing this so quickly. Nonetheless today we transplanted nine of the finest specimens into the larger pots where they’ll live out the summer, hopefully providing a better crop than last year’s plants.

I guess we’re still a good two or three months off picking our first tomatoes but it still feels like we’re making good progress to be moving them on so soon.

There’s plenty else in the garden to tend to while they’re slowly maturing, though, with the strawberry patch and the raspberries already showing the first signs of fruiting. How many strawberries we can expect this year, though, now that the cat has clearly decided to make it his favourite sleeping location most days, I don’t know.

The cat, snoozing in the plot

The artichokes are rising… and so are the errant potatoes

Nik — Sat, 07 May 2011 17:38:56 +0000

We’re growing artichokes for the first time this year. Why? Because we had them when we were out for dinner a few months back and loved them. Neither of us had ever eaten them before, and we actually thought they were potatoes when they turned up.

Not surprising, really. They looked like potatoes in the dish in which they were served, smothered in butter. So we decided to turn over part of the plot to growing our own, and you know what – even the tubers from which they stem look like seed potatoes.

We planted them a month back and they’ve recently put on a real growth spurt with the tallest one about a foot above the ground now.

The only trouble is, because we did actually give over the whole of the plot to a potato crop last year we clearly missed digging up one or two of the crop and they’re starting to sprout (see the picture below). It’s a shame, but we’re having to dig up these errant spuds so that they don’t interfere with this year’s growing pattern. If we didn’t, we’d probably be more confused than ever about what is – and isn’t – an artichoke.

Potato leaves

Our rhubarb has made it through the winter

Nik — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:43:47 +0000

I can’t tell you how pleased I am that the rhubarb has survived the winter. I thought it had died as it was taking so long to pop up above the soil line – particularly when there is plenty to be seen already on the allotment – but it seems I needn’t have worried.

Rhubarb is one of my favourite cooked vegetables (yes, vegetable) but you shouldn’t harvest it in its first year – which was last year. If they hadn’t made it through the frost and snow to the first possible harvest, then, I’d have been very disappointed.

So, determined to stop the neighbourhood cats sitting on it as they did last year I’ve put a couple of cut off milk bottles over the first spears and will leave them there until they get established. Hopefully it will also force them slightly as they race for the light.

Crumble, here we come.

Milk bottles, protecting our rhubarb

I’ve re-planted the strawberry plot

Nik — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:05:15 +0000

The strawberry patch has been looking a bit ragged since the onset of winter. Old runners, brown leaves, a few empty patches where my past planting hasn’t been entirely even. I decided this afternoon, probably a bit overdue, that it was time to do something about it.

The plants have a remarkable ability to survive the extremes. They gave us fruit every day for a month last summer, which was a bit of a scorcher in parts, and following the coldest, windiest, wettest winter for years they’re greening up nicely again as we head towards spring.

Not only that, but they’ve been spawning like mad. The strawberry patch was a nice, clearly-defined area when we planted it up three years ago, but over the years the plants have put out so many runners with babies on them that they have quadrupled in number and by today were encroaching well into the parts of the plot we want to use for carrots and beans.

They’ve done this so many times now that those original few plants we bought have proved to be one of the best value investments we’ve ever made in the garden.

I dug out all of the wanderers and used some to fill in the gaps in the original patch, but have also had enough to put in two and a bit new rows of plants at the front of the main part of the plot which, if they take, should significantly increase the amount of fruit we’ll get this summer.

If they can pace themselves, I reckon they may give us an extra fortnight of berries.

We can but hope.

End of the season

Nik — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:28:00 +0000

We’re moving into winter proper now. Some rainwater that had collected in a bucket outside the greenhouse had frozen solid by the time we got up the other morning, and I’m sure it won’t be long now before the chickens’ water is freezing, too.

That spurred me on to sort out the last of the summer crops, which have been lingering a little too long for my liking.

The tomatoes, which put on a really poor show this year, put in a last bit of effort in the greenhouse, despite the door still being open from the end of summer and all the heat escaping. They had a final fruiting, and popped out some delicious-looking yellow and red fruits.

So late on in the year, of course, the skins were far too tough for eating raw. We could have made chutney but we still have plenty from two summers ago, so I fed them to the chickens who gobbled them up in double time, clearly enjoying the treat.

They have started to lay a little more slowly of late, and our regular eight eggs a day have dropped to five or six (and in some cases less), but that’s still more than we need for our personal consumption. We’re still selling the surplus.

Anyhow, with the tomatoes our of the greenhouse I was left with the old compost bags in which they’d been growing, so I scattered their contents over the plot and mixed them in with the layer of chicken manure that is now starting to bed down.

Looking out there now, it’s a bit of a barren landscape. Summer is over, autumn has passed and winter is truly upon us. There’s talk of snow by the end of the week.

We’ve harvested our main potato crop

Nik — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 07:41:05 +0000

I dug up the main potato crop today. The tops of the plants have been looking scraggly and, frankly, dead, for quite a few weeks now and every time we have someone around into the garden I felt the need to apologise for their appearance.

So I set out with the fork and a bucket and levered them all out of the ground. In all, after throwing away some duds, I got 135 decent potatoes, which isn’t bad at all.

I laid them out on the potting bench in the greenhouse to fix their skins before putting them into hessian bags to store. These let them breathe while keeping them dry, which is key to making sure they don’t turn green. I’m hoping that these keep us going well into winter. It would be nice to be eating them at Christmas, and even better to still be using them when the first new potatoes start to appear in the shops.

Potatoes in their sacks

With the plot empty I could finally spread all of the much I’d dug out of the chicken compound across it so that by spring, when we’ll be planting again, it will have started to rot down properly and make the plot good and fertile.

It was hard work and I suspect that by tomorrow my legs are going to be very stiff, but at least now I can welcome people into the garden without feeling the need to explain.

The dug and fertilised plot