Blagger » Growing food

Our beansprouts are stunted

Nik — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:55:30 +0000

This seed sprouting business isn’t as quick and easy as we’d been led to believe. That picture shows our beansprouts after five days of growth. By six days they should have finished growing, but to my eyes they look nothing like a regular shop-bought beansprout.

We started them off in a jar of water, as the instructions dictated, and then transferred them to the seed sprouter the next day. Since then we’ve rinsed them through twice a day every day and kept them nice and warm in the kitchen.

Now admittedly, in terms of sheer bulk, they are a lot bigger than they were when we started them off – probably four times larger or so, but they’re nowhere near the healthy, long, slender beansprouts pictured on the front of the packet.

Either we are doing something wrong or the packet picture lies.

I’ll keep them going for another couple of days and see what happens. If there’s not much more growth perhaps we should just try eating them.

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We’re growing our own beansprouts

Nik — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:58:48 +0000

I never realised beansprouts were mung beans, despite eating them at least once a week. I bet not many other people know that either, when you consider how bad a reputation mung beans have as a staple of itchy, scratchy eco lifestyles.

The trouble with beansprouts, though, is that when you buy then in the supermarket they come in huge bags, of which two of us can only get through about half. It’s not necessarily a problem as the chickens eat the rest, so they don’t go to waste, but still I’d rather only have what we need.

So we’ve bought a seed sprouter and today we started growing our own.

A sprouter is a plastic tiered contraption with several layers like a little steamer on which you lay out your beans as they grow. You rinse them through with water twice a day, and in three to six days your seeds are ready for eating.

Monday night is stir fry night, so that fits well with our schedule.

The first stage, though, is to put them in a jar and soak them in water overnight, so the picture above shows our desertspoonful of mung beans doing just that. We’ll leave them until tomorrow, and then we’ll start using our sprouter.

Chitting potatoes… at last

Nik — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:32:10 +0000

Finally our potatoes are here and we have started chitting – the essential process that starts them sprouting shoots so you can plant them in the plot.

It took ages for them to arrive – well behind the lingonberry and redcurrant bushes that we ordered at the same time, and to be honest I was on the verge of chasing them up.

This year, then, we are growing three varieties, and have a total of 31 tubers to get us started. They are Rooster, a favourite all-round variety of ours that is great as a general use potato, Arran Pilot, which is a baking potato, so we’re hoping will grow nice and large, and Blue Danube, which is an early potato.

The Blue Danube tubers are a bit of an experiment. They were on offer at 99p for 10, so too good not to try, we thought – particularly when we saw that they have a bright purple skin, which will look great on the plate.

The flesh is still white, fortunately, so they shouldn’t look too garish when sliced open in a nice summer salad.

We’re chitting them all by putting them into used egg cartons on a worktop in the outhouse. This way they’ll be kept dry and well lit from a window in the end room, which should promote the sprouting. When the shoots are about an inch long – which should be a month or so from now – we’ll start planting them out in the potato bags that we keep behind the greenhouse. Hopefully, as it’ll be early April by then, the risk of frost will have passed.

We’ve planted a redcurrant bush

Nik — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:05:05 +0000

I want to make some new jams this year. We’re pretty much dab hands at marmalade, bramble jelly and, my absolute favourite, crab apple jelly, but I’d like to try some new berry fruit jams.

We have strawberries in the garden, and after replenishing our raspberry bed now have nine raspberry canes on the go, which together with the blackcurrant bush should make a nice mixed summer fruit jam. To round things off, then, we’ve planted a redcurrant bush in a large pot on the patio.

Actually, calling it a bush is a bit ambitious. It’s more of a stick at the moment. I’m hoping, though, that it’ll take well and provide us with a few berries by next summer. Fingers crossed.

That takes our fruit varieties to ten: strawberry, raspberry, apple, crab apple, cherry, apricot, blackcurrant, redcurrant, lingonberry and (although it’s actually a veg) rhubarb. We won’t get a huge amount from any single one, but combined they should do us quite well.

Planting a lingonberry plant

Nik — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:43:09 +0000

We both have a bit of a thing about lingonberry cake, but in all honesty neither of us could have told you what a lingonberry actually is. It turns out it’s related – very closely – to the cranberry.

Native cranberries are found only in North America, but lingonberries are found both there and in Europe. So, we decided to try our hand at growing some to put in our own cakes.

I don’t think we’ll get much cake this year.

Just look at the size of that plant. It’s tiny. We’ve put it into a nice large pot that was previously used for our patio cherry tree (now transplanted to a border where we hope it will be a lot happier) and it looks a bit lost among all that compost.

Lingonberry plant

Fortunately it should grow to fill the space we’ve given it. If you’re putting them into a bed you need to space then out by at least a foot and prepare for them to creep across the bed and mesh with one another.

The excellent Carol Klein assures (in print, not in person) us that lingonberry is pretty easy to look after, so long as you keep it nice and wet.

A lot of summer watering will be called for.

Best of all, though, it’s also an evergreen, so we’ll have something to look at from the study window through the winter.

Our 2010 seeds have arrived

Nik — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:25:58 +0000

Rather exciting: the seeds we’ll be planting this year have arrived. Not quite all of them – the seed potatoes still aren’t here and neither are the small fruit bushes that will replace the trees in our outside pots – but it’s a start.

The potatoes’ absence is a bit of a worry, really, as we need to get them chitting in the next couple of weeks so they’re ready for planting.

Other than that, though, we can now sit back and wait until next month before we need to plant the first of these crops, either under glass in the greenhouse or on the kitchen windowsill.

I feel like spring might finally be on the way now.

We’ve planted some rhubarb

Nik — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:08:18 +0000

Did you know rhubarb is actually a vegetable, not a fruit? I’m not sure why, but there you go. Perhaps because it looks so much like celery despite being great in a sweet pie or crumble.

Anyhow, I’ve wanted to grow some in the garden for the last couple of years and had a spot marked out along one side of the chicken enclosure, far enough away from the sides of their compound to stop them nibbling at the poisonous leaves. When we saw Wilkinson was selling rhubarb crowns at £1.98 a go, then, it was too good an offer to pass up. We bought two.

Rhubarb can be a bit temperamental. It likes rich soil, so benefits from compost and rotted manure. It likes a lot of moisture, and well-drained soil. It likes sun, but not too much heat. Picking the right spot isn’t exactly easy, and is complicated by the fact that when you’ve got rhubarb in the garden it’s pretty much there for life, so you don’t want to put it anywhere that’s going to encroach on your other crops.

All things considered, then, the patch of earth we’d originally earmarked still looked the best choice as it’s contained on three sides.

Empty rhubarb bed

Rhubarb crowns are small when you first get them, but they grow a lot, so you should allow for at least 90cm between each one. That meant we had room for just two, which should be enough for the two of us.

Tearing into our rhubarb packs we found a baking potato-sized crown in each one. They are like light lumps of wood with a small pink growth. Here’s one of ours, sitting in the bag of compost in which it was sold:

Rhubarb crown

They don’t need to be planted deep, so we dug a shallow hole for each one, lined it with some good quality compost and settled the crown on top of it. We filled it up with a mix of the original soil we had removed and some more compost, and watered them in well.

That’s all there is to it, really. One of our crowns – the one above – had a small piece of rhubarb growing out of it, so we planted it with that protruding from the ground like a little triffid. The other one’s first shoot was growing along its length, rather than upwards, so we have planted it to the same depth and will let it find its own way up.

Newly-planted rhubarb

All we need to do now is wait. It will take a year at least to get itself established, so we won’t be taking any fruit from it this summer. Next year, though, we have home-grown rhubarb crumbles to look forward to. The thought of it is making me want some right now.

We’ve ordered our seeds for 2010

Nik — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:07:01 +0000

We’ve finally ordered this year’s fruit and veg seeds. I’m glad we got it done before the end of January, as it was one of those jobs that has been hanging over us and really needed doing before the month was out.

We’ve decided to more or less start again with our seeds. Last year was the third time around for some of our stock and from the results it was obvious. A fairly disappointing harvest. Our tomatoes were slow to ripen, the carrot crop was small and the beans were noticeably less successful than in years gone by.

In fairness, we did pretty well to keep re-using them for so long (and the compost, too, some of which has also been used for a few seasons).

2010, then, will be a bit of a new start, with fresh seeds and virgin compost. So, what will we be growing?

Potatoes have always been a success for us, so we’re growing two varieties this year: Rooster, which is a really versatile all-rounder, looks nice and tastes great, and Blue Danube, which we’ve never done before. Again they’re a good general-purpose cooking potato, but they have deep blue skins and white flesh, and are apparently ’stunning’ when in flower.

We’ll be growing three types of tomato – our regular Gardeners’ Delight cherry toms, yellow Lidi tomatoes and a general Alicante for salads and sandwiches – and two beans: Aintree and The Prince, which between them will give us runner and French varieties. We’re not buying any new broad bean seeds. We love broads, particularly in three bean risotto, but we have some of last year’s crop left in the freezer, and the low-growing plants take up so much space that could be better used for something else.

Finally, carrots: autumn king.

That’s it for the plot, but as we have a couple of trees to transplant from large pots into the earth somewhere (where, I don’t know, as our borders are pretty full), we’re going to have a couple of large terracotta plots available, so we’ve bought a redcurrant bush and a lingonberry plant. The latter is particularly exciting as it’s an evergreen, so should still look good in the winter.

What are you growing this year? Let us know in the comments below.

Time to start planting for 2010

Nik — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:56:47 +0000

How quickly planting season comes around. We’re still harvesting last years parsnips but already it’s time to start thinking about what we’re going to grow through 2010.

Obviously the chance of a hard frost still hasn’t passed, so it’s too early to be planting seeds and seedlings out in the plot, but we can give things a head start on the kitchen windowsill and, with the help of the heater, in the greenhouse.

Fortunately the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has produced this handy PDF calendar telling you when to sow seeds indoors, when to transplant the seedlings into the garden and when to expect your first harvest.

It’s very comprehensive, covering artichoke (globe and Jerusalem), turnip and everything in between, including more unusual crops like kohl rabi and celeriac. It’s just a shame that it looks so awful when the RHS website, and the books it produces are so beautiful. That photo at the top of the post is a corner of the guide (ugh), and this is the much more attractive website:

Royal Horticultural Society vegetable-growing pages

Still, you know what they say about gift horses and their mouths, and this is a free guide that saves you reading the back of countless seed packets to plant your sowing session, so ignore its appearance and revel in its usefulness.

Download it, save it and use it year after year. It’s specific to the UK climate, so no good for the southern hemisphere unless you offset the months by six or so, and it’s certainly going to guide my veg growing this year.

Digging our first parsnips

Nik — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:07:18 +0000

After yesterday’s successful potato harvest, we tried digging up some parsnips today. Unlike the potatoes, they were grown in the ground rather than bags, and my worry wasn’t so much the cold and snow – more all the water that has sunk into the ground since it’s thawed out.

The plot is soggy right now, to say the least, and the fork slipped into the ground much easier than I’d been expecting. The last time it was like this, our carrots turned out very poorly indeed, and I’ve always considered parsnips to be similar.

Turns out, though, that they were fine. I dug up four, or very different shapes and sizes, but at least one of them would be good enough to put in a supermarket. Granted you might want to trim off the very long root.

This is the first time we’ve tried out hand at growing parsnips. It feels like an age ago when we planted them – back in the spring of 2009 – but I think we may try them again. Granted, we have plenty of this crop still left in the plot, and the proof is in the eating, but things are looking good so far, and it’s nice to be harvesting our own fresh produce in the depths of winter.