Flowers from the garden: April 2009
When I moved into the cottage sixteen years ago I was greeted at the end of the first month by hundreds of bluebells. I was thrilled, as most are, by the smaller wild British varieties of bluebells that I remembered from woodland walks as a child. These are prettier than the large ones that grow into thug-like clumps and invade with big hefty boots. We have a few of those and have found that they are not very invasive. I also discovered that there were small white and pink bells too. I didn’t know that these existed. The blue ones are...
read morePotato Head
Danny is enjoying tending his potato bed. At the moment it just is tweaking the drip feed watering system from our water butts so that his seed potatoes are perfectly irrigated every day. Somehow he managed to nick the first and strongest spur of drip pipe for his bed. Needless to say the spur that led to john Coe’s potato patch was a much weaker affair and there was a blockage somewhere in the pipe. I’ve been watering John’s spuds and the broad beans by hand. We returned home from an excellent lunch party today and I took the blocked...
read moreEasy, chic and cheap recipes: delicate cauliflower leaf and pecorino soup
For years it has hurt me to throw away the green outer leaves of the cauliflower. I have simmered them for the chickens in the past but mainly they are added to our kitchen compost bin. Having had the tip from John Coe – that all the leaves on the sprouting broccoli plant are edible – I decided to experiment with the cauli leaves this week. I chopped up the main stalk and tore the leaves away from the fibrous stems. Then I simmered them for about twenty minutes in vegetable stock. They looked really unappetising when I lifted the lid....
read moreThe secret of species tulips
I have written about species tulips before . I like growing ordinary tulips but have fallen wantonly in love with species tulips. Our local squirrel has adjusted our planting plans and has buried small groups all over the garden. And they are now slowly spreading. When I first moved to the cottage I planted over 500 ordinary tulip bulbs. Sixteen years later we have just seven bulbs left (these are the red ones that seem to just go on and on). But Lady of the Night, a beautiful red and white parrot variety and a host of other tulip wonders...
read moreYou can eat the leaves of sprouting broccoli plants
For the past five years John Coe has supplied us with sprouting broccoli plants. The purple variety gives a bigger, longer harvest. But nothing can beat the sweetness of white sprouting broccoli. This is the Premier Cru of sprouting broccoli. It is generally not available from the shops as the plants are smaller, the yield is minimal and the harvest is short. Sounds like the sort of vegetable that you should ignore. Wrong. White sprouting broccoli is a real delicacy. On a par with the first longed for asparagus shoots. If you have the space,...
read moreThe best gardening tools are not necessarily the most expensive
I’d cut down the rose bushes to large stumps and wheeled away about ten borrow loads of rose branches and quite a lot of bindweed roots. John Coe cast an eye over the warzone border covered with hefty skeletal stumps. “I can see what you mean. With this and the new potato border you will have a much more productive space for growing vegeatbles. Kitchen garden borders always fill up fast.” He picked up my spade and stabbed at the biggest rose root. “This’ll take some shifting.” Within five minutes the base of the spade had snapped...
read moreDigging, planting and watering your patch. And reading if you have the time.
Last night we planted the seed potatoes in Danny’s new border. He wanted slightly bigger spacing than I imagined so we only needed 50 seed potatoes. The last ten were halved spuds with eyes in both sections. Then I wandered into the greenhouse and discovered that we had ten teeny seed spuds left in the original bag. Danny sparkled, “Keep them in reserve, just in case some fail.” We ate supper late, and when D went up to the Rat room for a couple of minutes at the end of the meal I fell asleep at the table. It was only ten o’clock and I...
read moreThe magic of seeds
This has been a weekend of feverish digging and preparation. The new potato bed has such wonderful soil that we have ripped up half the rose walk to have a similar sized bed beside the spuds. This will be the brassica bed this year – cauliflower, calabrese, Brussels sprouts and sprouting broccoli. Although we won’t harvest the latter until April 2010. It’s our first year for cauliflower and Brussels sprouts so there has been quite a lot of thumbing through the vegetable gardening books. I can highly recommend Joy Larkcom’s...
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