Seeds, seeds, and more seeds

I'm having a wonderful afternoon surrounded by all these packets of seeds of possibilities of things I could be eating in the spring, summer and beyond...  Serge Gainbsbourg is playing in the background and I'm seed sowing in my warm living room whilst another cold snap is starting outside.

A fortnight ago I sowed some chillies and aubergines (2 seeds of each) in my heated propogator.  On the first sowing I've had at least one germination of each seed but for a few the second seed didn't appear so today I've resown a few (cayenne pepper and bangladeshi chilli).

Today with the cold snap on its way I decided to take advantage and sow some seeds that need cold stratification to germinate:  Alexanders (Smynium olusatrum) a parsley like herb and Sweet Cicely (Myrrhis Odorata) interestingly  both from the umbelliferae family (which includes carrot, parsely, coriander and many others that have the umbel flowers).  I've never tried this before so it will be exciting to see a new type of germination.  On the packet it stated that the sweet cicely need sowing on the surface as they need light to germinate as well as cold.

Today was also the day to make a start on the tomato sowing.  Varieties I am trying this year include varieties I've saved from previous years including a variety I saved from the Regents Park Capital Growth Allotment Garden in 2011 (a purple cherry tomato) - I tried to grow it last year but it got blight, luckily tomato seeds can be viable for up to 6 years.  I'm also trying the tumbling tom Moskotka,  Principe Borghese,  Roma tomato (a fave of ours), HSL Ryders Midday Sun, Chadwick Cherry, Golden Sunrise and last but certainly not least Real Seeds Gigante Liscio Vine Tomato.

This week I've also been planning for the future season and after some interesting twitter discussions I placed an order with the wonderful Real Seeds.  There'll be some new additions to the repertoire this year that I am sure I will need the help of some space at the amazing Urban Veg garden to be grown: Yacon and oca.

So lots of exciting prospects for the coming season.

What exciting seeds are you planting?

Astounded by Peas

Its Friday night, most people when they finish work would be enjoying a nice glass of wine and relaxing... except for the avid gardeners of Birmingham - I would guess that quite a few wandered over to the new Urban Veg garden at Winterbourne Botanical Gardens to have a nose at the new project.  Its an amazing space.  I can't wait to see how it develops and I had a lovely chat with the Birmingham Organic Group.

Such beautiful edible pea flowers.  Easy to see their relation to sweet peas

Arriving home in the dark and still with the glow of having seen such beautiful vegetable specimens I thought I'd wander over to my veg patch.  With the recent rain the patch is looking very lush and I'd weeded recently so it looks good - just lush lovely veg.  (We won't talk about the winter squash with pitifully small fruit for the moment!)

I was particularly impressed to see that the peas are very much alive and still producing.  Other things have performed poorly but I've never known a summer before when peas haven't died off in July.

The purple coloured pea pods in this picture are the HSL Purple Pods

Its especially the purple peas that don't seem to want to give up.

A delicious flavour to have at this time of the year when I wouldn't ever expect it.  Thank you for surprising me peas!

They are called purple pod and I first got hold of them from Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library. This is the second year I am growing them and this year they were from the seed I'd saved from last year.

I shouldn't be so surprised I suppose, the sweetpeas are still looking lovely and fresh in the autumn garden with their delicate fragrance.

Has any veg surprised you this season?

Squash Fantastic

Look at these monsters!  Zucca Lunga di Napoli (Franchi Seeds) - guessing they're going to make some massive winter squashes...

 These are slightly more polite in size but still eager to have more space for their roots - Zucca Berretina Piacentina (Franchi Seeds)

One of my HSL favourites from last year - Zapallito de Toscana (from saved seed so I hope they didn't cross polinate with anything else I was growing last summer)

And another superstar from last year's growing - Gem Squash.  Again, saved seed but I'm more confident that they will be true to type as I was more attentive with their pollination.  The fruit are absolutely gorgeous stuffed with goats cheese and slow roasted tomatoes and baked Stuffed Gem Squash Recipe

And look the Gem Squash loves me back! This one's baby leaves grew in a heart for me - how sweet :)

My first Seedy Sunday!

This weekend I will be heading over to Brighton for my very first Seedy Sunday experience.

I have heard stories about people swapping suspect little packages in brown paper bags with scribbles written on the bag - sounds very intriguing!

I am also a complete fanatic about growing heritage, heirloom and saved seed and keeping old varieties alive - in fact keeping a massive gene pool of a variety of edibles alive.  Its exciting - there's lots out there we can grow.  Wouldn't it be fantastic to save a variety from complete extinction?  Well it floats my boat anyway!

So much so that I am a very keen member of Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library

Last summer, I was saving seed for the first time and have a selection of chilli seeds, tomato seeds and gem squash to share.  I've bagged all my seeds ready for the big swap on Sunday.

Got any tips for a newbie to the Seedy Sunday experience?

2011 Gardening Year of Trials and Tribulations

What a challenge 2011 has been for us gardeners but with challenges comes resourcefulness and problem solving.

If we look back over the past year we've had an extremely warm start in spring with April reaching over 20 degrees centigrade.  In May, temperatures dropped (but I find they do most years so waited until early June to plant out the cucurbitaceae (squash)).  Then the summer didn't really come.  July was grey and wet through some of the weeks.  Then August came and didn't really bring summer either ending, certainly in the South East with a day of severe rain that swiftly followed with blight attack on many tomatoes (the community gardens and school garden I support suffered this more than my small patio garden).  In September as there were so many green tomatoes being given to me I learned to make chutney for the first time.  Followed by a crazy Autumn and really high temperatures in the first week of October when lucky people who hadn't cropped yet got a week's summer.  And now we are experiencing a rather warm winter - in fact, I'm not sure whether to call it winter at all.  Usually the nasturtiums have died off by now but my sheltered patio garden hasn't really felt the bite of a frost yet.

So a rather challenging year to garden in but his meant lots of adaptation and resourcefulness.

Early in the year my boyfriend bought me a plastic greenhouse.  It was absolutely fantastic for hardening off seedlings in early spring and I used it for this purpose from March all the way through to June.  For a few months I left it vacant, but I've really got into growing chillies this year and our summer wasn't really a good one for them so as the weather started to disappoint in July I started to move them into the plastic greenhouse - and they loved it!  I didn't even have to water them that much as they would sweat off the excess water and it would stay in the green house.  I continued to use it all the way through to October.  If you don't have one, and don't have the space for a glass green house I really recommend getting a plastic greenhouse!

In the summer I also started to use horticultural fleece.  I've never used this before, not even in the winter but I bought some by mistake when I was buying some horticultural mesh for my cabbages.

For ages it remained stored in its wrapper and then when I started to see flowers on my aubergines I had little hope of them bearing fruit and I thought about the idea of using the horticultural fleece.  It worked a treat!

Definitely using it next year, especially if I get impatient with my tomatoes!

This year I stumbled across a really good variety of winter squash that seemed completely unperturbed by our disappointing summer.  They are called Zapallito de Toscana and I ordered them from the Garden Organic Heritage Seed Library Catalogue.  I am definitely going to be sourcing more seed for next year.

It was the first year I grew from seeds sourced from the Heritage Seed Library and I had some absolutely beautiful purple peas. 


I wouldn't recommend them for crops to be grown in a container garden as they didn't really give enough of a yield but the flowers were beautiful and I just couldn't help take photos of them.

I would definitely recommend growing Heritage Seed Library varieties and to learn seed saving.  Its a great source of seed if you like to experiment with unusual or old heirloom varieties.

I tried seed saving for the first time this year and found it tremendously rewarding.

Next year, I am going to grow more varieties that are perennial/biennial and/or are low fuss to grow. Varieties I found to be in this camp this year were nasturtiums (plant them anywhere you have a spare bit of ground - you can make pesto, a little chopped leaves on top of curries, flavour for salads - they are truly wonderful and add colour to small plots), zapallito de toscana (winter squash), kai lan, chard, kale and herbs, salad potatoes...  

I am also going to introduce more early varieties of tomatoes as these will probably be more UK climate friendly.  I'll also look for early varieties of chillies, sweet peppers and aubergines as these could be more suited to the UK growing season too.

In 2012 I will be looking for more varieties to add to this list.  I am still trialling Egyptian Walking Onions and broad beans.

A review of gardening in 2011 wouldn't be complete without mentioning my wormery.  It provided me with wonderful worm casts and the garden benefited so much from the worm tea.  If I didn't have my own wormery I would pay for worm tea.  So much more superior than bought organic fertiliser.

Next year I plan to be far more savy in July and August with my winter planting.  Its lovely having things growing in the winter garden and I think you should be able to graze and browse your garden no matter what month of the year it is.  I still have some winter salad growing and brassicas in my garden.

I think it so important to keep a relationship with your garden no matter what season and that includes eating/grazing from it as many days of the year as possible!

Zapallito de Toscana

I'm growing a fabulous squash in my garden.  It's called Zapallito de Toscana and I got hold of the seeds from Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library.

They were easy to germinate.  Well, easier than the courgette seeds.

They were strong seedlings.  I could tell that they would be feisty growers!

I planted these two seedlings out into their final planters with a courgette plant.

They are the perfect squash for a small garden as they grow in a bush style rather than the squash that like to crawl all over your garden.  They just need a decent depth of soil (like the planter in the picture).  They also would grow very well in potato planters.  Anything which allows them a good depth for their root run.

They are hungry feeders with a good appetite for water too.  Give them water whenever its not raining and feed them once a week with the richest feed you have (I feed mine with worm tea from my wormery) and in return they will reward you with many squashes.

One of the major benefits of this squash is even if you have a glut, you don't need to eat them or cook them all up at once as you would courgettes.  As they grow bigger they form a hard skin which means they can be stored and eaten into Autumn.

Another benefit is, when harvested they will have grown their seeds to a large enough size to be able to save them.  Just be sure to pollinate the fruit yourself to ensure the seeds are actually a Zapallito de Toscana.  In order to do this, I check the flowers at breakfast time and have a look for any open female flowers.  Once I've found one I hunt for an open male flower from the same plant or exactly the same variety, in this case another Zapallito de Toscana.  I pick the male flower and remove all the petals.  I brush the stamen (the male sex part of the flower) over the stigma (the female sex part of the flower) and then leave the stamen inside the female flower.  I then use an elastic band to shut the female flower to ensure no pollinating insects can get into the flower.  Once the flower starts to die away I move the elastic band on to the base of the fruit so that I can identify a fruit that I have pollinated.

The benefit of pollinating a squash plant is that it will ensure that the seeds you save will produce the squash you want.  Squashes cross pollinate very easily and you will probably get a mix of all the squashes with open flowers on a given morning being grown in your street or allotment.  You can never be sure what you will get.  Although, the experimenter in me would like to grow one of these insect pollinated ones just to see what I would get!  





So there you have it... Zapallito de Toscana...

1.  Great for a small patio garden due to its bush growing habit
2.  Grows fruits that can be eaten straight away or stored for later use
3.  Easy to save seed from (once pollinated by a gardener)
 
Squash recipes:
Courgette Humus
Good Summer Roast

More squash inspired garden blogs:
Gem Squash, the intrepid explorer
Passion for growning cucurbits

Passion for growing cucurbits

Every year I fall in love with my cucurbits all over again.  I've been growing 

them every year for the past 7 years.

I was living in Brixton in a shared house when my next door neighbour gave me 

some spare courgette seedlings.  She had noticed that I was out in the garden at 

every opportunity and that I was starting to grow vegetables.  She told me she 

knew they were going to a good home!

At first I tried growing them in a large pot but their leaves started to look a 

little sad so I planted it in the flower border.  It grew these big luscious 

leaves and lots of courgettes and contributed to my very first home grown hangover 

recipe!

In my second year as a courgette grower I grew one fruit that was over half a metre 

long - I know, I know, that's not really a courgette anymore!  It looked very impressive 

but didn't really taste great!!
 

Last year I started experimenting with other cucurbits.  I tried a crook neck squash 

which I sourced from Real Seeds.  They had bigger leaves than the courgette and the 

bright yellow fruit looked amazing.  They also cooked very nicely too.  I fried them 

and roasted them with very tasty results.  I grew them in grow bags and neighbours 

did ask how they were growing in such a small amount of soil but they did.  I think 

I'm quite attentive with lots of watering and feeding which makes them look all the 

more lush!

This year I'm growing 7 cucurbits in the 2 containers in the picture above. I am often

asked how they can grow healthily in such small containers and so close to each other.

But they wouldn't show off their big velvety leaves if they weren't happy.  I keep them

well watered and well fed.  I have a wormery so they have been top dressed with 

vermicompost and get a regular feed of worm tea.  They seem quite happy on this diet! 

I've also heard of them being grown right on top of a compost heap as they are well 

known to be heavy feeders. 

Here's what I am growing this year:

1 courgette (this one's a heavy cropper so I shall surely be saving seed from this one), 

2 French heirloom pattypans, 

2 gem squash (inspired to try by my South African friends) 

and 2 squash Zapallito de Toscana from the Heritage Seed Library. 

All are cropping nicely, although the courgettes are slightly more in the lead.  All 

showing off their huge, luscious velvety big leaves.  And the gem squash have started 

to clamber over my landlords perennial shrubs - ever the opportunists!  How could 

you not love such a gutsy vegetable?

Last weekend, for my Master Gardener in service training, the theme was exotic 

vegetables and they were quite a few new cucurbits to find out about.  That sparked 

some future experimentation like trying shark fin melon, dudi and especialliy the

mouse melon looked very interesting to grow. 

But I fear that it is not a large garden or an allotment I need.... It's a very large field 

with lots of room for all the cucurbits I want to grow!!

Here's some recipe ideas for the squash glut:

Squash Flower Salad

Courgette Humus 

A Good Summer Roast  

An ornamental edible garden

Lately I've been pondering a lot about the ornamental qualities of an edible garden.

It could be my work at the garden centre that has inspired me.

It could be due to planting a few companion flowers in the garden to ward off pests (e.g. calendula and nasturtiums).

It could be recently reading Alys Fowler's book The Thrifty Gardener - I could not help but read this gardening manual cover to cover!  This book inspired me to look at the garden as a combination of a thing of beauty and an edible garden.  Previously, I had always been focussed on growing edibles.  It really got me thinking about combining the two aspects, not just the plants but the containers that the plants live within.

Since then shopping has not been the same - always on the lookout for potential plant containers where ever I go and what ever I consume.  Take a look at what the radishes are growing in, in the picture below.

As well as hunting for potential containers this also led to my sowing a few annual ornamentals which I haven't really done before.  Cosmos was the ornamental flower that crept in - technically speaking the rest of the flowers are recommended companions for an edible garden.

I find rainbow chard with its full leaves and colourful stems always to be visually beautiful as well as very tasty.  Virtues of growing chard

Another vegetable that I have always thought very beautiful are squash.  I grew crookneck summer squash last year and the leaves looked so lush, the flowers and the bright yellow fruit looked amazing. Wonder of germinating squash

This year I have simply been completely bowled over by the beauty of purple pea varieties.  I think their flowers are simply astounding.  The flowers look sweet and no doubt their peas will taste amazing too.  I have never grown these before.  They came in this year's batch of seeds from the Heritage Seed Library called Purple pod.  Just take a look at how it flowers.  Peas please

I had almost forgotten to eat nasturtiums.  I've grown them for the last few years but simply as a fodder for the aphids so that they would leave my more prized edibles alone.

The other day I was gardening at the Bramford Community Garden and one of the other volunteers ate a nasturtium leaf.  The penny dropped - of course, you can eat the leaves! So I picked a nasturtium leaf.  Immediately, I smelt a very evocative smell that reminded me of a smell I knew from my childhood and with that smell I remembered the taste.  I thought why didn't I do this sooner!!  Munched on the leaf and that leaf packed a punch of peppery flavour.  Ever since then, nasturtium leaves have appeared in my daily salad!!  And the leaves and the petals are so beautiful too.

Last week I planted a Globe Artichoke in the Bramford Community Garden for its beautiful tall thistle shaped flower and its multi purpose of being a beautiful and architectural plant as well as an edible.  (Not the one in the picture!)  It is just a baby plant at the moment but I am looking forward to it growing taller than me with loads of beautiful flower heads!

Another thing of beauty is strawberry plants.  They come in a range of flower colours from deep dark pink, to pale pink through to the classic white flowers.  They can be planted in hanging baskets where the ripening fruit can dangle down graciously.

Take a look at these radish flowers. 

If I hadn't neglected the radishes last summer, I would never have seen this beautiful display of white flowers.  Following on from the flowers came the radish pods which were delightfully crunchy in salad (a bit like very small mange tout). 

The garden's starting to look lush again

Lately I've been feeling like the garden's starting to take shape and look like a well populated edible garden again.  Through the winter months I only had chives, rainbow chard, rosemary, sage, garlic and a trough of carrots/parsnips I  planted last spring.  Now as I stroll through my garden having a nose at what's going on its starting to feel... well like I have company again!

The tomatoes are starting to come along

the strawberries are making an appearance (these arrived just last week from bare root stock)

the french beans are climbing away,

the peas are flowering (I really like raw peas!).  I've counted 6 flowers so far and they've grown another foot since my pea blog 10 days ago.

 
the turnips are sprouting,

The pepper plant has lots of flowers.  (I think this is a capsicum judging by the leaves, it just sprouted from some soil and last year I grew both chillies and capsicums)

the tops of the potatoes are huge and look like they want to escape the potato bag I planted them in!

.... it really feels like my edible garden is starting to happen.

I am currently eating chard salads, radishes and making tea from the garden (mint and lemon verbena).  My cooking is being flavoured with chives, basil and coriander.

Every day I water and I look out for anything new - seeds that have sprouted, any new leaves, flower buds, etc.  I like this habit as it also means I spot the pests early and the aphids are enjoying this time in my garden as much as I am - squishing fingers at the ready (I garden organically).

I'm experimenting with turnips for the first time this year.  They came in a lucky dip seed packet from the Heritage Seed Library.  Normally I wouldn't choose them as my parents didn't grow this vegetable on the small holding when I was a child so it just isn't a habit in my family to grow them, but as I had some seed it was too good an opportunity to grow some and try it for myself.

Last week I sowed some Kai Lan seeds.  They came highly recommended by Mark Diacono and are perennial.  I am currently very interested in perennial edibles, especially plants that have ornamental appeal as well as the essential edible appeal.  I am always inspired to try new edibles, but the ornamental factor is inspired by my day job in my local garden centre.  The punters like things that look pretty.  If you have discovered any good perennial edibles lately, please do let me know as I love to experiment.  Even better if they can be grown in pots :)