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Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Category Archives: unusual plants

Forever food

23 Tuesday Feb 2021

Posted by sallynex in climate change, exotic edibles, kitchen garden, permaculture, sustainability, unusual plants

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American groundnuts, Apios americana, artichokes, asparagus, babington's leeks, Chinese artichokes, mashua, perennial crops, perennial kale, perennials, rhubarb, skirret, yacon

Just imagine a veg patch which goes on giving, year after year – no need to resow or plant up each spring, and nothing to clear away in autumn.

All that’s needed is a bit of weeding, maybe some mulch and a little protection from pests – and in return you get armfuls of produce not just this year, but next year too and for many years to come.

Perennial food plants come back again and again, usually getting a little better every year. You’re probably already familiar with some – asparagus, for example, rhubarb and artichokes (both globe and Jerusalem). Fruit trees and bushes are perennial, of course, as well as many herbs including rosemary, thyme and sage.

The big, dahlia-like tubers of frost-tender yacon are sweet enough to eat raw: dig them up to overwinter somewhere frost-free and you’ll have them for years

But there’s also a wide range of lesser-known edible perennial plants which grow perfectly happily in UK gardens and provide you with a permanent supply of day-to-day greens, roots and florets to eat – no resowing required.

Grow perennial veg and you’ll never be short of something to pick. You’ll be doing your bit for the environment, too, as you use much less compost, plastic pots, water and fertiliser when you sow once and grow for years. You’re also leaving your garden soil undisturbed, which is great for locking up carbon; it also allows the complex web of interconnected life underground to thrive, so your soil is healthier and so are your plants. continue reading….

Postcard from Chelsea: New plants

24 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by sallynex in new plants, shows, unusual plants

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new plants, RHS Chelsea Flower Show

The RHS Chelsea Plant of the Year competition, launched in 2010, brings new and genuinely different plants into the light each year, these days attracting dozens of entries from growers all over the Pavilion. Here are the ones that caught my eye this year.

Morus rotundiloba ‘Charlotte Russe’

Winner, RHS Chelsea Plant of the Year 2017

Not the most spectacular of pictures to start with, but then May isn’t the best time to be showing off a new mulberry either. I spotted this one at the Garden Press Event back in February where it was attracting much interest: it is the first genuinely dwarf mulberry bush, small enough to grow in a container and a real breakthrough in small-scale fruit production. It’s even said to fruit in its first year (unlike tree mulberries, which take at least seven).

Rosa ‘Dame Judi Dench’ (‘Ausquaker’)

Meet Judi Dench: one of the five or six new roses which has made it through the rigorous 10-year selection process at David Austin Roses this year. Peachy-apricot, sweetly fragrant, and a little louche in habit: Michael Marriott at David Austin’s says they could be amenable to training as a climber, too.

Lewisia longipetala ‘Little Snowberry’

A truly lovely lewisia from alpine specialists D’Arcy & Everest, delicate, pretty, dainty, and carefully selected for the purity of colour of its flowers and for its robustness.

Lilium ‘Sunset Joy’

 I found this one bursting from containers on the Horticultural Trades Association stand – actually, you couldn’t miss it. Asiatic lilies are usually single colours but this one is a bicolour: it’s also a compact and vigorous little thing, great for summer patios.

Digitalis ‘Lemoncello’


Another chance discovery among foxgloves in the National Collection at the Botanic Nursery in Wiltshire: yellow foxgloves are rare, and this is a particularly interesting shade of lemony, limey yellow which looks lovely among brighter shades. It’s also quite compact, so could be a good one for containers.

Corydalis ‘Porcelain Blue’

There were mixed reactions to this little plant, tucked into the side of the Hilliers exhibit. But I liked it, especially that pretty bicoloured effect as flowers open blue and fade to white with age.

Clematis ‘Taiga’

I am usually a little wary of brightly-coloured clematis, but this one had something. The flower matures from spiky to rosette, then opens fully into a full double, each purple petal tipped with white like a little icicle.

Sweet pepper ‘Popti’

I am possibly a little biased here as I’m always on the lookout for new veg varieties coming onto the market. But this little bell pepper on the Pennard Plants stand did turn my head: it’s a bushy plant but still compact, and covered with peppers, unusually for a pot-grown plant. It’s disease-resistant and early-ripening, too.

Pelargonium ‘Rushmoor Amazon’

Well, who knew. A yellow pelargonium. And what a pretty one, too. This is the result of 30 years of breeding in Australia, the first in a series to be known as the Rushmoor River Series. Its habit is so different it’s even invented a new type of pelargonium, the Zonartic pelargonium, with big, open flowers and that delicate yellow colouring, this one just brushed with a smidge of pale pink. I loved it.

Malvern magic

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by sallynex in design, shows, unusual plants

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garden design, Malvern, peonies, RHS Malvern Flower Show

malvern1A happy day yesterday pottering among the plants at the RHS Spring Festival at Malvern. This is one of the most low-key of flower shows, rarely talked about yet hiding treasures at its heart. Not least of which is one of the very best floral marquees of them all: for my money, second only to the marquee at Chelsea in terms of quality, quantity and sheer wow factor. I never tire of it.

By the time I left I was three scented-leaf geraniums, three salvias, a solar-powered irrigation system and a lot of large bamboo plant labels the heavier. All of which, no doubt, more later. But since I also had a camera loaded with pics I thought I would resurrect an old Constant Gardener tradition, last seen in 2012, and dish out a few gongs for the bits of the show that I thought were worth singling out for special attention.

Best Use of a Borrowed Landscape
At One With… A Meditation Garden (Gold and Best in Show)

malvern_borrowedview
Head and shoulders above the rest, and a shoo-in for Best in Show, Peter Dowle’s garden was a study in how to transport you to another place using plants, water and very, very clever design. Not least of which was nicking the grandeur of the Malvern Hills to make your acers look like they’re at one with the landscape.

Best Use of Recycled Materials
Team AK’s Grand Day Out, Ashton Keynes CofE Primary School, Wiltshire (Highly Commended)

malvern_recycledbottles
I adore the school gardens at Malvern: they never fail to provide new ideas. I think it’s something to do with the way that kids see the world differently – and that includes gardens. Loved this painted bottle path edging – it just made me smile.

Best Wildflower Planting
The Refuge (Gold)

malvern_wildplanting
Ragged robin and corn poppies in a sublime little mini-meadow on Sue Jollan’s garden for Help Refugees UK.

Wall of the Year
Buckfast Abbey Millennium Garden (Silver)

malvern_wall
How lovely this garden was. Dominated by a delicate wire sculpture of a deer drinking, it combined gentle, airy planting with green oak arches – infilled at the base with cut logs to make a wall which combines natural beauty and elegance.
Highly Commended:
Molecular Garden (Gold)
malvern_wallart
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best: this wooden wall art transformed a stretch of render in the winning garden in the Spa Gardens category, by visiting designers Denis Kalashnikov and Ekaterina Bolotova, on an exchange from the Moscow Flower Show.

Garden Furniture I Most Wanted To Take Home
Ocean Garden (Bronze)

malvern_furniture
Colour… and comfort. Love it.

Funkiest Sculpture of the Year 2017
Nik Burns

malvern_sculpture
Garden grunge at its best. Loved this chap right down to the bulb. Now that’s what I call garden lighting.

Plant of the Show 2017
Peonies

malvern_peonies
They were everywhere: breathtaking, blowsy, beautiful. I particularly liked that the ravishing display on Primrose Hall Nursery’s stand was staged close enough for you to be able to smell the blooms and work out which are as perfumed as they say they are. I will be filling my garden with la Duchesse de Nemours forthwith.


Most Astonishing Stem Colour
Acer palmatum “Sango-kaku” (Staddon Farm Nurseries, Gold)

malvern_acer
Extraordinary: and those lime green leaves just popped against the stems.

Plant That Most Resembled a Pillow
Scleranthus biflorus (D’Arcy & Everest, Silver Gilt)

malvern_weirdplant
Hands down the weirdest plant in the marquee. I had to look twice before I realised it even was a plant. Then all I really wanted to do was lay my head down on it and go to sleep.

The “Why? Oh Why?” Wooden Spoon Award for 2017
Bubble Drops (Spa Garden, Bronze)

malvern_rubbishgarden
It had one slightly lonely-looking plant in it. In a pot. ‘Nuff said.

A new acquaintance

05 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by sallynex in chicken garden, unusual plants

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Clerodendron, Clerodendron trichotomum, Highdown, small trees, summer-flowering trees

IMG_4060
The thing I love most about gardening is that no matter how long you’ve been doing it, even if you’ve made it your life for the last 20 years as I have, you are never an ‘expert’; there is always someone, somewhere who knows much, much more than you. That means the learning never stops: there’s still new stuff to find out about, new techniques to try, and best of all new plants to get to know. It is never, ever boring.

So one of the big highlights for me this summer has been making the acquaintance of a plant I’ve never met before. I came across it en masse in the garden at Highdown in Sussex – incidentally, a wonderful example of how a garden run by the local council (in this case, Worthing Borough Council) should be. The whole thing is a National Collection, nestled in the side of a chalk quarry, with delights around every corner. And it’s free. Talk about breaking the mould.

Anyway, down in the bottom of the valley was a sea of little trees, each smothered in delicate white blossoms set off to perfection by cerise-pink sepals. The scent was intoxicating: it filled the air with a sweet, almost lilac-like perfume, heady and exhilarating. I had no idea what it was, so went off to find an obliging gardener (of which there are many at Highdown). And she informed me it was a Clerodendron.

In this case, I’ve later discovered, C. trichotomum, a summer-flowering and slightly tender shrub-or-small-tree. It can’t be that tender if it grows in such profusion on the South Downs, which I know, having spent a childhood there, is prone to a vicious frost from time to time – though admittedly these were in a very sheltered valley.

IMG_4061

Those white flowers are followed by fat, glossy turquoise berries that persist through autumn, again contrasted against those brilliantly colourful sepals.

As it happens, in one of those odd coïncidences, I realised on coming home that I had already come across this tree – I just didn’t realise it. Last year I was hacking back an overgrown bit of shrubbery in the chicken garden (more properly known as The Beeches B&B) which I look after not far from here, and pruned back a lilac off a neat little tree I couldn’t identify. It hadn’t flowered, but then not much would if smothered by a large lilac branch.

But when I went back to the garden only a week or so after returning from Highdown, the little tree had burst into flower in celebration of its release: and yes, dear reader, you have probably already guessed, I recognised it straight away as C. trichotomum.

IMG_4062

It is really a very elegant little tree: the ones I saw in Highdown and at the garden at The Beeches are no more than about 10ft or so tall. It has a nice neat umbrella shape about it, and the leaves are held in pleasing little rosettes. Altogether a thing of beauty. Its only slight drawback is that it does sucker rather a lot – which explains the size of the thicket at Highdown – so when it’s happy you do have to keep on top of it. But that’s a small price to pay for a thing so lovely.

 

Guernsey, Garden Isle #5: Of Guernsey lilies

17 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by sallynex in overseas gardens, unusual plants

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guernsey, National Collection, Nerine sarniensis, nerines, plant conservation, Plant Heritage

Membership form photo 2016

Sarniensis nerines at the Plant Heritage Nerine Festival

I was in Guernsey at the invitation of the local branch of Plant Heritage – one of those relatively low-profile charities beavering away behind the scenes doing the kind of work you only realise has been done when you come across some dreadful situation they have averted. In PH’s case, that almost always means some wonderful variety of hardy chrysanthemum, or pulmonaria, or hemerocallis or hebe which everyone’s suddenly talking about yet it emerges only survives because a PH volunteer has lovingly kept it alive, properly identified and labelled, in their back garden. It’s a bit like the Heritage Seed Library, but for garden plants.

I’ve been a Plant Heritage (formerly NCCPG) member for many, many years and indeed was on the committee of the Surrey Group in my day – so I have first-hand knowledge of the extraordinary, and largely unsung work they do in keeping hundreds of cultivated garden plants in circulation which would otherwise have been lost to us.

707

A mystery in pink: the as-yet unidentified N. sarniensis 707

They do this largely through the National Collections. These are held wherever there is space for them: in the homes of amateur gardeners, big public gardens like RHS Wisley, or in this case a spare glasshouse rented from Guernsey Clematis.

Actually, this is a nearly-National Collection: since 1993 members of PH Guernsey have been tracking down cultivars, common and then increasingly rare, of the wonderful Guernsey lily and bringing them together, documenting them to PH’s painstaking standards of record-keeping, in the hope (well-founded) of registering them as a bona fide National Collection.

Hanley Castle-001

N. sarniensis ‘Hanley Castle’

These aren’t just any Guernsey lilies, either. You are probably familiar with Nerine x bowdenii, lipstick pink stalwart of the dry, rocky, sunny corner by the house where nothing else will grow. That, to be quite honest with you, is a bruiser by comparison with the Rudolph Nureyev elegance of N. sarniensis: an exquisite confection of dainty petals held just so above a tall, elegantly swaying yet wiry stem.

I have one at home, N. s. ‘Blanchefleur’; I have raved about it before on this very blog. It is one of the few plants in my garden which is neither edible nor particularly useful: but it is exceptionally beautiful, the kind of beauty that makes you gasp every time you see it. Sarniensis nerines (named for Guernsey’s ancient title, Sarnia, although originally South African) have the extraordinary ability to reflect light from their petals, making them gleam and sparkle – a phenomenon the Victorians called gold (or silver) dusting. They make you do a double-take every time the winter sun hits them.

Hotspur-001

N. sarniensis ‘Hotspur’

And that’s when they flower: in winter, or nearly. Mine starts in late October and is usually still going in December (this year, it being so mild, it only finished in February). They have to stay indoors, as they’re frost tender: I keep mine in pride of place in the greenhouse, but I used to keep it on a bright windowsill and it was fine there, too.

‘Blanchefleur’ is considered among the easier of sarniensis varieties to grow (that explains why it’s so tolerant of me, then). But having now seen what else is out there I think I will have to start my own collection. Breeders like Ken Hall, on the Isle of Wight, and the de Rothschild family have produced some bewitching hybrids: there’s vermilion ‘Major’, ‘Wolsey’ in deep red with a gold dusting, ‘Springbank Elizabeth’ in soft pink and var. corusco in brick red.

sarniensis corusco major

Nerine sarniensis var corusco major

The Guernsey PH collection opens the selection even wider as of course many they grow are down to their last half-dozen plants: you won’t find these in the shops. ‘Hotspur’ looks sumptuous, the colour of well-hung beef: I might try to see if I can blag an offcut, perhaps at PH Guernsey’s annual Nerine Festival, held at Candie Gardens (itself an exceptionally lovely old 18th century greenhouse) each October. This year it’s the 8th till the 22nd: I may have to find an urgent reason to visit the Channel Islands again around that time.

Lavant

N. sarniensis ‘Lavant’

Neglect is the key, I find: once mine has finished flowering I water it until the foliage dies down, then bung it in a corner of the greenhouse and more or less forget about it till autumn. I let it very nearly dry out: not totally, or the bulb would shrivel, but enough that the soil feels quite dusty.

Then in late summer I bring it outdoors to feel the rain on its face and away it goes. I rarely repot it – like closely-related agapanthus, it prefers to be potbound. It seems odd that anything quite this lovely should withstand such offhand treatment, but there it is. It does mean terminally forgetful and distracted gardeners like me can share in that stop-in-your-tracks moment when the first blooms open. And for that alone, everyone should grow more of them.

My thanks to Plant Heritage Guernsey for allowing me to use a selection from their gorgeous collection of photos, and more generally for having been the perfect hosts. I hope to see you all again soon – if only to persuade you to part with one of those Hotspur nerines….!

Planting witchetty grubs

10 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by sallynex in exotic edibles, unusual plants

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Chinese artichokes, crosnes, exotic vegetables, planting, sowing, spring, Stachys affinis

IMG_3396

Not much gardening going on yesterday: it was blowing a hooley again and though it wasn’t exactly raining hard, what there was flew at you horizontally on the wind like needles. I am an unashamedly fair weather gardener: I don’t see the point of turning your garden into a muddy slurry pit under your feet and mashing your soil into a sodden pulp just so you can say you’ve been gardening in the rain. Good job I don’t work in a Proper Garden where they can make me go outside even if I don’t want to. Anyway: on days like yesterday, I beat a dignified retreat and spend the day at my desk.

Today though was a different story: lovely sunshine, a balmy breeze and everything was drying out nicely. Time to do a bit more sowing: the first peas and broad beans are already in the cold frame hardening off, and the next batch of mangetouts are now cooking nicely in my 15°C propagator.

I’m not quite venturing outside yet: the soil is still chilly to the touch and we’re regularly slumping to zero at night so direct sowing is still a few weeks off yet. That’s not to say you can’t plant, though.

The above curious little witchetty grub lookalikes are a new venture for me this year. These are Chinese artichokes, crosnes, or Stachys affinis: take your pick. Whatever you call them, they’re hardy so you can plant them direct outside whenever you want – unlike my other exotic veg (mashua, oca, yacon) which are still confined to the frost-free greenhouse. So I’m going to give them a go.

I’ve planted them in a patch by the pond in the exotic edibles garden. It’s a little triangle that’s quite nicely confined, having a stone wall on two sides and the pond across the third. The reason for the fencing is that these are veg with ambitions: they will multiply and spread, even if you eat lots of them, and while it’s never a bad thing to have a lot of anything edible it can be a pain if they’re anywhere near other plants (see Jerusalem artichokes and mint, to which Chinese artichokes are related).

They were easy enough to plant: bury on their sides about 5cm deep, and around 15cm apart (not that it matters too much as they’ll soon form a dense mat). They look like deadnettle once they’re up, so I may have to liven them up with a few flowers or this is going to be a dull little corner indeed.

You harvest them from about October. Cleaning is a bit of a faff: it’s easier if you grow them in lighter soils, but in heavy soils you’ll need a bit of elbow grease and a nailbrush. There’s no need to peel. They have a crunch like water chestnuts and a delicate artichoke flavour. Sounds great. I shall report back.

Heritage days

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by sallynex in exotic edibles, kitchen garden, seeds, unusual plants

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garden organic, Heritage Seed Library, heritage vegetables

heritagepotatoes

Variety is the spice of life: potatoes at the 2015 Chelsea Flower Show

Now here’s an exciting early Christmas present. Just chosen my six varieties from the Heritage Seed Library’s catalogue, which plopped into my email inbox on the first day of this month – about the most eagerly anticipated bit of virtual mail I’ve had for a long time.

The HSL is a fine institution, dedicated to preserving some of our oldest (and more recently most unusual) vegetables.

Heritage veg are increasingly finding their way into catalogues, and all sorts of things are making something of a comeback, from red-flowered broad beans to Telephone peas, baby ‘finger’ carrots and Lazy Housewife beans.

But the HSL deals with the extreme end of heritage: those varieties which have been passed on from father to son and mother to daughter, kept in packets in the back of sheds, collected again at the end of the season and resown the next.

pea_magnumbonum

Pea ‘Magnum Bonum’

True heirlooms, in other words, often passed on only to neighbours in a scruffy brown envelope without a second thought, the owner barely aware of what a little nugget of unique history they have in their guardianship. Many of these hand-me-down varieties are balanced precariously on the knife-edge of existence, the only ones left of their kind.

It’s these rarities which the HSL preserves in the interest of maintaining the diversity – genetic and general – of the vegetables we grow. Without them we’d all be condemned to circling around an ever-dwindling handful of veg approved by the supermarkets for uniformity, ease of mechanical picking and reliability. And where’s the fun in that?

The HSL is not allowed to sell its seed: they don’t conform to EU rules because their inherent variability means they can’t pass the tests on distinctiveness, uniformity and stability. That means they can’t be listed on the National List of approved vegetable cultivars: so they can’t be sold.

The get-around for this has been simply to make HSL a charity, and give away six packets of seed to each member in return for the membership fee. Heritage varieties preserved; interesting varieties spread around more gardens; members happy. Simples!

So here are the six varieties I’m going to be growing next year. None of them I’ve ever grown before: all are hug-yourself exciting for different reasons. Can’t wait!

Asparagus kale: I’ve grown this one before, actually, but it never quite made it to the asparagus stage so I’m having another go. The plant grows just like kale, then in spring – just in time for the hungry gap – sends up delicious flower spikes which you eat just like broccoli. So it’s a dual-purpose veg really: my favourite kind.

Lablab bean ‘Vasu’s 30 Day Dwarf Papri’: Last time I grew lablab it was gorgeous but never made it to podding stage (flowers were lovely though). My conclusion was it needs more heat and light then we can give it here in the UK: but this one is said to get to flowering stage in 30 days, so I’m giving it another try.

Lettuce ‘Soulie’: I’m always up for a new variety of lettuce, and this has many things going for it. It’s French: tick. A cos variety; tick. Slow to bolt: tick. And it even has a red tinge to the leaves so the slugs should leave it alone. Sounds great.

Pea ‘Magnum Bonum’: I first saw this tall pea in a polytunnel at Knightshayes in Devon and have wanted to grow it ever since. It’s got the huge yields of all tall peas and the pods are said to stay well on the plant too.

Shark Fin Melon ‘Joe Dalgleish’: oooh shark fin melons… no idea what they taste like, no idea what to do with them, but anything that produces a triffid-like plant of stems 2m plus and massive watermelon-sized fruits has to be worth a go.

Squash ‘Sucrette’: good job I’ve got quite a big garden as this one’s a monster too. Huge yellow squashes with warty skins, weighing in at about 1kg each. And it’s French, so should have a good flavour too.

 

 

 

 

Nature’s own weedkiller

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in Gardens of Somerset, kitchen garden, new plants, unusual plants

≈ 4 Comments

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bindweed, biological controls, couch grass, ground elder, Mexican marigold, Tagetes minuta, Tyntesfield, weedkillers, weeds

tagetesminutaBefore we leave the veg garden at Tyntesfield, I thought I’d just share this bit of veg-growing geekery: just to demonstrate that it’s not only computer whizzes who get unfeasibly excited at obscure things that mean nothing to anyone else, this little patch of 1.5m high nondescript greenery had me jigging on the spot and getting quietly quite worked up while all around me were just wondering what the heck it was there for and hurrying past to have a look at the pretty orange pumpkins.

This is Tagetes minuta: aka the Mexican marigold. It’s a giant of a thing, well over head height. Unlike other tagetes, its flowers aren’t much to write home about either being small, yellow and nondescript: like ‘an impoverished pale yellow groundsel’ as Chiltern Seeds, one of the few who stock the seed, describe it.

But this in veg-gardening terms is the Hadron Collider of weed control. Totally cutting edge, and the very latest thing.

You see, it’s an allelopath: which is to say it emits powerful chemicals from its roots which inhibit the growth and indeed eventually kill any plants which dare to try and grow nearby.

Great Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest strategy: and coincidentally an effective poison against bindweed, couch grass and ground elder. I haven’t heard whether it tackles mares tail too.

Of course you can’t plant anything else while this natural weedkiller is growing: but if you have an area to clear sow it with Mexican marigold and it’s supposed to be a very effective way of doing it. Certainly better than the usual black plastic (which just makes the roots come to the surface in my experience: you still have to weed them out in the usual way and then they break and come back… you know the drill).

The reason I was getting so excited is because this is the first time I have seen it in action, properly growing in the ground. I don’t have an area in my own garden I can clear to give this a try (despite having the bindweed problem from hell) so I was delighted to find Tyntesfield’s gardeners are carrying out the experiment for me.

They won’t know results until the middle of next year: this has been growing in this patch all this summer and so we’ll have to wait till spring next year to see if the bindweed comes back. I will give them a ring in six months or so and find out how they got on. Watch this space.

 

Hey, look at my stash!

04 Tuesday Jan 2011

Posted by sallynex in unusual plants

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

seed swaps, vegetables

Now of all my Christmas presents, the ones which most fired up my imagination were the series of intriguing little packets which dropped through my door one by one in the week or so leading up to the Big Day.

These are the contents of my Seedy Stocking Stuffers: a wizard wheeze dreamt up by Emma and taken up with enthusiasm by fellow veg-growing addicts Andy, Charlotte, Liz and Ali, as well as myself.

I did find myself rather humbled by the result: I save a little seed, but not that much, and blithely signed up before realising that actually, the contents of my seed packet shoebox weren’t quite as inspiring as they ought to be.

I did manage to send out some rather lovely beans I saved: blue (‘Kew Blue’), purple (‘Cosse Violette’) and brown (‘Coco’)as well as bog-standard green. But mostly, I didn’t come anywhere close to the delights I received in the post: so here’s a public thank you to all those who have given me the chance to try so many plants I’ve been wanting to grow for ages, and a sorry for fobbing you off with less interesting fare.

So from my box of treasures, here are the ones I shall most look forward to growing this year:

For my herb garden, I have some orach ‘Magenta Magic’ from Ali and some red and green perilla from Charlotte: the large French sorrel (also from Charlotte) should cope (and indeed spread like mad) on the shady side of the herb patch and look suitably handsome, too.

My tropical edibles garden has suddenly taken shape in a way it was struggling to do before: I can’t wait to get my Achocha ‘Fat Baby’ in the ground (thanks Ali and Charlotte, again) and – yay!! – at last I have some oca tubers to sow (thank you Emma!) though I have to somehow prevent them rotting off before I get them in the ground. I may just plonk them in a pot in the (heated) greenhouse for now as otherwise I think they’ll all be goners. Plus the giant sunflowers are making a comeback: I now have a pack of ‘Russian Giant’ from Liz. Tape measures at the ready!

And for the veg garden: can’t wait to sow the 5ft high climbing pea ‘Telephone’ – Liz and Ali, and possibly another candidate for the tape measure – and my tomato needs are very nearly taken care of too, what with the plum tomato ‘Scatolone’ (Liz), good old ‘Gardeners’ Delight’ (Andy) and ‘Sweet Pea Currant’ (Charlotte): tiny, delicious, and worth growing just for the name.

Of those plants I’ve never even thought about growing, I shall watch the ‘Potimarron’ squash (Ali) with fascination as it gallops around my plot; Italian capers (Emma) are a new one on me and I have no idea what to expect; and sea beet (Emma) I’m pretty sure I’ve picked wild on the seashore in my youth but never actually tried to grow.

Well who would have thought it. It’s still only January and I have a list as long as my arm of delicious things to fill my garden. I have a feeling it’s going to be a good year!

And now for something completely different

02 Tuesday Feb 2010

Posted by sallynex in unusual plants

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Edulis, yacon

Look what I got my hands on at the weekend!

I’ve been trying to track down one of these for years. I’ve put my name on waiting lists, sent hopeful emails to likely friends, even posted messages on message boards, but to no avail.

They say it’s when you’re not looking for something that – ping! – it shows up, and so it has turned out with my yacon crown, which I found while at the 12th Annual Hampshire Potato Day on Saturday at Whitchurch, near Andover. I’ve gone on about this at greater length on t’other blog I write for crocus.co.uk, as it was a revelation: I never knew so many potatoes existed in the world.

But potatoes weren’t the whole story, and there were some fantastic nurseries in attendance too: Pennard Plants whose collections of heritage vegetable seeds I’d already admired last year at the Wisley Flower Show, and Edulis, possibly my favourite nursery of all time. This is because they specialise in unusual edible plants: I’ve seen them at many shows and plant fairs before and every time I’ve found myself in raptures over their plants (and usually laden with carrier bags before I can tear myself away).

My eye was caught by a little tray of bright orangey-pink oca, another vegetable I’ve been wanting to grow for ages and haven’t seen anywhere else. While I was dithering over that, the lady next to me asked what the big yam-like tuber behind them was (being observant, I hadn’t actually noticed them despite the fact that they were at least a foot long).

“They’re yacon,” the man said. At which I suddenly started jabbering away at him in a state of extreme over-excitement, the lady previously mentioned backed away cautiously and my kids (who have previous experience of these outbursts of mine) went off to hide under a nearby table.

The man turned out to be Paul Barney, the lovely and very kind owner of Edulis who clearly knows an obsessive when he sees one. He reached down and produced a big yacon crown he’d been hiding in a plastic bag on the floor. He said it was his last one, but never mind, he cut me off a big chunk anyway (I do like gardeners) and I skipped off with a grin on my face like the cat who got the cream.

Now I’ve got to figure out what to do with it. Paul said there’s enough there to allow me to split it still further if I want to, but as a yacon novice I don’t think I’ll dare try that until next year. So for now I’m potting it up and keeping it on the dry side in the frost-free greenhouse before starting it into growth at about the same time as my dahlias (which it very closely resembles, only about six times the size). And then… well, let’s cross that particular bridge when we get to it. For now, I’m just happy my search is over.

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