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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: heritage vegetables

Life in the greenhouse: August

21 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by sallynex in exotic edibles, greenhouse, kitchen garden

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aji chillies, aubergines, chillies, cucamelons, cucumbers, green peppers, heritage tomatoes, heritage vegetables, life in the greenhouse, overwintering chillies, tomatoes

IMG_4025

Summertime… and the watering is endless….

Every day I am to be found in the greenhouses behind a hose – possibly my least favourite job in the garden. Ah well, I can’t be doing the fun stuff all the time.

It’s a good time, though, to take time just standing and looking at my plants (after all, there’s not much else you can do). Stand staring for a while and you’ll spot that early outbreak of aphids, or the yellow mottling that signals the start of red spider mite. And the earlier you spot trouble, the sooner you can head it off.

In this greenhouse – the cucumber greenhouse this year, which means there are also cucamelons, peppers and an aubergine or two in here, plus an almost-finished pot of mixed salad which really needs to go outdoors – I’ve also been peering at the weed seedlings and noticicing that several are actually self-seeded French marigolds, left over from last year when I underplanted the tomatoes in here with them.

This is very gratifying, as it means a) my tardiness with the weeding has paid off and b) French marigolds can self seed – who knew?! Saves me a lot of time faffing about with seed trays and propagators – all I have to do is leave the heads on to set seed and I’m done.

IMG_4026 The cucumbers are in full production now: and that means I’m in the middle of my annual cucumber glut. I’m picking one or two a day at the moment, far more than we can possibly eat. The plan is to slice and pickle them instead of gherkins (which have – again – been an abject failure this year): must find a recipe.

IMG_4027
And in Greenhouse no. 2 the tomatoes are at last really getting going: I planted them out far too late this year after getting distracted just when I should have been clearing the shelving, late-sown seedlings and containers out, so they hung around in pots much longer than they should have. Just green fruits so far but all looking promising.

These are heritage varieties, and rather special ones at that: they’re from a little packet of treasure sent me by the chap who looks after the 103-variety-strong heritage tomato collection at Knightshayes in Devon. On the right are ‘White Beauty’, aka ‘Snowball’ – a hefty white beefsteak; on the left, ‘Sutton’s Everyday’ which sound nice and reliable; and at the end ‘Jersey Sunrise’ which I’m promised offers exceptional flavour. There are about a dozen other varieties in the package I’m intending to work my way through over the next few years.

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And I couldn’t possibly sign off without mentioning the newest arrival in this side. Over winter I lost my beloved rocoto chilli – it was coming into its fourth year, and last year was so vigorous and enormous it hit the ceiling of the greenhouse and I needed to construct a support frame for it out of 2×1 roofing battens to stop it muscling out the plants around it. Covered in lipstick-scarlet fruits, so many I gave them to family and friends and still had bags left over in the freezer, it was my pride and joy.

I hadn’t done anything particularly different from the previous three years, so I’m thinking that rocotos (also known as tree chillies) are actually just naturally short-lived and don’t last much longer than three or four years.

Anyway, there’s no problem that doesn’t also offer an opportunity: so I took the chance to ring the changes and try another chilli you’re supposed to be able to overwinter. Introducing my Aji chilli: aka Capsicum baccatum and another of the slightly hardier, earlier fruiting varieties. This one has yellow fruits, much more like cayenne types in that they’re thin-skinned, so I should be able to dry them (unlike rocotos which are too fleshy) and also not quite as hot as the tongue-blistering fruits on my lost plant.

As before, I’ve planted it in the greenhouse border; as before, I’m expecting it to reach a spectacular height and generally become a bit of a talking point. Watch this space!

Guernsey, Garden Isle #4: Of Victoriana

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by sallynex in garden history, greenhouse, kitchen garden, overseas gardens

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

community gardens, guernsey, Heritage Seed Library, heritage varieties, heritage vegetables, Saumarez, Victorian vegetables, Victorians, volunteers, walled gardens

guernsey_walledgarden_wideview

View down the main path, with espaliered fruit trees to right and left

You knew it wouldn’t be long before I got back to the food. My visit to Guernsey wouldn’t be complete without a look at its fine walled kitchen garden at Saumarez Park: a classic piece of Victoriana currently being lovingly restored by a team of 40 dedicated volunteers.

The Victorians knew what they were about when they enclosed great swathes of their gardens with high brick walls and created the classic kitchen garden. It creates an instant microclimate: the walls act like storage heaters for trained peaches, apples and pears, and the soil, enclosed neatly with paths, is easily tended. The whole becomes a workmanlike, industrious place of abundance, where veg production is the pinnacle of achievement: enclosing an area of the garden for one purpose and one purpose only does seem to focus the mind.

guernsey_walledgarden_thyme

I loved the way carpets of thyme covered the ground at the feet of the espaliers in soft hummocks

Of course in the days of the then Baron de Saumarez (there is still a Baron de Saumarez but the States of Guernsey own the manor nowadays) there was enough money washing around to have a huge staff of proud gardeners, deputy head gardener, head gardener, the lot – most of them working just in the kitchen gardens. De Saumarez fought with Nelson, won the Battle of Algeciras for him (nope, me neither) and made a fortune from naval spoils. He returned home and married another fortune in heiress Martha le Merchant whose family owned what’s now Saumarez Park. They were, to cut a long story short, rolling in it.

Anyway, those were the days: now the States of Guernsey own the park and its walled kitchen garden, and the ‘staff’ is down to a few dozen volunteers led by the redoubtable (and great fun) Ivan le Tissier and head gardener Jill Tetlaw.

guernsey_walledgarden_greenhouses

The 170ft span of beautifully restored Victorian greenhouses

Between them, since 2006, they have restored three magnificent but tumbledown glasshouses spanning 170ft, once used to produce Guernsey’s commercial crop of grapes. They’ve also cleared a mountain of propagation equipment left behind by the council’s parks department, and set out metre after metre of hoggin path edged with cobbles set in cement. And in between all that they had to set up a whole organisation to do it, the Guernsey Botanical Trust; Raymond Evison, of clematis fame, was a founder member and a driving force behind the project.

And they’re still going: they’ve just uncovered an old underground boiler set 15ft below ground level into the greenhouse wall. They’re still trying to figure out why it was put there, and solve mysteries like why it’s so clean it obviously hasn’t ever been used.

guernsey_walledgarden_ventilation

These are ventilation shutters, a feature I’ve never seen before in a Victorian greenhouse like this one: they go through the wall to the outside and you winch them open to let the air out and cool the greenhouse on hot days.

The whole place is spick and span: perfectly trimmed espaliers and soft fruit, and a greenhouse bursting with new seedlings on my visit. Inside the greenhouse is all the equipment needed for raising grapes – including a kind of lie-on ladder which hung just below the glass on runners, parallel with the vines, where a gardener would lie facing upwards to do the pruning and training. Hot work, I’d imagine. They grew ‘Cannon Hall’ here, a Muscat grape grown widely in Guernsey in the days of commercial grape production, that is by all accounts as sweet as a lychee. The volunteers plan to re-plant six vines this year, as well as reinstating the ladder.

Out in the garden they are sticking to Victorian cultivars, as far as possible those grown on Guernsey and all painstakingly researched. Among the pears are Chaumontels, a Guernsey variety described in Mawe and Abercrombie’s ‘Universal Gardener’ as having a ‘melting… very rich, delicious flavour’ which sounds promising.

Other detective hunts haven’t been quite so rewarding: a search for ‘Golden Queen’ raspberries that volunteers finally tracked down to a Swedish seed bank has proved spindly, weak and rather unsatisfactory to grow. You can’t win them all: and sometimes there’s a reason why heritage varieties went out of cultivation.

guernsey_walledgarden_seedtrays

This year’s crops on their way and growing fast

They now have some 300 varieties of vegetable, herb and cutting flower, as well as an oriental veg garden (a nod to the 4th Baron de Saumarez who spent some time in Japan). Some, like the parsnip ‘Guernsey Demi-Longue’ are thought to grow nowhere else – one for the Heritage Seed Library, perhaps. All the produce is sold at the gate and in the cafe at the manor house.

It’s a model example of how this kind of project should be: driven by knowledgeable, skilled people whose enthusiasm, genuine interest – bordering on obsession – and deep devotion to the project seems to know no end. I came away filled with admiration. If ever there was a garden which captures the spirit of the people which created it, this is it.

Heritage days

03 Thursday Dec 2015

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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.

 

 

 

 

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