…makes a lot of juice

Apple Day at Barrington Court

Growing apples is a dangerous habit, you know. You start with one tree: perhaps a few Bramleys at the bottom of the garden, like I had at my previous house, or the pretty little ‘Devonshire Quarrenden’ I inherited with this garden.

Then you think, well, it’s all very well having cookers, or early varieties – but I’d like a few late dessert apples to store. And maybe a heritage variety or two. Then you need a few pollinators to go with them, and before you know it, you’ve grown an orchard.

If you’ve ever tried to eat your way through even one tree’s worth of apples, you’ll know that unless you find some very good ideas for storing the things pretty quickly, you’re going to disappear under an avalanche of tasty and healthy fruit. If you want an idea of just how large an avalanche we’re talking about: a small, healthy, mature tree at full production will give you around 100lbs of apples a year; a large tree produces up to 500lbs.

Of course, you can store them quite happily for eating over winter: but even that will only take care of a tree’s worth or so (a garden shed can only hold so many apple crates, after all). I came across a better idea at Barrington Court’s Apple Day the other week, where they were making industrial quantities of apple juice.

You can make small quantities of apple juice quite easily – there’s a great recipe here from VP which doesn’t require any special equipment. But if we’re talking orchards, we’re on a scale which demands juicers and apple presses: and there were several, of every conceivable shape and size, on display at Barrington.

With one tree or so you could get away with a small juicer (a quick google reveals more designs than you ever thought possible). But let’s not stint here. Let’s go the whole hog. I am thinking apple presses.

There was a fabulous one at Barrington, churning out juice from the bucketloads of apples people were bringing in from miles around. This is, it must be said, the way to do it.

First, fill your press: a muslin on the base board, then the crushed apple is packed into a metal square (removed to leave a neat square of mush)	The square of crushed apple is wrapped in muslin like a parcel: and that's one layer done
A slatted board goes over the top of each layer like a sandwich.	...and then you do it all again. Next layer. The apples aren't peeled or cored: just the bad bits taken out and then chopped roughly in a mincer
Once all your layers are complete (and that's a lot of apples: a (clean) wheelbarrow full in fact) the lid goes on	Lid in place, the screw is ratcheted down into its socket and the pressure is piled on.
Fresh apple juice just pouring out of the press. Store in sterilised jars and drink within 2-3 days: or freeze. Now that's what I call a good way to use up a glut of apples.

Read Full Post »

An apple a day…

Apples come in more shapes and sizes than I could possibly imagine

I have apples dancing before my eyes. Big apples, small apples, red apples, yellow apples, apples with peculiar bumps on them and apples with names straight out of a mediaeval pageant (‘Coeur de Boeuf’ or ‘Langton’s Nonesuch’, anyone?)

The world has gone apple mad. Probably something to do with Apple Day, which was celebrating its 21st birthday last Friday, but this weekend there were appley events at absolutely any garden which had so much as a passing acquaintance with apple trees (and quite a few who didn’t but wanted to get in on the act anyway).

It was all rather serendipitous for me, as I am planning an orchard. A proper orchard this time: not the two or three ailing trees we currently have, but a majestic hillside’s worth of apple, pear, plum and damson. But most important of all are the apples.

Since my soil is thin and chalky, and the site I have in mind is east-facing (so a little prone to early frosts in spring), I needed a little advice. I also have an existing apple tree which was fruiting its heart out this year – yet whose variety I couldn’t guess at. If anyone was in need of an apple day, it was me.

Somerset's finest: heirloom varieties of cider apples have been grown for hundreds of years

Fortunately my local National Trust garden at Barrington Court has a whole field full of trees bowed down under the weight of the most prolific apple harvest I’ve ever seen (it’s been a good year for apples: last year’s blisteringly cold winter gave them just the right amount of chilling time, followed by a mild spring with no late frosts to blight blossom) – and was using its Apple Day on Saturday to share all that knowledge and experience.

All things appley were there. There were toffee apples, apple chutney, apple jam, apple juice (of which more later) and of course cider, which is I believe what Somerset was invented for.

But most importantly for me there was a table with a very nice and very knowledgeable woman sat behind it, armed with a large and daunting folder. In this folder were detailed – and I mean very, very detailed – descriptions of every kind of apple you could think of (and quite a few you couldn’t).

So along I went with three samples of my small, red, early-fruiting and very sweet apples, as well as some cookers from my mum’s very prolific and rather ancient tree – also a mystery variety inherited from some previous and anonymous, but clearly inspired apple-planter way back in the dim and distant past.

Identifying an apple is a fine art. You don’t (unless it’s a Cox or a Bramley, which most people could identify at a hundred paces) just look at the apple and say, ah yes, that’s a ‘Pitmaston’s Pineapple’ or whatever. There is far more to an apple’s appearance than I ever thought possible. For example:

The eye: this is the bit at the opposite end to the stalk. Is it sunken? At the same level as the surrounding flesh? Does it have lumps and bumps or is the slope down to the eye smooth and uniform? ‘Cox’s Pomona’, for example, has exactly five uniform bulges around its eye. Bet you never knew that.

The stalk; again, is it sunken or level with the surrounding flesh? This end is also where some ‘lumps and bumps’ appear.

Skin colour and texture: Is it a russet or a smooth-skinned apple? Are there spots, streaks or splashes? On one side or both sides? Or is the colour uniform?

Flesh colour: Cut a slice from an apple and look at the flesh: it could be greenish-white, yellowish-white, or pinkish-white.

Overall size and shape: Large or small? Flattened or perfectly round? Some apples, like the wonderfully-named ‘Sheeps Snout’, are very elongated.

Fruiting time: Crucial in identifying apples: when does the fruit ripen? My little apple tree was about dropping off the tree in early September – which is very early for an apple. ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ on the other hand goes well into October.

And all that is long before you get around to tasting it: in fact apart from general observations, such as ‘sweet’ or ‘sharp’, taste is about the last thing you consider when identifying an apple, as it’s so subjective.

Incidentally in case you’re wondering: my little red apples turn out to be ‘Devonshire Quarrenden’, which came as quite a surprise as I’d never heard of the variety before. I learn it dates back to 1676 and is one of the very earliest to fruit of all apples – which explains why we’d finished them by mid-September when most apple trees are just about starting. And my mum’s big old cooker? ‘Warner’s King’, another new one to me and again, one with a long and honourable history (though a mere newcomer compared with my little dessert apples: this one first appeared in 1700). I couldn’t have chosen better varieties myself.

Read Full Post »

End-of-season review

I know my squashes did well, but... Nope, can't take credit for this lot: it's Heligan's astonishing harvest

The light is dimming, the air is chilling, and though it is still unseasonably mild here (much to my delight as I’m doing a lot of digging at the moment), there is little doubt that autumn has come and the 2010 growing season has come to an end.

So how has your year gone? Mine has had the usual share of triumphs and disasters: the two large sacks of container-grown potatoes I forced in a frost-free greenhouse with such care this spring gave me all of one meal’s worth of tubers, and the successional salads ran into trouble when I missed a month and then the early sowings hit dry weather and bolted too soon. My potatoes got scab; I chose the wrong first early variety; and my courgettes never got going at all.

But on the plus side, I had the best crop of squashes ever, my pumpkins actually turned orange this year, and I’ve discovered a fine beetroot (‘Chioggia’) which grows into a handsome root of palest pink with a deliciously subtle flavour.

It’s a good time for a stock take: so here are the things I know with another year’s veg-growing behind me:

Things that aren’t worth doing: forcing potatoes, growing temperamental yellow courgettes in a drought year

Things that are: forcing strawberries, covering bare soil with black polythene over winter

Varieties I’ve discovered: Beetroot ‘Chioggia’, Maincrop potato ‘Majestic’, Pattypan squash ‘Yellow Scallop’, Pea ‘Ambassador’

Little things I learned that will make things a bit better next year:

• I discovered that different varieties of runner beans mature at different times. So my ‘St George’ were producing beans a good month ahead of ‘White Emergo’ – great thing to know as now I can plan for successional crops of beans to pace the harvest a little better
• Sowing direct gives plants which are so much healthier and more robust than those sown into trays and transplanted: but you have twice the problems with pests.
• Grafted peppers don’t grow any better than ordinary peppers: in fact I harvested my ordinary peppers first.
• When you see your cucumber leaves yellowing, don’t just think, ‘oh, my cucumber leaves are a bit yellow’ and wander off to see how the peas are coming along: DO SOMETHING!

So: over to you. If you’ve kept notes through the season (I have, if erratically) then dig out your notebook and leaf back through. If you haven’t, take a big mug of tea in one hand and a scrap of paper – preferably one you won’t lose – in the other and go stroll around your plot.

Cast your mind back over the last twelve months: relive your triumphs, and learn from your disasters. The bits that were your fault, you can put right: the bits that were down to our increasingly capricious weather, large furry animals, or small and slimy ones, may well turn out better this year.

 Who knows: it’s a blank slate, full of promise, full of excitement. It is a time when gardeners develop terminal amnesia about the chronic failures that depressed us so greatly in August, and instead feel that bubbling excitement about the year to come: we start shouldering spades and hammers and improbably large planks of timber with visions of raised beds marching to the horizon, a quirky and warm new shed, a greenhouse to end all greenhouses…. insert major project here.

I love the fact that gardeners are such incurable optimists: we wouldn’t do it otherwise, would we?

So with that in mind, here are my…

Plans for 2011:

I have a whole new vegetable garden to build

and a shed and greenhouse to put up

I will create a fruit garden

and find space for my tropical crops too

I shall battle with new challenges: a chalky soil, bunnies galore, giant hedges and a phalanx of snails

and I shall find out all sorts of things I can’t even imagine right now

I shall go mad at the potato fair once again

and live to regret it

I shall try new things, re-visit old favourites, and inflict the lot on my poor long-suffering family

and above all, I shall have a great deal of fun along the way. 

Read Full Post »

Seeing the trees for the wood #2

Eight months ago these were newly-pruned and bare branches. Makes me wonder why I bothered.

I’ve spent much of this week up a ladder. Or scrambling precariously around among branches: there’s a certain way of wedging yourself in the fork of a tree that’s actually quite stable, if a little painful. I’m sure climbing trees was a lot less nerve-wracking when I was a kid, but then I was a lot more bendy in those days and wasn’t wielding a pair of secateurs with intent, so that might have had something to do with it.

I’ve been summer-pruning my apple trees: the second bite at the cherry, so to speak (if you’ll excuse the fruity mixed metaphor) following a rather brutal couple of days spent with them and a chainsaw last winter when I cut my wayward Bramleys back down to size.

They have bounced back far better than I ever thought they would: the early signs of disease I found, from woolly aphid to the first worrying hints of canker, have all but disappeared, so I think I may simply have pruned them out (a crude but effective way to deal with such problems).

Water shoots emerge vertically from old cuts like a miniature forest

Amazingly, I even have some fruit. This is particularly unexpected as when you hard-prune fruit trees quite as nastily as I did (it was kill or cure) it’s a given that you’re sacrificing your next year’s harvest.

I think they were probably grateful, actually. These trees were so badly overgrown that they were struggling to support themselves: a bit like a gaggle of portly ladies that had let themselves go and had things drooping and sagging and generally going awry in all the wrong places. So what I’ve done is give them a tummy tuck and a bit of a facelift, and it’s clearly made them feel a great deal better about themselves.

However…. when you hard prune apple trees, even if it’s reasonably successful, you can’t just sit back and admire your handiwork. There is a second stage of surgery that must be gone through before you’ve finished (and even then, there’s ongoing maintenance).

An apple tree’s natural response to having large bits of itself lopped off is to go into overdrive, producing as many new shoots as possible to replace what it’s lost. These are known as water shoots: and they’re a pain in the neck.

Every inch of my apple trees, including the trunks, is sprouting young, whippy, sappy twigs that are shooting skywards. Since I made a lot of pruning cuts last winter, and water shoots are concentrated around those cuts, that’s a lot of new growth.

Last job: thinning out apple clusters to two fruits. It seems tough, but the tree will thank you for it.

They’re congesting the centre of the tree and hogging all the food and water so the tree can’t concentrate on more productive things (like apples): and worse, they won’t be producing any fruit themselves for years and years.

You can avoid water shoots to an extent by doing your main pruning (the stuff I did in December) in summer: the golden rule is that pruning in winter stimulates growth, while pruning in summer restricts it. But I find summer pruning is tricky as the tree is in full leaf so you can’t see what you’re doing: and you inevitably chop off most of your apple crop, which is just too painful to bear.

So I prefer to do two sets of pruning: one in winter, and then a secondary chop in summer to get rid of all those water shoots. I take out the vertical ones right at the base: they’re never going to be any good. But any that are heading out more horizontally you can afford to be more lenient with: well-spaced, they may one day provide you with extra fruiting growth, and on my big and rather bare (post-prune) branches I could do with a little extra to fill in the gaps.

So what I’ve ended up with is a return to the reasonably good-looking framework I got my ladies back to last winter, plus a few extra bits where they were needed. Oh, and while I was at it, I did my July thinning: yes, I know, it’s August, and late in August at that (I’m behind by a few weeks this year – oh, heck, who am I kidding, I’m behind by a few weeks every year).

But some time during the summer, it’s well worth taking out any extra fruitlets your tree has failed to shed naturally during June. On my trees this is especially important as they’re liable to fall into biennial habits if you don’t: that is, they’ll fruit very heavily one year and then take a year off the next. This is infuriating, so to stop it from happening I go over each tree and where I find a cluster of three or more apples, I take out the smallest ones (and any which are damaged or diseased) until there are a maximum of two left.

Actually, I can’t quite believe my luck that I’m thinning at all this year. For all their drastic surgery, my lovely blowsy apple trees have recovered in fine fashion, and are back to their usual, and rather glamorously well-shaped selves.

Read Full Post »

Getting a buzz

Some of Sean's 14 beehives among the trees alongside the allotments

Ever since I saw a swarm of bees hanging off a tree like a ball of moving liquid treacle (while visiting the Twickenham and Thames Valley Beekeeping Association on quite another matter), I’ve been fascinated by beekeeping. And also more than a little scared.

You see the trouble is, I may be into self-sufficiency, keeping ancient traditions alive and saving the plummeting honeybee population: but I’m also a terrible wimp. And bees sting. There’s no getting around it.

But on the other hand, they make oodles of really lovely honey. To say nothing of beeswax and something called propilis. What’s more if you keep bees your fruit and veg yields are rumoured to rise by about a third: they pollinate whatever’s closest, so a beehive in your fruit garden or veg patch pays dividends in all sorts of ways.

But they sting. And that hurts. And they buzz rather angrily around you in a threatening sort of way. They may be catching on as back-yard livestock, but they’re rather scary livestock. And nowhere near as cuddly as, say, a sheep (although admittedly they do take up a lot less room).

Busy, busy, busy... these bees didn't even move when Sean lifted out their honeycomb-covered board

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m now seriously thinking of acquiring a hive of bees, much against my better judgement, having been talked into it by a highly excited and inspired little ten-year-old, my eldest daughter, who was totally taken with the idea of beekeeping after the demonstration we saw while on our visit to the Brighton allotments the other day.

She’s now asked for a hive for her birthday, of all things. Luckily it’s not till February so I have a little time to get used to the idea.

Sean, the beekeeper, had 14 hives tucked away in a corner of the Moulsecoomb Estate Allotments, and he makes so much honey he sells jars of the stuff to friends, family and fellow allotmenteers. You can get between 40 and 60 lbs of honey from your average hive in a good year. We must get through about 1lb of honey a year in our family, and that’s going some: so even with one or two hives you’re going to have plenty left over.

Almost the first thing Sean did when we arrived was to terrify the life out of me by bending down and pick up a bee which was crawling around minding its own business having just left the hive, so that we could take a closer look.

Ellie in full beekeeping garb, looking quite the part (and enjoying herself immensely)

I should here add a health warning: don’t do this at home. Sean did it very gently between thumb and forefinger, and because he’s an experienced beekeeper he could recognise this one as I believe a drone or worker bee, which doesn’t even have a sting, let alone use it. Actually it was quite a nice-looking little honeybee, as honeybees go. The far more angry and generally to be avoided ones that do sting are the guard bees, which are the ones that hover around the hive buzzing angrily at you if you come too close. Try to pick one of those up and you’ll know all about it.

It was a revelation to me that most of the honeybees in a hive don’t actually sting. He also says you can tell the mood of the colony when you come to do whatever it is that beekeepers do for the half-hour a week they dedicate to each hive: if they’re grumpy, he says, you just go away and come back another time when they’re feeling a bit more friendly.

He found a demonstration hive to show us and got rid of the guard bees by the simple expedient of moving it somewhere else: guard bees, being rather thick, go back to the original spot and wander round being puzzled as to why their hive isn’t there. As long as you return the hive reasonably quickly, they return to normal duties.

And this is what it's all about (minus the bees): sweet, sweet honeycomb.

Sean did amazing things with hanging boards covered in honeycomb and honey and plastered in bees. We weren’t even wearing beekeeping hats, which I confess I was a little disappointed about, though Ellie (the 10-year-old) got to put one on just for fun. It was all far less painful than I’d imagined beekeeping to be. If you were doing the beekeeping with guard bees in place, you would of course have to get suited and booted: apparently the key is to keep everything tucked in, as a bee’s instinct is to fly up and into things – which means sleeves, and I imagine rather alarmingly, trouser legs.

We went away with bees buzzing around our heads literally and metaphorically, carrying a couple of slabs of honeycomb oozing the freshest, sweetest honey I’ve ever tasted.

Ellie and I are heading for the nearest beekeeping school to do a course to learn the basics and find out more about what’s involved: and then, if we haven’t been stung too often and are still buzzing about the whole thing, we’ll don our white hats and suits and get to work. Well: it’s cheaper than a pony, I suppose….

Read Full Post »

Hampton Court 2010: The wierd and the wonderful

Lovely multi-coloured leaf amaranth on the Bangladeshi Allotment: pick, cook and eat like spinach

Hampton Court is always a great place to pick up ideas for widening your veg-growing horizons: but this year they’ve surpassed themselves.

I thought I was doing pretty well this year what with my sweet potatoes, yacon and tomatilloes. But that’s nothing to the exotica on display in the Home Grown exhibit, right at the heart of the show. They included balsam pears (bitter, a bit like lumpy cucumbers to look at, and grown much the same way too); chinese artichokes (Jerusalem-artichoke-like knobbly roots); snake gourds (see balsam pears – except long and skinny) and oca – South Americans use this instead of potato, I’m told, which is odd as I always thought that was where potatoes came from. Maybe they ran out after they gave them all to us.

Add to that the ancient fruit and veg now making a comeback after 400 years or more in the wilderness, and my notebook filled up with things to try next year. Here are a few of them.

First grown in the 1600s, skirret is a little like a parsnip, with similarly lacy flowers that look gorgeous in the veg patch. When you pull it up, though, rather than one long root it has a bunch of finger-like roots instead. Shakespeare's contemporaries would have known it's sweet enough to eat raw: it was a real delicacy then.	This is actually just a lime tree - but you see those lovely waisted leaves? This is kaffir lime: and unlike most citrus, it's grown for the leaves not the fruit. You chop them into Thai curries. Even better - it's pretty much hardy in milder bits of the UK, so one of the most reliable of all the citrus to grow outside.
Now this is one I've had on my 'wanna-grow' list for some time. Okra - or 'ladies' fingers in my family - are one of those foods you either love or hate: we love them, especially cooked and served as a side dish to curries. They need to be kept as warm as possible, which means a greenhouse, but otherwise they're straightforward.	How wierd is this? Strawberry spinach is another veg grown several hundred years ago but now out of favour: the young leaves are picked and eaten like spinach, and then you've got those jewel-like berries, a bit like wild strawberries so they say. Is it a vegetable? Is it a fruit? I haven't the faintest - but I'm trying it next year.
Another forgotten variety that's staging a comeback: medlars are one of Britain's oldest fruits. The strange open-ended fruits are preceded by some of the prettiest white blossoms you'll ever see on a fruit tree, which means even if you can't be bothered to 'blet' (semi-rot) the fruit in order to eat them, it's still worth growing	Hmm... not quite so sure about this one, but I found it in the Floral Marquee and was fascinated to hear its tubers are edible. Amorphophallus konjac is variously known as voodoo lily or devil's tongue: it produces a dark purple hooded flower which stinks of raw liver, so I'm told. The tubers apparently make a good soup or can be sliced into stirfry. If you can get over the smell.

Read Full Post »

Hampton Court Flower Show 2010: Veggie heaven

Giant cabbages in immaculate rows in the massive GYO centrepiece garden Home Grown

Never mind all that Chelsea razzmatazz and flummery. If you grow veg, the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show is where it’s at.

The show has always been where the GYO movement has found its natural home: probably as much to do with the timing as anything else, since there’s not much growing by Malvern (April), and Chelsea (May) requires major forcing efforts to get a show. But by July everything on the plot is bursting and burgeoning and generally looking pretty damn good. There was hardly a show garden without its fruit and veg: they stood in for hedges, draped themselves over obelisks and walls, lent sophistication to flowerbeds and carpeted the ground with greenery. Here are a few of my favourites.

Aren't these fantastic? These potatoes stuck with feathers, on the Shakespeare's Allotment garden (by Barry Locke, who's head gardener at Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford - now there's a job to envy), and they're pigeon scarers. Apparently our portly and bird-brained feathered friends think they're kestrels and won't come near them.	The ultimate in chic colour contrasts between the sultry, near-black ruffled leaves of perilla, and the zingy yellow of golden marjoram. From Food for Thought, a small garden by Bonnie Davies.
Fabulously architectural globe artichokes holding their own against salvia, penstemon and eryngiums in the wonderfully veg-packed Girlguiding UK Centenary Garden by Philippa Pearson	I liked this idea: ancient grapevines trained up on stems to make a loose raised hedge, underplanted with flowers. From An Uprising of Kindness, the Emmaus garden by Bill Butterworth.
You wouldn't be able to grow these here, but you can sure as hell admire them. Lotuses in the Reflections of Thailand garden, which incidentally won best in show: apparently you eat the rhizomes pickled, roast the seeds like nuts and use the young leaves a bit like vine leaves, for wrapping food	This was probably my favourite small garden: the Bangladeshi Allotment. The ground cover was coriander and mustard, and the bedding was two colours of amaranth: it was packed with unusual veg, too. Snake gourds, balsam pears and yard-long beans were just a few of the veg I'd never even seen, let alone tried growing before.
Another fantastic edible plant combination: purple pak choi and gorgeous asparagus peas (must, must, must grow these next year) in the Girlguiding UK Centenary Garden	It's good to see veg making inroads on the flower borders, and looking so good, too. Here it's a lovely architectural courgette, plus some parsley and beetroot, in among the heucheras and dianthus in the Shakespearean garden Twelfth Night, by Yvonne Mathews.

Read Full Post »

Playing gooseberry

Before...

Now normally by this time of year I’m enjoying the first fresh fruit of the season (if you don’t count rhubarb, which is technically a vegetable, and forced strawberries, which are cheating). But this year my gooseberries, growing along a fence by the path that leads down the garden, have been puzzlingly conspicuous by their absence.

I was remarking on this the other day in front of my little girls, and wondering out loud if birds had been at the fruit (hasn’t been a problem before, but you never know). Two pink faces later I discover that the pests in question have two legs and a marked preference for My Little Ponies. This proves to be an unexpected drawback to growing my gooseberries as cordons: yes, you can fit loads of different varieties into a small space – I have four growing along a 10ft stretch of fence – and yes, it makes them far easier to pick as you don’t have to burrow in among all those thorns. But that last advantage turns into a distinct disadvantage when it turns out that little fingers are finding it a lot easier to do the picking too.

Actually I’m secretly very pleased my kids turn out to share my liking for gooseberries: I adore them myself but I often find I’m in a minority. Gooseberry fool is a little early-summer ritual in our house (well, it was, in the years when the girls couldn’t get past the prickles) and last year I also discovered home-made gooseberry icecream. Yum.

Cordon gooseberries need a tiny tad more attention than bush-grown, simply because you’re trying to curb their natural tendency to grow into a bush. As you can see, mine have become distinctly shaggy in the last few months, so it was high time for their summer haircut.

...and after

The whole idea of cordon pruning is to check all that green growth (which diverts the plant’s energy into producing lots of stems and leaves) and thus encourage it to produce lots of flowers and fruit instead, on short ‘spurs’ along the main central stem. This is a whole lot easier than it sounds.

It seems a bit mean to remove all that growth the plants have been putting on enthusiastically since spring, but steel yourself and do it anyway as it has lots of benefits. Not only does the sun get at the fruit a bit better for ripening (well, it would if there were any fruit left, anyway): it also checks growth, as all summer pruning does, and keeps the plant nice and compact.

It’s a straightforward process: if you look closely at the branches coming from the central stem, you’ll see that there’s a first little cluster of leaves, usually three, followed by single leaves coming out from further up the branch. You count five leaves – the three at the basal cluster, then two more above that – and snip away the rest of the branch just above the fifth leaf.

You do that for every branch, all the way up the stem. And that’s it. You’re left with a neat column formed by a single, thicker brown stem, and then more-or-less equally long stems radiating from that at regular spacings. Tie in the leading shoot to its support if you need to (I train mine upright, but you can also do it at a 45° angle which they say produces more fruit), and give your plants a good soaking while you’re at it, just because it’s a good chance to do it: you can scatter some slow-release fertiliser, like pelleted chicken manure, around too if you’re feeling keen.

The result is a healthy, strong-growing plant which hopefully will be laden with fruit this time next year. Shame they couldn’t be this year, really. Now all I’ve got to do is deal with my little pest problem….

Read Full Post »

Honeyed words

I do like it when you get home from picking up the kids, or a frantic potato-planting session on the allotment, or racing around trying to fit in work, the shopping, picking up the cold frame lights you’ve just had glazed and remembering to phone someone’s mum about that sleepover all in the space of an hour… and there, sitting on your doorstep waiting for you, is a parcel labelled enticingly “Live Plants: Handle With Care”.

This week’s mystery parcel contained something I’ve never tried growing before: a honeyberry. These are supposed to be the next big thing. Now, I turn into an evil sceptic whenever I see the word ‘new’, never mind ‘next big thing’, so I was all ready to pooh-pooh this one just like I have done goji berries (the jury’s still out on that one) jostaberries (josta-what?) and countless other wierd and wonderful hybrids before them aimed at making you buy something you never knew you needed.

But honeyberries – well, these just might be different. They’re just like blueberries: but before you start asking why you don’t just go and buy a blueberry, the key thing is that – unlike blueberries – they don’t need acid soil.

Now, blueberries just about get by on my soil, which is acid-ish greensand. Even then it’s just a tad close to neutral for them to really flourish. For those who have ordinary bog-standard clay (neutral, mostly) or worse, limey chalk, blueberries are but a distant dream.

This is a shame, as blueberries are quite my favourite fruit. I have four bushes in my front garden: it’s one of the main reasons my front garden is so weed-free, although since I eat all the berries while I’m gardening, not many make it as far as the kitchen.

Now for all those on a neutral or alkaline soil, it just might be that honeyberries are the answer. The reason they don’t need an acid soil is that they’re not blueberries at all: they’re honeysuckles. This also means their native habitat is edge-of-woodland part shade: another point in their favour.

The fruit looks a bit like an elongated olive: blue-black, like a blueberry, but with a sort of waist to it. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait to find out what I’m on about as I’ve only got a little baby honeyberry bush, with no fruits just yet. But photos will follow – I hope – later in the year.

They come from Siberia, and you need two kinds to pollinate each other and produce fruit: that’s not generally a problem as most suppliers send two plants in one pot anyway (that’s certainly what arrived in the post). Though my little baby plant appears to have lots of straggly, rather messy stems – spookily like a honeysuckle, in fact – it’s not a climber but one of the many shrubby honeysuckles (don’t mistake it for anything else though as most honeysuckle berries aren’t edible).

I think this one is destined for Blackberry Way to add an unusual note to the usual rollcall of shade-loving berries setting up home there. Progress reports to follow, no doubt.

Read Full Post »

Forcing the issue #2

What a stop-start spring this has been.

A week of watery sunshine got me all Tigger-like and bouncy in anticipation that finally, at last, the winter was over. Weeds were weeded, beds were forked over, edges were trimmed.

Now it’s minus-goodness-knows-what at night again, blistering cold wind and sleeting rain all day. The allotment is under water, as is most of my garden, and I’m forced to retreat back into the greenhouse. My Tiggerish enthusiasm has flopped like a frost-stricken seedling and I’m now tending markedly towards an Eeyore frame of mind.

But it takes more than a little setback like that to keep a good gardener down. Before the weather closed in again, I managed to dig up half a dozen rooted runners of my super-reliable mid-season strawberries, ‘Cambridge Favourite’, for forcing.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite the right variety for producing the very earliest crops: if you’re serious about your strawberry forcing you should choose an early variety like ‘Honeoye’. I do also grow this variety on my plot but I’ve found it hasn’t settled in too well – it’s possible that the soil is a little too heavy for it, and I confess I did let them get a bit weed-suffocated last year so they weren’t exactly given the best chance. So ‘Cambridge Favourite’ it is.

Strawberries need a good spell of chilly weather to get them to initiate flowering and fruiting, so there’s no point in getting them in for forcing too early. I don’t think there’s much doubt that there’s been plenty of chilling this winter: so I’m pretty hopeful that these plants should be at just the right stage for potting up. They’re just runners which I deliberately didn’t cut off at the end of the season, instead allowing them to fall onto the ground and root where they fell: after that it’s simply a matter of digging them up carefully, snipping off the connecting runner and replanting them indoors.

I have a couple of these old tin baths kicking about – I bought them on a holiday in the Isle of Wight a few years ago after spotting them in a corner of an architectural salvage yard (my long-suffering family are quite used to me dragging back bits of old junk from holidays: it’s one of the few times I get the chance to mung about in salvage yards, which is a shame as it’s one of my all-time favourite leisure activities and a fantastic source of useful things for the garden).

The strawbs won’t be in there more than a few months so I’ve just used peat-free multi-purpose compost: I’ll start backing it up with a liquid feed as soon as they’re flowering. I reckon I’ll be eating my first fruits in around early May – a month sooner than from my crops outside. Now that’s something to look forward to.

Read Full Post »