The Awakening

Like gardeners everywhere*, I am being inordinately cheered by the arrival of spring in my garden, even if the garden in question is predominantly limited to a few windowsills of seed trays. I got my seeds planted a bit late this year, what with one busy weekend and another, but I finally managed to get the main seed trays done. The beans at least are already making a strong showing

So, what is planned for the patio garden this year? So far I have runner beans, two types of courgette (yellow and green), three types of tomato including the '100s and 1000s) which were much enjoyed last year, plus lots of lettuce and my favourite radishes. There will be a reprisal of the successful 'golden sweet' mange tout from last year as well, except that a surprising last-ditch attempt at growing from some over-wintered chard means that their designated spot is still occupied, so they will have to wait.

I must confess that I am not following last year's policy of heritage veg heritage veg so stringently this year, although my ideals remain unchanged. Last year was simply a bit too disheartening, and while I know this was partly due to the abysmal summer, I can't imagine that some of the varieties helped either. I'm also aware that my veg is at a disadvantage simply because it is grown in containers and not in 'real' soil, so for now I'm trying to knock at least one variable on the head by using more tried-and-tested varieties. When I have a garden of my own, there'll be a bit more room for experimentation. The exception to this is the 'Golden Sweet' peas, which performed so well last year that I'm tempted to continue growing them in containers in the future.

*That is, everywhere in the Northern hemisphere. Living with a South African has made me very well trained on this matter.

Kale

One of the aims I have always had with this blog is to make it a kind of resource for anyone else who might want to grow vegetables in containers on a fairly large scale. I'm not sure if I ever will get round to writing my single 'definitive' guide to what I have found works and what doesn't, but I can at least add to it by talking about my kale.

I put five plugs of kale in one of my large planters back in September. At the time, I didn't have huge hopes of a great harvest, or even much confidence that kale could actually be grown in a container. What I did want was something to grow over the winter and occupy some compost that would otherwise just get waterlogged and mouldy. Initially, my kale experiment was a constant battle with cabbage whites and their wretched caterpillars (surprising, I know), who munched one plant into oblivion, but after the first frosts in October I stopped having to mount a daily counter-attack. Since then, the kale has been growing slowly but steadily until they reached a fairly respectable size. The lack of space meant that two plants of the four were clearly 'dominant', but even the weedy ones produced a reasonable number of leaves. We have had kale twice with dinner so far, and I reckon there are probably another two servings on the plants. Admittedly the leaves are more like 'baby' kale than the kind of whoppers generally seen on allotments, but hey, the last time I checked supermarkets were charging twice as much for 'baby' sweetcorn, carrots and beans as they were for the full-sized version, so why not do the same for kale

In summary, container grown Kale is clearly never going to reach the large size of a plant in the ground. There just isn't the space for the roots. On the other hand, kale does seem happy enough to grow to a medium-sized plant with perfectly tasty leaves in quite cramped conditions, and more importantly, will occupy a planter all the way through from September to March, a time when little else will occupy those expanses of compost outside the front door. At six portions of fresh veg for about £1.50's worth of plugs, I imagine that I broke even with the cost, but this doesn't take into account the pleasure of having something growing over the winter and the convenience of being able to space the harvest out, rather than buying a big bag and then having to eat kale every night for a week.

I would normally here include a photo, but we ate too many of the leaves before I thought of writing this post, and the remaining kale looks rather like it suffered from a visit from the Very Hungry Caterpillar and is consequently not terribly photogenic.

Hiatus

I looked at my blog this morning and realised that it has been nearly three weeks since I wrote my last post here. I'm not quite sure why - I just haven't really felt like it, and the last thing I want is for this blog to become a chore in any way. I've been pretty distracted from veg growing, knitting and baking in the last few weeks by the sudden and unpleasant realisation that I am actually going to finish my PhD next year (OK, this is actually an extremely welcome realisation) and that I need to decide what I'm going to do afterwards. I'm actually feeling very positive about ending my long stint as a student, finding a job and moving a bit further into the real world, but as is the way of big life-affecting decisions, deciding on future plans is proving as mentally draining as it is exciting.

The upshot of all this is that there hasn't been much to report, good-life wise. Now that Autumn has well and truly come to Cambridge, the patio allotment is slowly wrapping up for the winter. The beans finished with a final flurry of activity and should probably be pulled out soon. The courgettes died off without producing any more fruit, and the single patty pan should probably be picked soon. There are still plenty of green tomatoes left, but continuing blight and cold are taking their toll on the plants and I've started to bring the most promising looking ones inside to ripen on windowsills. I don't have much that will over-winter, but three of my kale plugs are doing a lot better than expected, especially now that the colder weather means that they no longer need to be guarded quite so obsessively against caterpillars. I've also got some spinach and baby beetroot growing in the hope that they might provide another winter crop, but despite the two neath rows of seedlings, I rather get the impression that they don't like it very much in their planter. In fact, nothing seems to like it very much in that particular planter, and I have a growing suspicion that it doesn't get quite enough sun.

Job hunting aside, I now need to decided what I'm going to do with all these newly-empoty pots. Nothing is concrete as yet, but I'm tempted to plant spring bulbs next week. An array of snowdrops and crocuses on the patio would be very welcome come the dark days of January and February.

An unexpected squash

A pleasant surprise greeted me in the garden this morning - the flowering of my very first patty pan fruit, definitely a case of better late than never. I decided to grow patty pans this year for K (they are far more common in South Africa than here), but with sadly limited success. The plants themselves absolutely thrived in their pot, and in fact in many ways seemed well suited to container growing - the plants are both smaller than courgettes and distinctly more handsome - but the seed packet only promised a bumper harvest 'in a sunny year', hardly a description that could be applied to this wet and miserable summer. A couple of female flowers have emerged before only to shrivel up and die. I didn't really hold out much hope for this one, but it hung on despite everything and this morning bloomed into a beautiful (and quickly hand-fertilised) orange flower. Fingers crossed for a few more days of sunshine to allow it to ripen!

Courgettes and courgette fritters

I finally, finally got a few courgettes last week. Three, to be exact, hardly a good haul from three plants, not least when there are books with titles such as 'What Will I Do With All Those Courgettes'. Still, three was better than the 'none' I was expecting at various points through the summer, given that not a single female flower formed until August (due to the cold and wet), and then most of them subsequently turned yellow and fell off (due to the cold and wet), a tendency that continues to this day. Clearly this 'Verde di Milano 'variety, chosen for its suitability for pot growing, is not a huge fan of the English summer, however much it might like restricted space. I think I'll be searching for a replacement next year, so any suggestions of a small-ish courgette that can also deal with a bit of adverse weather would be very welcome.

Anyway, back to my three courgettes. There I was, admiring them on a daily basis, when suddenly I realised that one in particular was threatening to turn into a marrow, as is their wont, and suddenly we were having courgettes for dinner. We had been eating a fair number of courgettes and so I was quite keen to try something new. A quick rummage in the recipe books later and I had dug a recipe for courgette fritters, which was such a success that I thought I would share it with you lucky people who have managed a small glut this year. We ate the fritters as a side dish with borscht and freshly made bread, but I imagine they could be placed on any number of menus.

You need:

- 2-3 courgettes

- 50g freshly grated parmesan

- 2 eggs, beaten

- 6-8 tsp unbleached flour (the recipe wanted 4, which turned out to be woefully little, so keep adding slowly until the right consistency is reached)

- veg oil for frying

- salt and pepper

Grate the courgettes and squeeze them in cloth or kitchen roll to reduce excess water. Then quite simply combine them with all the other ingredients, shape to a desired size and fry until cooked. The recipe suggested eating them with chili jam, which I suspect would offset the fried-eggy flavours nicely, as would any other chutney-of-choice.

A success story of the tomato variety?

Yesterday evening was the first time that there were (just) enough ripe fruit on the tomato plants on my patio to form the exclusive base for a tomato-y dinner. As you can see, I've been growing three varieties, all of which seem to have been pretty happy in pots on my patio. The large ribbed ones are 'Costoluto Florentino', the smaller red ones tumbling toms and the small yellow ones are 'millefleur' centiflor tomatoes. The tumbling toms and the centiflors have already been providing us with ample tomatoes for salads and sandwiches for the last week or so, overall there has been a general reluctance to ripen, hardly surprising given the truly dire weather.

I’m really pleased about this, not only for the simple reason that even self-sufficiency in cheese-and-tomato-sandwich tomatoes is a step along the self-sufficient road, but because these are the self same plants which were showing every sign of blight a couple of weeks ago. In general, things are looking quite good on the blight front right now - one plant was beyond help, and I've had to pick leaves off all the others every now and then, but there's been plenty of new growth and the fruit has hardly been affected at all. The only real problem is that new buds on some plants are showing a tendency to turn brown and drop off, but to be honest I'll be happy enough if the current greenies are the only crop I get, given that at one point I thought I'd get precisely nothing. I’ve been spraying assiduously with my organic blight remedy once a week, and while I can’t know for sure whether it does actually work, something is clearly helping. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it helps for long enough for the rest of the crop to brave the miserable weather and actually start showing some colour.

I’m sure that I’m largely preaching to the converted here, but I can’t help but go on again about what wonderful plants tomatoes are for those with little space. I can heartily recommend the centiflor varieties, which up to now have indeed produced something approaching a hundred flowers and seem to do just fine outside in the wet and cool conditions of this summer. Space-wise, I’m even prouder of my tumbling toms, a variety which are intended for hanging baskets,but which I have arrayed in really rather small pots along the low wall which divides my patio from my next-door neighbour (fortunately, he thinks my rooftop vegetable garden is wonderful, to the point of once offering me a fiver in exchange for the pleasure of looking at the flowers). Despite undoubtedly cramped conditions and an occasional propensity to tumble right off the wall and into the lettuce, they have produced a remarkably heavy crop of quite good-sized small tomatoes (I should probably add that this photo was taken as an afterthought right after all the really ripe ones had been picked).

In case you’re wondering what I actually did with all these goodies, they were roasted at 100 degrees celcius for about an hour and a half with four garlic cloves, a sprinkling of salt and sugar, some oregano and rosemary (the herbs that happened to be to hand) and lashings of olive oil. The garlic was crushed after roasting and the whole lot mixed up with pasta. Serve with a fresh loaf of bread and a mostly-home-grown salad. Yum!

Blight update

I've now both removed all the affected tomato leaves and sprayed my plants with the following mixture from Lydia's Organic Gardening and Healthy Living Blog:

-1 gallon of water mixed with 1 tablespoon of baking soda and 2 1/2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
-Shake well
-Add 1/2 tablespoon of pure Castile soap
-Shake well
-Decant into a spray bottle and spray well, keeping shaking all the time

Will it work? Probably not, but it's worth a go. I decided to forgo the Strong Chemicals in favour of sticking to my principles and am attempting to accept graciously that organic veg growing brings with it such pitfalls. To be honest, I hadn't really done any research on organic tomato growing before I started, and I fear that I'm now reaping the literal harvest. I have to admit that I have often watered all my plants very late at night and have not generally been careful about only watering the compost and not letting the leaves get splashed, which is apparently the best way to encourage blight. It is also true that the warm, wet and windy weather we've had so far this summer in Cambridge has hardly been on my side, but I've definitely not helped matters. Ho hum.

If all else fails, I'll follow Casalba's eminently sensible advice and try and ripen some green tomatoes with the help of a banana. I've been suspecting in any case that the Centiflor tomatoes need a bit more sunshine than we've been getting to ripen.

I shall now go and inspect my kale for caterpillars. Despite two layers of net, I've found so many this week that it feels rather more like I'm picking kale off my caterpillars than the other way round. I hear that eggshells on sticks help.

Help! Blight!

Today has been quite literally blighted by my discovering of blight on my tomato plants. I first noticed a brown patch on one of the unripe tomatoes yesterday, and today I spied a number of tell-tale brown patches on the leaves of most of the plants in two of my three tomato locations, affecting both the heritage varieties I've been growing. I'm absolutely gutted as I've raised all these plants from seed and they were doing really well, promising a bumper crop later in the month.

Can anyone offer any help? I'm hoping the blight is in a fairly early stage at the moment, since most of the patches on the leaves are currently only tiny spots. I've moved the most affected plant to the other side of the patio and removed all the discoloured leaves and fruits I could find. I also discovered a recipe for an organic remedy on an American site that involves Castile soap, vegetable oil and baking soda, so I was wondering if anyone had tried that. Other than that, most advice seems to involve Strong Chemicals. I feeling worryingly tempted right now.

This pretty much rounds up an absolutely disastrous couple of weeks in the garden. I also realised today that the reason the kale plants were still being munched by Cabbage Whites is that they can get through the holes in the net. I've put another net on top, so maybe that will help. The runner beans also remain disappointing, since although quite a few plants are now climbing, they are going so slowly that only one plant is actually producing a crop. To top it all, both courgettes and patty pans are thriving, with giant handsome healthy plants and lots of flowers - but not a single fruit has started forming. I had one baby courgette last week, but it turned yellow and dropped off after a few days of especially cold and wet weather. The only thing producing a steady supply of anything edible are the ever-redoubtable spring onions.

Grr, grr, grr.

The nocturnal gardener

I planted my sunflower at 10pm last night. Is gardening in the dark a sign of obsession, or simply that I'm trying to do far too much?

As a result of my nocturnal activities, the pot that looked like this (before they all died),

now looks like this,

and I have a happy sunflower face to greet me when I open the door in the morning :-)

Mutant Courgettes

It's official. My courgettes are mutants. The little sods have been producing flowers now for a good few weeks, but so far not a single female. The ones that I thought might be female (on the grounds that the stems were a lot thicker than the obviously male ones), I now realise were in fact mutants, where two male stems had fused together, hence the two flowers. An extra gaudy male masquerading as a female? Could be be a cross-dressing courgette?

Exciting though mutant courgettes might be, the dreary upshot is no produce, with the exception of a few stuffed courgette flowers. Stuffed courgette flowers might make a tasty side dish, but they are hardly a hearty meal. Even more irritating, I'm having exactly the same problem with my Patty Pan squashes, which if anything are thriving even better than the courgettes, but also failing to produce any baby Patty Pans. Is this a problem with squashes that other people have met with, or am I just spectacularly unlucky this year?

Garden Update

Wow, June is suddenly over. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, except that it happened quickly. I seem to have had precisely no time to work on my various self-sufficient projects for most of this month - my two pieces of knitting are at about the same stage as they were at the end of May, and my skirt is as yet untouched. We've barely had time to go to the farm, and despite a total milk glut last week I didn't even get round to making yoghurt. This is because we try and do too much despite having demanding jobs. Even worse, I know that I would get bored quickly if it were any other way.

I'll stop moaning now and move on to the actual point of this post. Unlike me, my garden has noticed that it is now July, and is behaving accordingly, so I thought I'd like to give a quick summary of how things are going, what's working well and what would clearly prefer to be in a real garden and not in pots on a rooftop patio.

Anything pea-based is the big success story of June. Both my Golden Sweet mange tout and the sweet peas are rampantly healthy and produced veritable buckets of flowers and pods. The mange tout clearly love sunshine and shelter, and aren't too bothered about limited growing space. I don't know if it's made a different, but I planted some nasturtiums in the same bed and they have also done really well. The first crop of radishes was also a great success, but the peas have made that bed a bit too shady for the second crop to do as well and I don't have a great alternative at the moment. The beans have been less of a success. The cherokee beans are growing now, but sooo slowly. I have decided that they are perhaps a bit delicate for me, since they seem to react extremely badly to any temperature below about 8 degrees celcius and above about 23. Still, they seem to suddenly get going properly once they get to the point where they start to climb.

The courgettes are confusing me. Lots of flowers, few baby courgettes. This variety (chose specifically for container growing) is confusing me a little by growing two flowers rather than the usual one on each female stem. Has anyone else come across this? Do they both need pollinating? I've been a bit worried about the scarcity of pollinators on the patio - we do get bees and things, but far fewer than would be found in a 'real' garden. I've tried hand-pollinating, as suggested by the book I have on seed saving. It seems easy enough, but I'm not convinced that it's actually work. I have one possible success at the moment, so I'll have to see how that goes, and hope that the lavender which is just starting to flower attracts more insects. On the other hand, the profusion of orange flowers is very pretty.

Talking of pretty flowers, the tomatoes are just coming into flower and very nice they are as well! I really like the flowers on my 'Costulato Fiorentino' plants; they are much bigger and a more vivid yellow than those you tend to get on standard garden centre varieties. The first truss has set on the tumbling toms (which are actually in very small pots for a tomato), and the centiflor plants are producing their first buds.

Strawberries. They were so delicious, and are now nearly finished :-( I'll definitely keep using my planter in future, as it saves all the trouble of preventing the fruit becoming rotten from contact with the earth, and it is also much easier to keep birds and animals away, since they just tumble down the sides. I've currently got it surrounded with little pots of compost in an attempt to catch the runner which are making a break for freedom.

OK, more updates coming soon! Now I think I might indulgence myself my going on a limeflower-picking expedition during my 'lunch hour'

Spring Onions

The other day I had a sudden yearning for risotto for dinner. Having little veg in the house, I put my ciabatta on to bake and went across the road to our local butchers to get some vegetables. (This may sound a little perverse, but this particular butchers has by far the best fruit and vegetables in Cambridge. We probably spend more money in a butchers than any other vegetarian household in Britain). Feeling slightly guilty about the high percentage of my food marked 'product of Italy', I set myself a 'local risotto challenge', meaning that I had to find ingredients from whatever they had that was locally produced. It transpired that the only local vegetables that weren't potatoes were mushrooms, so mushroom risotto it was. All well and good, except that I usually like to add leek to this dish to give it a bit of tang, otherwise I tends to find it a bit starchy. The butcher's leeks purported to be from France, so they were a no-go, but then I had the bright idea of adding some of the spring onions from my patio garden instead. This I can recommend to anyone. Chopped into one inch pieces and stirred in right before the Parmesan at the end, they were delicious, the red spring onions in particular added a nice flash of colour.

Spring onions have turned out to be a pretty good choice for a patio garden, and I would recommend them to anyone who was trying to grow vegetables in containers. Unlike onions and leeks, they are small enough to be quite easy to grow in standard flower pots. I made the best use of this limited space by planting them in a circle about one inch from the edge of the pot rather than the straight line that would normally be found in a vegetable plot. This has worked well - admittedly the limited space has meant quite slow growth and much need for thinning, but then baby spring onions are not only a delicious addition to green salad, but have also been available since May. The only real other problem is that the roots can get a bit tangled, but this simply means that a bit more careful wriggling is need to extract an any individual. The other advantage of spring onions is that the seeds seem to be virtually indestructible. I planted them back in March (as instructed on the packet), where they lay dormant for about a month under a continual battering of downpours, cold, unseasonable hailstorms and even a thick layer of snow, before veritably bursting into life the second the sun came out at the end of April. I should probably confess that these are hardy F1 varieties from the organic section of Homebase, but I hear tell that they are in general a resilient vegetable.

Here's a photo. I don't think you can really see the circular planting, but it gives an idea. You should also be able to make out the giant towering wall of mange tout looming up behind them.

Blog duly updated, I'm going to go and get ready for the Nelson Mandela concert in Hyde Park. Very exciting! K tells me that I have been made an honorary South African for the evening!

On the Joys of Old-Fashioned Vegetables

Purple podded peas had a fascinating and extremely thought-provoking post on the recent growth of in interest heritage vegetables, the possibility that we are all being vegetable luddite sand the advantages (or not) of the prevalent modern hybrid, that glossy and proportionally perfect varieties generally found in seed catalogues and supermarkets alike. It has prompted me to put some of my thoughts about diversity, growing ‘old-fashioned’ vegetables and agri-business into some kind of order, so apologies in advance for topic-theft.

A number of criticisms can (and have) been levelled at the love the average modern organic-goddess displays for heritage varieties of vegetables and organic gardening and her literal and metaphorical distaste for anything with F1 on the packet. A quick flick through the posts that have accumulated on this blog in the last month and a half illustrates the point nicely, I feel. These arguments against a preference for all things diverse and organic boil down (just like my father cooking cauliflower) to one basic point; F1 varieties, pesticides and homogeneity have evolved because they are better than that which earlier existed. In other words, Darwin lives! Traditional varieties simply couldn’t cut the mustard (again, not unlike my father’s cauliflower). More importantly, pesticides and chemical fertilisers are essentially for feeding the growing world population.

I think this argument against heritage veg misses some major points. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I believe unequivocally that diversity is to be valued, not only in a relative sense, for the advantages it can give, but for its own sake as well. There is a practical aspect to this – I find it hard to believe that diversity doesn’t give some kind of protection against diseases, climatic variation and sheer bad luck. Some varieties are also unquestionably better suited to some local conditions than other. But I was also struck by the aesthetic dimension to diversity. Quite simply, a more diverse world seems structurally more appealing. Who wants vegetables that all taste and look the same? Modern palates are dulled enough as it is. Every autumn I search in vain for apples in local shops that aren’t granny smiths, coxes, great red waxy things or golden delicious, when I know somewhere in Britain can be found hundreds of varieties, each with their own taste, texture and smell. For followers of Darwin (and no, in case you were wondering, I don't deny evolution), it should not be forgotten that according to evolutionary theory more species should evolve as others die out, thus maintaining diversity, unless of course some great deus ex machina comes along and screws the whole system up as successfully as humans have done.

Beyond these questions of diversity and evolution lurk the spectres of profit and choice. Promoters of modern hybrids write as if consumers have had a free choice in selecting the restricted range of varieties currently on offer. They haven’t. They have been presented with a limited selection, often sweetened by reduced prices, and have had little choice but to take it. This choice has not been based on the needs of the allotment gardener, but on ease of mass production by a decreasing number of seed companies operating on an ever-greater scale. Cooks have been told that they should prioritise appearance over taste, the perfectly round tomato with a thick-skin that travels well in lorries over the local, bumpy, fragile fruit with the amazing taste. No-one has ever asked me which I prefer. Nor should it be forgotten that seed companies have a huge amount to gain from producing hybrid varieties where the seeds can’t be harvested by grower to produce the same type, because then gardeners require new packets of seed every year. I am astounded by the moral integrity and commercial bravery of companies like Real Seeds which appear to be trying to put themselves out of business by encouraging gardeners to collect their own seeds.

On the need for modern farming methods in order to feed the world, all I can say is that a couple of years ago I lived with an Ethiopian student of agriculture who was writing a masters thesis on how organic production was ultimately a more sustainable way of feeding central Africa. I read his thesis and talked to both him and his friend from Uganda. His conclusions weren’t quite ready to change the world, but what has vividly stayed in my mind is their anger over the companies who had their countries dependent on buying seeds, buying fertiliser and pesticide every single year, when huge percentages of the population were living on less than one dollar a day. Their frustration about how the need for cash to buy new seed every year has tied even small-scale producers into producing cash-crops for export was truly memorable. Their point? Does the West really think that Africa has never come up with its own ways of dealing with the pests, diseases and weather patterns that it has had to live with for millennia? Sure, they may not be doing a great job right now, but that is precisely because diversity and sufficiency on a community level were key ingredients in traditional methods of agricultural risk management.

In some ways talk of feeding the world is irrelevant. I’m not trying to feed the world. I’m trying to feed myself. And if everyone was given the space to do that, maybe feeding the world wouldn’t be such a problem.

Nature as art, art as nature

My 'golden sweet' mange tout peas are flowering and starting to develop their first pods, and yesterday in the sunshine I found myself quite enraptured by them. They are far too tall and extremely beautiful.

Radish Top Soup

From time to time, K accuses me of being obsessed with radishes, and I'm not saying that she doesn't have a point. I do like the taste very much, but it's really more that they have a particular knack for drawing out my maternal instincts. This is entirely the result of my gardening endeavours last year, when I was trying to establish a vegetable patch in a garden so neglected that little was ever going to grow without the application of some serious compost and much pruning of the many, many shade-giving trees. With no car, I had to transport compost in a bike basket, so go figure. I planted some radish seeds and was utterly convinced that I must be a terrible gardener if I couldn't even grow radishes, so I rather got into the habit of going to check on them to make sure they were doing OK. Sometimes I would check them three or four times a day. It became a bit of a standing joke in the house. Where's Sal? Oh, she's just gone to check her radishes again.

The point of telling the world this and thereby making myself look a tad odd is to excuse the fact that I googled 'radishes' during a particularly dull moment of my current PhD chapter. On reflection, perhaps I don't need an excuse for googling random vegetables instead of working on my PhD. Either way, I am glad I did, for I discovered that it is possible to make soup out of the tops. No part of my radishes will be wasted, and in this way they shall be reassured that I love them. So, without further ado, here is my version of Radish Top Soup.

To make about 3-4 bowls-worth, you need:

- The tops of a small bed of radishes, assiduously collected over two weeks, minus those that had turned to green slime in the fridge. This is probably about equivalent to 150g.

- The last two radishes from the above-mentioned radish bed.

- 2-3 potatoes, thinly sliced

- A fairly small onion, finely chopped

- A good knob of butter

- 600ml of veg stock

- double cream (no, I didn't measure it)

- salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan and saute the onion until soft and translucent. Add the potatoes and radish tops, mix it all up and pour in the stock. Season well. This should be allowed to boil and then left to simmer for thirty minutes. Cool until it the rather unappealing looking mixture can be put in a blender, then blend well. Add enough cream to make it creamy soup, garnish with sliced radishes and serve with freshly made wholemeal bread. It tastes a bit like spinach soup would taste if spinach tasted more like radishes and less like spinach.

How Not To Grow French Beans

Whatever you do, plant the seeds in situ, don't propagate them in a greenhouse/in a seed tray/on a sunny windowsill.

According to the received wisdom (i.e. wisdom received through books and the Internet), pretty much all beans grow better if planted in the final growing site, rather than started off elsewhere and transplanted. This means that in theory I should have known better than to start mine off inside, but I was seduced into some early planting by the fact that runner beans will actually cope perfectly well with transplantation. Last year I had great success with a tray-load that had been propagated somewhere in Yorkshire and brought down as a present by my parents (we do exciting gifts in my family). I have now learnt that this cannot be applied to French beans. Plant 'em out where you want them to grow, and they will repay you with health, vigour and shiny green leaves. Move them around too much and they will shrivel up and die at the first sign of temperatures above 20 and below 5 degrees Celsius. Trust the French to be more awkward.

On a different note, this morning we discovered that even the most passionate eco-warrior might be tempted to drive a short distance if the alternative is to risk getting a lovely and little-worn white linen skirt covered with bike grease.

First crop!

I don't usually like to post more than once a day (smacks of heavy-duty narcissism if you ask me), but I couldn't resist showing off the first harvest from my patio garden. Behold the radishes!

They were absolutely delicious with some freshly-made bread and a hunk of cheddar cheese for lunch. Now all I need to do is grow enough wheat, barley and hops to make my own bread and beer, keep a cow for cheese, and I'll be self-sufficient in one of Northern Europe's finest culinary offerings!

Garden Chintz

I meant to add this to my last post, but it was getting too long. I spent much of Saturday afternoon in a state of some astonishment that the same garden centre where I bought Clovis the Coffee Plant was also boasting a range of Laura Ashley seeds, which do indeed originate with the famously floral clothing shop of the same name. They come in themed ranges with names like 'antique', 'classic', 'tranquil', 'harmony' and 'rustic' and are generally marketed as 'take your individual style outdoors', which presumably means that having been sold an 'individual style' by the shop, you can then eradicate any possible originalit..., sorry, disharmony, by bringing your gardens into the overall 'look'. I suppose it at least has the advantage that mothers will now be able to play exciting camouflage games with the kids without having to wear any unappealing shades of khaki. Just blend with the poppies!

Now aside from the incredible silliness of having a seed range named 'rustic' and the irritation of such overtly packaged and fashion conscious gardening, it strikes me as utterly hilarious that a clothing designer that made its name with floral patterns and chintz should now be attempting to export flowers from fabrics to gardens rather than, err, the other way round. Whatever next, painters of landscapes encouraging people to get out and look at the countryside every once in a while?

Because I can be a pretentious artsy student sometimes, it reminds me of a passage by the strange and brilliant Halldor Laxness in his novel 'The Atom Station'. 'When the peace of Autumn has become poetic instead and being taken for granted...when the last day of the plover becomes a matter of personal regret...the horse becomes associated with the history of art and mythology...the evening film on the farm stream becomes reminiscent of crystal...then the time has come for you to say goodbye. The world-bacterium has overcome you, the countryside has turned into literature, poetry and art and you no longer belong there.' And this is just about a girl looking at a stream! Goodness knows what he would have made of the seeds.

Horticultural Exotica

Saturday was a clearly a target day for community shopping in our charming neighbourhood of Cambridge. We live in the kind of area which attracts veg boxes, copies of the guardian, John Lewis delivery vans and children's-second-language-of-your-choice au pairs like bees to the organic honey pot. Local plant sales for charity are right up the collective alley, if indeed there were any alleys left that hadn't fallen victim to house extensions and garden landscaping. Jumble sales too, even if this one was organised by the local branch of the Labour Party (not so popular in the Lib Dem heartlands except among crusty elderly socialists, still wearing Soviet cap badges from the first time around). What more could a self-proclaimed self-respecting organic lifestyle enthusiast require?

Improbably enough, I ended up with a kiwi plant. I walked into the plant sale to discover most of the plants on offer actually required a garden rather than a series of pots. Except for this kiwi plant, which improbably enough was marketed as a patio plant. It looked a bit sad in its cardboard box, and plastic wrapper, and I'm a sucker for the proverbial puppy at the dogs home, especially if it has leaves. Still, I thought, I have enough plants, and not many pots left. Whither the courgettes, if I fall for the charms of a furry fruit like this, however plaintive looking? So I start to drift unobtrusively towards the door, when I wasaccosted by one of the formidable and hearty ladies of the Newnham Gardening Club. Think the kind of women who have been cruelly deprived by social developments of the the last eighty years of a large house complete with platoons of housemaids to manage.

'Not see anything you like?'
'...I'm not sure I really have the space...'
'Rubbish, you've obviously come here, you have to get something'
'....'
'It's for charity, you know'
'...'
'What have you got to lose? £1.50? tchah'.

Blackmailed by the eldery and well-spoken, I go home to look up kiwis in my fruit book to discover not only that most varieties required a male and female plant (fingers crossed for this one being self-pollinating), but that they can grow up to 30 feet, apparently being especially suitable for covering unsightly walls, pagodas etc. Not exactly my idea of a pot plant, but it's nevertheless sitting comfortably in one of my best planters, surrounded by a complicated frame of canes and wire. And it looks happy now.

To complete a day of horticultural silliness, I also bought a coffee and cinnamon plant at the garden centre. Apparently if I look after the coffee plant for three years, it may actually produce beans. I have named it Clovis, after the first Christian king of the Merovingian Franks, because I actually am that much of a geek.

The Many Uses of a Bean Frame

This weekend was gorgeous in Cambridge, so I got most of the veggies either planted out or potted on (at least until I ran out of small pots). On Saturday afternoon I finally built a frame for my beans (and then promptly ran out of canes). Within half an hour it looked like this:

We really don't have that much room in the flat!