Saturday, 17 January 2015

Swedes - a disappointing result

I can't claim to be very proud of my efforts at growing Swedes. They haven't been a total washout, but not far off it. For reasons of lack of space, I only grew four of them. One turned out reasonably well (I wrote about it HERE), but the others have been a disappointment. Seen without anything to give it scale, this one doesn't look too bad:


In all honesty though, it is tiny. Here it is on a plate:


Let's not beat about the bush here: that is a 21cm (just over 8") plate! It will be OK to eat I reckon, just not big.


When I harvested that one, I also pulled up the remaining two Swedes. I don't think I can count it as "harvesting" them, because they yielded nothing useable:


That little one at the left is really weird. I don't know what went wrong with it, but as you can see better in the next photo it produced two crowns and practically no root:


I think I will not bother with growing Swedes again. They have a very low VSR. They take a long time to develop, use a fair bit of space, and are very cheap to buy in the shops. I have explained VSR before, but here's a reminder for you:-


That's a photo of a page from Joy Larkcom's book "Vegetables for Small Gardens", to which I used to refer a lot when I was new to veg-gardening.


I'm not sure whether this is significant, but my records (i.e. this blog) reveal that these Swedes were grown in exactly the same place as where I previously tried growing Celeriac - with equally pathetic results!
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6 comments:

  1. Jo17 January 2015 at 12:43

    It was worth a go. We enjoy swede, especially in a stew or casserole so I may give them a go myself this year. I have Joy Larkcom's Grow Your Own Vegetables which is a good book.

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  2. David Shinn17 January 2015 at 13:37

    If we applied VSR too strictly then I guess we'd be down at Aldi for most of our veg? My swedes were a bit of an after thought as I didn't thin them enough,but the few good ones were sweet and delicious and ,in terms of flavour ,would knock spots of the monsters sitting on the supermarket shelves.

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    Replies
    1. Mark Willis17 January 2015 at 14:53

      Yes, I think the taste (and texture) of a freshly-harvested home-grown vegetable is normally an awful lot better than one which has been hanging around in a shop for days / weeks / months, and this often outweighs the other aspects of VSR.

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  3. Sue Garrett17 January 2015 at 18:35

    We. Need to make more effort with swede as we tend to forget and be too late in sowing.

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  4. Margaret18 January 2015 at 00:36

    That's too bad about the swedes. But one semi-flop (you did get one edible one!) isn't bad at all considering all of the successes in your garden this year.

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  5. David19 January 2015 at 21:34

    I had to poke around to learn that what you call a swede we would call a rutabaga.

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