Frost and Sunshine

We have had some classic Spring days recently: cold nights and frosty mornings, but some welcome sunshine later in the day. This is what it is like in the mornings - COLD:

A frozen blob of water on a Broccoli leaf

Anyone for frozen Broccoli?

A frozen drip on a Dogwood twig

I have been wanting for ages to get some good pictures of the Crocuses, but due to the scarcity of sunshine in February and early March the flowers have hitherto been reluctant to open up fully. This week the Crocuses finally lost their inhibitions, and I got my chance.

The Crocuses finally deigned to open up fully


The tough, waxy leaves of the Bay trees have withstood the onslaught of Winter quite well, and the trees are now producing a mass of little flower buds.

Flower buds beginning to appear on the Bay trees


The Land Cress plants have been protected by fleece until about two weeks ago, so they have been able to keep producing a small but welcome supply of nice tender leaves to spice up our salads.

The Land Cress is still producing nice succulent leaves

Lots of new growth on the white Rose bush



The nodding Euphorbia flowers are beginning to open

Hopefully we will get plenty more sunny days now, and the soil will warm up, so that I can get sowing and planting. For us here in the UK, April is the busiest time for sowing, so I will have plenty to do over the next few weeks...

Harvesting Broccoli

Hooray! The long-awaited moment finally arrived - I harvested the first of my Purple Sprouting Broccoli (PSB).

OK, it wasn't a major harvest, but the first picking of any crop is always a little bit special, so this broccoli got the VIP treatment. The "spears" that I harvested were the main central shoots of the two "Rudolph" plants. It is accepted best practice to take the central shoots first because cutting them  (effectively "pinching out" the plant) will encourage the side-shoots to develop better.

Some of you suggested for me some nice ways to cook broccoli, but this is how I cooked it this time:-

I used our Asparagus Kettle for the task. It is a tall thin pan with a removable wire cage inside it.

I filled the pan with water to about a third of its depth, allowing the stalks of the broccoli to boil in the water, whilst the flower part cooks in the steam. This means that the stalk and flowers cook in the same length of time. To aid this I also slit the stalks with a sharp knife.

It only takes literally two or three minutes to cook PSB. Don't overdo it, otherwise the vegetable will go mushy and the flowers will fall apart.

I made a "sauce" to serve with the PSB. I heated up in a small frying-pan some good olive oil, then turned off the heat and added some finely-sliced garlic, which cooked gently in the cooling oil. When the PSB was cooked I arranged it on plates and then poured over the warm oil and garlic, and finished the dish with a generous sprinkling of toasted almonds. You'll notice how the purple colour has changed to green.

Not a very substantial dish, but then it was only a Starter - and it was absolutely yummy! And the best bit is, there is lots more PSB to come...



Anthropomorphism

Yes, it's a difficult word, isn't it? It means attributing human characteristics to things that are not human, such as animals, plants and inanimate objects. I am using it in a slightly different way - to mean attributing animal characteristics to plants. For instance, one of my readers pointed out that this photo makes a rhubarb leaf look a bit like a dragon (assuming you know what a dragon looks like).

I now offer you this one - I reckon it looks like a pair of penguins, dancing. "OK, Mark, have you been at the Magic Mushrooms again?" you may say, but look again and I think you'll see what I mean.

Here they are again, but with the kids this time...

These are actually photos of chits or sprouts on a "Kestrel" potato. The purple tinge is authentic, by the way. That's how they are in real life.

And these are not really tomatoes at all - they are clams...



And what do you think this is???

It's actually the natural "seam-line" on a Christophene or Chow-Chow.

Is this a cross-section of a brain, or what...?

And isn't this a tropical fish of some sort?

OK, I admit it. I did edit this one a leeetle bit.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", they say, and so I believe is Anthropomorphism!

Golden hops

I have some Golden Hop (Humulus Lupulus "Aureus") plants in my garden. They grow against the wooden fence at the bottom of the garden. Each year I cut them down to ground level in the Winter and they grow up again the next Spring. Once they get started they grow very rapidly, and with their prolific golden yellow foliage and striking purple-tinged stems they are really good plants for covering-up a plain wall or fence. If you let them, they will easily grow 10 metres or more in a season.

Right now the first of the new season's shoots are poking through the leaf-litter, not at all golden, but looking very much like Asparagus spears.

 I have read that you can eat Hop shoots just like Asparagus, but I have never tried them. Have any of you done so - and if you have, were they worth it?

The Hop shoots perform very much like the Rhubarb. They push through the soil in a protective sheath, which then gets discarded by the rapidly-growing shoot, almost like a chick emerging from its egg-shell. The infant leaves are red / orange to begin with (again, like the Rhubarb), but when they are exposed to the light they turn a greenish yellow. Later in the year the leaves will be bright golden yellow - very attractive.

By the way, here's another pic showing the Rhubarb "dragon" starting to turn green... And you can see the next leaf-bud pushing up at the base of the stalk too.

On the same back fence I have a little Clematis Montana plant, which is just coming into leaf. Last year (when it was new) it didn't produce any flowers. This year, I'm hoping it will.

Finally for today (for no particular reason), I just wanted to show you this picture of a bud on my apple tree...

The promise of good things to come?

Oriental Brassicas doubly protected

Early March is the time I start sowing most of my seeds. I have now sowed Chillis, Tomatoes, Physalis, Baby Leaf Salad, Cabbage, Broccoli, Kohlrabi, and several more besides. Amongst other things I have put in a small batch of Oriental Brassicas. I am going to try these first as "Baby Leaf Salad" ingredients, to be harvested when they are only 2 or 3 inches tall, and then a bit later on I will try growing some of them to maturity.

Komatsuna - photo courtesy of Takaeko

I sowed the first batch in an old washing-up bowl. These things make great containers for small veg, because they are deeper than most seed-trays, allowing the plants to put down some better roots. You do need to drill a few drainage holes though, otherwise the compost may become waterlogged.

The three varieties that went into this container were Mustard "Osaka Purple", Komatsuna "Torasan", and  Bekana "Tokyo". I have never grown any of these before, but I have high expectations, having read about them on blogs maintained by some of my Japanese friends, for instance Takaeko, from Osaka

After sowing the seeds I covered the bowl with a sheet of clear acrylic, like this...

And then I put the bowl in one of my little plastic greenhouses, so the seedlings when they emerge will have a double layer of protection, at least in the early stages of their development. The night-time temperatures here are still hovering around the Zero point, and even the day-time temperatures are only in single figures most days, so these seeds will need all the help they can get, even though the growing-instructions say you can sow them from Late Winter onwards.

In fact, I think I might try to bring the Oriental Brassicas container indoors until the seeds germinate (if I can find some space...)

I'd be interested to hear from anyone else in the UK who has grown Oriental Brassicas before, so that we can compare notes.

P.S. Since I drafted this post, things have moved on... Almost all the "ordinary" Brassicas - e.g. the cabbages and various Broccoli-style things - germinated really rapidly, in fact within 3 days. I had them in pots covered with plastic bags, placed on my Dining Room table. Evidently they enjoyed the warmth! I have decided however to grow then "hard" - in other words I have already moved them outside, though still in their pots, still protected by their little plastic bags. I want them to get lots of light, but not to be too warm, so that they develop slowly but sturdily rather than going leggy on an indoors windowsill. At night time they will go in one of the plastic mini-greenhouses for added protection. I think this strategy is going to be OK, because the weather forecast for the next few days doesn't look too bad.

An added benefit of my plan is that I will still have the windowsills free for other seedlings! I'd better sow something else... Herbs next. I've got some Basil, and both Summer and Winter Savory. And Parsley is already on the go.

P.S. More pictures of the younger generations of my family working in the garden are on Emma's blog Mellow Mummy today.

Free containers

I'm sure most of you, like me, still buy many of your groceries and other household requirements at a supermarket or traditional shop. Whether we like it or not, many of the goods we buy come in plastic containers. These tend to get thrown in the dustbin when they are empty, and usually end up in landfill somewhere, with all the consequent negative effects on our fragile environment. The sad fact is that if we just thought a little more about it, we could use these containers for loads of other purposes...

We gardeners always need containers for lots of things - seed-trays and plant-pots being the most obvious ones. It can cost a fair bit of money to buy new seed-trays and plant pots from a Garden Centre, so why not consider reusing some of those plastic containers from the groceries, that would otherwise go to waste?

I have shown you this one before - a butter tub being used for growing cress:-

Here are some more ideas for you.

An old washing-up bowl can be used as a harvesting receptacle.



Or as a deep seed-tray.

Here are some containers from Pelleted Chicken Manure being used as pots for growing tomatoes

Some other containers that are going to be put to good use in my garden include:

This plastic biscuit box, which will become a nice deep (approx 6") growing-container for Baby Leaf Salad, or Corn Salad, or even radishes. (No chance of losing this one in the gloomy weather, eh?)

This large 1-kilogramme Margarine tub, which will be a seed-tray.

These 284ml (10 fl oz) cream cartons will provide perfect deep pots for tomato seedlings. Obviously the normal little yoghurt pots also make ideal individual plant modules, but with a pot this tall you can plant a seedling really deeply, thus promoting beneficial additional root growth from the stem.

This shallow 175g paté tub will be a good one for growing Mustard-and-Cress on the windowsill.

And what about making individual plant modules from cut-down milk bottles. Most people use loads of these, and they are easy to cut using a sturdy pair of kitchen scissors.

And don't let's forget the traditional use of the surplus egg-carton: keeping seed potatoes upright during chitting.

This can be done with polystyrene ones too, but the cardboard ones like that in the picture above have the added benefit of being compostable.

Even when one of my plastic compost bins was broken by a falling fence in a gale, I was able to salvage part of it and convert it into a tub for growing Marrows.

OK, I've shown you lots of my Reuse ideas. I'm sure that many of my readers will have some equally good ideas, so who else is prepared to share them with us? 

P.S. Have a look at this great idea from David Offut's blog - In The Garden

A Rhubarb time-sequence

I don't have a large quantity of Rhubarb - only two crowns - but it makes a good photography subject. Hopefully I will also get a decent crop in a couple of months' time... My rhubarb is not as well-advanced as many plants that I have seen on other blogger's sites, but then as I have said before, mine is situated in a far-from-ideal site, where the light level is low and the soil is poor.

For now, here are some photos that show the rhubarb in the early stages of its growth, as the leaves initially push through the soil wrapped-up in their protective "sheaths" and then gradually unfurl:



If you're wondering what all the little sticks around the emerging rhubarb are for - they are to deter cats and foxes from digging up the plants. Not sure how effective they will be, but I live in hope...

Don't you think that the close-up pictures make the rhubarb leaves look as if they are part of an animal rather than part of a plant? One of them looks uncannily like a brain. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the leaves to turn green.