Rhubarb - may the force be with us

Following our success with forcing chicory, we’ve turned our attention to our rhubarb crowns. Forcing rhubarb is a notable tradition in the UK, providing bright pink, tender stems to harvest at a time when there is little else to be dug out of the ground.

You may have heard of the ‘rhubarb triangle’ – not a place where rhubarb mysteriously vanishes, but rather an area in West Yorkshire bordered by Wakefield, Rothwell and Morley, where rhubarb is grown in special darkened, warmed sheds and forced to produce early stems between January and March for UK shops. Lit only by candlelight, the sheds house 1000s of rhubarb plants which send out long slender shoots in search of light. You can even take a Yorkshire rhubarb triangle tour, during which you can even hear the fast-growing forced plants popping if you listen closely. Forced rhubarb from this area of Yorkshire has been granted Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status by the European Commission.

With our two young rhubarb plants, we won’t be forcing on quite the same scale, but the same principles apply. As with chicory, the process deprives the growing plants of all light. The resulting stems (rhubarb) or leaves (chicory) are pale and more tender, more delicately flavoured than those grown in the tough outdoors. The darkened plants will also grow faster, desperately hunting for light in order to photosynthesise and convert sunlight to energy.

The best time to start forcing rhubarb is when you can just see the first signs of new growth at the turn of the year. Up-end a large dark-coloured pot, or bucket, one that is big enough to accommodate the growing stems, over the whole rhubarb crown. Pin it down into the soil with pegs, so that a) there’s no danger of the bucket blowing away in a winter storm, or b) no light gets in between the edge of the bucket and the soil. Any drainage holes in the bottom of the pot must be blocked off to stop even those pinpricks of light from getting in. I usually cover them with stones or concrete slabs, which has the dual effect of blocking light and again weighting the pot down so it doesn’t blow away.

Try to do this during a spell of dryish weather so that the embryonic plant isn’t wet when you cover it with the pot. Also don’t cover the rhubarb when the ground is frozen or the covered plant will remain too cold. It’s also a good idea to give the plant a quick onceover for slugs, woodlice and the like.

You can now leave nature to take its course. Check the plant every couple of weeks for growth and in 4-6 weeks you should be cutting your own forced rhubarb. The forced stems are generally less fibrous and slimmer than ‘normal’ rhubarb stalks, and also a bright pink – the colour of Pepto-Bismol rather than the darker crimson of stems grown outside in summer.

The incipient leaves should be removed as these, like their outdoor grown counterparts, are poisonous. Then the forced stems can be used in cooking just as you would for any rhubarb – poached, in a fool, or as a savoury accompaniment to meat or fish. Or treat yourself to a classic rhubarb crumble with MsMarmiteLover's recipe. 

Chicory tips - forcing chicory for winter salads

Chicory is a dandelion-like plant which grows thick strong leaves. These are tough and bitter to eat, but at some stage of human evolution, people discovered that if the plants were made to grow in the dark, they would send out tender, crunchy, sweeter shoots that were much nicer to eat. These pale, yellow tipped shoots are called chicons - it's almost worth growing them for the lovely name alone.

Hence, forcing. We don't only force chicory. Rhubarb is forced to produce sweet tender stalks in February/March, a month or two before the unforced plants are ready naturally. Much of the UK’s forced rhubarb is grown in West Yorkshire around Wakefield, an area known as the 'rhubarb triangle', where row after row of blacked-out sheds are lit only by candlelight. You can even hear the stalks popping as they rush to send up shoots in search of light.

The French frisee, the crunchy lettuce with feathery leaves, is typically forced, by having a bucket set over the centre of the plant while growing, to produce a heart of white crunchy leaves. Frisee is related to chicory and here the forcing has the same effect: the white shoots are much more tender than the naturally grown green leaves.

We’ve been forcing chicory here in the Secret Garden Club for the first time this year.

With rhubarb and chicory, the plant must be well established before you try to force it. It’s no good planting a seed or seedling and then plunging it into the dark. The plant must have developed a good root system with stored nutrients. So you sow your chicory seeds in spring as normal, and raise the plant out in the open throughout the summer.

Three weeks ago, we dug up nine chicory plants like these and trimmed off all the existing leaves, to leave just the taproot. We replanted these roots in damp compost in pots, three chicory roots to a 25cm pot, and covered each pot with an upturned black bucket. Then just to make sure no light crept in, we covered the pots with a black bin liner for good measure.

In January we’ll be doing something very similar with our rhubarb and forcing that to produce early, bright pink, tender stalks. They have a more delicate taste compared to the robust stems which grow out in the open and which we’ll start harvesting in April.

Top tips for growing chicory for forcing

•      Plant chicory in spring. You can grow in pots or troughs, or in the open ground. We’ve done both, using a discarded recycling box (recycling it, in fact) as a trough. The plants in the beds outside generally grew bigger and stronger taproots.
•      The chicory plants look remarkably like dandelions when they’re growing. Don’t weed any by mistake.

Top left: choose a chicory plant with a nice fat base. Top right: Trim the
roots if they are particularly long. Middle left: drop the chicory root into
a pot filled with compost. Middle right: firm the soil around the
chicory. Bottom left: cut off the leaves at the top of the root. Bottom
right: three trimmed roots ready to be forced in the dark.

•      You don’t have to force all your chicory at once. Look for those with a taproot about 2cms or more across.
•      Loosen the root and carefully lift from the soil. Trim the roots if they are very long.
•      Cut off the leaves about 1-2cms above the root.
•      Replant in a pot in damp compost. You can replant 3-4 roots in a 30cm pot.
•      Cover the pot with a bucket or something that will exclude all light. It must be completely dark.
•      Place the pot somewhere frost-free and relatively warm – ideally within 12-16 degrees Celsius. It’s good idea to put it somewhere dark like a cupboard just to ensure the roots aren’t exposed to light.
•      Apart from checking the compost stays moist, leave alone for 3-4 weeks, when the chicons should have formed.

Chicons beginning to grow after a week in darkness.

Three weeks after the chicory plants were transplanted,
trimmed and repotted, we removed the black cover to find
chicons ready to be harvested.

For other accounts of forcing chicory and how to do it, see this post on GrowVeg.com, or here on My Tiny Plot. There is also an account of forcing red Rossa di Treviso chicory on Freshly Picked.

Blooming marvellous - the Secret Garden in summer

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The Secret Garden has burst into fruit and flower in the heatwave – after a slow start to the season everything is coming out at once.

Our fennel, above, is now hitting 6ft high with its umbrella-like flowers reaching for the sun. These flowers, like the fronds and stems, are edible and have the same anise flavour as the rest of the plant. They're beautiful in salads and as a garnish for vegetables, plus the pollen makes an intensely aromatic backdrop to the plate. We’ll be using fennel in our Secret Garden Club Edible Flowers afternoon this Sunday (book here for tickets, there are just a few places left).

Blackfly are always attracted to globe artichokes, although the problem is often very local with one plant affected and another quite free of them (see above). We’ve given our blackfly-infested plant on the left a good shower in washing-up water to get rid of them, using environmentally friendly soap, of course. A garlic infusion sprayed on the plants every few days as they mature can also act as a good preventative measure.

We only planted the rhubarb earlier this year, but it has already established well and this winter we’ll try forcing some of the stems for an early rhubarb treat in February or March. We chose a partially shaded site for the rhubarb, rather than placing it in full sun: it will tolerate some shade quite well.

Blackberries are forming after a brief and glorious display of blossom – we’ve never consciously planted blackberries, but they are persistent and vigorous intruders, and a welcome addition to the garden, so long as we keep them firmly in check.

One of the advantages of mixing edible plants with ornamentals as we do in the Secret Garden is some predators get confused. Grown in rows or block, these cavolo nero plants would be an easy target for pigeons which loves to eat the leaves and for cabbage white butterflies looking for brassicas to lay their eggs on. The pigeons haven’t found our cavolo nero yet, although we’ll continue to keep a sharp eye out for caterpillars.

Fruits for summer

However big or small your outside space, growing a fruit bush or two will, with care, repay you year after year with delicious produce, all for rather less fuss and pampering than the inhabitants of the vegetable patch.

The simple joy of eating fruit straight from the tree (no scrubbing, or trimming of roots) never palls. Fruit also tends to be more popular with children (sugar snap peas excepted), so it’s easier to get them out and helping with the harvest.

The Secret Garden is situated on land which was an orchard before the houses were built, and is overlooked by very tall trees at the back of the gardens - pear trees, grown in the days before fruit trees were grafted and bred to grow smaller, making the fruit easier to reach. The pears that grow here are liable to go to waste unless they drop as windfalls – though we do get a lot of windfalls.

Types of fruit

You can broadly talk about two main kinds of fruit: tree fruit, such as apricots, cherries, and, later in the summer, peaches, plums, damsons, and greengage. Then, into autumn, we get apples, pears, and quinces.

Then there's cane and bush fruit, including berries: Strawberries, raspberries, black, red and whitecurrants, gooseberries, blackberries, blueberries. We're also going to include rhubarb here, even though it isn’t a fruit at all, since we eat it as though it were. In this post, we're concentrating on bush fruit, much of which is just beginning to ripen now.

Strawberries

Everyone should have a strawberry patch. They are easy to grow, they can be grown in a pot, and the strawberries your plants produce will be far superior to anything you buy in a supermarket. The ubiquitous Elsanta is stocked in shops because it will keep for a long time once picked, not for any reason to do with flavour or sweetness. 

You should be able to buy other more delicious varieties – Gariguette, perhaps, or Cambridge Favourite - to plant in the ground. However, strawberries send out runners, which when planted up will readily root to create a new strawberry plant. Ask around your gardening neighbours or at a local allotment and you may well find someone only too pleased to offload some plants from runners. You may get them in a pot, or as bare roots. If the latter, keep the roots moist and plant up as soon as possible.

If you’re growing in the open ground, find a nice sunny patch, dig it over and mix in some organic matter, plus if you like, some bonemeal – strawberries like that. Water the strawberry pants thoroughly about half an hour before you plant them out.

Dig a hole, drop the plant in, disturbing the roots as little as possible, fill in and water well to settle them.

Your main challenge with strawberries is to stop other beasties from eating them before you do. Slugs, snails, woodlice, ants and birds all love strawberries.

Keep slugs and snails at bay. My usual solution – using copper rings around plants – won’t work here as strawberries are naturally trailing plants. I’ve had good results using slug-resistant matting under the strawberry plants. Slug-resistant usually means the fabric has been impregnated with copper, which slugs and snails dislike as the metal reacts with their mucus and gives them a sort of electric shock. When using the matting, I lay this over the bed after digging over, then cut slits or small circular holes in the fabric and plant the strawberries through this.

Strawberry plants growing through copperised fabric to deter slugs and snails.

Woodlice and other creepy-crawlies will do much less damage if the ripening fruits are kept off the ground. This is one reason why planting strawberries in elevated troughs or bespoke planters – high-sided bins with openings up and down the sides to take the plants – is so popular. These also save space and will grow a decent crop of strawberries so long as you remember to keep the plants well-watered.

To ward off birds, you can try bird scarers – hanging CDs from a cane to produce a kind of flashing mobile effect is popular – but maybe the birds in my locality are particularly bold as this doesn’t seem to bother them, hardened urbanites as they are. The only reliable way I’ve found to keep them off is to net the crop as soon as the first fruits start to ripen. It’s bothersome, but better than having all your fruit eaten.

In a wet summer you may find some of your fruits develop grey-ish brown fur all over. This is a mould called botrytis, very common in strawberries and raspberries. Just eliminate affected fruits and leaves as soon as you can, and try to keep the plants tidy – removing brown and yellowing leaves promptly, not letting fruit trail in the dirt. Planting them spaced well apart helps too, since it means the air can circulate more efficiently around and between the plants.

You should move your strawberries and replenish the plants every 3-5 years or so. In the open ground, you can ‘walk’ them over to the next bed, by training the runners to settle in the new bed, fixing them with a peg to encourage them to root on that spot.

Alpine or wild strawberries
Less prolific than their bigger cousins, the tiny fruits from wild strawberries have an intense, honeyed flavour if you pick them when they're really ripe. Readily available from garden centres, these small plants, once established, will spread across semi-shaded parts of the garden, fruiting throughout the summer.

Blueberries

My other must-have soft fruit is blueberries. The plants are very attractive, with foliage that turns golden-red in autumn, and soft pinkish-white blossom in spring. They don’t need pruning, in fact they need very little special care apart from one vital requirement. Blueberries like acid soil; at least they hate lime. Here in London, the soil tends to be slightly acid, but it’s not acid enough for blueberries. So I always grow them in pots and fill the pots with ericaceous compost. This is compost formulated for lime-hating plants such as blueberries, cranberries, azaleas, rhododendrons, and others.

So, they’re good for a patio and good for where you only have pot space. Our Secret Garden blueberry plants are sunk into the ground – this is partly for aesthetic reasons and partly also because blueberries like to be kept very moist. They crop best in a wet summer and when growing anything in pots, it’s all too easy to let them dry out through evaporation. Sinking the pots helps keep them cool and moist as well.

I find blueberries practically pest-free, apart from the birds wanting to eat them even before they ripen. I have lost an entire crop of blueberries to birds while they were still green before now. These days, I grit my teeth and throw a net over the lot before the birds realise they are even there.

Blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants

Currants are another fruit high on my list, if only because they are difficult to find in the shops. Apparently the reason you can’t find blackcurrants is because 95% of the UK crop goes to make Ribena, but that doesn’t explain the dearth of the red or white variety. And they grow very happily in our climate, giving you long strings of fruit in July. Better in the open ground, than a pot though.

Gooseberries

I find people either love or hate gooseberries. We love them at the Secret Garden Club and we’ll be planting gooseberry bushes later this year. The best time for planting is late autumn, in a sunny but not windy spot. We'll dig the ground over thoroughly beforehand, removing any weeds and roots, and we'll dig in some organic matter - manure, compost, leaf mould, before planting as well, to lighten up our clay soil.

There are two types of gooseberries: tart fruits which stay green when ripe and which really need to be cooked, and dessert gooseberries which ripen to a gorgeous maroon mahogany colour when ripe and are sweet. In practice, I find you can cook with these perfectly well too, so prefer to grow dessert gooseberries and get the best of both worlds.

They are fairly low maintenance: mulch around the base of the plants to keep them as weed-free as possible, and prune in the winter to tidy up the bushes and keep them open. They should reward you with fruit in June/July. Be careful when picking them because the bushes are very thorny. Needless to say the thorns don’t deter the birds and yes, it’s probably wise to net the bushes when the fruits start ripening. Gooseberry bushes tend to stay smallish and so rather than buying a specialist net and training it over a frame you may well get away with throwing an old net curtain over the plant.

Dessert gooseberries ripening under a protective net.

Rhubarb

Another love it or hate it taste, and something of an interloper in this blogpost, since there is no way that the stalk of a large leafy perennial plant can be described as a fruit. But we mostly eat rhubarb as if it was a fruit. So we’ll include it as a guest.

Rhubarb is indestructible once you get it going. It’s one of the first of the new season veg to be ready – usually you can start cutting in April and you can make it come even earlier by forcing it. Forced rhubarb stems are a beautiful bright pink colour and more tender than the conventionally grown stalks that come later.

Forced rhubarb stems uncovered.

We’ll be forcing our Secret Garden crop next year. Rhubarb dies down overwinter and you need to wait until you see the first signs of new growth coming in January. Then cover the tiny shoots with an upturned bucket to exclude all light from the plant. Make sure any holes in the bucket are plugged – cover with straw – and put a weight like a half-brick on top as well as pegging the lip of the bucket to the soil to ensure it doesn’t blow away in the wind.

The stems will take around 4-6 weeks to shoot up in the dark, although this year in the prolonged cold they took nearer to three months. Once you’ve cut the forced stems, uncover the plant and let it rest – don’t cut that particular plant over spring and summer.

One other bit of rhubarb maintenance needed is to cut out any flowering stems – you want the plant to put its energy into producing leaf stalks, not flowers.

And bear in mind that the leaves and flowers on a rhubarb plant are poisonous. Only eat the stems.

Raspberries

I love raspberries but I wouldn’t include them as a must-grow plant for a few reasons: 1) they are an open ground plant and need space, not suitable for growing in pots; 2) once established they can be invasive and shoots will pop up in neighbouring beds and pretty much anywhere you don’t want them; 3) following on from (2) if you ever want to move your raspberry bed to somewhere else, tough, and 4) they can be temperamental and fail to establish in what appears to be perfectly suitable ground.

Having said all that, happy, established raspberry canes in the right spot will reliably give you fantastic fruits year after year. All they really need in the way of maintenance is to have the old canes cut down after fruiting, the new canes tied in during spring, and a good mulch in February or March.

There are some interesting new varieties available from specialist nurseries as well, if you fancy it, Try golden orange fruits, such as the autumn-fruiting Allgold. If you want something more unusual, try some of the other less well-known berries like loganberries, or the sweeter tayberries, both of which are blackberry x raspberry hybrids. 

Physalis (Cape gooseberries or Chinese lanterns)

Now these are a bit of a luxury since they take up space and need a nice long summer to ripen in enough numbers to make them worthwhile, but home-grown physalis are something of a revelation compared to the imported shop-bought fruits. Much tangier and fresher-tasting. 

Physalis will germinate very readily from seed from March onwards on a warm windowsill. Once they'll about the size of the seedlings pictured here you can transplant into bigger pots and then into a nice sunny spot in the open ground once there's no danger of any more frosts.

The fruit develops inside the lantern-shaped papery husks and should be ready for eating in September.