Book review: my cool allotment. by Lia Leendertz

Guardian and Telegraph writer Lia Leendertz has written a brilliant book for gardeners both armchair and real, which would also appeal to travellers and cooks: a pilgrimage through allotments, ferreting out stories and characters.
Once someone gets an allotment, which in London, can take years on a waiting list, they become understandably territorial. I've noticed that with my allotmenteer friends, that bitching is no longer about outfits and boyfriends but ugly fences and unacceptable insect eradication methods. Some seem quite scarred by their allotment wars but undoubtedly it is a lovely way to garden and make friends. I'm lucky enough to have my own garden but it can be lonely. Allotmenteering has its own culture and community.
Lia writes of the history of allotments, how common land, widely available, which the poor depended upon for fuel and food, was given to rich landowners under the Enclosures Acts of the 1800s. Allotments were meagre but welcome compensation for free common land. She visits the oldest allotments in the UK and the oldest gardener still working on them.
The book is a series of interviews with allotment holders some of whom, reflecting our multi-cultural society, come from Tokyo, Cyprus, Thailand and Jamaica. The stuff they grow reflects their background and the food they cook.
Riverford cottage gardener Mark Diacono is the photographer for this book, capturing the diverse, often grizzled, faces of the characters, for instance the mad-haired permaculture guru Mike Feingold, looking like Einstein crossed with Wurzel Gummidge.
We meet the glamorous titian coiffed Alys Fowler in her plot, where she goes every afternoon, lights a fire and makes tea. She grows with a view to fermenting, sauerkraut and kimchi. Lia writes of a dahlia fetishist in Birmingham and a floating garden near Amiens. I was ignorant of forest gardening and the book visits Martin Crawford's woodland allotment. There is a fascinating chapter on a plot that concentrates on growing plants for dyes such as madder and woad. Lia also explores community projects, an edible bus stop,a school allotment where gardening is part of the curriculum, an edible office garden and a skip garden.
My only, albeit minor, reservation about the book is the design. It is part of a series, perhaps they all have the same look. It would have been helpful to have each allotment holder clearly identified and where their allotment is located. The typeface is hard to read and the background colour of the paper is unattractive.  I've learnt as a blogger, when at first you experiment with black backgrounds and the like, keep it simple! You want readability so stick to white or pale backgrounds and black type. The publishers should also consider that people tend to get interested in gardening over the age of 35, and small tight fonts are not easy for older people to read.
It's frustrating because this fascinating book deserves to be big and plush with lots of room.

Buy my cool allotment here.                             

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.

Menu for Summer Fruits, Summer drinks supper at the Secret Garden Workshop

I'm a berry addict which is no bad thing, since it was discovered that they were in fact, super foods. Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, black currants, red currants, white currants, elderberries, just to mention a few we grow on the British isles, but I envy Scandinavia with their larger range of berries: cloudberry, lingonberry, sea buckthorn berries... I like the combination of sweet and sour, gooseberries should be in season but sadly I haven't seen them around. Can we grow some gooseberries for next year, Zia Mays?
Visiting Jekka McVicar's #herbfest at the Queen Elizabeth hall last night, (do go and see her remarkable herb greenhouse and garden) I saw a copy of her book, which described how to grow your own berries by keeping the pips or seeds, teasing them out from the pulp, drying and planting them. There is a bizarre interesting debate on this Paleo diet site as to whether we should chew the seeds or not.
Zia will be showing guests how to grow berries and make summer drinks while I make the food.
Of late I've been interested in using fruits with savouries and vegetables with desserts. I'm going to play around with the former in this meal. Here a few ideas I've come up with which I'll serve this Sunday. As always, expect the unexpected at the Secret Garden Club.


Berry Spritzers

Strawberry and baby leaf salad with raspberry dressing. Strawberries are still quite acid, so should complement a savoury salad beautifully.

Roasted apricot and Danish blue cheese salad. Roasting apricots makes them gorgeously sour.

Stuffed pasta shells with pickled cherries. I like to add the piquancy of cold pickles to hot savoury dishes.

Summer pudding: a British summertime classic.

Forest fruits sorbet in blueberry soup, with grated chocolate: a sorbet made quickly in the Vitamix and paired with a very Scandi blueberry soup.

Wines from Winetrust100: a new wine club which asks three masters of wine to pick a range of 100 wines, the best for their price, from all over the world.


Book tickets here £30

Growing beansprouts

Growing your own beansprouts is ridiculously easy and they are genuinely always much better than the bagged beansprouts you buy in the supermarket: crunchier, with a more pronounced flavour. And yours will not start to go mushy as soon as you’ve opened the pack.

Supermarket beansprouts are nearly always mung beans, but my two favourites are adzuki beans and fenugreek seeds.

1   Get your equipment together. There’s not much: a clean glass jar, and something which creates a mesh lid for it. It could be the lid, punctured in many places with small holes, rather as if you were going to keep a caterpillar in there. It could be a square from an old (but clean) jelly bag or net curtain. My preferred option is for a square cut from an old, clean pair of tights. You’ll also need a rubber band to keep the mesh securely on the jar. And your beans of course.

Secret gardeners with jars of beansprouts.

2  Put about a level tablespoon of beans in a colander or sieve and rinse them to remove and dust or dirt. Put them in the jar, cover with cold water and leave to soak for about 24 hours – overnight, anyway. This gives the sprouting process a bit of a kick-start.

3  The next day, drain the beans in a sieve or colander. Rinse them well, and drain again. Put them back in the jar, fix the mesh top on and stand them upside down on a draining rack or similar so that they are not standing in water.

4   The beans need to be rinsed and drained twice a day – morning and evening in practice. You can simply pour cold water through the mesh into the jar with the beans, swirl around a bit to rinse the beans well and then stand the jar upside down to drain.

5.  Ideally the jars should be kept in the dark, as the sprouts can turn green and more bitter to taste in daylight, but I keep forgetting about them if they’re put in a cupboard. Having them out on the drying rack makes it much easier to remember the twice-daily rinse.

6   You should start to see sprouts in about 48 hours (less for fenugreek). The best time to ‘harvest’ and eat them is when the sprouts are a couple of centimetres long and just beginning to push out leaves, usually after 3-4 days. You can eat the whole lots, bean + shoot, although some people like to rub off the skin of the bean before eating.

Korean chilli tofu with mangetout peas, served at the Secret Garden Club.

Growing microleaves

If you can remember growing mustard and cress on blotting paper at school then you are familiar with the idea of microleaves.

These are new-born baby versions of salad leaves, sown thickly and harvested when still just a centimetre or two high. You get all the flavour and nutrients from the full-size plant in a miniature package.

Microleaves were all the rage in restaurants not so long ago – around the time that making everything into foam was fashionable too. They’re used mainly for garnish, but also are good for adding flavour and texture to a salad.

Good varieties to try in microleaf form include mizuna, mustard, shiso, radish, rocket, basil, coriander, and peas. Especially peas - this is a quick and easy way to get pea shoots for a salad.

I sow microleaves when I have a few seeds left in the packet and no space left in the ground.

1. You need a shallow tray to grow microleaves in, one with drainage holes in the bottom. I use up these clear plastic supermarket trays which fruit, veg or even meat come in. The tray gets a good wash before we do any sowing! 
2. Helpfully, many of these trays already have holes punched into the bottom. If yours doesn’t you’ll have to add some, with a skewer or fork or scissors.
3. Cut a single piece of kitchen towel so that it fits snugly into the bottom of the tray. This is to stop your growing medium falling through the drainage holes while still letting water in and out.
4. Now add your growing medium – I’m deliberately not specifying what it is because there are a number of effective things you can use:

a.     Seed compost. There are plenty of people who say that using compost gives your microleaves the best flavour. 
b.     Perlite. These are particles of volcanic rock that have been heated to a very high temperature so that the granules become light and very porous. Good for anchoring the roots in place and absorbing water, which is then available to the growing plants. Looks like cat litter.c.     Vermiculite, a silicate mineral which provides a clean inert anchorage for the micro-seedlings. It also has the advantage of being much cleaner than soil.
d.     Cotton wool covered with kitchen towel (or blotting paper). This has to be the cleanest solution of all. My only objection here is that I’ve found I get patchy germination using kitchen towel to germinate seeds.

Whichever you use, it needs to be about 1.5 centimetres deep in the tray. Sprinkle it in and tap or shimmy the tray from side to side so that the granules are evenly distributed.

5.     Sow the seed on the surface. You should sow quite thickly, so long as the seeds remain in a single layer on top of the vermiculite. You don’t need to cover the seeds.
6.     Now place your tray in a shallow dish, into which it fits comfortably. Add water to the dish, not the seed tray. The water will be drawn up into the seed tray, moistening the seeds.
7.     Place the seed tray and dish somewhere bright and consistently warm – a south-facing windowsill, especially if you have double-glazing, is good.
8.     All you have to do now if to make sure that the bottom of the dish doesn’t dry out. Check it daily and top up with water if necessary. And wait. Your seed should germinate in 2-4 days (2 days for pea shoots and mizuna, 4-5 for shiso or coriander), and, if it’s on a windowsill, you may have turn it so that the shoots continue to grow up straight.

Pea shoots are my all-time favourite here. You know that distinctive taste of pea shoots in salad? This is by far the easiest way to grow your own tender pea shoots – if you pick the growing tips of the peas you’re growing for full-grown pods, you will reduce your harvest.

Orient Express - fast-growing veg from the Far East

A friend was musing that children these days learn to use chopsticks before they learn to tie their shoelaces. It’s true: a Chinese takeaway, sushi snacks, eating at Yo Sushi or Wagamama all give them the opportunity to practise their chopstick skills while shoes for the under 10s do all seem to do up with Velcro.

But if kids are all savvy enough to know their bok choy from their mustard greens in a Chinese restaurant or in the supermarket, there is still comparatively little being grown in our gardens. In many parts of China, Korea and Japan the climate is comparable to ours, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be raising our own oriental vegetables. Most supermarket pak choi, for instance, does come from the UK, but you still don’t see it being grown very often in the vegetable patch. We seem to prefer to stick to lettuce and the more traditional kind of cabbage. Which is a shame because these Eastern brassicas are fantastically rewarding crops to grow:

• They’re quick. At this time of year they’ll germinate in three days and be ready to eat in a month.
• They’re unfussy: you can sow and grow oriental greens just about any time of year. In fact they grow better from midsummer onwards as the days get shorter. If you have a polytunnel or a greenhouse you can keep them going overwinter – most are reasonably hardy.
• They’re versatile. You can harvest oriental leaves at just about every stage of growth. As microleaves for a garnish after about two weeks. As cut and come again leaves in a salad or in a stir fry. As a vegetable in their own right when the whole plant is cut. The younger the plant when you harvest it, the more delicate the flavour.
• They’ll grow anywhere. In the open ground, if you have it. In pots, in troughs, on windowsills, or patios. They don't need a vast amount of space.

At our Secret Garden Club afternoon discussing oriental vegetables, we showed leafy greens being grown a microleaves, in pots and troughs, and out in the open ground in the garden. By successional sowing, that is, sowing little and often, we can have leaves available for crunchy salads pretty much 365 days a year.

Types to try:

Mizuna

Mizuna is a brassica with bright green serrated leaves. It’s often used in salads, where it adds a slightly chewy texture and a bit of bite. I actually think a little mizuna in a salad goes a long way; I prefer to eat it either as microleaves, or as a whole plant, pak choi style, in a stir fry.

It’s easy to see why mizuna is popular though: it’s probably the easiest salad vegetable to grow anywhere. It will grow in most soils, at most temperatures. It’s hardy and vigorous.

Mustard

Also known as red mustard, red giant mustard, Chinese red mustard, mustard green or several other names. This is a pungent, peppery-hot leaf, oval-shaped with a serrated edge and coloured green streaked with purple. You may have also heard of Green in Snow, a lovely name, I think, for a particularly pungent mustard leaf.

Pak choi

If you look on the package label, you’ll see that nearly all pak choi sold in supermarkets is grown here in the UK. Pak choi grows exceptionally well: like mizuna, any time of year will do, though if you’re sowing in winter, a greenhouse or polytunnel will be needed or growth will be very slow.

The only drawback to pak choi is that I think it is the slug and snail’s favourite food. Well, possibly second favourite to hostas. Wherever you grow them they will need slug protection – we tend to use copper rings around each plant in the open ground, or copper tape around the rim of a pot.

Choy sum

Related to pak choi but with slimmer leaves and – I think – a less distinctive taste.

Morning glory

Also known as water spinach, this is an edible variety, Ipomoea aquatica, from the Ipomoea family, which also includes sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas). Common bindweed is also a  relative. There are edible and non-edible morning glory varieties. As the alternative name water spinach suggests, it likes to grow near water, and can become quite invasive – there are controls over the growth of morning glory in many US states for instance.

Chinese broccoli, kailans

If I had to pick a favourite from this list, it would be kailans (left). This is a type of broccoli where the stem is the interesting bit and a floret a bit of an afterthought. The stem is crunchy, and has a nutty, mustardy taste. You can also eat the leaves.

Grow kailans in rich soil, with lots of organic matter. The plants will grow quite big and may need support. When you cut the main stem to eat, it will grow again, so that in a season you will get 3-4 cuttings from one plant.

They are not quite so prey to slugs and snails as pak choi, above, but we still take precautions. I’d be much more upset about losing a Chinese broccoli plant to a slug attack than I would a pak choi or two.

Chinese cabbage

The Chinese cabbage you buy in the shops is only one type; there are plenty others, such as Tatsoi,which grows as a low rosette of dark green leaves rather than the firm-headed, pale yellow-green variety we’re all familiar with.

Komatsuna

Dark green fleshy leaves, ideal for making a salad seem substantial, also good in stir fries. Another easy one to grow, unfussy about soil and temperature.

Perilla (shiso)

This is a leaf more associated with Japan: you frequently find this heart-shaped, frilled-edged leaves garnishing sushi – or quite often, a plastic imitation shiso leaf in the bottom of your pre-packaged sushi.

Shiso leaves can be green (we have a couple of green plants here) or red. They have a slightly chewy texture and faintly minty taste.

Let’s look in detail at how you might grow these greens in a variety of ways.

Growing in the open ground

Although our oriental veg will grow very happily out in the vegetable bed, not all varieties want to start there. Mizuna, mustard, komatsuna and tatsoi will all germinate and grow very readily if sown direct into the spot where they are to grow. Kailans will do in theory but I have always found it easier to start kailans in modules and then transplant them when the weather warms up. The same with shiso.

It’s worth taking the time to prepare your ground. Weed it, remove stones, dig in compost, organic matter, or manure if you have it. Think of it as making a nice soft bed for them to grow in.

Sow as thinly as possible: you will only have to thin out seedlings later if you don’t … though when you do thin them, don’t forget to wash and/or trim the thinnings and add them to a salad as well. The other way to do it is to station-sow: make a little hole every four inches or so, drop one seed down that hole and fill, thus determining exactly where each plant is to grow.

Remember your slug protection before the seedlings germinate, or you may never see them at all. When the seedlings are tiny, they will need watering until the plants are established.

If the soil is nutrient-rich you shouldn’t have to feed the plants – you’ll be picking them before too long. If you think they would benefit from a feed, choose a nitrogen rich solution: nitrogen promotes leafy growth, and good leafy growth is what you want from these particular vegetables.

Growing in a pot

There are advantages to growing in a pot. Slug and snail control is easier: you can move the pot away from the pests, or run copper tape around the rim of the pot. You can control the growing environment: the temperature, the exposure to wind, how much water they get, and so on.

If you’re growing in order to pick cut-and-come-again leaves rather than whole plants, I’d say a pot is probably the best way to do it. It’s only when you think of growing a full-size plant – pak choi, says – and you realise you’ll need a very big pot to accommodate the plants and all their roots.

My solution here is to grow in a trough rather than a pot. More convenient for windowsills, anyway, and it seems to give the individual plants more room.

You can either sow your seeds in the pot directly, for salad leaves, or sow seeds in modules and transfer the plants. From March to September, the pot will be happy outside. In March, it might need some protection at night: put some horticultural fleece, or drape some bubble wrap or fit a clear plastic lid over the pot. Although many of the plants named here are hardy, they won’t grow fast in the cold.

In autumn and winter, move your pot into a polytunnel, greenhouse, or inside altogether. I have successfully raised pak choi indoors overwinter, although it does take much longer to grow. It’s not so much the cold that bothers them, as they can stay nice and warm indoors, it’s the low light levels of winter.

If your pots are indoors, you shouldn’t have to worry about slugs, snails or flea beetles. Look out for aphids, though, especially when it warms up in spring. They can get everywhere.

Dealing with pests

Most of these oriental vegetables are brassicas. That means they are vulnerable to the usual cabbage pests: cabbage white butterflies, whitefly, and also disorders such as clubroot. 

However, here’s another thing in the oriental veg’s favour: they tend not to be in the ground for long enough to be too bothered by these pests. By the time the pest finds them, you’ll be picking them.

They’re not entirely pest-free though. You’ll see we’ve had slug damage on the Chinese cabbages. Or maybe it’s snail damage, since we’ve been using biological controls to get rid of our slugs. If you’re growing in a pot or trough, then a line of copper tape along the rim of the pot should keep both slugs and snails away. In the open ground it’s a bit more tricky. We’ve put copper rings round the bigger plants, and we don’t really want to use pellets. If you don’t want to go down the admittedly expensive route of biological control (but then we did have a lot of slugs), try surrounding the plants with crushed eggshells, grit, or set beer traps.

Mizuna and mustard, particularly, also get eaten by flea beetles. You can tell flea beetle damage by the tiny perfectly circular holes in the leaf.  We’re lucky here in the Secret Garden in that we’re not really affected by flea beetles, but there's not much you can do about them except be thankful that the damage isn't usually bad enough to seriously reduce your crop. Some people recommend trying to catch the beetles by holding sticky tape under the plant so that when the beetles jump, they land on the tape, sticky side up, and get stuck. I'd say it's quite fun to watch people trying out this technique but it rarely seems to be very effective.

The very young seedlings are also attractive to aphids. These can usually be wiped off, or you can use a garlic solution spray to deter them.

Lilac sugar

 I have lilac only two or three weeks a year so I like to make the most of it. This time I'm picking off the blossoms to infuse in caster sugar. Later I'll make a syrup or a sorbet.

Syrup:
150g caster sugar
150g water
a few heads of dried hibiscus flowers (optional)

Heat the water and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved then add the lilac petals. Simmer for ten minutes. You can add the hibiscus flowers for colour if you like. Then strain the flowers out of the syrup into a jar or bottle. Keeps in the fridge for 2 weeks.

Use on icecream or in cocktails.


This Sunday we are having a grow your own oriental food workshop and supper at the Secret Garden Club. Tickets for workshop, supper and goody bag are £30.
Book here: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/197293%20£30