Last chance to sow

At this time of year, when you are harvesting in earnest, you might wonder if you can put your now-empty beds to some use. With the summer vegetables being harvested and winter vegetables on their way to maturity you might think there's not  much you can start off right now. But actually there's plenty that can be sown at the end of summer and on into the autumn.

We filled up a number of empty spaces in The Secret Garden Club's beds with some late summer seeds. Some quick-growing varieties can be started off now to give you a crop before the winter sets in, weather permitting. Some crops need to be started off in the autumn to give them their best chance of developing well in the new year, so it's as well to remember to get them going. We also looked at how to raise a crop of new potatoes to be eaten on Christmas Day. 

So, we'll start with some fast-growing veg which you can sow now in order to harvest and eat later on in the autumn. Typically these will be final sowings of summer crops. 

Oriental leaves

Back in July salads were the main topic for the Secret Garden Club. We looked at how salad vegetables can be grown throughout the year if you take the trouble to protect them in the winter months.

Your best bet for salads at this time is for cut-and-come-again leaves. Here you don't let the seedlings develop into full-grown lettuces, but pick them a leaf at a time when you want a salad garnish. The seeds germinate quickly and you can grow a number of different varieties. Not just lettuce, but oriental veg such as pak choi, tatsoi, mustard leaves and mizuna.

At this time of year and into October, you can sow your seeds directly into the open ground. They'll germinate in about a week (mizuna almost certainly sooner) and you can start picking leaves in about a month. Keep them well watered - not a problem this summer - as a dry spell will check their growth and they will run to seed. Come October, the nights may well be getting cooler and you might want to throw some horticultural fleece over them to insulate them from the cold.

 

Alternatively you can grow salads in containers, so that you can bring them indoors or under cover at the first sign of cold weather. We've got three different types of container all happily growing salad.

The fruit crate is one of our favourite containers for growing salads and other fast-growing vegetables. This mixed salad crate was sown in August out here on the terrace. The trough of lamb's lettuce was sown in July and has been kept indoors - lamb's lettuce can be erratic when it comes to germination and so I'll always sown them under cover if I can. The small pots, also sown in July, have been raised in a patio greenhouse - these have a mixture of oriental leaves and give me a regular supply of interesting, spicy leaves for garnish.

These also have the advantage of germinating quicker, which is something you might well want to take into account at this time of year. Once the seedlings are growing well, you can move them outside to save on your indoor space.

Outdoors, of course, you can grow in greater quantities, and aside from possibly protecting against the cold, they need less cossetting than indoor plants.

As autumn wears on, you can continue to sow salad. By mid-October, I'd start them all off indoors using containers, and find the sunniest, lightest spot in the house to germinate the seedlings. Germination and subsequent growth will be much slower as the days get shorter.

Pak choi

You can continue to sow pak choi in September. If it looks like staying warm and damp, try sowing seed outdoors, but for more reliable germination, I would either sow in modules indoors and then transfer the seedlings outdoors in October time, or go back to our trusty fruit crate.

This is a good depth for growing fast-maturing veg like pak choi and evenly spaced, will give you around 12 plants. You can either treat them as cut-and-come-again leaves or let each plant develop a heart to harvest as mature pak choi.

One thing that puts people off growing pak choi is that it’s a bit of  a pest-magnet. It attracts slugs, flea beetles and pigeons for starters, all wanting some of those succulent leaves.

Pigeons can be deterred by growing them under a net; pigeons and flea beetle will be kept off if you grow under cover. To keep the slugs out, you can use tried and tested methods such as beer traps, night raids, even slug pellets, although there are many good reasons not to use pellets, mainly to do with contamination and the risk of something else, like a bird, or even a cat or dog, eating the pellet by mistake and being harmed by it.

The slug and snail deterrent I use for all my crops which are vulnerable – brassicas, courgette and pumpkin seedlings, sunflowers and globe artichokes – is to grow the seedling inside a copper ring, or collar. Slugs and snails don’t like travelling over copper – it sets off a reaction in their mucus, like giving them a little electric shock.

Now you can buy ready-made rings out of copper, but they are quite expensive. Copper tape isn’t exactly cheap either – 4 metres will typically cost about £7 – but it will stretch a lot further and you can make your own collars using cut-up water bottles.

They are re-usable – I have some home-made collars that are about five years old now and even when the copper dulls to a brown colour it’s still effective. Note though that you aren’t killing the slugs and snails, just keeping them off particular plants.

This may be a good thing, if you don’t like the idea of killing them, or a bad thing, if you want to exercise some population control. If the latter, then my recommendation is to invest in some nematodes come spring.

Pop the collars carefully over the seedlings when they emerge, or when you plant them out. Be careful, especially in the open ground, not to place the ring over a slug or snail that’s already in residence. Then you will trap the slug inside the ring, not outside.

Peas

You can sow peas in autumn in order to get an extra early crop the next spring. The idea here is to sow now, so that you can be picking your first peas of the year next May. Then you start sowing again in March to harvest from June, giving you a constant supply of peas from May through to August.

Your chances will be improved if you use different varieties at different times. Meteor or Kelvedon Wonder are known is known as ‘first early’ pea which will be the first to mature, so a good choice for autumn sowing.  I’d recommend a sugar snap pea for ripening in early summer – June and July – as they taste so deliciously sweet, especially so when they ripen in sun and warmth.

Peas can be sown directly into the ground, usually in the shape of the five-spot on a dice. However many people find that germination can be poor. Hungry mice usually get the blame for this – they like nothing better than nibbling at peas. You should always keep peas for sowing safely away from mice – I had a sealed packet of peas last winter which I kept in my storage chest. Retrieved them in the spring to find a neat hole nibbled out of one corner and all the peas gone.

The solution that I’ve used successfully for years is to start peas off in half-guttering. Like this:

I sow the peas in a double row, about four inches apart. Keep them nice and warm and moist – and away from mice. Up high in a greenhouse or a garage is good, somewhere light and frost-free.

Let the pea seedling grow to about 3-inches high before planting out, so that they’ve developed a good root system.

Then dig out a shallow trench in your vegetable bed, give the peas a really good soaking and using a trowel you should be able to slide them out, all in one piece, into the trench in the open ground. Now firm the soil around the seedlings, and water again. They will need some sticks or mesh to climb up – you can put this in before or after transplanting.

There are a number of reasons for using the guttering:

• It’s shallow, so it doesn’t use so much compost = economical;
• Because it’s shallow, it’s easier to slide out the seedlings in one piece. The long smooth semi-circular shape fits neatly into a shallow trench as well. You don’t need to dig out and then in again;
• This is important because pea seedlings don’t really like to be disturbed and are easily flattened;
• The seedlings get a good head start before the pea weevils start eating U-shaped notches in the leaves.

In fact I’m so enamoured of these half-guttering seedbeds that I use them for beetroot - getting the seedlings going and thinned before sliding out, and also parsnips. Parsnips are notoriously inconsistent germinators and this really helps get a good parsnip crop going. The other advantage of using the guttering, which in practice works particularly well with parsnips is that the seedlings grow to a good height, entirely weed-free.

Sown in the open ground, it’s sometimes difficult to tell, especially with parsnips, which is a weed and which is a tiny parsnip seedling. So you leave well alone, and end up with a weedy bed – not a good start for your crops.

Back to the peas ...

The peas are hardy and shouldn’t need protection from frost, but if we have a very cold winter, it will do no harm and will help them if you throw horticultural fleece over the seedlings to insulate them. Don’t expect too much in the way of growth over the winter: it’s when the weather warms up in March (maybe even February) that they will start to put on growth and be ready early.

You may well have problems with mice trying to dig the plant up to get at the seed under the soil. Try putting mesh down over the seedlings – they will happily grow through that and it should prevent the mice from being able to dig up the plant.

New potatoes for Christmas

This is a traditional way to grow new potatoes: planting them in late summer, ready to harvest on Christmas morning so that you have freshly dug new potatoes with your Christmas dinner. It sounds almost romantic, doesn’t it?

The reality is slightly different, but it’s still a fun thing to do. Don’t expect massive yields from your autumn grown spuds – unless you plant dozens of them, you can’t expect much more than enough potatoes for Christmas lunch. Don’t expect them to grow terribly big – again not a bad thing with nutty little new potatoes.

One reason to do it this year that I find quite compelling is that this has been a horrible year for potatoes – too cold, too wet, at just the time they were maturing.

There are two ways you can approach this. You can either plant them in the open ground, or use the bin liner technique which we’re big fans of here at the Secret Garden Club.

A nice strong black binbag will do. Or a compost bag, so long as it has that black lining inside. The black lining is to keep the light out, so that the potatoes inside don’t go green.

We planted Duke Of York potatoes at Sunday's Secret Garden Club. These are early potatoes good for both boiling and roasting, depending on how you like your Christmas Day spuds.

The Duke Of York potatoes had little shoots emerging from them before we planted them. This means the  potatoes have been chitted,ie, stored in a light cool place so that the shoots develop. It’s not essential to chit potatoes but it does get them off to a head start in the ground. It also helps you when you’re planting them out as you can see where the shoots will develop and plant them the right way up.

Each compost bag will take three seed potatoes, seed potatoes being the starter which will grow into new potato plants. 

1) The first thing to do is to put about three inches of compost in the bottom of the bag, spread evenly. Make it easier for yourself by rolling the sides of the bag down so that your bag is about six inches tall. You’ll want the sides rolled down anyway after you plant the potatoes – if you keep the bags at full height your potatoes will never see the sun and they won’t grow.

2) Next you want to take a sharpened pencil or sharp stick and make some drainage holes in the bottom of your potato bag. This is very important – you do not want waterlogged potatoes.  They will rot, and they will stink while they’re doing it.

So, make about 5-6 drainage holes at the foot of each bag.

3) Now place three potatoes into the bag. Space them out evenly.

Always use seed potatoes, ie, bought from a nursery or garden centre specifically for growing. Seed potatoes should be guaranteed free from viruses, which culinary potatoes won’t be. Potatoes in the shops may have been sprayed with a shoot suppressant.

Potatoes in the shops may not have been grown in the UK and so may not be well adapted to grow here. Many, if not most, of the seed potatoes grown in the UK come from Scotland and are bred to grow well in our conditions.

4) The potatoes should go into the sack with the chits uppermost.

5) Once the potatoes are in, cover them with more compost: aim to have a layer of compost  about 2-3 inches thick over the chits.

6) Finally, water them lightly. They don’t need to be soaked. Check that water is seeping out of the drainage holes.

7) Put the potato bag outside somewhere light and somewhere reasonably sheltered.

8) After about 2-3 weeks you’ll see the dark green leaves poking up through the soil surface. Once the leaves are about 3-4 inches above the surface of the compost, add more compost to the bag, until the green tops are only just visible above the soil surface.

You’ll probably need to starting unroll the sides to accommodate the new compost as well. This is an ongoing process. Every time the plant grows so that you have about 3-4 inches of stem and leaves above the surface, unroll the sides a little more and add more compost.

If it rains a couple of times a week, you probably won’t need to water them. But do check your compost: if it’s very dry, then water it. Make sure any excess water is running out through those drainage holes. If it rains a lot and you put your hand in and the compost is sodden, move the bag under cover for a few days to let it dry out a bit.

In early December, you can put on a pair of gloves and stick your hand into the compost to make sure you have some potatoes coming, hopefully enough for dinner on Christmas Day. 

The best way to harvest the bagged potatoes is simply to up-end the bag on to a surface and pick out the spuds. Put the rest of the plant on the compost heap and spread the compost on your garden beds. 

The main advantage of growing potatoes in a container at this time of year is that potatoes are not frost-hardy, so if the weather turns very cold between now and Christmas when the plants are still young and tender, you can move them indoors/under cover. Keep them in the light, somewhere frost-free, and don't forget to water them if they are under cover. Do not overwater – if they sit in the wet, they will rot.

Happy hour - good mixes for homemade drinks

We sampled a range of homemade drinks at this month's Secret Garden Club meeting, using flavours easily harvested or foraged at this time of year. 

Shrub is a traditional English drink which became popular in Colonial times, especially in the Southern states of the US. Shrub can be either alcoholic or non-alcoholic and it’s typically a berry-flavoured drink made with an acidifier to give the sweetness a sharp tang. It’s known to be very refreshing in hot weather.

Raspberry shrub

Recipe from Jams, Preserves & Edible Gifts, published by the National Trust

Our raspberry shrub is a simple non-alcoholic version. We used homemade raspberry vinegar to give it both its very flavour and the acidifier. You can choose whether to have sparkling water with it, or the more traditional still water, or in American fashion just served over plenty of cracked ice.

600ml raspberry vinegar

350g sugar

Heat the vinegar and sugar together gently until the sugar dissolves then bring to the boil. Boil for 10 minutes. Pour into sterilised bottles, cover and leave to cool. Dilute to taste with still or sparkling water. (Or sparkling wine.)

To make raspberry vinegar, steep 600g raspberries in 600ml white vinegar for 3-4 days, then boil up with sugar to taste for 10 minutes or so. Strain and pour into a sterilised bottle.

Blackberry syrup, for mixing with Prosecco, Cava or any other sparkling wine

1kg blackberries

75ml water

Put the blackberries and water in a pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 20 minutes, pressing on the fruit with a potato masher every now and again to make sure the berries release as much juice as possible.

Strain the mixture through a nylon sieve or jelly bag. Warm a clean jar, or sterilise a jar if you want to keep the syrup for longer than a week.

Measure the resulting juice. (We got 500ml but much depends on the juiciness of your blackberries.) Pour the juice in a clean pan and for every 500ml of juice, add 250g sugar. Or more to taste. Heat slowly at first to dissolve the sugar, then bring to the boil.  Boil for 5-10 minutes, until the juice starts to reduce and become slightly syrupy. Skim off any scum, then pour the syrup into the clean, warm or sterilised jar. Seal.

Ginger beer

Making ginger beer usually requires yeast and fermentation and can take several days. In his book Happy Days With The Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver gives a recipe for Easy-Peasy Ginger Beer, which takes about half an hour to put together and has all the sweetness and fire of traditionally made ginger beer.

The recipe is available on Jamie Oliver's website here.

Damson gin

500g damsons, freshly picked

125g sugar

750ml gin

You don't have to stone the damsons, but do nick each one with the point of a knife. Put the damsons in a large clean jar with the sugar and gin. Stir well, seal the jar and leave to infuse in a dark place for 3 months. You need to shake the jar every other day, so put it in a cupboard that you open fairly regularly so you don’t forget about it.

After 3 months, strain through muslin until the liquor is clear. The damsons left behind make the base of a wickedly alcoholic trifle.

We pick the damsons in September and start drinking the damson gin at Christmas – the timings seem to work perfectly for this.

Rosehip syrup

600g rosehips

1.6 litres water

500g-600g sugar

Remove stalks and as much of the hairy bits from the rosehips as you can easily manage. Give them a quick rinse and dry and blitz in a food processor for a few seconds until pulverised. Scrape the chopped fruit into a pan with the water and bring to the boil. Simmer for five minutes, then leave to stand with the pan covered for around 20-30 minutes. 

Strain through a fine sieve or muslin and measure the resulting liquor - it will come to somewhere between a litre and 1.5l. For each 600ml of juice, add 300g sugar. Stir to mix and heat slowly until the sugar has dissolved.

Pour into a bottle and use within a week. Or freeze the syrup. To drink, dilute to taste with water.

The Urban Kitchen Gardener by Tom Moggach

I'm so tired of the empty ghost-written celebrity/TV driven cookbooks which have no heart or soul. The love and thought is evident in The Urban Kitchen Gardener, for this is a book actually written and lived by the author, Tom Moggach. Suggestions such the 'daily patrol' of your plants, to tune into them, accompanied perhaps by a strong cup of tea, are born of experience and intuition. Tom's book is vital for the city gardener and, at the same time, contains inspiring recipes for the green-fingered cook, so the Secret Garden Club, devoted to growing their own food, is a fan!

A few months ago, on a dusty but eye-opening trip through Georgia, the former Soviet republic, I met Tom Moggach. He was reporting for The Food Programme on Radio 4, exploring the markets in particular. I tailed behind him as he fearlessly bought mysterious seeds wrapped in wriggly writing newspaper cones from a market stall. I grew some of these seeds myself, unsure what would emerge from the soil a few weeks later.
I also led Tom astray from the path of legality when I found tiny purple Parma violet plants, sweet and sickly like confectionary, growing wild at a central Georgian vineyard. We used our water bottles to make mini protective greenhouses for these plants and smuggled them home in our pockets. My Parma violets* are doing very well in my London garden, despite the sodden British weather this summer.

I've always struggled with growing coriander, which is a shame because it is probably my favourite herb. Tom has useful tips, telling you to sow it every couple of weeks to retain a regular source of leaves for use in cooking, to only use seed less than two years old, to choose the brown unpolished seed to germinate. He also uses fresh green home-grown coriander seeds in his cooking which sounds deliciously intriguing.
The book is divided into vegetables, herbs, leaves (for salads), fruit, edible flowers; each section has enticing recipes such as chilli cornbread, fresh coriander and coconut chutney, home-cured mackerel (makes a change from the usual gravad lax), tomato and lemongrass rasam (a kind of South Indian soup).
Tom's growing stuff that we've not tried: I've never eaten mouse melons, small and crunchy like cucumbers, nor have we grown shisho leaves, a Japanese ingredient with a distinctive flavour. Yet.
It is equally good as a cookbook, offering genuinely innovative recipes, as a gardening manual for small urban spaces. Tom Moggach teaches school children to garden, therefore his style is approachable as well as informative. This is a great book to inspire and instruct beginner gardeners.

Buy Tom's book here or here on Amazon. Highly recommended. Makes you feel good, that real authors are still writing heart-felt personally researched books rather than the empty soulless drivel that passes for publishing nowadays.


*must make sure I split these after spring flowering, to propagate some more. I'm not sure of the exact cultivar. 

Salad days

A rose-like radicchio plant in the sunshine.

Once you have raised your first homegrown crop of salad leaves it will be very difficult to go back to bagged salad at the supermarket. Those cellophane pillows are highly convenient, but your homegrown leaves will will be juicier, spicier, tastier. You’ll know your own leaves haven’t been sprayed with anything or washed in chlorine. You’ll also be surprised to find out how long your homegrown leaves stay fresh in the fridge compared to bagged salads which start to sag and look mushy the minute you open the bag.

The Secret Garden Club looked at the very wide variety of leaves available to grow yourself, and why you might want to do that.

First, some advantages of growing your own salad leaves:

• Choice – raise the tastiest varieties
• Versatility – you’re not limited to what the supermarket wants you to buy (which will be stuff that looks good and keeps well, rather than the most delicious tasting)
• Peace of mind – you’ll know the exact provenance of every leaf
• Convenience – a pot of leaves just outside the back door, or on a windowsill, means you’re only ever two minutes away from a salad
• Value for money – I’m always hesitant to say you’ll save money because once you add up the money for seed, pots, compost, and so on, I’m not sure it’s cheaper. It probably is. But if you get into it and start treating it as a hobby then the temptation is to spend money on it.

You don't have to restrict yourself to pulling leaves from a lettuce - there are plenty of other types of salad leaves available.

What to grow, where and how

Traditional lettuce – the type which you grow as single plants, spaced out, in order to mature and develop multiple leaves. You then harvest the whole plant at any one time.

Little Gem lettuce: succulent green leaves around
a nutty tasting heart

This is a crop for the vegetable patch – lettuces need time and space. The best way to sow lettuce seeds is indoors in modules. Each plant can be planted out in the vegetable bed when the seedlings are big enough to handle. From the seed germinating to you eating a full-grown lettuce will take about 13 weeks.

Lettuce works best as a summer crop although they will appreciate some shade in high summer. For winter salads, I grow radicchio (see the picture at the top) and chicory. As with summer lettuce we sow the seeds in modules indoors in May-June and transplant the seedlings outside when they've outgrown the plastic pods. Both radicchio ad chicory have a robust, slightly bitter flavour, and can be cooked as well as eaten raw.

Chicory can be forced in the dark to make the leaves grow whiter, more tightly packed, more tender and less bitter. Grow your plants in pots, and in autumn, cut back any growth to leave a short stub above ground. Bring the plants indoors, somewhere unheated but frost-free - a garage, or cellar, perhaps. Place a bucket over each pot to ensure all light is excluded. It takes a few weeks, but the plants will send out white chicons, which can be cut and eaten as white chicory.

Cut and come again lettuce, also known as CCA, or Mesclun, or mixed leaves. This is a much quicker and more space-efficient way to grow lettuce: instead of thinning the seedlings and letting each plant grow to maturity, you snip leaves from the plants on demand - whenever you fancy a bit of salad.  This is a quick way to raise salad – you can be eating your leaves 4-6 weeks after the seeds germinate.

Sow the seed thickly in a container or in the kitchen garden and let the seedlings grow without any thinning. Once the leaves are a reasonable size, snip them off at the base with scissors. Don’t pull whole plants up – you want the seedlings to continue to produce new leaves after each harvest.

You can also grow different varieties in the same container so that you always have a mixed salad on tap.

What you won’t get is that lovely firm, nutty heart that you get in a Little Gem lettuce or similar. If you like lettuce hearts, like I do, it’s always worth growing a few for this alone. But my main salad crops are these, mixed leaves.

Lamb's lettuce growing in an old
fruit crate.

Mixed leaves grow really well in containers (which whole lettuce plants don’t) and so you don’t need a garden at all. You can grow on a windowsill, indoors or outside – see the corn salad trough. You can grow in a reclaimed container – see the fruit crate.

You can mix and match varieties to your heart’s content to get the best taste possible from your salad or so that you can vary your salad flavours. At the Secret Garden Club we’ve got a standard leaf mix here and also an oriental mix here.

This crate was devoted to rocket, which is now well and truly in flower – don't let them go to waste, they're delicious and can be added to your salads too – and can be resown soon.

Micro-leaves

You may have seen these in fancy restaurants: tiny perfect salad leaves that still pack a punchy flavour. I suspect that if you’re trying to feed a family with salads that these may be too dainty but they’re useful to have around for a quick garnish.

All they are is seedlings. There’s no special treatment, it’s not like growing bonsais. You can use a shallow seedtray, or a small pot, because the plants won’t grow big enough to put down deep roots. Fill with seed compost, firm lightly and water. Sprinkle the seeds over evenly so that they rest in a single layer.

Cover v lightly with more compost. Then cover the tray – I’ve got the clear plastic lid but you could use a clear polythene bag – and place somewhere warm.

At this time of year, you’ll see the first seedlings in about 48-72 hours. Remove the lid but keep warm and sunny – a south-facing windowsill is ideal. The microleaves will be ready in about two weeks – again, this is a fast-growing time of year. In spring and autumn it will be more like 4 weeks.

Be brutal when cutting them for salad use, it’s not as though you’re growing them as cut and come again. Then resow – after only 2-3 weeks, you can re-use the soil.

Good for microleaves: coriander, most mixed salad leaves, oriental leaves such as mustard and mizuna.

Thinnings

Thinnings or leftovers from the vegetable patch made great additions to the salad bowl. Beetroot, chard, spinach and cabbage are all tender enough and tasty enough in seedling form to be used in salads. So when the time comes to thin or transplant the seedlings, don't throw away or compost the plants you thin out. Take them home, give them a good trim and wash and use in a salad.

This year I potted up the cavolo nero seedlings which didn't get transplanted into the main bed, transferring them instead into a 20cm pot with the seedlings evenly spaced out in it. These pot plants have leaves which are smaller, less fibrous and more tender, ideal for tearing up and using in a robust winter salad.

With beetroot, chard and spinach, I deliberately sow them thickly so that there is plenty of thinning to be done, and the thinnings always make up a nice spring salad. Similarly, when I transplant leeks the seedlings left over are delicious and delicately flavoured in a salad.

And don’t forget pea shoots. You can now buy these at great expense as part of a supermarket bagged salad – instead, why not sprinkle leftover pea seeds over a pot and use the seedlings for salads?

It also feels like food for free, which is always pleasing, as it’s kind of a by-product from another crop.

Salad of Little Gem lettuce leaves and nasturtium flowers (plus a few buffalo mozzarella pieces).

Edible flowers
We covered edible flowers in some detail at the Secret Garden Club in June. These are always good for adding stunning good looks and a delicate contrast in texture and flavour to a salad. Adding flowers to a green salad will immediately lift it out of the ordinary visually. Our post on edible flowers explains how to pick and prepare flowers for culinary use.

Nasturtiums, shown above, are first choice for adding to salads - and the leaves, finely shredded, will give any salad a good peppery kick as well. The flowers are plentiful at this time of year and are easily picked a separately to give salads a shot of hot orange or vibrant red.

Also good in salads are chive flowers, bergamot, violas and marigold petals.

Sprouting seeds

If we can have microleaves, I suppose these must be nano-leaves. Most people are familiar with beansprouts as bought in the supermarket, and possibly – if you’re feeling very healthy – alfalfa sprouts.

These are seeds which you sprout in water just to the stage of producing the first leaves, which can then be eaten raw or stir-fried. They have a delicious flavour and crunchy texture and add variety to salads. They are also highly nutritious - each sprout packing all the nutrients needed to grow the plant from germination to its first true leaves.

The beansprouts you buy most readily in the shops are grown from mung bean seeds, but of course you can experiment and find the ones you like the best.

I think mung bean sprouts can be a bit bland – my favourite for flavour are adzuki beans and also chickpeas – which can be quite large.

Here’s how to grow them. You will need a glass jam jar, with a fine mesh lid or covering. A cut-up square from a very clean pair of tights or stockings stretched over the top and secured with a rubber band is a perfect solution.

Rinse a handful of beans, drain well and put in the jar. Stretch the mesh over the top and secure - with a rubber band or similar. Rest the jar facing down at an angle so that any excess water drains away.

Twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, you need to pour water into the sprouts, either through the mesh or with the mesh removed. Then replace the mesh, swirl the water around to rinse the seeds thoroughly, and drain, resting the jar at a downwards angle again. The jar should be kept in the dark - but choose a cupboard you open and use fairly often or it's all too easy to forget about them!

Don't forget to rinse the jar twice daily or the seeds will dry out and not grow. Don’t forget to drain them after each rinse – if they sit in water they’ll rot.

The sprouts should germinate within a week. Use them when they about an inch or two long and before they grow their first leaves.

With a combination of all of these you can have salad on tap 365 days a year.

(Incidentally, do you know the trick to keeping bagged salad fresher? Once you’ve opened the bag and used some of the contents, fold the bag back up very tightly, getting as much air out as you possibly can, then seal the bag – I use Scotch tape. But if you have strong ziplock bags you can transfer to one of these and flatten out as much air as you possibly can before sealing and returning to the fridge.)

Kitchen table hydroponics

Mixed salad seedlings growing hydroponically, without soil.

Growing plants hydroponically, or without soil, is a clean, and resource-efficient way to successfully raise a variety of produce. Yet it seems to be viewed with a great deal of suspicion in many quarters. This extract, from Green Harvest, an Australian website, is reasonably typical:


"A large quantity of the salad greens available in the supermarket are grown hydroponically, the complete opposite of organically. Hydroponics is a growing system that bypasses the soil in favour of a 'nutrient soup' made from chemical fertilisers fed directly to the plants. The lettuces in the supermarket might look like a lettuce but chemical cocktail might be a better description."

I don't know what they put in bagged salad in Australian supermarkets, but I wonder what the author thinks soil consists of, if it's not a chemical cocktail itself.

Conventionally grown plants have their roots in soil, which is typically made up of minute rock particles, organic matter (material which was once living, now decayed) and water. The more fertile the soil, the more chemically rich it will be, especially in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, the three main nutrients needed by plants.

However, the soil isn't necessary for plant growth; it's only there as the medium for delivering water and nutrients to the roots. Hydroponic growing eliminates the soil and concentrates on getting water and nutrients directly to the roots.

Growing hydroponically isn't the "complete opposite" of organic growing. You can incorporate many organic elements into a hydroponic set-up - using organic coir as a growing medium, for example. I suspect that what makes people suspicious of hydroponic systems is the micro-managed nature of it.

What an organic philosophy and hydroponic growing have in common is the desire for sustainability. Both methods are far less fuel-intensive than using manufactured fertilisers. Organic systems aim to reduce soil erosion and exhaustion with the addition of organic matter; in many hydroponic systems, the growing medium can be reused many times. For example, perlite, the rock granules which are often used to anchor the roots, can be sterilised in a microwave and then used again for the next batch of hydroponically-grown seedlings. The micro-management that delivers precisely the nutrients needed to the growing plants also means there is far less waste.

If you look around on the Internet you'll find off-puttingly long lists of technical equipment required for a hydroponic set-up: pumps, filters, hoses, lights. You would be forgiven for thinking it's less like growing plants and more like a laboratory experiment.

However, much of the expensive and hi-tech kit is needed for hydroponic growing on an industrial or commercial scale. To successfully grow salad leaves an herbs on a windowsill, some pots, water and a soil-less growing medium is all you really need. And your 'nutrient soup' of course.

Hydroponics

+ Sustainable

+ Efficient use of resources - less waste

+ Takes up relatively little space, with high yields

+ Versatile – does not need fertile soil, can be grown anywhere

+ Cleaner to maintain

- Cannot be called organic
- Lot of management required to get the balance right

- Leaching if not managed properly

- Only suitable for some plants

We used a simple base kit from The Achiltibuie Garden. Based in the north-west highlands of Scotland, this company specialises in developing hydroponic growing systems for domestic use. Many of their systems are modular, so that you can add extra units to the base kit if your needs increase. This windowsill kit shown below, is good for raising salad cut-and-come-again leaves and herbs.

The kit: long plastic trough and four pots. The growing medium, a mix of perlite and vermiculite, containers with liquid nutrients and four packets of seeds.

The absorbent material which fits into the slotted base of each pot will take up water and the liquid nutrients into the pots.

The pots are filled with the perlite/vermiculite. This growing medium is there to anchor the roots and so keep the plants stable. Its structure means there is still air held in the growing medium and its ability to hold water means the plants can access the liquid feed.

Seeds are sown in each pot and lightly covered with more perlite/vermiculite.

The pots are covered to keep the seeds dark until germination. The funnel in the middle delivers water to the base of the trough, from where it can be taken up by the absorbent wicks protruding below each pot.

First signs of germination.

Once germinated the seedlings are covered with a strip of fleece to provide a protective 'micro-climate'.

Topping up the water beneath each pot via the funnel.

Our seedlings ten days after germination. From the bottom up: chervil, dill, salad mix and lamb's lettuce.

We'll be discussing hydroponic growing in more detail in a future Secret Garden Workshop, looking at ways to set up a simple system in a restricted space and the most suitable plants for this kind of set-up. Keep an eye on our Events pages for scheduled dates.

Further reading

http://ag.arizona.edu/hydroponictomatoes/overview.htm
Highly detailed discussion of hydroponic tomato growing, including a history of hydroponic development.

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/269753/hydroponics_in_the_city.html

Sustainability of hydroponics, roof top gardening, using excess heat from air-conditioning units

http://www.thehydroponicum.com/page.php/21/Is_it_sustainable.html

The Achiltibuie Garden website, addressing issues of sustainability

http://www.simplyhydro.com/whatis.htm
A detailed overview of hydroponic systems.

Dig this - potatoes and garlic fresh from the soil

We planted garlic at the Secret Garden Club back in December - on the shortest day of the year, as is traditional. Continual rain and cool temperatures aren't ideal for garlic, but our bulbs have survived and swelled well.

Once dug up, the bulbs need all that excess soil removed. Usually, in July, it's a case of rubbing off dryish dirt; this year the mud needed to be washed off. Garlic can be eaten fresh, but to store bulbs, hang them up somewhere light and airy to dry out until the outer skin is papery - about 2-3 weeks.

In February, we planted our Secret Garden Club potatoes in a bin-bag - an easy space-saving way to raise a crop of spuds. Again, the weather hasn't been very helpful; normally, we would harvest these early Lady Christl potatoes from mid-June. This year they have been about a month late to develop to a decent size. 

The crop can be harvested just by up-ending the  bag in which they have grown. The compost using for growing the potatoes makes an excellent top dressing for the winter.

If you attended our garlic workshop back in December or the potato masterclass in February, do let us know here how you got on with raising your own produce. We'll be harvesting our onions and maincrop potatoes next month - a good few days of sun now should just finish the onions off nicely.

Edible Flower Secret Garden Club in pictures

Christina ran the gardening workshop, teaching people which flowers are edible and how to grow them. She also demonstrated how to distill your own rose water and orange flower water, so the rain wasn't a problem, we took the workshops indoors. These are a few pictures from the edible flower supper we served our guests. 

Book for the next Secret Garden Club, 22nd July: How to eat salad 365 and still laugh like these women. 

Nyetimber English sparkling wine with rocket flowers

Making geranium and dill pasta which I served with creme fraiche and pesto. Gorgeous!

 Pasta hanging up to dry over the Aga

Guests learnt to crystallise rose petals. Christina is showing how to distill your own rosewater in the background.

Flower tea was served. 

Flowery French fancies

Rose water giant meringue with blueberry syrup and cream