Happy new year

My first ‘proper’ trip to the allotment this year was heartening. A four-inch blanket of snow insulated most crops and while the outer leaves of Swiss chard and spinach are unappealingly brown and slimy, there is encouraging new growth coming through in the middle – thankfully as these two usually keep us going through the ‘hungry’ weeks in February and March. The chicory and radicchio look pretty horrible as well, but when I peel back the mushy, frostbitten layers there are healthy pink hearts underneath. I’m thinking they could go into a tart with some of the leeks and some blue cheese.

The greatest number of casualties is in the brassica bed. Many of the purple sprouting broccoli plants have been flattened by the weight of snow on the net covering them – although thankfully, I don’t think any of the main stems have snapped as they did last year – and the mature Savoys are browned and soft. The calabrese looks dead as well: no sign of any recovering growth here.

I dug up parsnips and the very last of the pink fir apple potatoes. The parsnips taste wonderful after the prolonged freeze: sweet abd fragrant instead of that soapy flavour they have early in the season. The potatoes are remarkably unharmed: there’s a bit more slug damage than there was back in November and just as I was thinking that the potatoes were generally smaller this year than last, I found some utter whoppers under the last haulm right at the end of the row. I love these baked whole, or roasted, especially if I can mix them with some of the parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes, since a cold, wet January is hardly the time for potato salad.

Dig or no-dig?

I’ve long been seduced by the idea of no-dig vegetable gardening. I like the idea of recycling cardboard and newspaper, I like the idea of letting nature get on with managing the soil ecosystem itself, and most of all I like the idea of not having to dig over beds at this time of the year.

Around four years ago, I began gradually introducing no-dig cultivation on some of the beds at the allotment. I started with one area of about 8sqm which had been cleared but never cultivated, which I planned to use for strawberries – an obvious crop to try this with as you won't be deep digging around strawberry plants each year anyway.

No-dig gardening practice starts with digging. Not everyone will tell you that. At least, it starts with clearing the ground, and the best way to do that is to dig out the existing vegetation. The Garden Organic booklet for Schools, for instance, says “Dig over the ground as usual taking out as many perennial weeds as possible or cut down the vegetation and then cover with a light excluding mulch which will kill the weeds”

Now this is fine if your perennial weed population consists of a few fat hens, a dandelion and a spot of couch grass at the edges, but when you are taking over a 10 pole plot completely overgrown with brambles, ash saplings, nettles and bindweed (and horsetail, as I later discovered), then strimming followed by digging is going to be required.

Once the site is clear of weeds, lay down cardboard, in a single layer, but leaving no gaps, over the whole of the bed. Tesco, Homebase and B&Q are your friends here, as you can plunder their old cardboard boxes to give you enough for this. I then like to paper over the cracks – literally – spreading newspaper sheets over the cardboard to ensure that all the joins are covered. I have found out the hard way that you need to do this on a day when there is no wind.

The next layer – you can see why this is sometimes called lasagne gardening – is the top mulch. Pretty much any organic matter goes here: compost, manure, leaf mould, composted bark, grass cuttings, straw, wood chip, or a mixture of all or some of them. With wood chip, be aware that until it has fully composted it will deplete the nitrogen in your soil rather than adding to it. If you just spread a layer over the top, it won’t affect the nitrogen content further down and will still do all the good weed suppressant, moisture conservation work. 

After that, I consider the bed finished. I know that a top dressing of straw and a thorough soaking to prevent the mulch being blown away are also recommended. The final straw layer is useful in that it does seem to deter cats and foxes from digging up your carefully layered mulch and cardboard. The wetting part of it I leave to the rain.

The bed is then left until planting time. You can plant through the cardboard, by cutting a small hole in the cardboard and inserting the seedling in the soil beneath. On onion beds in particular, I have made a very deep top layer of mulch and simply planted the alliums in that.

In theory, you only ever hand-weed after that, and top up the surface mulch with a 5cm layer annually, while the soil gradually breaks down into dark crumbly richness. In practice, it isn’t quite like that.

FIrst of all, do not imagine – as I did – that ‘no dig’ is somehow synonymous with ‘no effort’. With an initial digging out to start the process, plus the layering stages, starting a no-dig system is considerably more laborious. It can also be quite a challenge to find enough OM for the mulch layer. If like me you have no vehicular access to your plot then everything has to be bagged up and carried in. However, it encourages you to think creatively about the OM that you use. Buying in enough bagged commercial compost would be insanely expensive, so you do start thinking about recycling compost, homemade compost, straw, cuttings, etc. And the wider the mix, the better it probably is for the soil.

But I seriously question how suitable the system is in its purest form if you have perennial weeds that spread horizontally: bindweed and brambles for instance. Even if you manage to dig out every scrap of perennial weed root from the bed (and that in itself is quite a tall order), they will invade again from the outside. With these, and horsetail, you will probably have to settle for managing them rather than eliminating them. And at some stage this will require further digging.

For the first year, however, it was lovely. The top mulch settled down and provided a fertile environment for crops. The card and newspapers did their light-excluding barrier job and there was very little weed regrowth. At the end of the season, the mulch and cardboard had rotted down into a lovely rich dark mix – although with all that OM piled on to it at the beginning of the year, I felt it damn well should have done.

In year two, the bindweed reappeared. Attempts to hand-weed it out demonstrated that while some roots had come in over the original cardboard layer and could therefore be easily peeled back to the surrounding bank, plenty had encroached from under the cardboard, and wouldn’t come out in one piece without snapping. Unless I set to with the fork and dug it out. Which is not how a no-dig bed is supposed to work.

In year three the returning bindweed was accompanied by nettles and couch grass. By year four I decided a complete re-dig would be necessary and found that underneath the top layer of mulch a complex, dense network of bindweed and couch grass root had established itself – certainly much more than could ever have been handweeded out. However, in contrast to my initial struggle to extricate roots from thick clay, it was relatively easy to lift them out – the soil really had improved that much in a comparatively short space of time. But it was disconcerting to find quite so many perennial weed roots lurking in the soil.

In a no-dig bed I started two years ago, I planted sweetcorn last summer, and when pulling up the corn plants this autumn I disturbed a number of chafer grubs – enough of them to make me get the spade out to dig the bed over again and see how many of the grubs we had. This does seem to me to be the strongest argument against the no-dig system: you can’t see what’s happening under the soil surface. Pests can build up very quickly without you knowing anything about it, as can an underground root system.

Four years on from my initial forays in no-digging, nearly all of my beds have now had the big dig/cardboard and mulch layering treatment, followed by a year or more of hand-weeding. The bed at the front corner of the plot where there is no surrounding bindweed, brambles or nettles, hasn’t been dug  out since 2008; the bed at the other end, which was created out of a nettle forest, has had two cardboard and mulch treatments in three years. 

I think this can best be described as a minimal dig system, and I'm happy to settle for that. I like not feeling obliged to dig out at the end of the season, but at the same time, bindweed/horsetail can't be eliminated by mulch alone, and I do like to know what's going on under the soil surface from time to time.

The last of the apples

Among the chillies I grew this year was a yellow variety called Hot Lemon from Nicky’s Seeds. It lived up to its name, ripening from emerald green to a bright lemon yellow, a punchily hot flavour and, yes, a distinctly citrusy tang.

I had thought my final apple jelly might be a spicy version with cinnamon, cloves and maybe some ginger, but then remembering the success of the red chilli jelly I made last year based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe, I decided a clear clean sharp lemon version using these chillies might be the best way to use them.

It took a couple of goes to get it right – my first attempt was visually stunning, a shimmering pale yellow, looking more like Roses’ Lime Marmalade, but the set was too weak. Once the liquor was boiled down to a good set, the colour was more amber than lemon, but the taste is there – hot, sweet and crystal sharp all at the same time.

Lemon chilli jelly

150ml cider vinegar

750ml water

Juice of 4 lemons

1½kg cooking apples

600ml juice

450g sugar

1 large yellow pepper

150g yellow chillies, eg, Hot Lemon, or Aji Amarillo

Put all the liquid ingredients in a large pan. Roughly chop the apples – do not peel or core, but discard any bruised, damaged or holed bits – and add to the pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for around 45 minutes, stirring and squishing the apples from time to time.

Let the mixture cool a little, then strain through a jelly bag or butter muslin overnight. Do not try to speed the process up by squeezing or pushing the liquid through the fabric, or the resulting liquid will make a cloudy jelly. Just let it drip.

The next day, measure out your juice into a large pan. For each 600ml juice, add 450g sugar, and heat, gently at first to dissolve the sugar, then turn the heat up so that the mixture can boil hard. Meanwhile, core and deseed the pepper, removing any white pith and cut into large pieces. Cut the stalks off the chillies, slice in half lengthways and remove the seeds and core. Put the pepper pieces and chillies into a food processor and blitz until well minced.

Back to the jelly - when the setting point has been reached, skim the surface very carefully to leave the liquid clear, then add the minced chilli and pepper pieces. Leave the jelly to cool in the pan until it is just beginning to solidify, then ladle into sterilised jars, seal and label.

Big bugs beat the birds

I hauled out the sweetcorn today and dug over the bed, disturbing a colony of chafer grubs in the process. These are the fat white grubs with a brown head and six little legs up at the head end. They are disconcertingly big - approaching the size of my little finger - and voracious eaters. Apparently they are particularly fond of potato roots, which is not good news since this year's sweetcorn bed is meant to be next year's potato bed.

I removed each one from the soil, placed them on a flat gravel board, and waited for the tame robin who follows me and my garden fork around the allotment. He was along in a couple of minutes and homed in on the beached chafer grubs, picking one up in his beak and hopping off. When I next glanced his way, he was still clutching the grub and shaking his head from side to side as if wondering what to do with it. Then he seemed to give the whole thing up, dropped the chafer grub on the ground and flew away.


I need some bigger birds. 

Apple glut III

We had our first frost of the autumn this week so everything needs to be safely gathered in rather earlier than usual this year. I still have two rows of pink fir apple potatoes in the ground, the chillies are still ripening and the large white beans - the fabes de granja, which are very late this year anyway – won’t make it to maturity before it gets too cold, I think.

So the kitchen is looking rather full at the moment. Pumpkins and squashes curing on the sunniest shelf; the last of the tomatoes stubbornly remaining green on a wide plate in the window, a big bowl of quinces, a netted bag of borlotti beans drying out and strings of shallots and garlic from earlier in the summer. And I’m still working my way through the apples.

We are two jellies down and one to go. The apple and rosewater jelly has a beautiful floral fragrance and is a shimmery pale gold in colour. I was surprised how little rosewater was needed to lift the jelly – just two teaspoonfuls to 2l of apple juice.

Apple and rosewater jelly

First make the apple juice:

5-6lb cooking apples

300ml apple vinegar or cider vinegar

250ml lemon juice (that’s six lemons, the way I squeeze them)

1.2l water

Wash/rinse the apples. Put the vinegar and lemon juice in a very large pan. Roughly chop the apples and add them to the juice. Don’t peel or core them, but do remove any stalk and bad bits.

Add the water and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for about 45 minutes until the apples are very mushy.

While the apples are simmering, rig up your jelly bag. I used to tie jelly bags up with string and suspend them from cupboard doors, until we refurbished the kitchen and I found that none of the cupboard door handles are high enough – there isn’t enough clearance between the handle and the worktop to suspend a jelly bag with a bowl underneath.

I’ve resorted to the time-honoured method of upending one kitchen chair on another. The bowl to catch the juice sits in the (inverted) seat of the chair, then I tie a big  metal colander by its handles to each upside-down chair leg, so that the colander hangs high over the bowl. The jelly bag sits in the colander – in fact, it’s not really a jellybag, just a very large piece of butter muslin, draped over the sides of the colander.

Ladle the appley mush and all its liquor into the butter muslin and leave to drip overnight. Don’t be tempted to help it along by stirring it or pushing at it  - this will make the resulting jelly cloudy, so just let it drip.

Next day:

Get some jars together and sterilise them by washing in very hot soapy water, rinsing in very hot water and then drying/warming them, on their sides in an oven heated to 120 degrees. They can sit happily in the oven while you get on with the rest of the jelly, I find it impossible to estimate at this stage how many jars I need, so I always wash and sterilise what looks to me like far too much.

Measure out how much juice you have, and pour into a very large pan. Then (this is so much easier in imperial measurement), for every pint of apple juice in the pan, add 1lb sugar. Next add 2 teaspons of rosewater. Heat the juice and sugar slowly at first, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Taste the juice and add a little more rosewater if you think the taste is very faint. Once happy with that, raise the heat to bring it to the boil. Once boiling, boil hard.

Apple juice doesn’t take long to set. Start testing after five minutes, then every 2-3 minutes after that. Spoon out 2 teaspoonsful of juice from the pan on to a saucer. Leave for a minute or so to cool a bit, then push a forefinger through the middle of the juice puddle. When the mixture wrinkle as you push the finger through, and the juice won’t flow back to meet in the middle again in your finger’s slipstream, you have reached a set. Turn off heat and skim the surface of the jelly. Retrieve the warmed jars and ladle the jelly into them – I use a strainer as well if there still some floating bits in the jelly. Seal the jars and leave to cool.

Apple jelly with a hint of mint also works. I wanted to keep the mint reasonably subtle rather than producing a green sludge, and also I over-enthusiastically threw the chopped mint leaves into the jelly *before* I skimmed it. So when I did skim it, I ended up removing quite a lot of mint as well. Ahem.

But, you know what? It’s prettier, and the flavour isn’t overpowering. I think I might prefer it.

Apple jelly with a hint of mint

Apple juice as above

Sugar, as above

A large handful, maybe two large handfuls, of mint.

Remove the stalks from the mint and chop finely. Make the apple juice and jelly as above (though minus the rosewater, obviously) and when it reaches setting point, turn off the heat and skim the jelly meticulously. Leave for about five minutes. Add the chopped mint and stir well. Leave the jelly again and then stir to make sure that the mint is being held in suspension in the jelly and not all rising up to the top.

Ladle into jars as before, and seal. Leave to cool and keep an eye on them. If the mint leaves are all huddling together, invert the jars for a minute or so to let the mint flecks resettle.

Apple glut II

I have two carrier bags full of apples, mostly cookers, waiting hopefully in the kitchen at present. That’s too much apple and rosewater sorbet for me to think about, so instead I’m going to make apple jellies.

Or at least, I’m going to think about making a few different apple jellies. What I’ll get going with straightaway is turning 10kg of apples into the apple juice that will form the base for the jelly. Once I have the basic juice it will keep in the fridge for a few days, or if I run seriously short of inspiration, it will freeze. Or I can make cider.

Apple jelly is particularly versatile: tasty enough to eat on its own as a spread or with meat, but also good to add flavour and consistency to gravy, and sauces, for deglazing the pan after cooking meats. With a high pectin content, it will help to set jellies whose main flavouring ingredient doesn’t contain pectin – chilli jelly, mint jelly, for example.

As well as an unadulterated apple jelly, which should set to a beautiful clear amber colour, I’d like a warm spiced version – perhaps with cloves and/or ginger, and in contrast something lighter, possibly floral. I have a recipe for apple and geranium jelly in The National Trust's book Jams, Preserves & Edible Gifts, by Sara Paston-Williams, and since I don’t have any geraniums, I wonder if the rest of that rosewater might do stand-in duty for the geraniums.

I also like the idea of adding a hint of thyme; rosemary appeals as well but I think it would be easy to make it rather overpowering.

Pickled pumpkin

My brother gave me a substantial wedge from a pumpkin he’d grown to the size of a small car. After hauling it home and idly wondering just how many gallons of pumpkin soup it would make, I decided I could make it last longer without feeling pressured to eat giant pumpkin every day by pickling it.

Skye Gyngell has a great pickled pumpkin recipe in My Favourite Ingredients – the pickling liquor is not unlike a curiously-flavoured mulled wine, with a bottle of white, plus 200ml red wine vinegar, 220ml caster sugar and bay leaves, coriander and fennel seeds. I now have two huge Kilner jars full of pickled pumpkin: good, I think, with cheese, and cold ham and leftover beef, if we ever have any.