Pear vs quince

A bit of light pruning on the pear trees today, just to remove some overcrowded branches. I’ve discovered that I have two long quince tree shoots growing from the rootstock below the graft on the Doyenne de Comice. I can't remember exactly what variety the rootstock is, Quince A I think, but it clearly wants to branch out.

Very tempted to leave them growing and have a dual species tree, half pear and half quince, but every expert I consult says the rogue shoots should be removed. Apparently they will grow more strongly that the scion and weaken the tree overall. One did suggest burying a section of one of the quince shoots in the ground to try to propagate it so that I end up with standalone quince tree as well, but since I do already have a perfectly healthy Meechin’s Prolific quince which is living up to its name I have decided against that. So I have now removed the quince shoots and will keep an eye on the base of the tree for any more.

A Victorian cherry

So my son and I finally planted our cherry tree last weekend. It arrived from Victoriana Garden Nursery back in December when the snow was on the ground and has been waiting patiently, potted up, ever since. Now at last the brambles have been hauled out, many of them tangled up with convolvulus roots snapping off everywhere. Lots of shallow-rooted nettles too to be pulled back and lifted. We’ll find out in a month or two just how well I've managed to clear the ground when the new season’s shoots start showing.

We dug a nice big square hole for the cherry and tried not to cosset it too much with compost. Son hammered in a sturdy stake for it  which is tied to the tree with a pair of old tights – good and strong, but soft so that the tie doesn’t cut into the bark of the tree. We chose the variety Stella for the tree – a reliable cropper rather than anything unusual or exotic, and it’s grafted on to Gisela 5 rootstock, so the tree won’t grow much above 9ft. Small enough for me to be able to cover with a net when the fruit come. I have my fingers crossed for blossom this spring and a small crop - even a handful of cherries would do - this summer.

Review The Flavour Thesaurus

This is not a recipe book, although it does contain recipes. Author Niki Segnit has devised a flavour wheel (divided into segments like a colour wheel) made up of sections for different ‘flavour families’ – such as ‘Green & Grassy’, ‘Citrussy’ and ‘Floral Fruity’. Each of these sections gives examples of foods in that category, so under ‘Mustardy’ you get watercress, capers, and horseradish; under ‘Creamy Fruity’ there are banana, peach, coconut and mango, among others. The bulk of the book comprises exhaustive lists of the ways in which two different flavours can be paired together.

So, on the flavour wheel, you find anchovies listed in the ‘Brine & Salt’ section, and adjacent to oily fish in the ‘Marine’ section. Turn to the  chapter on anchovies and you’ll find descriptions and recipe examples for anchovies paired with cauliflower, anchovies paired with lemon, paired with beef, with sage, and so on. All the classic double acts are in here: tomatoes + basil, pork + shellfish, cabbage + bacon, peas + mint. There are also lesser known pairings: lamb + dill in the Greek soup mageiritsa, or Sauce Maltaise, the Hollandaise sauce made with blood orange juice instead of lemon and created to be paired with asparagus.

The result makes for (possibly surprisingly) compulsive reading – and extremely satisfying for a list-obsessive such as myself.  The treatment could have been dull, but Niki writes in a bright and breezy style with plenty of good throwaway lines (“The only drawback to lamb and artichoke stew is having to peel and chop globe artichokes. You end up looking as if you’ve been playing pat-a-cake with Edward Scissorhands”).  It’s not all superficial though: there are some lovely turns of phrase – she describes the flavour of cloves as ‘like sucking on a sweet, rusty nail’, and likens the ‘faint metallic tang’ in watercress and blue cheese to letting ‘the tines of your fork linger in your mouth a moment too long’. She also gives a brief recipe for Asturian fabada, under black pudding + pork, which she calls ‘astonishingly delicious’, which is just fine by me.

The Flavour Thesaurus

Niki Segnit

Bloomsbury

Review: A Taste Of The Unexpected

Mark Diacono specialises in ‘climate change’ crops at Otter Farm in Devon and is also head gardener for River Cottage. His premise in A Taste Of The Unexpected is that too many of us grow potatoes, cabbages and onions when there is no real need to do so: they are cheap and plentiful in the shops and we could be spending our time and labour on fruit and veg which is unobtainable elsewhere. I think this rather glosses over why people grow the crops they do but it certainly chimes with my own ideas on what to grow.

Mark writes engagingly with enthusiasm for flavours and scents – there are some gorgeously sensual descriptions of scrunching up leaves in your hands and tasting the produce . The author also does a good job of making a case for the inclusion of each fruit/vegetable here. It would be too easy to write about crops just because they were unusual. Here each one has to earn its place on the page. Peaches and nectarines, for examples, are included because “unless you’ve grown your own, or had the fortune of being in an Italian peach orchard in the summer, you have yet to enjoy all that a peach has to offer”. Even so I would on the whole have liked to see more on the culinary uses of the produce included here. I feel a bit as though not enough is made of the unique properties of, say, Chilean guava, or Carolina allspice: more is said about how they can be used in place of other more familiar ingredients.

I also succumbed to the combined pleasure/annoyance of seeing vegetables I already grow in here. Admittedly a somewhat smug pleasure: Ha! – I already know about romanesco cauliflower , borlottis and globe artichokes too. The annoyance is that I no longer have exclusive bragging rights over the quinces (and look, he has medlars too, s’not fair). Actually I would have found this book useful for the section on kai lan alone. From the description and the pictures, I am certain that this is the same plant that I grow as kaaillan, but Mark Diacono seems to get so much more from the crop that I do (Cut and come again? Survives the winter?). Intrigued, I will be following his growing instructions to the letter this year and will hopefully boost my yield to something approaching his.

I also like the fact that guidelines for sowing, care and harvesting are kept concise and simple. And although he makes gardening sound like an easy no-brainer activity, it’s probably not a book for the raw beginner  - even though The Directory section gives information as basic as a list of gardening tools needed.

I’ll be using this book: it’s made me think about Szechuan peppers and those wineberries, and I think it’s convinced to dump the cabbages as well.

A Taste Of The Unexpected
Mark Diacono
Quadrille Publishing Ltd

Bramble clearance: starting from scratch

After the relief of finding most crops unaffected, it’s time to get going with this winter’s Big Task: clearing the bramble hedge. This has been on my to-do list since October and while there’s no doubt other jobs were more urgent, there is a strong whiff of procrastination about this.

The boundary on one side of my plot is almost entirely taken up with brambles. This is not necessarily a bad thing: the brambles covered around two-thirds of the plot when I took it on seven years ago and I cleared it back to the edge to provide a useful windbreak – it’s on the west wide of the plot. Equally usefully, it gives me large juicy sweet blackberries every year, although the hedge has now grown and spread so much that it now produces far, far more blackberries than we could ever hope to eat, even when I coerce half the neighbourhood to come and help me pick them. 

This year, the hedge began encroaching on the adjacent vegetable beds. I hadn’t realised quite how unwieldy it had become until I realised that the paths between the beds and the hedge were now completely overgrown which means the hedge was now 2m wide. Room for another bed in there, my plot neighbour observed. Room for my nascent orchard, I thought. My son wants a cherry tree, I want a greengage and we’re running out of space.

The middle section of the hedge is cleared - still needs digging out.

Hence the clearance plan. The hedge is 12m long. So I intend to dig out the middle 4m entirely – slightly perverse, but the middle section has always for some reason had the least juicy blackberries and is also more accessible from the paths on the plot – and plant the new fruit trees there. The cherry tree is on Gisela rootstock, so we’re looking at around 3m high at maturity (so says the RHS here); the greengage will be on Pixy, I think. Then, this year, I will cut the top 4m section right down to the base and put in proper strong stakeposts and wires so that this year’s growth can be properly trained. The bottom 4m can be trimmed to keep it away from the parsnip bed but left to fruit again this year before it gets the back-to-base post ‘n’ wires treatment next winter.

This means this year’s crop will be reduced by two-thirds. I doubt we’ll even notice.

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.