Tangled up in blue

Not all the plants have suffered in the cool, wet and windy conditions that prevailed here in the south of England for much of the spring and early summer. The blueberry plants, snug in their sunken pots of ericaceous compost, loved the daily soakings and produced a massive glut of fat indigo berries.

Blueberries need an acid soil (lower than pH5.5) and London clay on its own isn't nearly acid enough. So each plant occupies its own 35cm pot, and each pot is sunk into the soil so that the tops are at ground level. Sinking the pots reduces water loss, which is helpful since blueberries also like plenty of water. A yearly topping up of ericaceous (acidic) compost keeps them fed, and I also spread the shredded needles Christmas tree around the foot of the plants as a mulch in January.

This year, seven blueberry plants have produced around 6kg of fruit so far. I'm still picking enough each day to sprinkle over breakfast cereal.

But what to do with the rest of them? Blueberry muffins was an obvious choice since the homemade variety is invariably so superior to anything shop-bought. I used Nigella's recipe from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, also reproduced here: http://www.mumsnet.com/Recipes/i/1203-Blueberry-muffins.

But blueberry muffins will only make a small dent in the glut. In the past, I've made a blueberry tart with a blueberry-flavoured custard topped with the fruit, but the custard always cooks to a brown colour instead of mauve or deep purple - it's the blue of the blueberries mixed with the orange egg yolk. It's a real 1970s wallpaper brown and doesn't look very appetising. So this time, I went for a more conventional vanilla custard underneath the blueberries.

I wanted this to look like something you might buy in a French patisserie, and knowing my limitations, used a bought ready-made sweet pastry case.


Blueberry tart

185ml double cream
4 egg yolks
3 tbsp sugar
1.5 tsp vanilla extract

Pastry case
1-2 tbsp blueberry jam (see below), optional
Blueberries
Icing sugar

Heat the oven to 190 degrees. Take the pastry case out of its wrapping and place on a baking tray. Beat the egg yolks, cream and sugar together until smooth. Add the vanilla extract to taste and whisk well in.

Pour the custard into the pastry case and bake in the oven until set - about 25 minutes. Leave to coll, then spread a thin layer of blueberry jam (see below) evenly over the custard. Stud the top of the tart with raw blueberries - the jam helps to stick them to the top of the tart but isn't essential. Dust with icing sugar to finish off.

Blueberry jam
For the first batch of jam, I followed the recipe from the National Trust's Jams, Preserves and Edible Gifts. This calls for 850g sugar to 900g blueberries and was far too sweet for my taste.

For the next batch, I reduced the sugar and used 350g ordinary granulated sugar and 250g jam sugar. I also had 300g blackcurrants left over from harvesting the blackcurrant bushes and added these too for extra bite.

I left the blueberries to steep in the ordinary sugar, lemon juice (one lemon's worth) and a pinch of salt overnight. The following day I added the jam sugar, and boiled it up - it reached setting point in about 10-15 minutes.

Blueberries in kirsch
An incredibly simple recipe from Preserve, published by Hamlyn. For every 175g blueberries, use 50g caster sugar and 100ml of kirsch. Layer the blueberries and sugar in a sterilised jar, add the kirsch and seal.

Shake the jar every day until the sugar is dissolved then leave in the dark, unopened, until you want to use the blueberries.

Cutting remarks

I nearly forgot to take cuttings this year. With all the unseasonably cold and wet weather, it's been hard work just keeping the weeds down and taller plants staked against the wind. Late spring to early summer is the best time for taking softwood cuttings: creating new plants from the green stems and tips of this year's growth. Rosemary, lavender, lemon verbena, fuchsia and hydrangea are all easy to propagate this way. This year I've concentrated on rosemary and lavender as I want to restock the herbal bed at the allotment next spring.

1. Choose your cuttings. Snip non-flowering growing tips from the plant. Cut cleanly using a sharp knife or very sharp small scissors just above a leaf node. You don’t want to be leaving a long bare stalk on the plant which will be prone to rotting or admitting disease.

2. If you can’t use them straightaway, put your cuttings in a polythene bag and seal (zip-lock is ideal).

3. Use modules, tall and skinny better than flat and wide.

4. Fill the modules with cuttings compost, not too finely textured. Firm the tops lightly, and water thoroughly. Leave to drain.

5. Prepare your cuttings. Trim the stem just below the bottom leaf nodes. Remove the bottom leaves so that you have 3-4 leaves left at the top. Don’t peel or tear the leaves away: again, cut as cleanly as possible.

6. Take a dibber – my ‘dibber’ is a pencil, which is about the right width – and dip the pencil into the compost in each module to a depth of about 2cm.

7. Drop each cutting into the hole left by the dibber. Don’t bury the leaves - they should remain clear of the compost.

8. Use your fingers to firm the compost around the cutting.

9. Label your cuttings.

10. Place the potted cuttings in a seed tray or propagator. Cover with a clear plastic lid. Or a polythene bag secured over the cuttings will do, so long as the polythene doesn’t actually touch any part of the plants.

11. Move the tray or propagator to a spot out of direct sunlight for 2-3 days to give the cuttings a chance to recover, then move to a warm light, sheltered spot indoors.

12. Resist the temptation to check and pull at your cuttings. Take a look every so often and if there is any sign of wilting give the propagator some ventilation (punch a small hole in the polythene bag).

13. After 3-4 weeks, have a look at the bottom of the modules. If there is any sign of roots poking through, you can remove the lid altogether.

14. Leave the rooted plants to form a string root ball before potting up into small pots (about 8 weeks).

A wet day at Hampton Court Flower Show drove us straight into the Growing For Taste marquee where we met up with old favourites like Seeds Of Italy - I'll be trying some of its giant-leaved Neapolitan basil, Pennards, The Garlic Farm and Dobies, and found new exhibitors in Otter Farm's Edible Forest Garden and Plants4Presents' exotic herbs and spices.

Spice plants were popular in the Growing For Taste pavilion. Plants4Presents had an especially good range of
turmeric, ginger, cardamom and curry plants.

From top, left to right: chocolate mint plants, the herb display and Perilla frutescans at Jekka's Herb Farm stand. Bottom rotw, hostas and agapanthus in the Floral Marquee.

Waking up in the sun

After what seems like weeks of wind and cold and rain, it only takes a couple of sunny days and suddenly it looks as though we might get some produce this year.

These are tree onions, or Egyptian walking onions, which is a much more exotic name by far.
These edible bulblets are produced at the top of the stems.

Walla Walla sweet onions, grown from seed, beginning to swell at last.

These Quattro Stagione lettuces have been looking like limp flattened seedlings, but are now finally beginning to heart up.

Little Gems are also putting on new growth fast.

Last week they were immature white buds; this week, we have raspberries!

Hosts of strawberries hang down over the side of the raised bed.

Purple-podded mange tout peas need another couple of weeks before they're ready to eat, I think.

Can you beat the blight?

The tomato plants look gorgeous at this time of year. Green, sturdy, in flower with the first truss just setting. It's always hard to imagine in June that in a few short weeks these lovely healthy plants could be a mass of sooty rotting foliage, as the blight hits.

This year, with the cool, rainy, windy weather battering our gardens, there have been reports of blight already. The RHS reported some early confirmed cases of early tomato blight on its Facebook page on June 14th, and then last week it came closer to home, with two gardening friends of mine in London reporting blight on their tomato plants.

That might seem just unlucky, except that in this particular case I discovered that the affected plants had been bought from the same nursery. And that in one case, these blighted tomatoes had been planted out next to tomato plants raised from seed and that the home-reared plants were still healthy.

I can think of no better argument for knowing the provenance of your plants and, wherever possible, starting from seed. You can control the growing medium, the environment, the feeding, the watering ...

Tomato blight: blackened stems, sooty-looking leaves, brown
patches on the fruit.

In the case of tomatoes, the arrival of blight in the UK is a case of 'when', not 'if' and even with the best of care, I reckon outdoor grown tomatoes in Britain will get blight sooner or later. But the middle of June is a bit too early to have to consign one's tomato plants to the incinerator.

Since I started growing tomatoes outdoors 15 years ago, there has been roughly one year in five where the plants have either escaped blight or it has arrived late enough to enable us to harvest a proper crop beforehand. 2002 was a blight-free year, as was 2006. (It's not that I keep meticulous records, but I remember these years particularly: 2002 was the first year I had my allotment and the tomatoes were about the only crop I had time to plant out and grow successfully; in 2006 we were staying with friends and bringing home bowlfuls of tomatoes every day. "I never knew growing tomatoes was so easy," they would say. "It isn't, usually," I would mutter back.)

Tomato blight has always seemed to be unavoidable. And once you've got it, you've got it. However, this year and especially when I was researching tomatoes for the Secret Garden Club workshop on Mediterranean vegetables back in April, I've thought a lot more about how one might increase the chances of avoiding blight in the first place.

Red Alert: can ripen in June

1. Grow early varieties, like Red Alert. They should start fruiting before the end of June, even grown outside (disclaimer: not this year, we have a few immature fruits the size of olives so far); normally you wouldn't expect blight until July so you would hope for a month's worth of cropping.

2. Grow as far away as possible from other tomatoes. If you have any sort of choice.

3. Grow in fresh soil. This is where I suspect the problems lie with the garden centre that my neighbours shopped at - as described above. Growing in fresh compost is essential, and I think, unwillingly, growing in pots or growbags rather than the open ground is desirable. And if you use pots, these should be thoroughly cleaned and rinsed before filling for the tomatoes. Greenhouse tomatoes tend to fare better than those grown outdoors, although I'm reluctant to give up outdoor tomatoes altogether. (I don't have the indoor space, for one thing.)

Sungold tomatoes beginning to ripen

4. Don't be so keen to pinch out those side shoots. If you grow cordon-style tomatoes, such as Sungold, Ailsa Craig, Tigerella, the advice is always to pinch out the shoots that grow between the main stem and the leaf stems. Leave them in, they say, and the plant will become wildly bushy and grow a mass of leaf at the expense of fruit. Over the years though I've come to think that maybe the over-enthusiastic pruning of side shoots is unhelpful. Every cut creates a wound; every wound is an opening into which blight can penetrate. My most blight-resistant tomato ever was Broad Ripple Yellow Currant, a bush variety which tumbled about all over the place, but which never succumbed to blight. Last year I semi-forgot about trimming a Marmande (semi-indeterminate, or not-quite-cordon) in the greenhouse and while everything around it eventually turned black and crumbled, the Marmande soldiered on. I'm sure it would have produced more fruit if I had pinched, and pruned, but we were still picking tomatoes off the plant in early December. (Although a Marmande that ripens in November tastes nothing like a Marmande that ripens in August.) I can't find any references that suggest bush or untrimmed varieties are more blight-resistant; this is anecdotal evidence only.

5. Try grafted tomatoes, or even better, graft your own. This is my secret weapon in the battle against tomato blight. The idea is that you take the top of one tomato variety and graft it to the root and stem of another - with tomatoes you would choose a 'top', or scion to give it its proper name, which would give you lots of delicious fruit, and a root and stem, or 'rootstock', which is known to be disease resistant. The rootstock confers this resistance to the scion, which continues to produce its delicious fruit as before. In other words, you get the best of both worlds.

Fruit growers have been grafting for decades, although more usually in their case, the rootstock is chosen to control the size of the mature tree. This is how you are able to grow apple or pear trees, say, which never grow taller than 8-9ft and yet are laden with fruit. The apple or pear tree 'top' has been grafted on to the rootstock of a much smaller tree (often in the case of apples and pears, a quince rootstock, as it happens).

Tomato grafting is fiddly rather than difficult. We showed Secret Garden Club attendees back in April how to graft tomatoes - detailed photos and instructions are here - and the initial results are looking good. I'm already planning to graft more tomatoes next year to give them more of a chance to beat the blight.

Any more blight-beating tips would be most welcome - I suspect a combination of tactics is the strategy that will work best.

Kailans - gorgeous greens worth tracking down

I harvested the first of the kailans, this week. Slightly later than usual but then everything is shaping up to be 'slightly later' this year. This has been a must-grow crop for me ever since I discovered how unobtainable they are in the UK after feasting on them during a trip to Singapore in the 1990s.

Kailans are a type of brassica with thick juicy stems, deep green leaves and a small head of florets. Joy Larkcom calls it Chinese broccoli in her essential text Grow Your Own Vegetables and certainly in looks they are closest to the type of broccoli sold as 'tenderstem' by Waitrose and others. Not the same, though. Kailan stems have a distinctly nutty mustardy flavour. It makes other types of broccoli seem bland in comparison.

It's not totally unobtainable in the UK. There's usually a crate of kailans set outside the Loon Fung supermarket in London's Chinatown and the New Loon Moon on the other side of the street. But that's the only reliable source of supply I've found other than growing my own - if you know of a UK supplier, do please share the secret.

Despite being mainly thought of as an oriental vegetable, they grow much like any other brassica here in the UK. I sow the seeds indoors in modules in March, then slowly harden them off as they grow, moving them out of the propagator as they germinate on to a sunny windowsill, then into the patio greenhouse and finally, around four weeks after the shoots appeared, outside.

Once they are about three inches tall and with proper leaves, I transplant the seedlings into a raised bed with lots of good compost. The first stems are ready to cut after about six weeks. If you leave a good bit of stem and leaf on the plant when you cut, the stem will regrow, making kailans a reliable cut-and-come-again crop. Harvested regularly, each plant will keep going until the first frosts.

Kailans growing in a raised bed

Once the stems are in the kitchen, I tend to cook them very simply.The big tough foliage needs to be trimmed off, leaving a good plump stem plus the younger, smaller leaves. A quick wash and a shake to dislodge any clinging insects and then they can be either steamed or boiled briefly - I like to leave a bit of crunch in the stalks. 

The Chinese often drizzle oyster sauce over kailans; in Singapore I ate them dressed with garlic in oil. Either of these are good, as is a quick slug of soy sauce and sesame oil. Yesterday I smeared the stems with an anchovy butter which I'd originally made for the last of the asparagus: the savoury bite from the anchovies went well with the nutty taste of the kailans.

Fat stems: cut above the first four leaves
shown here to ensure the plant will regrow
to provide you with another harvest.

The trouble with radishes

Why does growing radishes give me so much trouble? Children grow radishes, for heaven's sake. They're the sort of crop you just drop in the ground to pop up quickly while everything else takes its time. Radishes are known as an catch crop or a marker crop, the latter especially with parsnips which can be slow and erratic. The faster-growing row of radishes 'marks' the row of parsnips, helps to keep it weed-free and - in theory - provides a quick harvest while the parsnips are still pondering germination.

And yet they give me endless trouble. They don't like my clay soil for a start and would prefer something more sandy and freer-draining. Their leaves are pockmarked by flea beetle: by the time I harvest the effect is like delicate lacework. The slightest check in growth and off they bolt, leaving a thick stem with a woody  stub of a radish at the end of it. Last month's spell of fine dry weather following the record-breaking wet April is a good case in point and I'm writing this after coming in from lifting a good three quarters of the first radish sowing - all bolted.

Radish leaves reduced to holes, complete with flea beetle - in the centre of the picture.

I usually make three radish sowings: in March in a sheltered raised bed. I get to March and I long to be able to put something in the ground and radishes seem to fit the bill. The second sowing in April are the parsnip marker rows. Hearteningly, this year's April sowing is shaping up quite well, especially welcome after losing so many of the first lot. The third set, in May, is always totally hit and miss. Mostly miss.

And yet I will persevere with radishes. Partly because, yes, they are quick to mature. If they're going to fail, they fail quickly and I don't feel I have invested too much time and space and hope on them. And partly because the ones that do slip through the net are well worth it. Home-grown radishes have a much stronger, more well-rounded flavour making shop-bought ones bland in comparison. They're so attractive on the plate - I always get a delicious sense of anticipation from a dish of ruby and crimson radishes. I've tried white varieties such as Ping Pong and the Polish yellow radish Zlata without much success: alongside the standard French Breakfast, I would rate Scarlet Globe and Amethyst the highest, although Amethyst is a bit of a bolter. All these three have a strong clean flavour, plenty of crunch and that all-important peppery kick to the taste.

The leaves may be beetle-bitten, but these radishes are still good to eat, if a bit misshapen.