Pink and perky: forcing rhubarb for an early harvest

Forced rhubarb is that which has been made to grow earlier than usual by being kept in the dark. This is what they do to the rhubarb grown in huge sheds in the famous Wakefield triangle, and sold - at a premium - in shops from December onwards, but it's very easy to force your rhubarb plants on a domestic scale as well. The resulting stems are rosy pink, long and slim. They taste slightly sweeter than conventionally grown stalks, perhaps all the more so for being available when most homegrown produce is either dormant or left over from the autumn.

You can buy special pots for forcing rhubarb but apart from a certain aesthetic appeal I’m not sure what the point of them is. All you need is a bucket, a weight – half a concrete slab will do – and some straw or similar packing material.

Rhubarb crowns covered with pots, weighted and packed with straw
to ensure all light is excluded.

Once your rhubarb shows the first signs of coming to life again in January, up-end the bucket over the budding root. Put the weight on top to ensure the bucket doesn’t get blown over. Pack the straw around the base of the bucket inside and out to ensure that all light is excluded from the interior of the bucket. The budding rhubarb needs total darkness.

Rhubarb bud just showing above the
soil in early January.

Wait six weeks or so – anywhere between four weeks and eight in my experience. Start checking after four, anyway. You should be able to harvest your slim, pale pink, forced rhubarb in February and March.

Make a note of which of your rhubarb crowns you forced this year and do not force these particular plants again next year. Give them a chance to grow on naturally before forcing again.

Forced rhubarb is more tender than conventionally grown stalks so treat it gently for cooking. I love rhubarb crumble but always feel this is a quite a hefty treatment for these more delicate stems. I usually simmer them, either on top of the cooker in a pan, or in the oven, in a very light syrup, or with orange juice. I also like the idea of serving rhubarb with meat or fish as part of the man course - Jamie Oliver teams rhubarb with pork in a number of recipes and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an interesting-looking recipe for forced rhubarb with mackerel in The Guardian this week.

The buds are simply covered with
an upturned pot.

Planting fruit trees

Having cleared and dug out an unruly bramble hedge over the last year, I've clawed back some space on my plot - about 6.5m x 3m in total. What I thought was a thin hedge was sprawling year on year over the rest of the plot.

In its place, I planned to plant some new fruit trees rather than create new veg beds. I already have damsons, plums, pears and a quince tree, and I find myself thinking more about fruit when there's a space to fill. Fruit trees tend to be much less labour-intensive than vegetables: they don't need replanting every year, just a spot of pruning, weeding under the canopy and checking for pests every now and again.

Another reason for going with fruit, I realised as I was cutting down the bramble hedge, is that it had been useful, not just in giving us a glut of blackberries every year, but in acting as a windbreak, as it lined the western edge of the plot, blocking and dissipating the prevailing winds. I'm hoping the fruit trees will do much the same job as they mature.

I consulted my ten year old as to exactly which fruit trees to plant; after all, he will be eating most of the produce. After some lively discussion and an agreement that it's disappointing that you cannot grow mangoes outdoors in London and really not worth trying, we chose two cherry trees and two greengages.

Greengage Reine Claude, just planted in, with  a sturdy stake
and a soft tie made from a leg from a pair of tights.

The cherries, because they are probably jointly our favourite fruit and even in high season they remain very expensive in the shops these days. The greengages are a nod to the beautiful Reina Claudias we buy when in northern Spain: greeny-gold bite-size fruits tasting like honeyed plums in all the supermarkets in July and August.

Both sets of trees have been grown on dwarfing rootstock, so that - I hope - they will fruit better and quicker than an ungrafted tree, but also crucially to keep the mature trees to a manageable size, so that we can reach all the fruit!

Both cherry trees are of the variety Stella, which is a sweet dessert cherry producing beautiful dark red fruits, and grafted onto Colt rootstock to keep the overall height down to around 3.65m when fully grown. I figure that if the birds look like eating the cherries before they're ready (and they will) I should be able to throw a net over the whole tree to keep the fruit safe until it's ripe.

The greengages are Reine Claude de Vars, and grown on St Julien A rootstock, which will cap the tree at about 4m at its full height.

All the trees were bought from Victoriana Nursery Gardens - I've had consistently good results with their plants and on this occasion they had the varieties I was looking for in stock at the right time.

Each tree was planted in the same way: with the bare roots soaked for an hour or so before planting, I dug a hole big enough to take the sapling comfortably, so that when placed in the hole the soil will come to the same level as it did in its pot. I've been told it's best to dig a roughly rectangular or square hole to encourage the trees to push out strong roots (apparently in a circular hole, the roots will grow round and round without spreading so much). Similarly, while you should refill the planting hole with plenty of organic matter, and water it in well, you shouldn't add fertiliser at planting time: you want the tree to send down strong roots in search of nourishment, not loll around luxuriating in an artifically enriched environment.

I also staked each tree to give it support while the roots establish themselves, and tied the main trunk to the stake with a soft tie (you can buy these, but I tend to use old pairs of tights for this). Finally I watered the tree in - a whole bucketful - added a mulch to conserve the water in the soil and help to suppress weeds, and tied a greaseband around the main trunk of each.

Greaseband on Conference pear: this protects
against a number of winter moths 

The greasebands protect very specifically against several varieties of winter moth: wingless females will climb up the tree to mate during the winter months and it is their caterpillars which eat the leaves in springtime.

The other great pest of apples, pears and plums (and other members of the plum family) are winged moths which lay their eggs on the leaves, and whose caterpillars bore into the ripening fruit to feast. Codling moths can give you maggotty apples and pears; plum moth will affect plums, greengages and damsons. Plum sawfly (not the same as plum moth) will cause the unripe fruit to fall to the ground prematurely.

Greasebands won't deter any of these winged moths. Here I've found pheromone traps to be effective. You place a pheromone capsule on a sticky band placed inside a rainproof trap. Hang the trap at about 4ft high in the tree and the female should be distracted by the pheromone and fly into the trap instead of the tree. On a commercial scale growers use these traps to ascertain how great a problem they have before deciding whether they need to use sprays to eliminate the moths. On a domestic scale, ie, if you have just 2-3 trees of each type, the traps can keep moth damage down to a minimum.

So I take double precautions and the results vary. Before I used the pheromone traps, my plum crop was largely unusable. Since installing the traps and renewing them each spring, a bad year means that say one in four plums will have some plum moth damage, a good year, such as 2012 will have zero damage. Yet this year, I had undamaged Conference pears, but maggots in many of the Doyen de Comice. The quince have never suffered any moth damage, although codling moth can attack quinces as well as apples and pears, according to the RHS.
 

Quince tree, Meeches Prolific, planted as a bare root sapling in 2008 and now
in its third year of fruiting. Although 2012 was the poorest yield yet, I'm putting this
down to the generally wet conditions and a late frost which we think got the blossom in late April.

Growing ginger - the harvest

It was either brave or foolhardy to harvest my ginger plants live at the Secret Garden Club in our Grow Your Own Curry session on Sunday. We dug these triffid-like roots, above, out from a pot where I'd planted a single piece of ginger root 10 months ago.

I've been documenting the growth of these ginger plants on this blog since January, when I planted the root. Over the summer, the plant grew tall and architectural, then, about six weeks ago, the foliage turned brown and wilted. By the time we came to harvest the ginger at the Secret Garden Club, all I had to show for 10 months of raising ginger were two pots of compost with no visible plant growth at all.

In truth I did check one pot the day before to make sure I would have some ginger root to lift on the day itself, prodding the soil until I could find a good solid mass of new root. As the other pot had been nurtured in identical conditions, I reckoned it was safe enough to leave that one undisturbed until the big unveiling.

Clockwise from top left:  (1) look for ginger root with visible yellow nodule - these will develop int shoots when you plant them; (2) sink the root in a pot of compost with the nodule facing upwards - cover the rot cover with a layer of compost; (3) cover the pots with a clear plastic cover and place somewhere light (but not in direct sunlight) and consistently warm, 24 degrees Celsius or more; (4) our first shoots appeared after about 30 days.

Ginger plants growing tall over the summer.

All the way from Walla Walla - sweet onions

I was intrigued to see Nicky's Seeds offering Walla Walla sweets seeds earlier this year. Walla Walla sweets are a type of onion grown for their high sugar content and sweet taste. I posted on this blog about these and other sweet onions, such as the Oakley onion, grown here in Essex.

That post was in March, so the Walla Walla sweet onion seedlings were just germinating. I planted them out at the allotment in a raised bed in late April, and happily they did very well. The bulbs swelled up just at the height of summer, if you can say that last summer had a height, and I lifted them in August. They did rather better, in fact, than the 'ordinary' Sturon onions and Red Barons, both of which were disappointingly small.

So I'm looking forward to growing Walla Walla sweets again, although I believe the Walla Walla name  is subject to the north American equivalent of appellation controllee and so once the seeds are sown here they should perhaps now be called North London sweets. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?

Once the onions reach the kitchen - and they should be eaten fresh: not only do they have a higher sugar content than other onions, but also a higher water content which makes them less suitable for keeping in store - the sweetness means they can be eaten raw without making you cry. Indeed these are excellent for anyone who is prone to tears when slicing or chopping onions as the side effects are noticeably less severe. Thinly sliced Walla Walla sweets perk up salads beautifully. They added a lovely mellow note to Spanish omelette, made lovely syrupy onion marmalade - also fantastic added to a reduced sugar apple sauce for a relish-style accompaniment to pork.

Get Cape Gooseberries. Grow Cape Gooseberries. Fly

I was given some physalis seeds at the beginning of the year. Physalis is one of those fruits I buy occasionally and then never know what to do with them. They look little a small orange tomato, wrapped in a papery case, and I find it very hard to describe the taste - sweet and fruity with a tart note is about as much as I can manage. I didn't feel they would be very appetising cooked. I also wasn't sure why I might want them: physalis plants spring up self-seeded every year, germinating from the kitchen compost. 

So we buy them occasionally from the supermarket and snack on them. A few overripe ones get thrown in the compost and it is presumably these whose seeds germinate later on the allotment - often intermingled with some enterprising tomato plants which self-seed the same way. These 'volunteer' plants never seem to set fruit (the self-seeded tomatoes never seem to get blight, either).

Physalis are related - fairly closely - to tomatillos, and also to tomatoes and aubergines. They're part of the botancial family Solanaceae. Solanaceae is the nightshade family, but don't let that put you off. They're also known as Cape Gooseberries, groundcherries, Chinese Lanterns (usually the more non-edible varieties, grown for the lantern-like seed cases) and improbably enough, golden strawberries.

The one you'll most often see in British gardens is Physalis alkekengi, which is hardy in winter and bears the bright orangey-red lanterns. 

The name Cape Gooseberry is often associated with the edible plant, Physalis peruviana - the 'cape' in this instance isn't a geographical cape harking back to the plant's origin, but the item of clothing, referring to the case which covers the fruit. They grow in sub-tropical and temperate climes, and, I have discovered this year, in a cold wet summer in London. I thought it might be interesting to grow some physalis on purpose and see just how many fruit we could raise. We were also growing tomatillos at the Secret Garden Club and I wanted to make a comparison between two such close relatives. 

I treated the physalis seeds as if they were tomatoes or aubergines: sowing them (a bit late) at the beginning of March, two to a small pot under a cloche, and leaving them to germinate indoors in warmth. The seedlings were up two weeks later, and grew quickly in their pots, uncovered, on a sunny windowsill - see above.

By the beginning of June, they looked as though they might need staking in their pots. I also desperately needed the windowsill space to bring on the pumpkin seedlings and so, despite the fact that it was pouring with rain every day, out the physalis had to go, transplanted to a sheltered, south-facing bed on the allotment (left).                                                                                                                    They grew on vigorously despite the inclement conditions, and yes, by July they did need staking. They also came into flower, the flowers closely resembling those of tomatillos. In fact the general growth habit of physalis and tomatillos are similar, although the physalis are sturdier. The tomatillo plants were almost flamingo-like with their long spindly stems supporting multiple branches. The downy heart-shaped leaves of the physalis are a darker green and wider than those of the tomatillo. 

Physalis flowers: much of the foliage shown here is actually of the neighbouring
comfrey plant. You can also see several immature green fruits developing.

The fruit starts developing inside the green cases in July/August. If you gently squish the green teardrop-shaped lanterns between your thumb and forefinger you can feel the fruit, at first just the size of a pea, then growing bigger and bigger. Unlike the tomatillo, they don't split the casing, but when the husk turns brown from green, the fruit inside is ripe.

An unripe physalis fruit in the foreground, with one ripening behind it.

Trying out the first ripe fruits, the taste was a revelation. Having never eaten a physalis that hadn't spent most of its days in a supermarket before, I was unprepared for any complexity or depth of flavour. But that ill-defined fruity-and-a-bit-tart is so much rounder and syrupy - and yet still with a threat of tartness. Now I can see why you might want to make jams or jellies (and definitely a pavlova) from them. If all physalis tasted like this, we'd do so, so much more with them.

Plums and pickles

With autumn bringing a bracing chill to the air even on sunny days, and even colder nights, it's time to accept that the summer crops are over. Whatever fruit they have produced, they won't be producing much more.

With that in mind, it's time to finish up the remains of some vegetables, and to deal with the gluts in other areas. This year, I've been making lots of simple pickles, experimenting with different flavoured vinegars and aromatics to give the preserved veg a bit of extra zing. Earlier this year I discovered using apple vinegar, thanks to Mia Christiansen and Anna Colquhoun, at their Nordic Cooking Class, and I've used this successfully as the base for pickled quinces and pears, and also pickled beetroot. Last year, I pickled beetroot in horseradish vinegar and while it was delicious, it was also hot enough to blast us from one end of the room to another. Apple vinegar - or cider vinegar, they're the same thing - has made a much softer, more rounded flavour to the pickle.

The beetroot are small, no more than the size of a ping ping ball, because the beets that go in the autumn pickle are the leftovers from the summer crop, the ones that for whatever reason, never really swelled and made it - too many of them the yellow Touchstone Gold variety this year as well. They're small enough to be pickled whole.

Pickled beetroot

Beetroot - about 10-12 small beets

Apple (or cider) vinegar

Salt

½ teasp Szechuan peppercorns

½ teasp coriander seeds

2 chillies

2 garlic chive flowerheads (optional)

Clean the beets and place in a large pan. Cover with cold water, bring to the boil and simmer until just cooked. Much depends on size, but ping pong ball sized beets should be ready after 20 minutes.

Drain and let the beets cool. Meanwhile sterilise a jar into which the beets will fit snugly.

When the beetroot is cool, slip off the skins and trim the root and stem. Pack the jar with the beetroot and aromatics.

In another jar, add 10g salt to every 400ml apple vinegar. Put the lid on and shake the jar vigorously to dissolve the salt. When ready, pour the vinegar/salt solution over the beets so that they are covered. Seal and store in the fridge.

Aside from the question of whether to cook the vegetables or not, the pickling method stays mch the same whatever you are pickling: bring vinegar, salt, and also sometimes sugar, plus herbs and spices to the boil. My husband can't tolerate the smell of boiling vinegar in the house, so I, a) wait until he's out for the day before doing any pickling, and b) heat the vinegar, salt and sugar up in the microwave, as it seems to contain the smell a bit better than on the open hob.

Pack a sterilised jar full of your chosen vegetables, then pour the hot vinegar solution over them. Seal the jar, let it cool down then store in a cool place.

I took much the same route with elephant garlic. These crop produced 4-5 mature bulbs, each with 7-8 mighty cloves; I think  the rest of the plants must have got waterlogged this year. After roasting one whole bulb to mash and serve alongside a Sunday roast, I was left with just enough elephant garlic to pack a 500ml Kilner jar.

Pickled elephant garlic

20 garlic cloves

500ml rice vinegar

1 chilli

2 kaffir lime leaves (optional – you could use bay leaves, or star anise, or nothing at all)

1 tbsp salt

2 tbsp caster sugar

250 ml water

Have a sterilised jar ready. Peel the garlic cloves, leaving them whole.

Place the vinegar, water, salt, sugar and any aromatics in a large pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for five minutes then add the cloves. Bring back to the boil and simmer on for another five minutes. You can do this in the microwave if yours has a good simmer function.

Pour everything into the sterilised jar and seal.

If the elephant garlic has been disappointing this year, like so many other crops, it's also worth noting the successes. I have a very old plum tree - I say very old, but I've no idea exactly how old it is, as I inherited it from the previous allotment holder. Its branches are covered in lichen, and there is no sign of a graft at the base of the trunk so I assume it is self-seeded, or planted before grafting became the norm? 

Thanks to this blog, The Garden Diaries, I think I have identified the variety as a Warwickshire Drooper. Certainly the tree has a somewhat weeping habit, and the plums themselves are yellow, blushed pink where they are exposed to the sun, and also sometimes with a slightly mottled look to them - they are not smooth and supermodel glossy.

The tree is mainly notable for its prolific consistency. Since I started work on this particular allotment nine years ago it has produced an astonishingly large number of plums every single year - and this year it has surpassed itself. Every single branch is laden with fruit. I simply cannot cope with all these plums, and in addition to sheer numbers, this year the fruit has been entirely free of plum sawfly larvae. Most years, despite the greaseband around the trunk and despite the fly trap hung among the branches, a few get through and worm their way into the fruit. This year, none at all.

So, we eat plums straight from the tree. I've made plum crumble and an approximation of Chinese plum sauce. And every year I make up a big jar or two of pickled plums and we eat our way through them over the course of the following year. Tart and fruity and fragrant all at the same time, they go brilliantly with pork, with duck and game, with cheese, and perhaps a bit more surprisingly, they are fantastic with Thai fishcakes.


Pickled plums

40 plums - choose firm-fleshed ones rather than overripe specimens or windfalls

500ml white wine vinegar

600ml water

600g caster sugar

2cm root ginger, sliced (no need to peel)

4 star anise

4 cloves

4 hot red chillies

1 teasp salt

Put the vinegar, salt, sugar and aromatics into a pan and bring to the boil, making sure all the sugar has dissolved.

While the vinegar is heating, wash the plums, halve them and remove the stones. Pack the plums into 2 x 1 litre Kilner jars, which have been sterilised (40 halves per jar).

Once the vinegar mixture reaches boiling point, take it off the heat and pour over the plums, making sure that each jar gets an equal number of star anises, chillies, cloves, etc. (You could scoop out the aromatics before they boil and add them to the jars when they are about halfway full of plums.) Seal the jars and let them cool down at room temperature before transferring to the fridge.

These pickled plums last about 3-4 months (less if they were pretty ripe when picked) before going a bit slushy and syrupy.

The great nasturtium caper

No matter how pressed for space I am, I'll always find room to plant a few nasturtiums. I think of them as a superplant, both ornamental and useful in a variety of ways. They will grow happily without much in the way of attention - they don't need fussing over. The flowers are prolific and beautiful, cheering up odd corners, patio pots, and the backs of the borders with vibrant orange, yellow, pink or red flowers throughout summer and into autumn. Their scrambling, tumbling habit means that they make good ground cover and keep the weeds down, and they'll also climb over posts, low walls and up trellises, softening the view of harsh backdrops. (Admittedly, they attract blackfly like a magnet, but we can't have everything.)

They are ridiculously easy to grow. Each year, around April (or May, at a stretch) I push a few seeds into the soil where I want them to grow and water them in. After that, I treat them with benign neglect and they seem to like it.

Nasturtiums are great in the kitchen too. Shredded, the leaves make a succulent, pungent addition to a salad. Or you can mash up some herby cheese and roll it up in a nasturtium leaf like a cigarette. The flowers are also edible, lending a delicate peppery taste and soft texture to a salad, or scattered around a whole fish in a centrepiece, or just as a beautiful garnish to a vegetable platter.

When the flowers finally fade, around now, they leave behind little green seedpods. Brush your fingers through a tangle of nasturtium plants and you'll see them drop to the ground, the size of peas and a pale jade green.

The seed pods look like little pale peas

These seedpods too are edible, if pickled in vinegar, and have long been called 'poor man's capers'. They mellow with keeping, with a nutty taste and firm not-quite-crunchy texture. Good enough for everyone, I'd say.

Nasturtium capers

Nasturtium seed pods, still green, to fill a measuring jug to the 200ml mark.

200ml white wine vinegar

A pinch fennel seeds

A pinch peppercorns

2 bay leaves

Salt

(The vinegar and salt gives you a basic pickling liquor; the exact nature and amount of aromatics can be played around with.)

Wash and pick over the seed pods, removing any dirt, chaff, blackfly, whatever. Give them a good final rinse and dry on kitchen paper.

Sterilise a jar that will fit the nasturtiums snugly – a complete dishwasher cycle should do the trick, or wash in very hot soapy water, then dry by placing the jar upside down on a rack in an oven heated to 120 degrees.

Rinsing the seedpods prior to packing in a sterilised jar.

Put the bay leaves in the bottom of the jar and fill up with the seed pods. Bring the vinegar, fennel seeds, peppercorns and salt to the boil. I do this in a jug in the microwave – the vinegar smell is less pervasive. Then pour the liquid and aromatics over the seed pods in the jar. Seal and let the jar cool before storing in the fridge. They’ll keep for a good six months if kept chilled.