The joy of fartichokes

I am regularly asked what vegetable I would recommend growing to someone who is just starting a kitchen garden. I'm sure they expect me to say potatoes, or radishes, or runner beans. Usually I suggest Jerusalem artichokes. They are in so many ways the perfect vegetable. (And in one crucial respect, not so perfect.)

They are virtually indestructible. Apart from a little slug damage when the new shoots appear in April, they appear to attract no pests.

They are perennial so they come back year after year. You'll get bigger and better tubers if you dig up the remaining artichokes in spring and replant just the biggest ones, but it makes them very economical; buy once, replant infinitely.

At the end of the season in March, dig up your remaining tubers and
choose the biggest to replant for next year.

You can grow them in the same spot each year. You don't have to integrate them into a rotation plan and prepare a bed for them every year.

The tubers can be harvested from autumn throughout the winter into early spring, so a long-lived crop and one that is producing for you at a time of year when little else is growing.

The plants are tall and if you choose the position of your Jerusalem artichoke bed with care, they can act as a windbreak for more tender crops.

The artichokes are highly versatile in the kitchen. You can roast them under a Sunday joint like potatoes, or roast along with other rot vegetables. They make a delicious gratin Dauphinoise, substituting thinly sliced artichokes for the potatoes. You can make Jerusalem artichoke fritters, you can mash them, you can eat them raw, shaved thinly into salads. They make a beautiful creamy puree that can be used as a base for soups.

But they do divide people. I think you either love them or loathe them. And whichever side you're on, you can't deny the one thing that puts many people off Jerusalem artichokes. They make you fart. Each tuber, whether raw or cooked (and funnily enough, I think the effects are less explosive after eating raw artichokes) contains a carbohydrate called inulin, which gives you wind. Not for nothing are they usually known as 'fartichokes' in the Zia maison.

Jerusalem artichokes take a fair bit of washing and peeling. After you've
peeled the skins, put the tubers in water with a little lemon juice
squeezed into it to stop the bright white flesh from discolouring. 

So while I have no inhibitions about serving Jerusalem artichokes to supper guests - after all, they will leave at the end of the evening and do their farting in the comfort of their own home (and so will you) - I would advise not serving them at the starting of a camping weekend, say.

Not to be confused with ...
Globe artichokes
Note that the Jerusalem artichokes pictured here are quite distinct from globe artichokes, the giant round buds which we eat, spiky leaf-bud by spiky leaf-bud, until you reach the nutty heart in the centre. Despite the fact that both plants are called artichokes, they are not related. Globe artichokes belong to the same family botanically as thistles; Jerusalem artichokes are related to sunflowers. Quite how they both ended up being commonly called artichokes isn't 100% clear: it's thought that the Jerusalem artichoke is a corruption of girasole, the Italian word for sunflower.

Chinese artichokes
Unrelated botanically to either Jerusalem or globe artichokes, the Chinese artichoke, or Stachys affinis, looks like a smaller, skinnier, paler version of a Jerusalem artichoke tuber. Actually, I think they look like fat cartoon caterpillars, but don't let that put you off.

Like Jerusalem artichokes, the tubers can be planted in spring. They are then harvested from late summer onwards, and again, keep some healthy tubers aside at the end of the season for replanting for the next year's crop.

The taste of these is not dissimilar to Jerusalem artichoke and they can be cooked the same way or in stir-fries, or served raw like a salad vegetable.

Recipe
Jerusalem artichoke gratin
5-6 good-sized Jerusalem artichokes

1 tbsp chopped parsley

100ml double cream

Butter (about 25g in total)
Walnut oil (to finish off)

Salt

Pepper

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.

Have a large bowl of cold water mixed with a little lemon juice standing by you. Scrub the Jerusalem artichokes and peel them, putting each artichoke  in the bowl of water once peeled to stop them from going brown.

Then slice the artichokes into rounds as finely as possible. Arrange the slices neatly and evenly in layers in a shallow gratin dish. After each layer, season with a little salt and pepper and a smear of butter.

Once you’ve placed the final layer of artichoke slices, sprinkle with the chopped parsley, then pour over the cream. Top with a knob of butter and a last pinch of salt and pepper. 

Cover the dish with foil and bake in the oven for 20 mins. Remove the foil and put back the in oven uncovered for another 10-15 mins to brown the top. Drizzle over a little walnut oil when you serve.

Serves 2

Open house at Seeds Of Italy

Just a small selection from the Franchi Sementi range, which numbers
over 500 different seed varieties in total.

Seeds of Italy held an open day at the weekend at premises in Harrow. It was a chance to see, under one roof, the full range of seeds from Franchi Sementi, which Seeds of Italy distributes in the UK, plus its ancillary products - preserving jars, soaps, packet seasonings and tomato presses. It was indeed the horticultural equivalent of being a kid in a sweetshop.

With a friendly welcome and coffee and biscuits it was also a chance to chat about growing produce in the UK with the immensely knowledgeable and infinitely enthusiastic Paolo Arrigo, head of Seeds Of Italy and author of From Seed To Plate, which is one of my favourite cookbooks.

Paolo was keen to talk about provenance on Saturday - how the parent company, which has been run by the Franchi family since 1783, carefully sources its seeds, how the Italians treat the locality of its produce with the utmost seriousness, how the produce specific to each region is used together. Much of the seed sold in the UK these days, Paolo says, is bought in from China, with little attention paid to its suitability for our climate. In contrast, looking at - for example - the courgette varieties offered by Franchi, I can see Zucchino Bolognese (from Bologna), Zucchino Genovese (from Genoa), Zucchino Fiorentino (from Florence) and Zucchino Nero di Milano (the black courgette of Milan!). You don't get different British counties extolling the provenance of their parsnips, although a few regional varieties live on in the names - Kelvedon Wonder peas, for instance. Interestingly, as Paolo points out, we're better at protecting the local heritage of our fruit: think of all the different apple varieties and where they come from.

And compared to China, Italy is much closer to the UK in terms of growing conditions, Paolo explains. We may think of Italy as mainly Mediterranean, and hot, but 74% of the country is mountainous and the southern tip and Sicily aside, it gets very cold in winter.

I can believe it. I've always bought as much of my seed from Seeds Of Italy as possible, because 1) the quantities of seed in each packet is always generous, 2) the varieties offered are always interesting and frequently different to those on sale in the shops here. Lots of different - and very local - courgettes and squashes, for instance, from the deliciously sweet and nutty Berrettina Piacentina pumpkins to the round stuffing courgette Tondo di Nizza. It was also Seeds of Italy that introduced me to the pink and white striped beetroot from Chioggia, which I know is now available more widely but which was quite surprise find 10 years ago. 3) I always get good results from Franchi Seeds: near 100% germination and healthy plants. Lastly, and definitely not least, is this idea of provenance, of knowing where the seed is from and where it has been saved. The blurb that comes with Seeds Of Italy packets online is always knowledgeable and specific (in contrast, amusingly, to the sowing instructions, which are decidedly cryptic!).

After a delicious couple of hours browsing, I left happy, clutching a number of seed packets, including some Puntarelle - that crunchy Roman salad leaf, a variety of chicory, which I now discover originally hails from Catalonia rather than Italy, even though it's now so strongly associated with Rome. I'll plant this along with the other chicories I grow, the round radicchio and elongated red Rossa di Treviso, and look forward to winter salads next year.

When Paolo Arrigo isn't extolling the virtues of locally
raised Italian seeds, he rescues and restores
accordions in his spare time. This beautiful accordion
is around 80 years old and sounds as good as new.

Confessions of a basil addict

I have a confession to make: I think I must be a basil addict. Every year I seem to add another variety of  basil to the pots and troughs on various windowsills throughout the house.

It started, as I suppose these things do, with the apparently harmless classic Italian basil, packaged in a deceptively friendly-looking envelope from Seeds of Italy. At first this seemed more than enough: this is the aromatic, fleshy-leaved variety, the same as the fresh basil sold growing in the pot in supermarkets. Even if I wasn't cooking with it at any given moment, it was still a pleasure just to brush one's hands across the leaves for a rush of heady aroma.

But when it came to seed buying the next year, I wanted more. Lemon basil, with a citrus overlay to the distinctive clove fragrance, seemed to fit the bill, and produced tall, willowy plants which wafted scent around the kitchen every time I opened the door to let in breeze. The year after that I was looking for a warmer basil aroma again and found cinnamon basil, with gentle spice notes which contrasted with the sharper lemon variety.

By the time I discovered how easy it was to grow Thai basil (pictured above) and how wonderful it was to liberally apply its leaves to curries and indeed any coconut-based dishes, I knew I was hooked. Holy basil came next, and now, this year, I've come full circle back to Seeds of Italy and its Neapolitan large-leaved basil - a variety with leaves as big as lettuce, I'm promised. Will that be enough to satisfy my basil-lust?

I've also flirted with Greek basil (small pointy leaves), lime basil, purple basil (beautiful but duller in flavour) and holy red basil (which was identical to holy green basil until I transplanted it outside and only then did the leaves turn truly red).

Now is the right time to start thinking about sowing basil, with the days getting longer and the light levels rising, and since I'm not about to give basil up any time soon, what other varieties should I try?

Hard graft - working on tomatoes

I sowed the first of my tomatoes today, a variety called Aegis which will grow extremely vigorously, but bear very few fruits - and those which do develop are by all accounts bitter and inedible. The packet even comes with a warning: "This tomato is not suitable for eating or for food production".

A good thing, then, that I have no intention of growing these particular tomatoes to anything like maturity. Once germinated, these tomato seedlings will be used as rootstocks - this year I'm going to try grafting many of my tomato plants. These vigorous Aegis plants will have their tops lopped off leaving a bare stem and root, and the stem from a different variety - a variety which bears more bountiful and more flavoursome fruit - will be grafted (transplanted) on to the stem of the rootstock.

Aegis seeds being sown in modules before being covered with
compost and placed in a heated propagator to germinate.

Nearly all fruit trees sold for cultivation these days are grafted: the rootstock generally determines the size of the fully-grown tree, which is why we can grow fruiting apples, pears, etc, in a pot on the patio. The top of the tree will have been grafted on to a dwarfing rootstock, a variety which produces only a very small tree anyway. Grafted trees also typically bear fruit much more quickly - no waiting around for years until you get your first crop. Now grafted vegetables are becoming more popular - nearly every seed catalogue I received had a couple of pages of grafted plants for sale, and not just tomatoes, but aubergines, peppers, cucumbers and melons as well.

Why do this? Why take the root of one plant and meld it with the top of another? For vegetables, it's not so much a case of determining the overall size of the plant and more to do with vigour, heavy cropping and disease resistance.

Aegis rootstock from Heirloom Tomatoes - on the back of the
packet it says "not suitable for eating or for food production".

When you graft a plant you apply the characteristics of the rootstock variety to the top plant - called the scion. The tomato variety Aegis, as mentioned above, is vigorous, and also disease-resistant. For the scion - the variety you want to graft on top of the Aegis rootstock - I'm looking at varieties which might bear beautiful fruit, but which may not be overly productive and which may tend to be prone to disease. Both of these are characteristics of many heritage varieties: delicious fruit but difficult to grow satisfactorily. I'm hoping that by grafting a heritage scion on to my Aegis rootstock, I'll get a healthy, heavy-cropping tomato plant which doesn't keel over at the first sight of disease.

I haven't entirely decided which varieties I'll use for the scion and there's no harm in sowing the rootstock a few days in advance to ensure a good strong base for my heritage 'top-plants'. We're looking at tomato grafting in the Secret Garden Club at the end of March and we'll keep tabs on all our grafted plants and how they do throughout the summer. 

Pink brandywine tomatoes ready to ripen

Untried, untested - this year's new veg

I have my favourites in the kitchen garden, the crops I can’t imagine being without. I can’t imagine tiring of first early Lady Christl potatoes, or the candy-striped Chioggia beetroot, sugar snap peas, cavolo nero or Berrettina Piacentina squash or Sungold and Black Russian tomatoes.

But in other areas I am a lot more fickle. Quite deliberately I look for new veg and new varieties to try each year. It’s part of why I took on the allotment and the luxury of space for experimentation. Last year, I successfully grew ginger (indoors), physalis and sweet onions for the first time and was correspondingly unsuccessful with celeriac; the year before I had a complete 'mare with salsify.

This year’s newbies show a bias towards the new world. It’s partly intentional as I’m developing a Secret Garden Club workshop based on the food from the Americas, so some of the new produce is being grown for harvesting and tasting for the meet-up on September 1st (more info and ticket details here).

Mouse melon, or cucamelon (Melothria scabra)

These very attractive fruits look like stripey grapes and taste, apparently, of cucumber dipped in lime juice. We’re going to grow these in the Secret Garden this year – according to the supplier Suttons Seeds, the plants will climb vigorously, so we’re going to train these up a wigwam made of willow canes and hopefully we’ll be harvesting the fruit from July.

Melon pear

Or Solanum muricantum to avoid potential confusion. I first encountered these fruits which both look and taste like a cross between a  melon and a cucumber about 20 years ago in Chile, where they are called pepinos dulces. I’ve often wished I’d brought some seeds home as the climate in southern Chile isn’t so very different from the climate in northern London, and have been keeping a look out for them ever since. This year I found them in Thompson and Morgan’s catalogue. This is another one to grow indoors, cautiously, to start with and to see if the conditions warrant taking them outside into a sunny sheltered spot – my patio, in this instance.

Sweet potatoes

Although really a sub-tropical plant, cultivars of sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas , so related to the morning glory) are being bred to better withstand our cool wet summers. This year I’ve ordered some plug plants of the variety Beauregard to grow in a sheltered spot in the Secret Garden – the supplier, Suttons, claims that this is a better option than the more conventional sweet potato ‘slips’, or cuttings. They’ll need as much warmth as possible, so I’ll cover the ground the black plastic and plant them out through holes cut into it in late spring and cover with a Victorian-style bell cloche. Then we’ll see how the summer goes from there. If it’s anything like last year they’ll stay under cover. And even if they don’t provide much in the way of edible tubers, the young leaves and shoots are apparently also edible and can be cooked like spinach.

Tomato Black Cherry

There are so many tomatoes to choose from that it’s worth trying some new varieties every so often. I’m in a bit of a rut with tomatoes at the moment: Red Alert for early ripening, Brandywine and Marmande for cooking and making passata, Black Russian for flavour; Sungold for eating straight from the plant … Black Cherry looks as it would make a fabulously striking addition to a mixed salad bowl, like a Goth version of Gardener’s Delight. Available from Heirloom Tomatoes and others.

Pak choi Rubi

I can grow great pak choi under cover right at the start of the season, sowing in February or March to harvest in April and May, when, let’s face it, you’re not harvesting much else. After that, I find the slugs and the flea beetles get them, however much I try to prevent it, and also by May/June, lots of other summer vegetables are demanding attention. So pak choi is an early spring crop for me, and the more of it I can raise in that short space of time, the better. With this red version from Nicky's Nursery, I’m looking for a deeper, mustier flavour than the bright spring green of the conventional variety.

After our fantastic results with tomatillos in the Secret Garden last year, I’m going to try these on my rather more exposed allotment, where I’m also going to grow a couple of Szechuan pepper plants this year – more on this they're ready to go out into the ground. We’re also hoping to plant some witloof chicory for forcing in the Secret Garden later this year and I’ll blog more about that on the Secret Garden Club website once we’ve got going with that.

 

  

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.