Keeping pests at bay

Garlic (Solent Wight) on the left, Egyptian walking onions behind, hopefully protecting the Chinese broccoli (kailans) and kohl rabi seedlings. The copper-lined collars prevent slugs and snails from reaching the brassica seedlings.

I planted out these heavily guarded brassica seedlings yesterday. Bitter experience has taught me that they need this level of protection. The copper-lined collars are made from sections of 500ml plastic water bottles trimmed with copper tape around the top and will deter slugs and snails. The metal reacts with the mollusc's mucus when it tries to cross the copper strip and gives it a shock-like sensation.


I've found these home-made copper rings perfectly effective and use them with brassica seedlings, cucurbit seedlings, lettuces, of course, and also globe artichokes when they are first planted out. I can still remember the heartbreak of coming home after an Easter weekend away and finding my globe artichokes, planted out on Maundy Thursday, had vanished. The only clues to their disappearance were a number of long, ribbon-like, shiny trails.


The only drawback really, apart from the need to have as many collars as you have seedlings in the ground at any one time, is that the slug/snail population isn't controlled. In a particularly sluggy year, they will go off to try to find something else to eat that's unprotected. One year I found slugs attacking the beetroot, which is not normally vulnerable. This year, with a wet April with showers interspersed with sunshine, we are on Code Red as far as slugs and snails are concerned.


The second level of protection here is the perimeter planting of various alliums. I have deliberately positioned garlic (pictured here is Solent Wight, with elephant garlic out of shot) and onions around the outside of the raised bed to deter cabbage whitefly. Alliums are often planted with carrots to deter carrot fly, as it is said that the onion smell confuses the carrot fly (and also that the reverse holds true, the carrot smell deters the onion fly who is after an allium snack). 


Here I am hoping that the same principle holds true against whitefly. If this mini-trial proves successful, and the kohl rabi and kailans in the raised bed remain relatively whitefly-free, I will extend it to the main brassica bed, where the cauliflower, broccoli and cavolo nero will be planted later in the summer. Last year, the cavolo nero in particular was horribly infested with whitefly to the point of not being able to harvest it.


Copper tape is available from larger garden centres and from a number of online gardening suppliers. It's well worth searching and shopping around as prices can vary widely. Copper rings are also available but tend to be much more expensive while performing exactly the same function as the homemade rings here. For a copper ring with a larger diameter cut sections from a 2l water bottle.

Clockwise from top left: cut an empty water bottle into sections; take the mid-section and line with copper tape, tucking the ends over the rim to make a neat edge.

Spuds you like

For the last few years, I've been very conservative about growing potatoes. Having found an early new potato, Lady Christl (left), which for me matches a superb nutty flavour with beautiful unblemished creamy skin, I've stuck with that for harvesting from June to September, and have grown Pink Fir Apple as a maincrop for harvesting from September onwards. I've occasionally tried out some other earlies, such as Charlotte (nice but too similar to Lady Christl), and International Kidney, which I disliked at the time because the potatoes fell apart in the pan when I tried to boil them. I'm now not so sure that this is the fault of the potato and is more likely to be down to the growing conditions (too dry), so perhaps I should give the International Kidneys another go.

Having tried out a number of heritage potatoes in preparation for our Secret Garden Club Potato Masterclass, I've cleared some extra space on the plot in order to experimenting with growing some new varieties.

Cara
Recommended by a number of people as a great baking and chipping potato, it's also apparently fairly drought-resistant. I find I rarely have to water potatoes specifically, but if we do have a dry summer under the hosepipe ban, hopefully the Caras will come through unaffected.

Shetland Black
With skins of a deep midnight blue, the flesh is creamy-yellow with a dark blue vascular ring. Like Cara, above, these are best baked or chipped, or roasted.



Pink fir apple potatoes

Pink Fir Apple I'm sticking with Pink Fir Apple for this year at least, as it usually rewards me with a high yielding, long lasting crop. I can dig up beautiful Pink Fir Apples throughout the winter. It's great boiled or steamed in salads, but they're also good sauteed and I love baking them whole as well.

Salad Blue
"Are they dyed?" our Garden Club attendees wanted to know. These potatoes are puzzling as no-one expects potatoes to be a dark indigo colour all the way through the flesh - and yet they still taste like potato. They make a distinctive mash and great chips. Roasted, the colour loses a lot of its impact as the potatoes brown in the fat.

Mayan Gold
Mayan Gold is a variety developed comparatively recently from the Phureja potatoes of Peru, so you can say that this is a close approximation of the first potatoes brought back from the New World. They are a distinctive buttery-yellow colour, a shade I associate with potatoes served in the Mediterranean, as opposed to the creamy-white of many British varieties. The taste is very like a new potato, but the texture is more floury: they're good for mash, roasting, and beautiful, pillowy chips.



 Examples of heritage potatoes, clockwise from top: Highland Burgundy, Salad Blue, Mayan Gold, Golden Wonder and Pink Fir Apple

 I've managed to retain space for my beloved Lady Christls, but one heritage potato which I would have liked to have included for its looks failed the taste test: Highland Burgundy is a hugely attractive spud, with dark red skin and bright crimson flesh all the way through. Unfortunately, I found it bland in flavour and with an almost fudgy texture. It looks great mixed with 'normal' potato in a mash, but the flavour didn't stand out on its own.

Salad blue, Highland Burgundy, Mayan Gold potatoes supplied by Carroll's Heritage Potatoes - seed and eating potatoes both available. Lady Christls supplied by Marshalls Seeds. Pink Fir Apples supplied by Victoriana Nursery. Cara, Shetland Black potatoes supplied by Thompson & Morgan.

Veg in a box

I've resubscribed to an organic veg box scheme to keep us going until the allotment produce kicks in again in June or thereabouts (assuming the sugar snaps, asparagus and lettuce don't all shrivel up in the drought, that is). We've managed without for the last couple of years, but the hungry gap seems to be particularly ravenous this year. And Abel & Cole were offering a free bottle of wine and cookbook for returning customers. I am that easily bought.

There's always a sense of anticipation opening up the box: this week it included a big flossy lettuce, a mango, aubergine, red pepper and purple sprouting broccoli. The basics - onions, carrots, potatoes, apples - I'd taken for granted.

I earmarked three of the carrots for an Easter weekend carrot cake (at least a day late, I know), for which I follow Nigel Slater's recipe to the letter. I'm sure it's my carrot cake of choice mainly because the quantities of icing that the recipe makes are so absurdly lavish that there are plentiful bowl scrapings to be had.

With the cake safely in the oven, I surveyed the rest of the contents of the box and decided to put the basics to good use with some brunch-style potato and apple cakes, which go so brilliantly with bacon rashers, or for non-meat eaters, a poached egg on top.

Potato and apple cakes
3 medium to large 'old' potatoes, not waxy salad potatoes
1 shallot or onion
1 dessert apple
1 egg
Salt
Pepper
Butter
Olive oil

Grate the potato, apple, and onion/shallot. Beat the egg quickly and stir in, a little at a time until the mixture glistens without being sloppy. Season well.

Heat around 20g of butter and 1 tbsp or so of olive oil in a non-stick frying pan over a medium heat. Place a cookie cutter (about 3 inches or 75mm in diameter) in the frying pan and spoon enough mixture into the cutter so that the potato cake is about 1cm thick. Leave for around 20 seconds, so that the cake starts to cook on the bottom, then lift the cutter carefully and place elsewhere in the pan to make the next cake. This amount of mixture will make 6-7 potato cakes.

Fry for 5 minutes, then flip each cake over and fry for another 5 minutes until cooked through. The top and bottom of each cake should be nicely browned. Dish up on to kitchen paper to drain off excess oil, then serve hot.

Signs of spring - the asparagus is up

Like the sound of the cuckoo and daffodils coming into flower, the sight of the first asparagus spears poking bravely above ground is a sign that spring is on the way. Every year, I think they're leaving it later and later, but this time, these four spears just managed to get their heads above ground before the end of March, as usual.

We ate the fella on the right (above) before we even left the plot, but experience suggests it will be a good two to three weeks before there's enough for a decent portion and after that we'll be struggling to keep up until June, when we'll stop cutting the spears and leave them to grow into fern. The plants need to rest and replenish themselves to store up nutrients for the next year's crop.

From last year, freshly cut asparagus spears.

Growing sweet onions

The subject of sweet onions was much discussed at December's Secret Garden Club session on the allium family. I've long been fascinated by these ever since a trip to the US where I encountered the strong cult following enjoyed by that named varieties such as Walla Walla Sweets.

Walla Wallas hail from - oh yes - Walla Walla county in Washington State in the far northwest of the US. They look just like an ordinary yellow onion, but have been selectively cultivated since the beginning of the 20th century, when they were first brought to the US from Corsica, to maximise their sweetness.  


I've always wanted to try growing some Walla Walla Sweets - or failing that, Vidalias from Georgia, or the Hawaiian Maui onion - but seeds are understandably hard to come by in London. 

This year I managed to find some Walla Walla Sweet seeds from Nicky's Nursery in Kent. They need to be sown in March and kept at around 10 degrees C as they germinate. Nicky's advises trimming the tops to 10cm before planting out once the soil warms up and growing on as for any other onion.

My Walla Wallas were sown on February 29th and are now germinating. So they are still very tiny and I'm still uncertain how they'll fare. In the meantime, I've been given a generous bagful of Oakley sweet onions by Pete Thompson of Brook Farm in Great Oakley in Essex. The Oakley onion is a strain of French onion from the Bourbonnais, and their delicate nature means that the mature bulbs are all harvested by hand.

According to Pete, they are 'just a bit sweeter than a Cox apple'. They would make for a pretty overpowering apple, I reckon. But that sweetness means that the onions caramelises beautifully when cooked, in a tart or in onion marmalade, for example. They also work well sliced finely into salads, where you get the onion bite without it being too heady, much like a spring onion, although I would say they are both sweeter and more pungent than a spring onion.

New Nordic cuisine

I know very little about Nordic cuisine beyond what I've read in the news and about Noma, Denmark's number one restaurant. So for me, it's been about edible soil, cured salmon, foraging for berries and roots and wild herbs. Recognising that this must be a rather skewed picture, I set off for New Nordic Cuisine For The Home Cook, a workshop run by the Culinary Anthropologist together with Mia Kristiansen of CPH Good Food in Copenhagen with an open mind, but not entirely sure what to expect.


The next four hours were utterly inspirational. Food that was at once familiar - the climate and growing conditions in Denmark aren't that different to those in the UK - but used or combined in completely different ways. This is food that tastes clean and healthy, with lots of emphasis in contrasts in texture, and the use of souring agents gives many dishes an extra zingy flavour.  


Mia explained first of all that Scandinavian food refers, or should refer, to food produced in Norway, Denmark and Sweden only, while Nordic cuisine can refer to countries such as Iceland, the Faeroe Islands and Finland as well. She also explained that the parameters of the new Nordic cuisine demand that ingredients should be sourced from the Nordic countries, so items that we might regard as essential, such as olive oil, or lemon, were totally off-limits. Butter or pumpkin oil are used a lot, as are vinegars. Apple vinegar, for example, featured a lot during our morning.


Here's what we made and ate for our lunch:

• Crispbread with ramson pesto
• Lightly cured and hot-smoked salmon
• Malt pizza with home-cured bacon and herbs
• Pork cheeks in wheat beer
• Apple bread made with old wheat varieties
• Cauliflower salad with hazelnuts, cress and cranberries
• Spelt salad with horseradish, kale and apples
• Danish apple trifle with skyr foam, oats and hazelnuts

(Note: Ramson is wild garlic; skyr foam is a frothy, whipped mix of cream and skyr, a Danish version of fromage frais or the middle Eastern labneh. This trifle was also lifted by the addition of a truly delicious  blackberry liqueur.)

Dough for the beetroot crispbread, studded with pumpkin seeds.  Made with spelt flour and rolled oats, the crunchy, wafer-thin home-made crispbreads were addictive - this beetroot version baked to a delicate rose colour in the oven.

This light sweet cure with fresh dill is similar to gravadlax. The ramson pesto packs a lovely earthy green punch, made with wild garlic leaves, hazelnuts, rapeseed oil and hard cheese (I think we used Cheddar on the day). 

Salmon fillets, hot-smoked the way we do it at the Secret Garden Club! These were wonderfully tender and silky in texture.

Malt pizzas with home-cured bacon and herbs. These were a revelation - nothing scary about the individual ingredients but combined in an unfamiliar way. The dough for the base has malt extract added to it - "Oh, I think it needs more malt," Mia would say every time she passed our station until she was finally happy with it. These baked beautifully crisp, and were topped with cheese (Cornish Yarg on the day), smoked pork belly, sliced potatoes, rosemary, herbs and a creamy dressing. The result was recognisably pizza, but a wonderful melee of soft, smoky, malty, green and crunchy. I'll be making this back at home. 

Kneading the pizza dough. This one definitely needs more malt.

Malt pizza toppings before baking.

Nordic mixed herbs: dill, celandine, woodruff, ground elder, lovage. Not your average bouquet garni ...

Pork belly piece, smoking in the double pan. A layer of smouldering wood chips sit in a foil pocket in the bottom pan under the steamer. 

Growing ginger - we have shoots!

It took almost exactly one month, and it might have been quicker had I put the ginger pots in the heated propagator, but I now have one ginger shoot clearly emerging from the soil and two more coming up in the other pots.

Once the shoots appear, the plastic bag keeping the pot warm and humid should be removed.  I've split the pots up: one is now under the north-facing skylight where it will be consistently warm but won't get any direct sun; another is on the kitchen windowsill, which will be sunnier. It will be interesting to see which does better.