Saturday Snap: Summer swan song

Of all the flowers in the garden, the sunflower is surely the one most readily associated with the long, leisurely, picnic-filled days of summertime.  Most of my sunflowers have either faded and drooped their lovely faces towards the soil or have been cleared away during the last week due to their extremely brown and crispy appearance. As this gloriously welcome hot weekend dawned over the veg patch on Saturday morning, there are two sunflower plants still putting on a show.  By standing on a wall, I could just about photograph this one;  with the sun shining through the petals, I was struck by how beautiful the back of the flower is. It seemed an appropriate view to symbolise the last of the summer. 

This unseasonal heatwave is forecast to start fading soon, with it lingering the longest in the South East of England, and then we'll be forced to face the reality of October as it should be.  I noticed a heavy beading of dew on the cauliflowers so the night temperatures are low; not too long before we all have to think about night frosts and cloches, I think.  

As luck would have it ...

I just wanted to say a big Thank you! to Tracey at igrowveg.com.  She recently ran a comments competition on her excellent website, asking which winter veg we were growing in our respective plots or gardens and I won one of her prizes.  How thrilling!  It was my comment about the cut and come again cauliflowers flourishing in my veg patch that caught her attention; this is a vegetable that I'll be writing about in my next post.

So, I now have no more excuses for being tardy with my veg patch next year because I've been sent a Veg Patch Planner, beautifully illustrated by Siobhan McCrudden of EarthedUp.

I especially like the January illustration, seen above, as this suggests that I should be feet up, in a large comfy armchair, snoozing under my seed catalogues with a large mug of hot tea nearby.  Ooh, I can only hope!

I was unaware of this shop site before and I know nothing about it except that there are some nice hand-illustrated garden themed cards and posters available and I'm always happy to support the work of a fellow illustrator.

Stringing out your onions

Ah, the synchronicity of blogging!  Several of my favourite bloggers are writing about the storage of their onion harvests and, at the risk of driving people away through subject repetition, I need to do the same.  A quick look back at last year's post on this subject highlights how I've done things differently this year.

Last year the onions were lifted earlier and left to dry in a wire basket in Leigh's greenhouse.  I've since read that hot weather can start to 'cook' or soften the onions on the inner layers whilst crisping up the outside.  Certainly, many of my red onions needed to be used quickly last year and didn't store well, although the same method seemed to work well for garlic as I'm still using those stored bulbs. (And let's not talk about this year's garlic.)

This year I lifted the reds at the beginning of August (quite late) and the whites soon after, although I'd been pulling them both as needed for the kitchen since late June.

Last onions drying on upturned basket

I constructed a small drying igloo out of reclaimed plastic piping, some chicken wire and a roll of plastic sheeting. (I was lucky to find the pipes; they were clean offcuts from a local redevelopment project.) The onions were laid out in a single layer on top of upturned wire baskets (salvaged from an abandoned Ikea wardrobe) - this keeps them above the soil so that air can circulate all around. The pipes were bent across the bed and pushed into the soil at the corners, chicken wire was wrapped round the pipes and held up the plastic cover, the cover was then tied firmly to the piping struts at the sides and the ends gathered and tied to form a nice airy tunnel.  Ventilation and a moisture free environment is key for proper drying.

Certainly not a thing of beauty, the igloo was very effective and it held together (just) even in the strong winds we've suffered.  The onions had air circulating all around them but stayed dry and there they stayed for a few weeks until the bulb skins were papery but the leaves still had some flexibility.  In hindsight, the whites should have been lifted earlier as they suffered in the heavy rain we had end of July;  I thought they would be okay if left in the ground, I was wrong. In my defense, the leaves had only just started to yellow but the bulbs were beginning to rot as I lifted them.  (The good bits were swiftly chopped, blanched and frozen for future stews and soups, making sure any soft layers were cut out.)

Initially I brought them home in a big old rice sack but I needed to get them out of the way (my flat's not big) so I've strung them up using a combination of Matron's method (link below) and finishing off with a nice plait. I prefer to tie a double length of string to one of the first onions and then weave that in as I go, I think it gives the string greater strength.  Matron's method is to take the stem of the second onion round the back of the first stem, then over and round it's own stem.  Here's an illustration but check out Matron's wonderfully clear instructions:

Start with 3 onions, string tied round one.

Loop stem and string of onion 2 under the back of stem of onion , coming round above stem of onion 2. Then take it over and round the stem of onion 2.

Add in a 3rd onion and repeat: over and round back of 1st two stems ...

... then over and round itself.

Keep repeating with added onions.

As the string of onions starts to get heavy, split the stems into three and start to plait. (Bring outside stem into middle of other two and so on.)

Split double lengths of string and wrap - going in opposite directions - around plait to secure. Tie off and join string lengths at the top for hanging up.

Ta dah! 

However tempting and visually pleasing, it's not a good idea to store onions in your kitchen as this room can get steamy and hot and your onions won't store well!  As I don't have a garage, and my shed is a step too far when cooking, I've hung mine high up in the hallway where it's cool and airy - as in top pic.

Seed saving

As well as noticing more bugs and slugs in the veg garden as the season revolves round into autumn, I'm also watching out for seeds.  Some will be saved for sowing next year, others have food uses.

Cerinthe, orache, sunflower and nasturtium plants are the ones in my garden to look out for as they are all prolific self seeders.  If the seeds are not collected, they'll scatter into the soil and pop up goodness knows where. (As I found with my nasturtiums and sunflowers this year.) Earlier this year I had to relocate dozens of tiny red orache plants that had self-sown from one underdeveloped plant plonked into the soil last summer.  I also bought one cerinthe seedling from Perch Hill Farm in Easter 2010 and collected the seed at the end of the summer; this provided enough seed for another 2 dozen plants this year.

Cerinthe seeds are very easy to collect as they're so obvious. Two large black seeds sit in the leaf bracts where the flowers were.  Here's the flower:

and here's the seeds:

When they're ready, you can just pick them off. That will be a job for this week. I won't be able to collect them all, scars in some of the bracts show that a few have already been shaken off by recent windy weather!

I've also grown fennel in my herb bed for the last two years - the leaves are lovely in salads and sauces if you like the taste of aniseed but are best cut before the plant flowers. A couple of weeks ago, I needed fennel seeds for a sauce and there they were, practically on my doorstep. They worked perfectly so I'm now going to cut the rest of the seeds for use in the kitchen; the main plant can be propagated from side roots separated from the main tap root.  The way to collect fennel seed is to cut the whole head then suspend it upside down in a paper bag although if the seeds are already fairly dry, make a paper funnel and brush them into this.

I've read that fennel can be quite invasive - a bit like bamboo - but apparently makes a poor companion plant for other herbs so perhaps I've been spared the invasion by growing it in the middle of my herb bed! It's also worth knowing that whilst aphids find fennel thoroughly unpleasant, ladybirds, hoverflies and other beneficial bugs love it.

The other seed that I'll be saving, although not for myself, is the sunflower seed.  Last year I left the heads for the birds but as that encouraged a bit of random propagation, I'm cutting the smaller flowers when they've gone brown and removing the heads for seed and drying the stems because I'm hoping these will make good pea sticks next year.  The bigger heads will be cut and suspended as a sunflower perch, as illustrated in Dave Hamilton's book 'Grow your food for free (well, almost)'.

Other seeds I may be able to collect are nigella (love in a mist), calendula (marigold), poppy, hollyhock, wallflowers and nicotiana.  I've passed a magnificent nicotiana plant on my walk over to the heath, I may have to find the courage to ask the owners for seedhead in due course!

I wonder what seeds other people are saving?

Saturday Snap: Just a Perfect Day

Actually, yesterday was the perfect day especially since it was also my day off! I was at liberty to go and drift through the veg patch making lists of what needed to be done.  I'd walked past earlier on my way to the recycling corner and been completely bowled over by how beautiful the garden looked in the morning sunshine.  So pencil, notepad and camera in hand I strolled, paused, sat, pondered, touched, ate, plucked (the odd weed) and planned.  Being Friday, with all the kids at school, it was so quiet in the garden that as I approached the Cerinthe planted next to the purple beans, I could clearly hear several bees busy collecting nectar.  The usual determination to gather every last drop of nectar was evident as they buzzed between the flowers.  And there I sat, on the ground, crouching low, camera in hand in the warm sunshine.  I have no idea how long I sat there because it was just ... perfect.

And this is what I came home with:

Finally! A clear and detailed photo of a bee in action!(Click on the photo and you'll be taken through to Flickr where you can see the photo in BIG full screen size.) Can't begin to tell you how pleased I am with this photo but it was a hard choice as I also snapped a ladybird dozing on a drying sunflower head, which is sort of cute and summed up the moment nicely.

Hope the weather stays good for us all, happy weekend everyone! (Our street party takes place today so I'm hoping to fit that in as well as gardening.)

Know thine Enemy ...

Rootling around among the nasturtiums yesterday evening, lifting the last of the gar-leeks, look what I found:

Eeeeuwwww!  (But not so much that I didn't stop to photograph it.)

I have a horrible fascination for these creatures of the damp.  Beyond ugly and a right royal pest in the garden, they make a tasty snack for hedgehogs and frogs. That doesn't make them welcome in my veg garden so I have relocated this guy to the railway hedgerow and hope that he doesn't slither back.

I'm also finding quite a few tiny black slugs lurking in the veg, I think these are Keel Slugs that mostly live underground and can do a fair amount of damage to roots and tubers. Best get those carrots out and stored. I pulled up a carrot a couple of nights ago with one clinging on to it - such information is best left unsaid, especially about the dinner table.

I'm a firm believer in organic gardening and you won't find anything stronger than tomato fertiliser in my veg patch so it has to be natural deterrents to save my winter veg. I've heard of using coffee grounds and egg-shells as a mulch around the plants (a bit scratchy for a midnight slither) and beer traps to drown them - an option I can't personally use as I wouldn't know what to do with the inebriated slugs in the morning.  Recently, though, I came across PKS copper tools. When using these to dig the soil, they allegedly disturb the "ley lines" that slugs follow and throw them off the scent into a different direction, thus avoiding yer prize caulis. They're pricey but apparently work.  I'm about to order one (for they are indeed a beautiful thing to behold) and I'll have to report back on their efficiency.