Back to work

It didn't help that I buzzed off to Somerset right after I got back from Afghanistan, for a weekend with my father. When I was a city kid I never quite took it in that my father has got to be a pretty hot gardener. I thought fresh veg appeared on country kitchen tables with the dew or something. But now I learn all sorts of good things from him.

Patience, for example. He's made the most delicious compost - I don't know what the plants think but I wanted to eat some. How has he made it? By putting cuttings and kitchen waste in a corrugated iron box two or three feet wide and a yard deep and leaving them there for three years. That's a great thing about gardening for a chap like me who complains when his cable modem slows down to 400 kbps.

Also he came clean about HDRA. He'd given me a subscription to their Heritage Seed Library for Christmas. It's really fun. They have a huge list of varieties that have dropped out of the regular catalogues, and lots of odd and exotic plants. You get to choose six a year.

What my dear father only told me now is that there's sometimes a reason why they dropped out of the seed catalogues - they got replaced by the turbo-charged high croppers we know and love. Some of the older varieties are uniquely beautiful and tasty. But "it can be a bit of poisoned chalice" he said. Now he tells me. I have tomato bushes that are almost trees, but they're like the little nut tree in the nursery rhyme. One tomato each.

Well, I can't absolve myself. Probably they would have been more fruitful if I'd cut them back as they were growing. Back home I spent several hours doing this retrospectively. I cut out all limbs and plants that weren't bearing and tied everything else up so it can get at the light. Now there's quite a high fruit to branch ratio, some reddening at last - I'll tell you how they eat in a future episode.

I also hacked away at the achocha, another HDRA special. Classicists will call it Cyclanthera pedata. The Catalogue says Achocha is described as "One of the Lost Crops of the Incas" and some have wondered 'how?'. I'm one of the "some"... it really took over the greenhouse, shading my poor squashes so they didn't fruit in July.

Having grabbed its sunny spot iit has now started fruiting itself. They are pale and beautiful. About two inches long, tear-drop shaped, the fat end on the stem, a milky green. A soft shell and pulpy interior, like pepper but less well defined. The flavour is like cucumber. I've put them in salads but if they get going in bulk I may start stewing them. I have a couple in the greenhouse and a couple outdoors - only the one under glass has fruited.

Oh and there's so much else going on - tree fruit is busting out all over and I'm having adventures with bolting lettuces and I put in a new watering system. Something for another day...

More by jbr | Oct 13, 2005 | | TrackBack ()