Borlotti Beans

I stumbled upon this contraption in one of the store rooms at Rocket HQ the other day and was immediately intrigued. Was it a miniature maypole? I realised probably not.

It's actually a climbing frame for Borlotti beans. Brilliant!

Borlotti beans grow on climbing plants and the plants need something to climb up, otherwise they droop over. The particular contraption that I found has 8 strings stemming from a central pole. Each string can be pulled out straight and secured with what looks like a tent peg. It's quite compact, so can be used in a container, as well as in beds.

One Borlotti seedling can be planted next to each string and as it grows it will wind itself round the string, keeping it nice and vertical. As they get taller, I'll probably have to secure them with ties, just to make sure they stay put.

It's also possible to use canes for growing beans on (runners being another climbing bean.) You can either place them individually in rows or make a tepee by placing them several canes in a circle, then tying them together at the top or placing a topper on it. If you've got a bit of space, you can also use netting.

I'm keen to use my new-found contraption though and so I'm going to stick with the climbing frame.

Borlotti plants are best sown outside from May onwards, when they are at least 5cm in height. Considering it's been so cold this year (there was snow up in Scotland yesterday, apparently!) I'm running the risk of killing them by planting them out right now but with a blog to write, I've got to plant something! It might be best to hold fire for a couple of weeks before planting them. Either that, or cover the baby plants up with fleece to protect them from the frost.

When choosing a spot to plant Borlottis, consider that they like plenty of sunshine. Dig a small hole, sprinkle in a small handful of organic fertiliser and then pop in the plant. They like plenty of space so try not to plant them too close together. An ideal space would be 30cm between each plant. Once they start flowering, they will need regular watering.

Marigolds are a good companion for Borlottis as they will help keep the bugs away. Slugs and snails are also partial to these particular plants so I'll have to do regular checks. If they do become a problem, I'm going to try sprinkling used filter coffee granules round the base of the plants, as this apparently is a deterrent. If that fails to work then I'll have to resort to the glass of beer trick, which draws the slugs in and then drowns them- a bit gruesome though!

Borlotti beans should be ready to harvest from August onwards. You can tell they're ready when the pods turn cream. Before that, they'll be speckled with red.

Earthing Up Potatoes

My potatoes are looking 'andsome!

In just a few weeks, the plants have shot up and are now a good foot or so high, with a thick covering of leaves. This means that the potatoes, hidden underneath the ground, should be growing well, too.

Unfortunately, just as the wanted plants are growing, so too are the weeds and so today it was time for a little bit of weeding. Luckily, the unwanted weeds were small enough to be pulled up by hand, which I did in between each row of potato plants.

The space now looking much clearer, I was told by my resident expert, to 'earth up' round the potatoes. As they get bigger, there is a danger that the potatoes themselves will start to emerge from the soil. This is bad news because, once in contact with the sunlight, they will turn green and become inedible. So, I scooped soil from in between the rows and mounded it on to each row of potatoes. This makes the depth between air and potato deeper, making it less likely for the potatoes to pop up as they continue to grow.

With any luck, I reckon I'll be eating home-grown potatoes by the end of May.

Salad leaves

It appears there is no limit to my brother's talents! I arrived at his flat, which happens to be above the office at Rocket HQ (so that we can keep him working 24/7) and he proudly showed me to the direction of his balcony where there were 3 containers full of a variety of salad leaves. Considering we haven't yet reached May, this is quite a feat and so I made suitably impressed noises.

I imagined that there must be some clever gardener's trick that he had employed to get such successful results so early on in the season.

At this point, he went rather quiet.

At last, he confessed that, no, there was no trickery or voodoo magic involved, he had simply stumbled across some plugs leftover from last year and had casually sown them into the pots to see what would happen.

It would seem that our particularly mild climate, deep down in the southerly tip of the UK, means that plants, such as delicate-looking lettuce, are able to survive where in other parts they wouldn't be quite so lucky. The farm is also pretty well sheltered from any extremes of cold or wind.

I should probably now highlight that my aim of writing this is not to encourage you to ring up our office, demanding our Salad Garden immediately! Although Rob was lucky, it is definitely preferable to wait a month to be sure of success.

Having said that, the taste of those leaves, picked fresh from the ground and chopped straight into a salad is absolutely divine! If you've not tried growing salad yet, I cannot recommend highly enough that this is the year that you give it a go. As proven by Rob, you don't need much space, or skill, or even a very high attention span. The books say that lettuce likes shady, cool areas and damp soil. In a roundabout way, they imply that salad leaves are easy to grow.

From Rob's experience, I'd recommend the following:

Stick them in whatever container you have available. Water them occasionally (Rob admits he was sometimes a little sporadic with this). If they are outside, watering them is often done for you, straight from the sky.

Rob is now noticing though that a lot of the salad plants are going to seed, he reckons through lack of care and attention, so regular picking is good.

One book I read gave "Keep eating," as aftercare advice. Now that's something even the most novice of gardeners can surely do!

Onions

Inspired by a delicious recipe for onion and cheese pie in How to be a Domestic Goddess (I'm aiming high on the domesticity front!), onion sets are next on my list of "Things to plant."

I'm going to be growing some onions from plant and others from sets, to see how I get on with both. Onion sets are basically mini onions, which are meant to be much easier to grow than from plant. Despite this, I'm quite looking forward to attempting to grow from plant though- I like the surprise of not knowing how many onions you're going to harvest. With sets, the number of mini onions you plant is the same number you'll harvest- only, they'll hopefully have grown quite a lot bigger!

I'm growing Sturon onions, which are a variety that can be planted during the Spring. I'm planting mine in the raised beds that have already been prepared and, like the rhubarb, they like growing in a sunny spot. Onions are a good companion for carrots, so I'm told, as they help to keep the carrot fly at bay. Which is helpful.

I've planted the onion sets straight into the ground, without digging a trench or anything as they need to be planted only shallowly. I pushed each bulb into the ground, leaving the tips only barely showing. If you leave too much tip showing, there's a danger that birds will uproot them. I left a space of about a hand-width between each onion. The books tell me you have to be particularly fastidious about weeding around onion plants because their thin leaves can't deal with competing weeds (bless, the delicate little things!)

And that's it! A big tick for the ease of planting onions! Completely faff-free! I just hope that they grow just as easily!

PS. I had a look at my forced rhubarb just now and it is looking FANTASTIC! Bright red and delicious- I can't wait for it to be ready. As a comparison, I also planted some in pots and left them to grow normally- although they're growing, they are nowhere near as big or as brightly-coloured as the forced stuff.

Forced rhubarb (not a very convincingly Unforced rhubarb- much

red photo, I'm afraid.) smaller!

Raised beds (part 2)

It took a little longer than I intended to write this post as there are so many exciting things happening on the farm at the moment. The polytunnels are filling up with plants fast, the bluebells are popping up their green bits in the woods and the fruit bushes in the field are all turning from lifeless looking twigs to bushy green things.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the garden over the last month, this is a lot to do with the pile of wood staring at me through the office window. My normal way of tackling a project is to get stuck in and work my way through problems as they arise. I’ve had mixed success with this way of working, but since I’m having to explain what I’m doing and there’s the potential for loads of people to see me muck this up, planning seems to have taken a front seat.

To kick this planning process off I decided to measure out the space I had available. After a frustrating half hour of searching for a tape measure, I gave up and moved onto plan b. I’m not entirely sure on the accuracy of this method but it suited my needs just fine – logging onto Google Earth I found that my patch measures 19m/13m.

Armed with my dubious measurements, an excellent selection of stationary I’d liberated from the office, I set to making a scale plan of the garden. To make life easy I choose a 1cm to 1m scale, with this I drew out the tiny 19cm by 13cm garden onto A3 paper.

At this point I had to decide how I was going to rotate my vegetable patch. There are a few schools of thought here. Because I have plenty of space and wood I thought I’d try two of them- the 3 and 4 bed rotations. As the title suggests, I need 4 beds for one of them and 3 for the other. I also want a bed for rhubarb, one for asparagus, one for flowers to attract bees, one for strawberries and a spare one just in case I run out of room. That's a total of 12 beds.

During the build I wanted to waste as little material as possible. With this in mind, I decided on making a good proportion of the beds 5m long as this was the length the wood arrived in. I found some old card and cut out a few 5/1.2m beds to my crafty new scale and laid them out onto the garden plan to see how they would fit in. Once these were on the paper I soon realised that I couldn’t make all 12 beds 5m long. After a bit of sliding beds around I decided that 6 would fit in quite nicely. This meant the four beds for one of the rotations were sorted, plus my strawberry bed and spare one. Based on the space I had left, I cut out some 3/1.2cm beds and slid these around until I found that five fitted in. This covered the 3 bed rotation, rhubarb bed and asparagus. With a good space free in the centre of the garden and an excellent supply of willow in the woods at the bottom of the farm, I decided on a 3m round bed for all the pretty flowers.

Once I was happy with how everything was laid out I found a tape measure and ventured outside to double check the garden measurements. Reasonably happy with how everything worked out, I checked that the Rocket crew were happy with it and then firmed up the design with a biro. Planning completeish, I’d better head into the workshop and start building.

Cheers and gone,

Rob

Jamie's Plot (Seed Potatoes, part 2)

I was lucky enough to visit my friend, Jamie's beautiful allotment at the weekend, down at Prussia Cove, in Cornwall. I think he's possibly the luckiest gardener, ever! Take a look at the view from his plot- it's gorgeous! (finally, I've added the photo!)

Jamie's a little bit more experienced than I am at gardening and has quite a large space to fill. I haven't measured it and neither has he but it must be somewhere in the region of 50 square metres that he's got to play with.

The plot hasn't been used for several years and so needed a lot of tlc before Jamie could begin to start planting. Brambles had pretty much taken over the whole site, so firstly he had to get his strimmer out and clear it all. Next up, he had to roughly mark out where he was going to have each plot and dig over the ground. He did this all by hand, using a shovel and then a hoe. It took him a whole afternoon to do this but, having watched him work, I think it would probably have taken me about two weeks. He then covered the freshly-dug soil with compost.

So far, he's planted his potatoes as finally the ground has warmed up enough to do so without delaying their growth. He's planted 40 of Rocket Gardens' seed potatoes; a few of each of our varieties.

Like me, Jamie has planted early varieties of potatoes, which should harvest by May. Not only does this mean we should get to eat our delicious crops sooner, rather than later, it also means we should avoid the perils of potato blight, which I hear is one of the greatest risks to potato crops. Although early varieties are particularly susceptible to the disease, it doesn't usually hit until July so we should miss it.

For those of you planning later potato crops, here is some info' about potato blight, as I understand it:

• Potato blight is a fungus-like organism, which affects the green parts of the potato plant, causing them to fall apart.


• Wet, soggy leaves are one of the causes of potato blight so watering the plants can help spread the disease. It's best to water the soil around the plant, rather than all over the leaves.


• Growing several varieties, especially when laid out in alternative rows, can help reduce the spread of the disease.


• Warm, dry, sunny conditions are the best way to fend off blight- those of you who have experienced our British 'Summers' can see why we need to worry about the disease!


• If you do get blight, pull off the infected areas and discard them by throwing them away or burning them- don't use them for compost.

I got my information from http://www.potato.org.uk/, which also has a blight watch service, so you can keep an eye on prevalence of the disease in your area.

Forcing Rhubarb

When those in the know at Rocket HQ suggested I grow forced rhubarb, I wasn't that keen. It sounded rather violent and not very natural. However, after a bit of a talking to, followed by a bit of reading up, I discovered that actually it's more 'encouraging' than 'forcing.' By preventing natural light from reaching the emerging rhubarb plants, they shoot upwards more quickly than normal, trying to search for light. The result, so I'm told, will be delicious tasting, bright red fruit.

Everything I've read and every conversation I've had about rhubarb tells me that it's the easiest thing to grow. Perfect for a beginner like me, then. Although you can grow rhubarb from seed, apparently year-old plants, called crowns, are the best way to do it. I'm more than happy to let someone else do the hard work for me, so I collected some ready-made crowns from the greenhouses at Rocket Gardens. These pinky-greeny fleshy blobs (I'm getting really technical here) come in 3-litre pots and just the tip of the crown pokes out the top of the soil.

Having prepared the beds last weekend, I was able to transfer the rhubarb crowns straight into the ground. I was told to choose a spot that receives plenty of sun, at which point, I got really confused- surely if they're going to be covered up to prevent them from seeing the sun, choosing a sunny spot to plant them in is, at best, slightly silly and, at worst, just teasing the poor plants? Again, I was wrong.

Rhubarb plants will harvest annually for around 10 years and it's only the first month or so of each growing season when you might want to cover them up and 'force' them. The rest of the time, the sunnier the spot, the sweeter and more fruitful the plants will be.

So, I chose the perfect sun trap spot and simply dug a hole about 30cm in depth into the bed and put in a handful of wormcast. I then emptied the contents of one of the 3-litre pots, and popped it into the hole. I then covered it all over and gave it a pat with my hand (I'm not quite sure why I pat the soil but I vaguely remember doing it whilst gardening with my Dad when I was little and old habits die hard.) Finally, I placed a bucket over the top of the newly-planted rhubarb and weighted it down with a large stone. I'd been warned that rhubarb likes to spread and so needs rather a lot of space, so I placed each plant about half a metre apart.

They'll take a month until they're ready to harvest initially and at this point I'll leave the bucket off and let the plants get some sunshine. Generally, the harvest season lasts between March and July, although this will be pushed back somewhat with the harsh Winter that we've had. Who knows, in Scotland, you may well be picking rhubarb well into August!

If you do fancy having a go at growing some forced rhubarb, Rob says there's still time to order some from us. In fact, his exact words were, "they're beauties!"

There's a scrumptious-looking Jamie Oliver recipe for rhubarb bellinis that I just can't wait to try!

I'm hoping my rhubarb turns out like this!