How does our garden grow?

Our potager is now producing healthily. We are experimenting this year with varieties that we know and love, and that have performed well for us on our allotment in the UK, as we still have plenty of unfinished packets. We are also trying French varieties, sometimes alongside British ones. Astonishingly, our stony soil produced insanely long carrots and parsnips (both locally purchased fresh seed), straight as you like with no forking! Beetroot and chard, both sown in trays and transplanted, have done really well. Climbing beans are feeding us nicely, and we may have overdone it with eight cucumber plants. Still, we have some nice pickle recipes, of which more no doubt in a later blog.

A tasty trugful.

One particular thing we noticed is the short harvest period for some crops. This was most true with the Petit Pois variety "Peawee" (available from Marshalls). I could pick a row on the allotment for about three weeks. Here the window between the mange-tout and marrowfat stages was about three days. Once the pods set, there were no more flowers. We picked the peas industrially, by uprooting the plants and stripping them, shelling them on the spot and freezing them.

Scuse the gardener's hands!

Generally, summer brassicas have performed poorly, under attack from battalions of flea beetles and aphids. We know a song about flea beetles, don't we? Back in May I tried red cabbage and tenderstem broccoli, both hopeless!
Disaster area featuring red cabbage and field bindweed.

The kales I planted recently are looking quite strong, and I hope they may do better. Red Russian Kale is a wonderful vegetable, highly decorative as well as excellent to eat, but I had to order it from the UK. Kings came up with the goods, bless them! Black Tuscan kale, by contrast, was on sale among the bedding plants at the Point Vert in Loches.

The dreaded Onion Fly

My poor "Jermor" shallots, planted in November and just about ready to lift, were infested with the grubs of onion fly. The first signs were a yellowing of the leaves, which is also a sign of the shallots being ready, but when I lifted a sample of the yellowest, the bulbs were rotting from the neck downwards. There were signs of little white grubs (mostly dead) and a few pupae.

Grub and pupa of onion fly

According to my gardening books, this little perisher emerges from pupae in the soil in May, but I suspect that it was earlier this year because of the warm weather. The organic treatment is netting to prevent the flies getting to the leaves, and of course growing alliums (onions, garlic, shallots, leeks) in a different place every year, cultivating the soil well so that the birds can get to the pupae.

I'm sure I have had such infestations back on the allotment, but never with the same effect. But then there was so much onion white rot that I often lost 50% or more of the harvest. Some plotholders didn't bother to grow alliums because of the losses. White rot is a fungus, and its spores can remain active in the soil for thirty years. No white rot here! It can only come in on infected sets - moral, don't plant supermarket shallots or garlic!

The grubs have not in themselves done much damage, and most of them are dead, but rot has taken hold where they have been working - just above the neck of the shallot - and unless I cook or freeze the bulbs immediately I will lose the lot. For that reason I'm making some more shallot confiture. I'd have made that anyway, but not with green shallots, so it'll be interesting to see if there's a difference.

The garlic and onions are also affected. I've lifted the garlic ("Germidour") and found tunnels and pupae, but not the rot, as yet. The garlic harvest is magnificent, with large, even-sized heads and decent-sized cloves.

The Germidour haul

The wounds caused by the grubs have scarred over, so I've hung the dried bulbs in bunches in a cool place away from the mice.

A sad day for Leeds

Brewing at the Tetleys Brewery in Leeds ceased last Friday. Tetleys has been on the same site, just across the bridge from the City Centre, since 1822, and 170 workers will lose their jobs. A lot of Tetleys Bitter has flowed under the bridge since then, and Tim and I have had a bit of it, not to mention Tetleys Mild and (while it existed) Imperial. Not among the world's greatest brews in my opinion, but back in the early 80's when we used to collect all the beers for York Beer Festival ourselves (no beer agencies then), we had to ensure that there was a supply of Tetleys Bitter for those punters who insisted on drinking nothing else. For every beer ticker there's a beer conservative, though the latter are now more inclined to stay at home drinking Smoothflow out of cans rather than they are to go to beer festivals, or to pubs for that matter. Thank goodness for the number, quality and success of microbreweries, both in Britain and in France.We had a very pleasant bottle of Turone Blanche yesterday!

Getting the potatoes in

At last all our seed potatoes are installed in the ground, supplied with their ration of fertiliser and buried under as much soil as we could pick out from between the rocks. Richard Décharte confirmed our suspicions that we were actually digging up a cobbled yard in front of the hangar (metal barn). Back when this was a real farm, a big load of rocks was actually imported and laid down so that the cows would have something solid to walk on. The soil, when we find some, is extremely fertile, and all the seeds I have sowed so far have germinated, the latest being coriander and parsnips. I am watering them every evening - we had a sprinkling of rain last Saturday, but only one decent rainy day in the whole of April.
The potatoes are a bit of an experiment - seeing what varieties like our growing conditions. The order of play is:
Rows 1 & 2 - Red Duke of York
Row 3 - Sunrise (new variety)
Row 4 - Salad Blue
Row 5 - Jaerla (new variety)
Row 6 - Taster row of Sunrise, Salad Blue and Jaerla
Row 7 - Charlotte (we know this grows well)
Row 8 - King Edward
Row 9 - International Kidney
Rows 10 & 11 - Remarka
Row 12 - Pink Fir Apple
Rows 13 & 14 - Stemster
Row 15 - Sarpo Mira
Row 16 - Forty Fold & Yetholm Gypsy (Heritage varieties)
Row 17 - Linzer Delikatess
We still have to find room for leeks, beans, tomatoes, beet, chard, red cabbage, broccoli, kale ... The only thing that keeps me going is the possibility of finding a prehistoric stone tool among the rocks.

It's raining! It's RAINING!

A touch of Pickle?

Behind the longère, a spiny shrub is in full flower. This is a sucker from the rootstock of the old plum tree, which we've allowed to grow. There's another specimen just the same in the orchard, but with no other prunus species anywhere near, and until now we thought it was a blackthorn, like so many other of our bird-sown trees. We have now identified this shrub as a cherry plum or myrobalan, prunus cerasifera (i.e. the plum that bears cherries). Myrobalan is widely used as a rootstock for plum trees. It has edible (sour) fruit rather like a sloe, but bigger and round, and it makes great sloe gin. If you think you're seeing blackthorn in flower right now, it's a cherry plum. The blackthorn won't be out for another three weeks.

OK, there's an obvious reason why we have a cherry plum behind the longère - the old plum. So where did the one in the orchard come from? We think it dates from our first planting, a mirabelle from the nursery that used to be near the Weldom store in Descartes. This tree got whacked when Richard mowed the field later in the year, and we thought no trace of it remained. When we planted the tree, we scattered a pinch of the ashes of our old tabby cat, Pickle, who died at the age of 19 years, blind and senile but still beautiful in her stripes. She was a tough old girl, and a reminder of her will always be with us. We hope to drink her health in sloe gin, maybe next year (don't count your sloes until they're ripe! But you can make a very nice drink from some young shoots, brandy and wine called Epine Noire - more on this later!!)

Prunus cerasifera... Cherry Plum. a close-up of "Pickle's" blossom

 For a full sized picture of Pickle in bloom visit Aigronne Valley Wildlife.