Tag Archives: pennard plants

Early Birds Seeds

Irises in the snow

Winter arrived at the end of January with the snow and frost, but before it did, I had managed to plant some extra irises and a Delphinium from the Old Place in the herbaceous border in the back garden.  I don’t know how they will tie in with the Hesperis, aquilegia, Rudbeckia and other established shrubs.  I am nowhere near being a garden designer – I am just someone who plants stuff in borders and hopes for the best.

With little to do in the garden, planning is what this time of year is about.  There is an anticipation of what might be, which is why all those seed catalogues land on your door mat post-Christmas.  It is a time for some horticultural pornography, turning the pages with your hot sweaty fingers (better than them being frozen in the garden) as you imagine  which hot chilli is going to steam up your greenhouse this summer.

I ordered up some of the early planters from a major seed company for convenience, but have also ordered some of my favourite niche herbs – like Pipiche and Korean mint – from Real Seeds.  And of course the annual Red Letter day for veg gardeners round these parts was the Castle Cary Potato Day when Pennard Plants rolled into town like the horticultural circus with the finest range of seed potatoes to wow the thronging hordes.  We duly went and paid our dues.

And last night, when doing boarding duty at school, I took a few minutes away from watching dull-witted Beautiful Young Things bitching and flirting on “Shipwrecked” to buy some flower seeds from Higgledy Garden.  If I have bought an excess of seeds I will blame it on a temporary paralysis of reason caused by the stun-gun effect of listening to bronze-skinned, bikini-clad structured reality TV.  But the flowers will look wonderful (in my imagination, at least, which has little structure, or reality).

Sarpo Mira – in the bag
Real Seeds
Bulbs coming up around the Greengage
Snow Drops. (No shit Sherlock)
Snowy garden – this will be a blaze of colour in June…
Different Seeds being appreciated
Walking the back road to Mrs B’s Old Man
White Snow on Blueberries

 

 

 

The First Lift

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Potatoes – Swift and early. But where have all the flowers gone?

These are the days of miracle and wonder, as Paul Simon once sang. The garden is starting to produce, and all the fastidious work sowing seeds, potting on, planting out, weeding, hoeing and slaughtering snails, begins to pay off.

One of the key moment is the lifting of the first root of New Potatoes. It is something that was treated with due pomp and ceremony by The Old Man and required the type of careful prodding and inspection one would normally expect only of a midwife.  The Old Man would have counted the days since planting, checked the growing conditions and attempted to calculate the exact best day to start digging.  But he traditionally only planted one type of potato (probably Wilja or Desiree), meaning that those dug in June were new potatoes, anything after that were main crop.

For my part, I am always seduced by the choice on offer at Pennard Plants Potato days so I buy various types for different end products.  But every year I am unsure about when they are likely to be ready.  The sages of the internet gardening fraternity say you need to start harvesting when the potatoes have stopped flowering, but this May / June has been so dry they seem to have barely blossomed.  And this has been a very different this year for other reasons:

  1. The potato patch (and veg patch) is only a few strides from my back door in the new property
  2. Due to a lack of supply we had to go for Swift first earlies instead of the usually reliable Belle de Fontenay
  3. In an even more radical break with normal procedures, earthing up has been done not with earth, but with grass clippings, thanks to reading an article by Alyce Fowler.

So the timing of when the first spuds would be ready was even more of a guessing game than normal.  However, the three variables noted above were more likely to help rather than hinder.  Point one makes it less time-consuming to check them, point two suggested that the they would be ready earlier (or else why give them a name synonymous with fast) and point three, after some initial misgivings, was the most beneficial of all.  With the dry weather, I was able to simply lift a portion of grass clippings to expose the golden orbs that indicated the potatoes were ready.

And so we enjoyed our first potatoes of the season along with the first kale of the year too.  The kale should have been ready much earlier, but it was a victim of unknown assailants – like the peas and salad.  But, on the whole, there is enough greenery to suggest a good growing season beckons.

Snug under their blanket of grass clippings
The First Root – ready for prepping

 

Potato Day 2017

Your Potato Day Experience Starts Here
Your Potato Day Experience Starts Here

Today was Potato Day in Castle Cary and once again Mrs B and I pottered along to Caryford Hall to grab our annual selection of little chitters.  It used to be in the Consti Club where we would enjoy the raffish charm of the old place but  Caryford Hall seems too clean and well-ordered to be hosting a bunch of mostly middle-aged and elderly gardeners rummaging through multi-coloured tubs of spuds.

Mrs B mentioned our plans to The Old Man this morning which set him off on an initial criticism of the event as somewhere that people went to buy some fancy-dan hoity-toity potatoes that would ultimately fail, and inferred that we would be doing the same. Mrs B (who handles situations with TOM with the cool detachment of a seasoned daughter-in-law) put him right on that score, informing him that we knew exactly what we were going to purchase, based on previous experience and detailed plans for the season ahead. He seemed  impressed with the answer and in an effort to offer advice, resorted to the tried and tested “Pink Fir Apples are delicious and I always found you can’t go far wrong with Wilja for an all round potato”.

It is for that very reason we have never planted Wilja since we took over the garden.

This year we planned a repeat performance of the plantings of recent years, with Cherie (1st Early), Belle De Fontenay (2nd Early), King Edwards (a high risk / high reward kind of spud), Sarpo Axona (Blight-resistant main crop) and Arran Victory (1st early:  our one vanity potato – historically and geographically significant to us). The plan back-fired slightly with no Cherie on offer, so we threw in another wild card chitter by taking some Swift instead. So maybe The OM was correct after all as we were suckered into buying random spuds on impulse.

Your Potato Journey Starts here
Stand in line – no queue jumping

Pennard Plants run a smooth Potato Event,  but swift is not the word to describe the method of selecting your chitters.  They were alphabetically arranged in plastic trugs with colour-coded labels for earlies or mains.  Everyone dutifully shuffled clockwise round the tables picking their spuds as they passed them.  Skipping ahead to go from C for Cherie to K for King Edwards was not recommended and it is amazing how tightly packed a line of septuagenarian gardeners can be.  If Stoke City had had a few of these yesterday to form a defensive wall, Wayne Rooney would still be waiting to break Bobby Charlton’s record.

Waiting to pick out a few scoops of shallots and onions, the gardeners in front of me took an age to make their own choices.  They approached the trugs in the same manner a major predator stalks it prey:  eyes fixed on the sets (in case they attempted a sudden escape?), moving with feline precision, but at a snail’s pace.  I was willing them to make their choice between Longor or Vigamor, to pounce, take a scoop and move on but I lost my nerve and upset the hunt by elbowing my way in to grab my prey and take my shallots triumphantly back to Mrs B.  Oh, the joy of sets.

Returning home with our booty, I was interrogated once more by TOM who asked what I had bought.  I started to list them but he interrupted to suggest that he assumed we had bought some Pink Fir Apple too?  “No” I said.  I felt mean to be denying garden space to one of The Old Man’s favourite spuds – but frankly they are a pain to clean and peel.

Or did I still feel some sort of residual duty to do as my father advises?

“No” is the resounding answer to that one.

 

Dead Air

Retaking territory after the weeds
Re-taking territory after the weeds

It rained yesterday.  Bucketloads.  Which was a good thing.  Not in the “It’ll do the garden good” kind of way, because the garden is plenty wet enough thanks.  No – it gave us the excuse to stay indoors and watch the battle of Good v Evil which was how the World Athletics Championships had been billed.  Having had the brilliance and farce / tragedy of the women’s Heptathlon as Ennis-Hill ruled supreme and Johnson-Thompson fouled out (tragically? stupidly?) we had the Bolt v Gatlin race for the soul of athletics.  The whole eternal battle thing was a little over the top, but it was pleasing to see the Good Guy beat the one wearing the metaphorical black stetson.  Usain rode off with gold on his golden Palomino.

Raspeberries are secure
Raspeberries are secure

After that breathless excitement it was time turn to our own Midday in the garden of Good and Evil.  There is plenty of decent stuff in the garden – such as my nice new fruit cage that I have manufactured out of the twisted remains of the gazebo that took a battering in the June gale, and the flowers that we planted are still blooming:  Cosmos are brilliant, Rudbeckia tall and proud, Gladiolae still glad to be gay and Veronica small but perfectly formed.

There are plenty of veg, if one looks hard enough:  courgettes ranging from petite to XXXXL, green beans, runner beans and dwarf french (although the climbing french for some reason have simply whithered on the cane).  Plenty of potatoes, summer psb, and spicy, peppery salad leaves.

Eggs have hatched
Eggs have hatched

But there is still a constant battle of Good and Evil here too.  The cabbage whites have managed to lay their eggs and we now wage war with the caterpillars which have stripped some plants clean.  The leeks which we planted before we went away, were razed to the ground within 24 hours so we raised the barricades for them and they seem to have recovered.  The lawn (well, grassy area) has more patches than a quilters’ convention with splodges of bare earth dotted all over showing a  constant reminder of mole activity.  And the roses have once again been given the sign of the black spot with death and decay to follow.  Not even the greenhouse is immune where the ants nests are abundant despite the ants always seeming to take to the air (I thought they all flew on one day and that was it?).  I am not sure how much damage they actually cause, but surely they cannot be helping?

But despite the dead air of the greenhouse there is still some promising news with the first two tomates finally making it to the table – about three months after the gardening giants of Galhampton had started cropping their wonder plants.   Ours will taste all the better for the wait – or at least that is how I try to argue it with Mrs B.

Hot Chit

Another wet day for hens and gardeners
Another wet day

The rain teemed down again today which meant no golf as the course was closed (I reckon The Royal Wheathill will be closed for weeks at this rate) but it did mean that I was able to accompany Claire to the big event of the weekend: Potato Day at the Cary Constitutional Club.  Last night I made my debut as a model, making a guest appearance in the school fashion show to near universal hysteria (interpret that how you like) so I was taking a journey between the ridiculous and the sublime: from catwalk to garden path.

Last year we could not attend Potato Day as Claire was in hospital.  It is incredible to think it is only twelve months on from Claire’s stem cell / chemo month in Musgrove Park.  But a year ago Lynn did select a cross-section of spuds for us: Belle de Fontenay, Kestrel, Setana, Sarpo Mira as well as some stray Red Duke of Yorks – which served us well.

Spud you like?
Spud you like?

So we hit the Consti Early this morning to get the best little chitters – and just as well we did.  By the time we left at 11.00 the local gardeners’ elbows were being sharpened as competition for the potatoes increased.  The variety of potatoes was impressive, brought in by Pennard Plants along with onion sets, small plants and the full range of seeds.  But it was the spuds which were the main attraction – colour coded in their trugs according to first or second earlies, main crops and late mains.  We had gone with the idea of getting more Sarpo Mira – the only spuds that withstood the ravages of blight in what passed for our washout of a summer in 2012.  And also on the shopping list were repeat orders of Belle de Fontenay (a fab early salad crop).  Alongside that we decided to try some King Edwards – the very finest roasting potato. And as a wild card, Claire had read up about Ratte – like a Pink Fir Apple, but not so knobbly and a lot easier to prepare.

Of course, once we got there the sheer range of seed potatoes on offer turned our heads to some more obscure strains of potato – and that surely is the fun of it all.  Why not try something different each year?  I know the OM will have plumped for his favourite Wilja after years of spud growing, but I like the idea of trying something a little different.  Apart from anything, variety is not only the spice of life, it also surely security against such things as disease or poor weather as some might do better than others.  Or am I naive?  (yes is the resounding reply.  But I am happy in my horticultural simplicity)

Cary gardeners get stuck in to get their little chitters
Cary gardeners get stuck in to get their little chitters

That said, we did avoid anything that said that it needed “good conditions” to thrive: after last summer we are not going to rely on great growing conditions to ensure a good crop.  So after some umming and aahing, we ended up with: Belle de Fontenay (10), King Edwards (10), Sarpo Mira (12), Ratte (10), Cherie (8), Salad Blue (6).  In addition we took a scoop of red onion sets and 15 banana shallots for good measure.  Not sure we have as many potatoes as last year – but then we can always get some Wiljas from Dave Marsh to make up the numbers.

Next up, we just need to look out the egg boxes to start the chitting…