Coffee in the Square

The Equinox

Today I issued an edict to my husband, Mike. "Thou shalt purchase no more supermarket salad. We now have our own crop on the roof top veg plot."
My efforts to have salad all year round can't be said to have given us enough greens through the deepest winter months, principally because a) I didn't plant enough and b) I forgot to take enough account of the slowing of the growth process that happens from November to February.
The Johnson's Mesclun mix I planted in October and left growing with very little attention in the growhouse has finally come to fruition.
The saladini mix I made myself and planted in January, produced a rather weedy crop of microveg, in about six weeks. The same mix planted in February, looks much more sturdy.
Next winter I will start my winter veg off earlier, so that it has already grown by the time winter sets in.
It seems the secret is that salads are happy to sit during the winter months, but they will only grow slowly. So there's little point in succession sewing for winter. Get it all in by the end of August and then you can crop right through winter.

Autumn is With us

I've been protecting my crops against hard weather, forecast for the weekend. But my, how deceptively mild it has been today. At the moment, it is about four pm on a sunny afternoon, my garden thermometer reads 16 degrees. Sitting against a south facing wall and protected from a light east wind is delightful.
But I fully expect temperatures to plummet by the end of the week. In the nick of time, I am bringing in the delicate plants, protecting my seed crops and slowly clearing away spent vegetation.
There's something very cosy about huddling the pots together, wrapping fleece over the vulnerable seedlings and popping the lids onto cloches.
I've had to cut the Chinese broccoli right back so that it fits under the fleece.
The wisteria is turning colour, the last sweet peas and nasturtiums are in flower. Everything is awaiting winter.
But the soil is still deliciously warm, and this damp weather is brilliant for seeds. I see mysterious and familiar green shoots everywhere. Did I really sew pak choi amongst the garlic?
This is the time of year for record keeping and planning. I've already sewed onions in the wrong quarter! But no matter. There is some serendipity allowed on the rooftop veg plot.

Square foot garden images

Square Foot Gardening October Review

One whole season has passed since I decided to start a micro-garden on my roof in W1. By any account I chose a rotten year to start with. The rain has been ferocious and the quantity of sunshine fairly low.
However I think I can claim success, in spite of the awful weather. From fine beds, each 600mmx1800mm, I've cropped the following:
Broad beans - poor
Radishes- variable
Sugar Snap Peas - delicious but small quantities
Garlic - good
Onions - good
CCA lettuce - excellent
Butter head lettuce - good
Mizuna - amazing
Runner beans - awesome with sweet peas and tomatoes growing through them.
Tomatoes - awesome
Chard - tasty and long lasting but modest
Wild celery - alarming growth spurts
Cabbage - slow
Japanese broccoli - slow
Kale - prolific as CCA and delicious
Japanese kale - prolific, but susceptible to cabbage white and slugs!
Purple sprouting broccoli (not yet cropped)
Green and yellow courgette - not bad considering the weather
Dill - pretty
Cilantro - great seeds
Parsley - enduring
Cress - spicy
Red mustard - not enough, my all time favourite leaf. I plan to sew much more next year.
Beet - hopeless
Celeriac - lots of pretty leaves, but no bulbs yet
Silver thyme
Carrots - failed
In pots:
I've grown fantastic early potatoes, pretty good chillis and basil (which has been hopeless - but I blame the weather).
Mint - started well but now looks a bit sorry for itself.
Strawberries prolific for a short season.
Nasturtiums - pretty for a time
Autumn carrots, which so far look okay.
We've hardly has to purchase any salads or veg since May, and we've benefitted from some wonderful fresh food.
However the first crops have it easy. Now I'm contending with having to recondition the soil as I re-plant. I'm also getting to grips with intercropping - see strawberry plants squeezed between maturing garlic! So I don't get a chance to re-condition the soil between crops.
I've just bought a big bag of pelleted chicken manure and mulching like crazy with compost, as well as feeding with my own brand of liquid manure. I'm also considering a top dressing of lime. Anyone out there know if that might keep the soil sweet?

Veg plotting a la mode!

It is not often that I recommend a book on my blog - remember I'm strictly ad free. However it's worth learning French in order to read this one.
L'art du potager en carrés by Éric Prédine and Jean-Paul Collaert is an excellent read and an authoritative resource for the urban veg plotter.
The authors acknowledge their debt to Mel Bartholomew's ideas about square foot gardening. But this book is miles away from Bartholomew's rather dry rhetoric.
The French take on small scale veg gardening is infused with gastronomic enjoyment. For example the growing of lettuces is discussed in the light of the fact that the French believe that a meal really isn't a meal without a little salad au vinaigrette.
The photographs, which seem to be entirely taken in the authors' own garden(s), are delightful. They show a more picturesque Potager than the US model.
The book is packed with good ideas. Growing vegetables on this small scale is not done by many gardening writers, most of whom have large market gardens at their disposal. It's refreshing to come across experts who have actually tried growing on really tiny plots. They pass on loads of good advice, particularly on how to keep your plot moving; sewing, planting and harvesting at a really fast speed; so that you can get two or three crops per year from each square cm of soil.
The others revelation is the varieties they recommend, many of which can not be easily found in English seed catalogues.
Now I'll have to make a point of visiting a French seed merchant when next I cross the Channel.
For those who like surfing I can recommend the websites of Vilmorin, Caillard, Terre Vivant and Biaugerme for sources of authentic French seed varieties. I'm certainly going to try planting Courgette De Nice next year which is a climbing courgette, so takes up much less room, as well as being able to make use of the sunny south facing wall of my roof garden.
Bon appétit!

Wild Celery Soup

One of the 'weeds' that grows in my veg plot, in the gaps between the pavings and in every gutter up here is wild celery.
The wild version has a sharp celery taste and is firmer than shop-bought celery. I've never found the hollow stems up to much in a salad, but the leaves are great.
This year I've tried blanching a few stems, by wrapping them up in kitchen towel rolls!
This soup seems to be a delicious way of using the whole plant.
Ingredients
Small onion
Large bunch wild celery leaves and stems
Handful of new potatoes
Dill seeds
Double cream
Butter for drying
Powdered stock

Serves two/ four

Fry onions in plenty of butter. Drop in potatoes, cut into small chunks. I used some of the very small Ratte potatoes that I recently harvested, but are too small for the plate.
Wash and roughly chop the celery into 2" sections. Place in the pan with the potato and onion. Allow to fry for a few minutes. Add a little water at any stage if it starts to stick.
Once the onions are soft pour in diluted stock and flavour with plenty of black pepper and dill seeds(which may be green or dried)
Cook for fifteen minutes until the potatoes are soft.
Blitz soup for a short time to break up the stalks and potatoes, but don't make it into baby food.
Once it is slightly cooled pour in a generous portion of double cream. I used a cupful.
Season to taste and serve with wholemeal toast.
Delicious.
Don't stint on the cooking, wild celery can be rough if not cooked down. Neither stint on the butter for. Poking which adds a lovely buttery flavour to the final soup, as well as colour.

Home grown tomato and courgettes

Finally the tomatoes have reddened and the courgette are fruiting. Tonight's supper will be completely from the garden!

One day in hot July

Though this has been a difficult season for veg plotters, in many ways, those of us who persevered are finally seeing some benefits.
This weekend we spent a majority of our time up on the roof, tending the garden, idling in the sun and harvesting.
The crop of Rocket new potatoes from one pot was spectacular, giving us several feeds before I finally up-tipped the entire pot. The potatoes were large for newbies, kept their shape well, (under gentle steaming) and tasted fabulous. I particularly chose potatoes that were recommended as salad potatoes. I reckon you can't beat that waxy, earthy taste, with your own greens and yes reds!!! The first tomatoes were picked and Mike and I had a modest crop on our plates for the first time.
I've been growing the majority in the growhouse, giving copious (automatic) watering and regular feeds, while down in the living room I've been growing a few specimens 'hard'. Monty Don swears that this produces a ya store crop. However in yesterday's blind tasting, no discern able difference could be detected. However the difference in size of crop is spectacular.
However I've saved seed from the first hard frown tomato to ripen, which should provide a hearty strain for next years crop.
Tomato seeds are stored inside a sack of belly like growth inhibitor, so after de-seeding the fruit, I have stored it in a jam jar, where decay will set in, thereby releasing the seeds.
A few days ago I was complaining of problems with pollination. I'm pleased to report that, as the weather improves and as wind speeds drop we are finally seeing baby courgette, radish seed pods and runner beans!

So where's the sunshine?

I usually rely on the first week of July being the temperature high spot of the summer. But today you find me sitting in the rooftop beach hut, like Noah.
It was a joke when we named the hut High Tide, back in 1997. Now, as I'm watching evil clouds gathering around the Telecom Tower, I regret the irony. It feels as if it might just rain for ever and the Thames high tide reaching Great Titchfield Street doesn't seem so far fetched any more.
The general feeling of doom is heightened, as I write this, by a church bell tolling just one sonorous note over and over again and a mysterious black helicopter circling overhead. (I'm guessing that the chopper is part of our heightened Olympic security.)
However, in spite of the foul weather, things are still coming to some sort of fruition in the rooftop veg plot.
On the bright side, just take a look at the stupendous tomatoes which are ripening nicely in the growhouse. The oil filled roof vent has done stirling work, closing down when the temperature dips for a rainstorm and then opening right up again, as the sun appears from behind a cloud and temperatures soar. I took the shading away ages ago. Those tommies need every ray of sun that's arriving on them.

Today I clipped off a few more tomato leaves and found a few more side-shoots, which seem to grow out as soon as my back is turned. Some of these shoots I've re-planted in odd spots in the garden or beneath the mother plant. I'm hoping that they will provide me with a late crop of tomatoes, once the main crop has passed. There is going to be a glut of tomatoes, but I never mind that too much. Anything surplus to requirements goes into an astonishingly simple bottling process. I make jam jars full of tomatoes preserved in oil, which I shall use as a quick relish for fresh pasta over the winter.

What is woerying at the moment is the fact that I'm not getting the pollination I need up here. Earlier in the year we were awash with bumble bees, hover flies and other furry friends. But the cold weather has chased them away. I had a fantastic showing of broad bean flowers, but only about 25% have converted into pods. I'm now watching the same thing happen on the radishes I'm nurturing for pods. But despite loads of pretty flowers I've had just one pod mature so far (and that's already been eaten). What makes it worse is that my posh counterpart NY rooftop veg blogger in Battery Park has chosen this week to wax lyrical about radish pods. (www.batteryrooftopgarden.org)

Broad Beans

Radishes flowering - but no pods!

Runner Beans Red Emperor

Courgette, all male flowers!

 

 

 

 

 

Flowers are doing well, I've got some lovely nasturtiums, sweet peas and runner bean flowers. I even saw a bee pollinating the runner beans the other day, but are there any tell-tail swellings yet? No!

But this humid weather seems good for seeds. I've got rocket, celeriac and lettuce on the go, cabbages and carrots are finally filling out and the potatoes are doing well. I harvested my first four early rockets today.

Rocket seedlings

I keep thinking of the ying and yang of the weather and gardening. If one thing does badly, something else will do well in compensation. And if summer is a soak, surely autumn will be fine?

The pigeons had a go at the cabbages before I had time to net them.

 

Veg Plot Review

It was 9th January this year when I first launched my Roof Top Veg Plot on an unsuspecting blogosphere. It was the end of February before it was warm enough to get outside and start the reconstruction works on my rooftop. Today, in early June on a balmy afternoon, having eaten the first of the sugar-snap peas for lunch, I realise that this is what it was all about.
The garden looks a picture today. I've got curly lettuces, strong tomatoes in the growhouse and runner beans about to run wild - all in just six inches of soil. (More about soil depth later. )
On the down side Chinese leaves, onions, beet and endive lettuces have all gone to seed and the second crop of radishes have refused to bulb. However I don't think I'm alone in this. I'm just heaving out anything that seeds and replanting.
When I started reading The Square Foot Gardening books I knew that it could not possibly be true. I knew that if you could grow all veg known to man in six inches of soil and within a tight square foot cube, then farmers wouldn't bother with fields!

So what tips have I learned?

Water, Water, Water
Fortunately we have had a wet spring, but in small containers you can forget the adage, one big drench a week. In the potager I need to water everyday and often twice a day, even when it rains!
And despite the fact that I'm growing in a brand new compost mix, I'm now starting to feed weekly as well.

Think Potager - not Prairy
The real revelation came to me as I was searching the Internet for plant spacing. I came across the French potager en carré movement - and that's been revelatory. Trust the French to have been doing this for ages and to have got a bit more sophisticated than the Yanks.
I suppose that it goes without saying that in small spaces it's best to use small varieties, but it's taken me a while to twig. Also of course if you plant out two seedling, one in a big space and confine the other, the cramped cousin will grow smaller. However the titch is also more likely to crop more quickly and produce tastier, if smaller veg.
This means that choice of cultivars or varieties is much more important to me, than the average allotment grower. For example, I'm growing Paris Market 5 carrots, which are small and round as well as Annabel radishes, which are also very fast growing, as red as ruby lipstick and, yes you've guessed it, small and round. Is it a coincidence that both these varieties sound French?

Specials not Mains
Stands to reason then that with limited space I should go for special things. So I've planted four different tubs of early potatoes and I have a sneaking suspicion that they are almost ready.
I've grown a whole mélange of different salad crops and for about a month now we've been eating every lunch time salad from our garden. In fact, we have been getting at least one full and interesting bowl of salad a day, and still it's difficult to keep up!

Eat Everything
Another tip for the intrepid potager is to eat the whole plant. My first plantings of Mizuna and Rocket (planted indoors back in January) have both gone to seed, but the flowers, as well as attracting insects, are just as delightful in salads as the leaves. Because the produce is fresh, there is far less wastage than with supermarket produce.

Size isn't Everything
My Pak Choi went to seed because I was waiting for the heads to get bigger! Another lesson learned. In a confined space they won't grow as big as on the supermarket shelf, so pick a day or two earlier - don't wait too long.

Sow, Sow and Sow Again
I've become quite a fan of succession sewing. Sometimes a sewing will not produce. For example my radishes. But I just sewed another sprinkle of seeds elsewhere and this third crop is plumping nicely. Similarly I've had excellent results with the small crinkly lettuce Salad Bowl, which I've got now in red and green and at various stages of growth.

Flowers Too!
Some of this veg crop looks as good as it tasted, but I've planted the odd companion, in order to brighten up the beds. Edible flowers like nasturtiums should look great. In other places I've chosen veg varieties which sport good flowers. For example, the runner beans are Red Emperor, which will, I hope give me and the bees an eyeful of zingy red flowers some time soon. This strategy has certainly started to attract wildlife. Despite the fact that I'm five floors up, there is generally a bee of some type buzzing around when the sun's out and I've been spotting the first ladybirds this week. I even spied a cabbage white butterfly the other day. (Now I thought that we'd be too high for them at least!)