A year of Cats

The 14th of January is the anniversary of the date we brought the kittens home for the first time.

We love them very much.







The full year of kitten pictures can be seen here.

Peruvian Tubers update

Oca tubers and squash seeds.

Happy New Year.

Just like last year, we arrived a couple of weeks too late to harvest the oca and ulluco before the hard frosts came. As a result, there is almost no ulluco - so nothing for swaps this year unless I have already made you a promise and not a lot of oca either.

I have reserved enough to secure a new planting for next year but to be honest I'm beginning to wonder if it's all worth it. I love the novelty of these plants but the main reason for my gardening is to provide food for the family. There is almost never enough crop from these tubers to provide one square meal to justify their space and trouble in the vegetable plot. I think I'll give it one more go this year, with extra mulches and fleeces and if that fails, they may just fall by the wayside for failing to make the grade, if that isn't mixing a metaphor too far.

I'm also going to give Chinese Artichokes (crosnes, Stachys affinis) another go after finding a tub of them in the supermarket but my hopes aren't high. The last time we grew them the plants were fine but the ground was too wet and heavy and there were no tubers, just a few thickened bits of root that had come to nothing. The plants, which are considered perennials, failed after the first year. The plan is to use part of the newly recovered herb garden with extra sand and grit to improve drainage for these members of the mint family and hope for the best.

Not a terribly optimistic first post for the year but come back soon as I hope to have more exciting news about other plans for the farm this summer.

Fly away

The end of the year is here. Such thoughts as I had for an end of year report have whooshed away on the wind like this buzzard spiralling high in the December skies.

I think 2010 will be a year when many things have to change.

Happy New Year and good luck to you all.

From south of the border...updated

I received some interesting herb seeds in a swap this week, entirely new to me. I then discovered some similar seeds were available from Realseeds but in the interests of agricultural biodiversity I'm hoping these are a different strain because Riana who sent them to me gives their provenance as direct from Mexico.

They are heat loving annuals or bi-annuals from the Aster family, with distinctive flavours described by one French writer as "strong, ultra-fresh and musky, vaguely reminiscent of coriander, but also ozone". The same writer goes on to suggest that only tiny amounts should be used for fear of overwhelming the taste of the food. Sounds bizarre but as a slow adopter of ordinary leaf coriander (remember when we thought it tasted like the smell of mice?) I'm prepared to give them a go.

Porophyllum ruderale also known as papalo or quilquiña or Bolivian coriander (no relation to true coriander) is a strong growing plant reaching about 1.5 metres. It forms part of the "quelites"; foraged and cultivated greens that are an important part of the diet of the native peoples of Mexico by providing variation in basic staples of corn, beans and squash. Papalo is used for flavouring in salsas and salads and in tacos. It has a golden yellow flower a bit like a marigold and you can see a picture of it on Jim Conrad's site Backyard Naturalist

Porophyllum tagetoides, pipicha or pepicha is used in soups and with courgettes and summer squash. The plant is rather different in habit and flower colour having narrower leaves and (according to Riana) a purple poppy like flower.

I'm not sure which the Porophyllum coloratum is, it certainly looks like Papalo. There seems to be a lot of confusion with mapping these traditional herbs to formal Latin and until I've actually grown out what I have there's not much point in speculation.

Looking forward to growing them immensely but they will need a long hot summer to achieve their full potential in Normandy, so fingers crossed.

NB Post updated as Riana has now closed her blog to visitors so the links were broken.

Jerusalem Artichokes

Winter hardy vegetables don't come much easier than the Jerusalem Artichoke, also known as the Sunchoke in America or topinambour in French. Stick them in the ground in spring and stand back as they shoot up at speed. They overwinter in the ground and can be dug as needed or taken and stored in the fridge for several weeks if the ground is likely to freeze hard. Once you have them you never lose them either, so no matter how thoroughly you clean the ground after harvest expect to find new plants popping up in the spring. Because of this many people set aside a patch for a permanent bed for them rather than risk seeding their entire garden with knobbly tubers.

But despite their reputation as hardy thugs and incipient vermin they are a gentle sort of beast. They don't sting, scratch or induce allergy easily and if they are in the wrong place simply removing all the foliage for a month or three will sort them out. Although they are mostly pest and disease free (deer will nibble the tops, but then what won't they nibble?) they benefit from moving onto a new patch regularly if you have the space. Digging tubers from a new row is infinitely more rewarding in terms of tuber shape and the crop is concentrated around the plant stem making it easier to remove tiddlers that might otherwise form unwanted volunteers the next year. If you have to keep them to a permanent patch, thorough cultivation and light feeding every other year is recommended.


We now have two varieties, the stumpier round red one was originally obtained in Waitrose many years ago. It grows tall but never flowers and if you leave the tubers in the ground too long they become impressively knobbly and difficult to peel. We get around this by scrubbing them well and cooking them in their skins. The soft pulp is then easy to remove and make soup with or mash into the potatoes. The skin isn't hard anyway but the texture isn't always welcome.

The longer whiter variety came from Sainsburys. A small rant of mine is that supermarkets never identify vegetables properly but these appear to be of the Fuseau type. This was the first year we've grown them and I was impressed with the yield compared to the red ones. On the other hand, there's a limit to amount of Jerusalem artichokes anyone can eat so perhaps a big harvest isn't the significant indicator of quality. This sort also flower which is a bonus on the vegetable patch in the early autumn.

They can be eaten cooked or raw and are, I think, best cooked with lemon and oil in the Turkish style. The flavour is quite sweet and smoky and also goes well in soups and stews.

There is one unavoidable issue with them as a human food crop. They contain the sugar inulin, which most people are unable to digest. This makes them a low calorie food but also means that it's a very windy one. For this reason we eat very little of our crop most years although because they are so easy and prolific they are a valuable famine food for years when stocks of other more digestible vegetables run low.

Mixed Medlars

It's that time of year again and I remembered to bring back a handful of wild medlars from the farm to make this comparison picture. The small ones are wild, the large ones fruit from our cultivar Nottingham. There are several medlar cultivars known but it's hard to source them, most nurseries only carry Nottingham which is prized for its large flowers and fruit. Keepers do list seven varieties.

However, it's rumoured that some of the other sorts have a better flavour. Testing the Nottingham against the wild ones I think that could well be the case. The small fruits seemed a little fruitier, more fragrant and with a delicious toffee after taste that I couldn't detect in the larger fruit - or was it just wishful thinking... I still haven't managed to collect enough wild fruit for a pot of jam but I think it could be rather special.

Anyway, I have what I have and we always enjoy the jellies and preserves I make with them. This year I'm not in a great mood for cooking so I'm going to stick to the established option of jelly which is quite quick and simple but here are links to all the recipes I've tried in case you're feeling more adventurous.


Medlar Jelly
Medlar and Quince Jam
Medlar Butter or Cheese

The Elusive Tuberous Rooted Pea

The tuberous rooted pea, Lathyrus tuberosus, came to me as seeds last autumn. I'd never heard of it before but researches on the web didn't turn up all that much. A small perennial climbing member of the pea family that produces edible tuberous nodules on the roots. No useful pictures (the one on Wiki looks like everlasting pea to me), no tasting notes.

Eventually I tracked down a short paragraph in Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica which states that the pea is a native of southern Europe, which was found growing wild in Fyfield, Essex and named Fyfield Pea for that reason. It was believed to have escaped from cultivation in Holland where it had been grown as a vegetable in the early 19th century. It should not be confused with the Bitter Vetch, Lathyrus linifolius.

All I could do was grow it and see what happened. I started the seeds in March 2009. You can see the seedlings here. A fairly weedy little plant that is alleged to suffer badly at the ravages of slugs.

Planted out in France in May the two plants grew on well enough and formed a low scrambling mat underneath the runner beans. They didn't seem to mind the lightly shady conditions but of course, I've nothing to measure their progress against. I think they might have climbed if they'd had the option. Pretty cerise flowers in August produced tiny pods each containing one or two seeds.

It was my intention to try to overwinter them in the ground with the expectation of much stronger growth next year but the deer attacks meant I had to rescue them and pot them up for the winter. Still, that meant I could examine the roots, and there were tubers! I don't know why I doubted it, but the plants were rather small and insignificant.

Not that the tubers were exactly huge, the biggest were rather smaller than one joint on my thumb. I cleaned and ate one raw. A bit chewy and fibrous, it had a sweet pleasant flavour of peas, which is perhaps unsurprising. One of the only recipes I could find suggested they should be roasted and would then taste like chestnuts, but chestnuts are the chicken of the vegetable tasting world. I think I'd prefer them to taste like peas. I'm sure the texture would be improved by better cultivation and watering - we had a dry summer in Northern France - which would make for quicker more tender growth.

So, that's it for the tuberous pea until next year. If the potted plants survive the winter we'll have a head start, but I have saved a few seeds and I think it's worth making the effort to try them again.