February already and a book review

One twelfth of the year gone and it's taken me by surprise. I've been in dormouse mode, hibernating away the darkness and cold weather and ignoring time slipping away, being wasted in depression, doubts and bad dreams.

As the sun is shining today and the days are getting longer it seems just possible that it's time to wake up. At least it seemed feasible to make a start on my Christmas present books, all from my wish list and yet sadly neglected until this moment.

How to grow Perennial Vegetables by Martin Crawford was the only gardening book I received this year, all the others related to food and food preparation in one way or another (particular mention of Veggiestan, which I devoured immediately I opened the wrapping, it's that good!) so it seems the obvious choice for review here.

It makes a neat paperback, although it's available for Kindle I don't think it would be as easy to read in that format, as with most reference works you need to be able to flick through quickly and let items catch your eye for browsing and then narrow in for proper research with an index.

The book is arranged in two parts, the first exploring why perennial vegetables make sense in the garden, forms of perennial gardens; permacultures, polycultures, forest gardening etc and giving general advice on gardening methods and the management of vegetables in permanent positions.

The second part is an A-Z encyclopedia listing many species that can be included in perennial planting schemes along with specific cultivation and usage advice.

I am often impatient with 'How to' books of all kinds because they usually state the blindingly obvious whilst overlooking the really important points that would increase my own knowledge. The fairly light touch here in the first part therefore meets with my approval as I can skim it and ignore it without feeling I'm wasting time but less self satisfied gardeners might find it a bit short on detail, it's not for absolute beginners.

The second part is where the real interest lies for me and I've already noted  several possibilities for experimentation in our own garden. I'm particularly pleased to see perennial wheat and rye listed, keen to try Baker's garlic (the Japanese Rakkyo) and grateful for a large table listing Bamboo varieties good for shoots.

But, there are some caveats too. Firstly I'd be hesitant to call some of the listings vegetables. Certainly they are vegetable but trees like beech, elderflower and mulberry are not what most people would expect to grow in their veggie patch.  Beech has a very short season for harvesting the young leaves, elderflowers are delightful but not worth the space in a cultivated plot and mulberries so late in leafing up in the UK that you'd only really want to eat them in a starvation situation, so many alternatives being available at that time.

There are a few plants listed that I've long avoided because I believed them to be too poisonous to risk. I'm going to have to research more on this but I didn't think you could eat Aquilegias and Pokeroot requires a very specific cooking regime. The plant causes sickness in its raw state so I wouldn't want it in a garden where there were young children about. Hostas as vegetable makes me laugh, I can't even grow them as ornamentals because the slugs and snails enjoy them so much.

As to potatoes and other tubers listed, I'd not include those in this sort of perennial scheme but I can see that there could be a range of opinions on that.

Overall, an interesting little book, inspirational in its way but not without flaws.

Tea and Kittens*

I now return you to your normal programming.

Today I was thrilled that a kind friend living overseas sent me two tea plants from Tregothnan , an estate in Cornwall where they have a commercial tea plantation and botanic garden (open by appointment only). 

The plants are varieties of Camellia sinensis, Tregothnan don't say which variety but I'm guessing that these are C. s. sinensis, the Chinese form as they are considered hardier than the assamica grown in India.

Camellia sinensis is a shrubby evergreen plant originating somewhere between Northern Burma and Yunnan in China but it has been used for so long all over East Asia that it's not known how it came to be a cultivated plant. Left to its own devices it will make quite a large tree 15 metres tall but for tea production plants are kept as bushes to make them easier to pick.



It should be easy to grow on the farm as it's considered to be hardy to -10C, likes an acidic soil and plenty of rain. I already have an ornamental Camellia japonica (above) which grows vigorously in the shelter of the northwest aspect of the house. This would probably grow just as well in the open but that little bit of cover helps stop the flowers from frosting, which is always a terribly sad sight when it happens.

It's a bit soon to talk about how to process the crop as the plants won't come into full production for six years (if I can keep them that long) but Tregothnan say that trimmings and a tiny tithe of fresh green leaves each year until then can be used in salads and green infusions, so I'll keep you posted on that.

I wonder if deer like tea?

*By the way, I never tire of recommending the excellent Tea and Kittens Daily Mail blocker. Make your day a little more pleasant by avoiding all contact with that disgusting bit of media.

The North wind

It's pretty damn cold, to state the blindingly obvious, and all thoughts of gardening have been put on hold until we get some sort of a spring thaw.

Which has left me roaming around on the internets getting peeved and overheated at the number of miserable indignities humans inflict on other humans, animals and the environment.

Most notably was a truly odd piece in the Guardian, which I'm not going to link to, where the writer felt it was appropriate to put vegans in the frame for causing food price inflation in Bolivia. Apparently because we've caused such a clamorous demand for quinoa poor farmers are forced to eat junk food instead, it's cheaper. There's some other guff about rain forests and soy, conveniently overlooking that most soy is grown to feed the beef also farmed there and an overworked but valid comment about Peruvian asparagus, at least she doesn't hold the vegetarians responsible for that.

There are so many points that this raises I'm overwhelmed by the possibilities of writing a lengthy tome correcting all her poor reporting and mistaken interpretation but it's also the sort of thing that XKCD explains so well here, and I have to tell myself it's not worth it.

I will mildly remind younger readers that quinoa has been promoted as a valuable cash crop for the Andean subsistence communities, that food futures trading and globalisation are destroying many small farmer's lives and that the whole western population drives the consumption of quinoa and other third world products, not just bogeymen vegans and veggies who quite frankly are more likely to be aware of the issues than the average Waitrose shopping Guardianista.

In fact, coming as it did on the day the horsemeat in burgers story broke I hold an unworthy suspicion that it was a stock piece, held back to release at a moment when the meat lobby needed something to deflect from their own poor performance. What better way to forget that burgers are made from lovely cuddly ponies than to remind the public that vegans have two heads and kill babies whilst laughing maniacally over their wholesome grain salads? Could I be right? I doubt we'll ever know.

By the way, if you're concerned about the provenance of your chenopod grains you can grow your own . Whether this will improve the lot of farmers hoping to cash in on Western fads and earn a living or not, I leave to your own consciences.

More Roots

Happy New Year.

On the first day of this year, after the wettest year on record last year, it was time to bring a few of the other root crops up for air from the sinking sand and claggy clay that they've been growing in.


We have two sorts of Jerusalem artichokes here,  both commercial varieties bought in from supermarkets. The smaller red ones are the oldest and they haven't enjoyed the wet very much at all. Normally they are much larger and more knobbly but the plants are weak growers and need good conditions. I've never seen this sort flower.

The long white ones are another more modern variety, I think Waitrose told me they were grown in Lincolnshire but didn't provide a varietal name. I'd guess they were some selection of the old Fuseau type. These are more vigorous and do flower rather attractively in late autumn although I've never seen seed set.

Since I'm not trying to breed new strains it's of little importance; to be brutally honest we eat very few of the ones we grow now from fear of the gaseous consequences of poorly digested polysaccharides despite the many health benefits attributed to them.

The big chunk of horseradish was something of a bonus, the wet earth meant it yielded more easily to the spade and made excellent relish for the salad lunch of abstemious January.

Here's hoping for a great year.

The odd tuber

I've been watching the harvests of other more dedicated growers of Peruvian root crops as they publish their results throughout the autumn with some anxiety and anticipation for the outcome of my own lackadaisical efforts to keep a minimal stock in hand for next year.

Finally the moment has come and I've emptied the small pots of my hopes and counted the yields. The photo is above.

For scale the smallest ulluco pictured, the tubers to the right of the screen, are about baked bean size (that's a navy or haricot bean if you're unfamiliar with the term). There were a few rice sized tubers as well which I didn't photograph and a few chewed ones which might grow but didn't look very pretty. Overall I have to say that my total worth of ulluco is no greater than it was when I first obtained some tubers from Realseeds some years ago and the diversity has reduced. They sent me 3 or 4 varieties and I seem to have only the one, admittedly pretty pink spotted, sort left.

The mashua, labelled, is the one left of the several sent to me by Rhizowen earlier this year. I'm glad to have brought it through but there's nothing to be proud of there and nothing to eat either!

And so to the oca. Over the years I had accumulated five varieties, two which I obtained from New Zealand via Waitrose, a white one from Realseeds and two fairly similar pinky white ones from a kind swapper who's name escapes me for the moment (but I'll look it up when I can). It seems I only managed to put one of these into a pot last spring but we've had a mild autumn here and I'm reasonably confident that I'll be able to find volunteers in amongst the detritus of the vegetation which was last year's failed crops.

By the way, there's no way of assessing the quantity of the crops from this exercise as the pots and culture for each example were all different; similar only in the lack of attention given to them.

Other roots, the hopniss, tuberous rooted peas, chinese and jerusalem artichokes await closer investigations although I was reasonably confident that I had enough propagation material of these in October. Unfortunately while we were away we've had a plague of mice and all bets are off.

So once again, I've scraped through, holding on to these novelties for another year. I'm still not convinced that as they stand they're worth growing for anything other than eccentric interest and I'm definitely not dedicated enough to contribute much to the very laudable efforts of others to breed adaptations better suited to European environments but my options are still open.

The End of the World

The shortest day and the end of the Mayan world, at least according to popular internet memes unsupported by rigorous academic study. Whatever, for this little weasel the time has come.

I'm really surprised a cat managed to bring this evasive small predator in and wonder if it was already ill or had been discarded by some other hunting animal. They didn't want to eat it but left it with the post on the mat, identifying where many other unsolicited offerings are made.

We had never seen such a creature so closely before, they move so quickly in the wild and are very shy. You can never be sure quite what you've seen, just a flash of rusty brown that might be weasel, stoat or even a red squirrel in a hurry although the preferred habitats are not very similar. To find one on the edge of a built up area seems very unusual but I suppose this was hunting the same small rodents the cats do.

You can read more about weasels here, including the worst joke in the world.

The wheel turns

 And another year is nearly completed.

Today I received, chose, completed and returned my Heritage Seed Library catalogue and order form. As usual the selection came down to picking through the back stories and trying to establish which were most plausible but I was pleased to find a French bean with connections to Caen (so local to us)  and another which will be good for Caribbean cookery.



On a housekeeping note, I've closed the Stripey Cat food blog, ostensibly so I can organise the recipes into book form but more accurately because I've become very depressed and disheartened with life and couldn't find enough cheerful things to write about.

Even so, from time to time I still have small cooking successes I'd like to share so they're going to be appearing here when they happen.

I have a new sourdough baby and together we're revisiting the skills needed for bread making. The loaf above is one of the first successful constructions to have come from this and I hope, with a little more experimentation, to have a foolproof base recipe that will happily take additions and variations in the near future.

There are also some pictures to come from my only pop-up restaurant date this year but I have to talk Paul into downloading them from his camera before I can see if they're worth publishing. Hope to be back with them soon!