Jun 12

Jun 12 Growing your own Greens - 2 months in

Please, please, no more peas

In April I set out to grow all our greens for the year. I have promised myself not to buy any leafy greens for a year partly as an experiment in self-sufficiency in a shady garden but more importantly to cut down on our plastic use and food waste (See my previous post for full reasoning).

A sensible gardener would have prepared in advance, overwintering brassicas and salads ready to start the challenge in spring. I am definitely not sensible and, apart from some fortuitous sowing in February (Pak Choi, a few kale plants and some lettuce), I pretty much started sowing on the day that I stopped buying. We still managed the first month just fine, but the upshot of this was that we went through a period of eating A LOT of pea shoots.

They were ready in 10 days and they’re delicious, and definitely a great filler for salads and for cooking up…but you can definitely eat too many. In week 2 we were raving about how they went with everything and how great they tasted on their own, thinking up recipes to use them. By week 4 I began to be peeved by the way their tendrils stick between the teeth. In fact, they should always be very tender as long as you limit yourself to taking only the very tips… but as they grew faster than we could eat them I began to scythe them down with greater and greater abandon and our dinners became increasingly earnest. Lesson learned. At least they’re wonderfully good for you.

The humble pea shoot. A thing of great beauty, nutritious and indispensable in home grown salads… just don’t over do it!

The big discovery we made in these early days of April was growing broad bean shoots. These we bought from the corner shop (as ‘fava beans’), soaked overnight, planted in Amazon boxes, and they were ready to eat in 10 days. The shoots are perfectly good raw although texturally less delicate than peas, but they really come into their own when cooked up (in a garden omelette for example) as they take on a very sweet, spring, pea/bean flavour. They don’t regrow with the rampant abandon of an injured pea plant, so don’t work so well as a cut and come again crop (I think we got 2 harvests of each sowing) but if you treat them as a grossly oversized micro-green and re-sow regularly they are a winner.

Broad bean shoots ready to harvest. A delicious discovery!

I’ve taken up Spinning

The number one most helpful item when preparing a daily diet of garden salad and veg is, undoubtedly, the salad spinner. I’m not sure if it’s a pregnancy thing, but I am becoming increasingly squeamish about a high protein salad. Any credibility as an 'outdoor type’ would be instantly lost if you could see the neurotic way I wash my salad leaves under bright light, scouring each one for any sign of movement and I have redoubled my efforts since last week when I pulled a wriggling caterpillar off the tip of my tongue. I know it’s harmless and I really should just grow up… but there we go. With lettuce, pulling off the lowest leaves as you go means you eventually end up with a spike of leaves far enough off the ground that slug and snail damage isn’t an issue. They look a bit ridiculous, naked to the waist with a lot of volume on top, and a far cry from Mr McGregor’s fulsome butterheads, but it’s worth it not to have to keep slugs in a specially constructed holding pen by the sink.

There’s not much I can do about aerial attack as I refuse to net most of our garden, and our salads probably come with a heavy dose of aphids and caterpillars despite my best efforts. I console myself with the fact that this must make our garden salads into some sort of ideally balanced Keto diet meal (from my limited knowledge of healthy eating), and I no longer need to add toasted seeds for texture.

Boiled cabbage

As March and April progressed, we couldn’t believe how wonderful the sunshine and warm temperatures were for getting things growing. By May we were a bit anxious and doing our best to water what needed it. By the first of June everything was bolting for the heavens, just in time for the rain to arrive about a week too late. Luckily the plan had been to grow most of our greens as baby leaves during the spring, so it wasn’t really a problem at all and actually if you have the space, it works pretty well to just have lots of small plants and eat as you go, but for a few things like Pak Choi where what you want are the fat, juicy stems, it was frustrating. With a lot of brassicas, plants that have had enough time to mature will cope much better with the heat, so luckily our early sown kale plants have done well. Meanwhile, trays of cut and come again began to look like they would bolt so I transplanted the biggest into the much deeper grocer’s boxes and plonked them in the shade under our garden table with regular watering. A few casualties like spring rapini (our first time growing them) never made it out of the plugs, but we have sown again and it’s not great loss.

So far so good. 9 months to go

For now we are enjoying cavolo nero, Pak Choi (albeit a bit leggy) and a lot of lettuce, rocket and spinach. Wok broc are taking off, chard is bulking up and my planter of semi ornamental kale (‘Fizz’ and ‘Red Ruble’) are looking so ornamental I can't bring myself to pick them. All in all a good start to the year. Not perfect, but perfectly good enough, and a lot of fun along the way.