The catalogues are streaming in at the moment as the seed companies gear up for a busy season.
As usual, there are deals galore, tempting unsuspecting gardeners to part wi’ their sillar with reports of ‘sensational’ new colour combinations, stunning container plant deals and NEW succulent tasty vegetables.
One staple winter vegetable that gets hammered at every turn is the brussels sprout, it is even written into sit-com scripts.
The joke is on them – it is a topper of a winter veg. especially when picked fresh off the plant.
My early relationship with this brassica was not quite so positive as firstly, it brings back very unhappy, uncomfortable memories.
As a youngster pre-college, picking sprouts and lifting leeks in frosty weather – nae fine.
Secondly, as I have probably told you before, my dear old mum was a good baker but not a great cook.
Even so, we never went short and we always cleaned our plate (otherwise there was ‘no pudding for you, my lad’).
Dad was quite ‘picky’ when it came to chuck, but if he liked it, that was that!
The problem with sprouts was that she put them oan tae bile at the same time as the tatties. Yellow mush, yuk!
We had sprouts the ither nicht, chopped up and mixed wi’diced bacon, – I’m salivating as I think of that combination.
Nowadays, the varieties we use are mostly F1 hybrids, they are heavy yielding, resistant to weather damage and tasty, requiring tenderising in boiling water for a few minutes, that’s all.
Another thing I get het up about is size.
It stands to reason, if you are a commercial grower of brussels sprouts that you want the heaviest yield possible, consistent with good quality so the more sprouts you harvest the size of ping-pong balls the better.
If you pick them at a smaller size it will take more to make a kilo, cost more to pick and subsequently the price will go up.
The answer is to grow them yourself, start harvesting at regular intervals and pick them when they are as big as a 10 pence piece – they are sweet as a nut, yummy.
A wee reminder of how to cope with horsetail in the veg garden.
This thought came as I was working through a pile of applications submitted to Beechgrove from community gardens across the country looking for our help.
My mind went back to the summer of 2013 when we visited the old, derelict walled garden at Ardentinny in Argyllshire.
Some areas were infested with the weed – could I come up with some suggestions for control, especially in the area where they hoped to grow vegetables?
Off we tramped to the site to discover that they had all but solved the problem themselves.
Basically they had adopted a strip cropping system with beds just over a metre wide then a generous path just over a metre wide covered with landscape fabric.
You will have worked it out as I did, the fabric blanketed out the weed and they were regularly cultivating the strips sown and planted with the vegetables thus cutting down the horsetails.
Regular hoeing, cutting off the green shoots weakened the weed growth significantly, preventing it from building up further food reserves.
Come end of season, clear the debris and swap the fabric over.
Cultivate the area that had been path and cover the cropped area with the fabric.
Neat eh?
Not a quick solution by any means, thrawn more like – you must defeat your task and not let it defeat you.
Hyacinths
I have a failure to report.
This year we had two bowls of prepared hyacinths – planted with the intention of having them flower at Christmas.
They missed the target by four days.
Aye, the first flowers opened fully on the Sunday after Christmas and only just going over now and are being replaced by the next batch which have the flowers just through the neck of the bulbs.
Now then what do we do with the old, flowered bulbs?
The pots are now sitting in the unheated glasshouse, the plants will still be looked after, the flower heads cut off and a minimum of water applied to allow them to finish their growth cycle.
In due time the bulbs will be dried off and stored in the shed, ready to be planted up again next year.
They will need a recovery year to build up their strength so I wouldn’t expect a stunning performance from them next season. Throw them out?
No way.