Got the post-hibernation blues

Yaaaawn!

The new year has well and truly started (ahem: it's nearly summer!), but I'm just waking up to the fact that I still have a blog about my garden.

By way of re-introduction, here are some photos that I took at the start of the year after several months of leaving the garden to its own devices ...

Before winter, we had a last (small and tasty) crop of multi-coloured carrots:

The burdock that I planted at the start of August were ready to be lifted in December. Unfortunately, they weren't too big:

Then nothing until the following year. Time to survey the damage ...

On entering the tunnel in early May, the first thing I notice is various streamers festooning the ceiling. Not exactly a cause for celebration, as the non-slip backing from the anti-hotspot tape has separated from the rest of it. These days there's considerably more squeaking whenever the wind blows. That's not the worst of it, though ...

In an effort to minimise mould over the winter, I often left the front door of the tunnel open, including during storms. The prevailing wind blows through there and by spring I could see the effects (hindsight = 20:20). Besides the various debris knocked off the staging area, you can also see that the skirt at the back of the tunnel has become unburied. If left too long, the whole canopy could have taken off with the wind.

What a scene of carnage! Well, I guess I couldn't call it unexpected. The billowing back wall has knocked various trays and surviving pot plants onto the ground and the skirt has continued to ride up (oo-er) further towards the front of the tunnel. On the left are my perennial (yeah, right) chilli peppers which actually succumbed in early winter.

The peppers are dead? I'll just confirm that they're dead:

Yes, the peppers are dead.

Between chilli peppers and lemongrass (two things that have no Godly reason to exist at such latitudes), I have two survivors. Of course, couched in such a way, things can be expected to not end well with these two:

Perhaps I shouldn't have used such an excited tone in talking about these two. In fact they're quite healthy (for now). But I'm sure that you're all wondering what their ultimate fate will be? So as not to cause any undue stress and nervous tension (stress and nervous tension are now serious social problems in all parts of the Galaxy, after all), I will reveal their ultimate fate:

• the chervil on the right was transplanted indoors, provided some flavouring for various scrambled egg dishes, then died eventually while trying to bolt (unlike like Logan and his run)
• the semi-cos lettuce on the left survived the slug attacks that killed his brothers and sisters, but succumbed to 30+ degree heat when I forgot to open the vents in the tunnel when the hot weather hit

But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

The kohlrabi on the left did survive the winter without bolting and we did eat the bulb of the green plants. Nobody wants to eat komatsuna that's bolted, though, so it went in the compost 'Dalek'.

The tour isn't over yet. We've not even done 180 degrees.

Behold, the wonder that is one third of the main tunnel growing space: the roots bed!

OK, so the burdock at the bottom have already been lifted (foreshadowing: they're not completely gone) and the rest of the stuff is looking a bit sparse (particularly the spinach in the top corners). In fact the rest of the areas didn't turn out too well, either. The root parsley in the middle only provided tiny (but admittedly tasty) roots, while the salads in the top/middle did hang on for a few more weeks without bolting. The star of this picture has to be the Claytonia (big patch in the top right). It kept on growing for weeks after and even re-seeded after I'd turned the whole bed over.

Equally obvious here are the areas covered by mould (white) and moss (green). Evidently the micro-climate inside the tunnel over the winter agrees with them. If only they were edible...

Deeper into the recess of this micro-climate, mould and moss still hold sway. At the bottom are the Senshuu onions, which seem to have overwintered OK in a very non-regimented way. Barely visible above them are the Ishikura negi. I didn't give up on them and actually they managed to thrive later on. At the top are more spinach and beetroots, which got composted. It's depressing to lose the beets and spinach but things do eventually turn out all right for the guys in the Allium family (until we eat them--mwuahaha!).

Yes, this is supposed to be an "over-wintering vegetable bed."

It's a pathetic excuse for one, that's what I say. If I were a bear with the requisite number of opposable digits (needed to sow seeds in the autumn) and I awoke to find this "limp" (it's not a "stand") of veg growing on my pillow, I would not be best pleased. In fact, it would remind me of how much I hate spring and I would probably set out to kill and eat the nearest postman, insurance salesman or hobo that I could find. Granted, I would probably be shot, but in my defence I would simply point and mime "do you see what it is that I'm reduced to eating after several months of starvation?" Wouldn't you have some compassion?

To be fair, the scraggly looking greens in the front did manage to produce some fairly nice broccoli/cauliflower heads and we also ate some passable (if tough) greens (boiled then roasted with a small amount of sesame oil):

The curds themselves were nice enough but I always seemed to harvest them a day or two late. They certainly weren't big eretrospectnough or "fractally" enough to consider using them as part of a yearly rotation plan.

Speaking of rotation, I seem to have come full circle with my poly tunnel photo diary. Were things outside my bear man cave any better?

Unfortunately not. The scenes in the outside bed were so depressing that I didn't even bother taking photographs. I may be a glutton, but not for punishment. I know when enough is too much.

As I write this, it's almost June. So obviously we survived the winter and the hungry gap (thanks, supermarkets!). Things did get better and the new year brought new opportunities for planting and harvesting. I'll get to those anon ...

Trying my hand at making kimchi

The first time I ever heard of kimchi (or kim chee, as it's sometimes spelled) was in the excellent 90's TV series "Northern Exposure" (IMDB link). Maurice Minnifield's character got a jar of it from his Korean son. What I learned about kimchi from that episode was that it was made of cabbage, "smells like an old pair of gym shoes" and that that particular batch had been buried in the back garden for four months. The image that this conjured up was that a head of cabbage had just been buried and left to rot for four months. It certainly didn't sound appetising.

A few years later, when I travelled to Japan, I got to taste kimchi for myself for the first time. Despite the image I had of how it was made, I was still keen to try some. I'd already eaten plenty of strange (to me) foods in Japan and found that I liked the taste of most things, even things like "nattou" (fermented beans) that are definitely a bit of an acquired taste. The combination of sour, spicy and crunchy cabbage certainly didn't match my expectation of "rotten cabbage" (it's actually fermented, as I learned later) and it soon became a favourite of mine. Although it's a Korean food, the Japanese also eat quite a lot of kimchi, along with loads of other pickled and fermented foods. I guess that it's a mark of how popular it is that instead of saying "cheese" when posing for a photo, the Japanese say "kimchi" instead.

It's been around 20 years since I left Japan and in that time I can only recall having kimchi once since then, in the Yamamori Japanese restaurant in George's Street in Dublin. As much as I'd been looking forward to it, I didn't actually like their version that much. It might have been quite authentic (I've never had anything there that wasn't top quality and as good as anything I ate in Japan), but I found that it had too much dry heat and that the cabbage was too fresh—it could definitely have done with more fermentation, I thought.

Anyway, all of this is just by way of introduction—the backstory behind why I was keen to plant napa cabbage and why I was looking forward to harvesting it so much. In order to keep these posts "bite-sized" (like a nice kimchi, perhaps?) I'll continue with a couple of separate posts—one on what kimchi is exactly and how it's made, the other on my first foray into making it myself.

Much ado about ... cabbages?

In my last post I said that I was particularly looking forward to harvesting Chinese cabbage (aka, "Napa"). Unfortunately, things didn't go exactly to plan with it. First, it was taking a long time to form a head. I tried tying it up a bit with some jute and eventually I could see that the head was forming properly. After that I was checking it every other day. These are supposed to form a compact head, something like a Savoy cabbage, only taller, but mine never got that far. Instead, just as I was closing the tunnel for the night I found that the plant had sent up a flower head and was in the process of "bolting":

When a plant bolts, it generally becomes more bitter. The plant wants to set seed so that it can reproduce itself and when it enters the flowering stage it redirects much of the stored energy (sugars) from the roots and foliage (the parts we usually want to eat) to flower and seed production. I wasn't sure how far gone the process was or how edible the plant was at this stage so I harvested it and did a couple of taste tests.

First I just shredded part of one of the outer leaves and offered it around to test when eaten raw. I didn't think it was too bad, but it got more upturned noses than thumbs. Napa cabbage is quite tasty when thinly sliced as per Cole's Law, but considering that this one hadn't formed a head, had green leaves instead of paler or white ones and was in the process of bolting, it didn't taste bad raw, but I'd obviously be better off cooking it if we were going to enjoy eating it. With the rest of the outer leaf I whipped up a quick stir-fry with garlic, ginger, spring onion, sambal oelek (chilli paste), sesame oil and a dash of soy sauce:

This time the taste testing went much better, with the only complaint being that I didn't make enough for everyone. In fact, it went down so well that we decided we'd have something similar the following day. I used about half of the cabbage (the inner part) to make pork yaki udon, which is basically a stir-fry with cooked udon noodles added at the last minute (yaki soba is more common, but I hadn't got soba noodles). The only changes I made to the seasoning was to replace the sharp sambal oelek paste with a sweet chilli sauce to mask or balance any bitterness. That also went down very well.

Overall, I was reasonably happy with the way the napa turned out, despite it bolting. For an investment of one square foot and 56 days (which would have been longer—up to 85 days—if it hadn't bolted) you could provide 8 people with a dinner green. That's all well and good, but not the most exciting way to use napa cabbage. In my next post, I'll follow up with the reason that I was most looking forward to this crop—making kimchi.

Harvest time

When writing my last post I had to double-check my notes to make sure that I was right in saying that it's only been a shade under two months since my first seeds went in the ground. Sure enough, it's only been that long! In that short time, we've already enjoyed various crops from the tunnel:

• plenty of Mibuna and Mizuna, used both as salad leaves and as a cooked ingredient (also known collectively as Japanese greens)
• a Pak Choi plant, used in a delicious Tom Yum soup (another plant succumbed to rot, cause unknown, while another is awaiting harvest)
• various "cut and come again" salad mixes (Mesclun and Provence mostly)
• the odd bit of Corn Sald (mostly thinnings; it's also known as Lamb's Lettuce or Mâche)
• White Turnip ('Tokyo Cross', an "F1 hybrid"), used grated in a 'slaw and simmered as a veg
• Komatsuna, used in a stir-fry (harvested whole, but the plant regrows; this is another "Japanese green")
• Radishes, used in a beef casserole (half a dozen mature 'French Breakfast 3' and a small Daikon along with another of the turnips)
• Baby Leaf Beetroot greens to fill out the salad bowl (sown densely and cropped sparingly, but before they get too big)

This doesn't include the various bits and pieces nibbled and sampled directly from the garden. Nor does it include the edible weed plants that sprouted up from the topsoil we bought in. On that side of things, I deliberately saved some Chickweed (Stellaria media) to grow in a container, while I just sampled some "Fat Hen" (Chenopodium album). Both are actually quite tasty (and nutritious, apparently). To my surprise, a foraging expedition also turned up a bunch of plum trees, with one of them outside a property boundary making for delicious pickings.

Many of the plants in my "official" harvest list above came from the first bed that I planted. For a variety of reasons (which I'll skip over), when I made my first seed order, plants in the cabbage family featured highly for me. It seems slightly ironic to me that I placed such a high priority on plants from the cabbage family. Not only was it the last crop that had been in the ground—and failed—over 20 years ago, but cabbages and their ilk were the foods that I most hated as a child.

On the other hand, I now know that "cabbage" doesn't just mean regular Irish cabbages boiled beyond the last inch of their lives. Even boiled cabbage (or fresh turnip that hasn't gone woody, for that matter) can be delicious if prepared well. Not only that, but the Brassica family includes a fairly bewildering array of cousin plants that are pretty far removed from standard Irish fare—as I discovered on browsing the seed catalogue. Some of these, like Pak Choi and Daikon, I've already had a chance to become familiar with, either through the odd appearance in supermarkets or in my travels in Asia, while others were still fairly unfamiliar though I may still have eaten them unbeknownst to myself. Mibuna, Mizuna and Komatsuna fall into the latter category. Strangely, I can't recall eating white turnips ever, either.

I mentioned that each of the beds in the tunnel is about 1.4m by 1m. They're actually a bit less, taking the size of the timber frame into account—more like 1.3m by 0.9m (which is roughly 12 square feet). Most of the crops above came from the one bed that I earmarked for cabbage-type plants this year. Between dense spacing (using the "square foot gardening" idea) and "cut and come again" plants (mibuna, mizuna and komatsuna, as well as some salad mixes), this little patch of earth has yielded quite a bit of produce and still has more to give this season. I think that the patch has reached a mid-way point ... an anniversary, of sorts.

On this kind-of-milestone, I'm happy to say that I harvested the one plant in the brassica family that I'd been looking forward to perhaps more than any other. It's pictured here:



That, friends, is a Chinese cabbage ('Wong Bok' variety). As I've got plenty of things to say about it, I'll follow up in the next post.

A tour of our garden

When we moved into our quarter-acre property over 20 years ago, we attempted to grow cabbages, Brussels sprouts and cauliflowers for ourselves in the back yard to the east of the house. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very successful experiment as the whole crop was wiped out nearly overnight by some pests.

Since then, there's been nothing but grass and weeds growing there. Then, this summer, the topic of growing in a poly tunnel came up. Shortly after, we'd ordered a decent-looking 3m by 6m tunnel for around €250. It took us a while to get it ready for planting (more posts on this to follow) but finally we had various spaces to grow things:

• Three 1m by 1.4m raised beds along the long, south wall
• Space for up to four grow bags along the north wall (only using 3)
• A staging area with several shelves (a cheap, tall mini-greenhouse with the cover left off)
• Extra floor space for various large (20cm plus) container-grown plants (plus tools and such)

I ended up assuming responsibility for growing things in the tunnel. So far, in the two months from early August when I sowed the first seeds to now (the start of October), things have mostly gone pretty well. I realised early on, though, that we wouldn't be able to grow very much in the limited space of the tunnel—neither in terms of quantity of produce nor in terms of producing all the varieties of food we might like to eat. We would need some outside space to grow large plants like kale that could provide food over winter. At first I considered large containers, but in the end decided that we'd need a proper outdoor bed sooner or later.

By this time, the only resources we had to hand were over a tonne of bought-in topsoil left over from building the raised beds in the tunnel (we deliberately got more than we needed), a 55-gallon drum of compost that had been sitting in the end of the garden for quite a few years and a newer compost "dalek" that was only partly filled. I wanted to go with raised beds for easier access, better drainage and to help stop the encroachment of weeds from the surrounding ground, but didn't want to go to the expense of building with timber. After a bit of brainstorming and researching on the Internet, I decided on using sandbags for the walls of the bed. I ordered around €50's worth, but ended up only using half of them. The bed's vital statistics are:

• around 3' by 12' inside area
• dug underground to a spade's depth
• two sandbags high (around 8")

I used a kind of mix of Hügelkultur and lasagne gardening ideas to construct the layers, finishing up with about an inch and a half of eggshell-heavy compost. I'll get back to talking about these topics in later posts, but for now I'll keep this post focused on giving a brief tour of the garden. With the first outside bed completed, we have an extra 36 square feet for planting, which is around the same as the raised beds inside.

The main reason I went with the Hügelkultur idea was that the one other resource that we had plenty of was rotten wood. We used to have Griselinia hedges around the fence, but I'm sure that many Irish people will know that these hedges died en masse throughout the country in the last severe winter that we had a few years ago. We mostly just left the skeletons there since then—even if they were a bit unsightly they still worked as a hedge to some degree (blocking the view and providing a bit of protection from the winds)—so I had a ready supply of rotted wood that suits the Hügelkultur method.

I'm mentioning the Hügelkultur method here because around the same time that I was thinking of a permanent (or semi-permanent, since I could always move the bags if I wanted) outside bed, I was also thinking about building a bed specifically for growing comfrey. Besides all the good things that I'd read about comfrey, I'd also read various warnings about how invasive it could be if left unchecked. Besides the apparent benefits of the mound method (which is how I'll probably refer to Hügelkultur from now on since I don't have any umlauts on my keyboard, and it's kind of awkward) for building a cheap, hassle-free bed that can last several years at least, I also went with the mound as my strategy for preventing the comfrey plants from "escaping".

I haven't actually measured my comfrey bed since I completed it, but I reckon it's about 8' long, 3' wide and maybe 2.5' to 3' tall. At the moment, since it's the wrong time of year to plant comfrey on it I've sown a mix of clovers and white mustard on it as a green manure or cover crop.

The final stop in this short tour of the garden is my "Straw Bale Garden". I came across this idea by accident when I was researching how to use straw in the garden. I'd intended to get a few small bales to use as a mulch on both beds and pathways and as a handy (and cheap!) brown material to add to "lasagne" beds and to the compost heap (to balance out too many greens from the kitchen). I also thought about using bales as retaining walls for a raised bed but decided it wasn't practical. I did come across the idea of growing stuff directly on the bales as espoused by Joel Karsten. I ended up buying his book (ISBN 978-1-59186-550-6). As yet, I don't have anything planted there as I'm waiting for seedlings to grow rather than sowing directly. Otherwise, they're pretty much ready for growing things in:

• Seven bales, each measuring 1' by 3' (and 1.5' high)
• Arranged like a lower-case 'n' with the two "legs" going north-south,
• An espalier strung across both north-south legs
• Weed-suppressing membrane and wood chips inside

It's easier to show this than to explain it, so I'll follow up later with some pictures. This post has been quite a bit longer than I would normally want for this blog, so if you've read this far then thank you! I'll try to limit myself to more "bite-sized" posts in future. I promise.

Wildlife NORAIN

I was going to call this post "wildlife corner", but it's said that there are No Right Angles In Nature. There may not be right angles, but 60 degree angles certainly exist:

I found this comb in the front garden after some routine pruning. I guess that it was made by wasps (paper or bald-faced, perhaps) rather than bees, but either way I'm glad that there were no stinging insects still inside when it was unceremoniously cut down.

A justified and ancient art

Once practised out of necessity, nowadays the production of food for human consumption is treated as one of those incidental items in a country's fiscal ledgers. In the developed world, self-sufficiency in food production is almost universally taken as a given, and so I am inclined to agree with Douglas Adams' trichotomy of views towards the same. We have progressed beyond "How can we eat?", through "Why do we eat?" and have finally arrived at the ultimate evolutionary endpoint of asking "Where shall we have lunch?" Truly, for ape-descended lifeforms we have climbed very high indeed.

This is my blog about growing food in Ireland (fruits and vegetables—not cattle!) mostly for the fun of it. I'll cover most of the usual topics, sprinkled with a bunch of pictures, recipes and a dash of whimsy. The train for mu-moo land is about to leave. All aboard!