Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i Kitchen Garden

July is a time of plenty on the plot with many spring-sown treats ready for harvesting and second sowings and tender greenhouse crops starting to come into their own. I can’t wait for those first ripe tomatoes! This month we have some great expert advice for you from gardening writer and broadcaster Martin Fish on growing another of our favourites, lettuces, while KG’s own Emma Rawlings looks at mini veg – those bred or suitable for growing at closer spacings and harvesting when at their young and tender best. I offer some growing advice on one of the nation’s top veggies – runner beans – but if you fancy trying something a bit different our resident fruit expert and leading nurseryman David Patch has something for you – ever grown…

OUR SERIES FOR YOUNG GROWERS Hapa Zome is a Japanese word for beating or tapping leaves and flowers to make prints on fabric. This might sound complicated, but it’s really easy and with a bit of practice you can make some really beautiful or fun designs. YOU WILL NEED: ■ Your choice of vegetable leaves, tree leaves and flowers ■ Cotton fabric – at least 15cm x 15cm ■ Hammer or stone ■ Chopping board or other hard wooden surface to work on (make sure you get permission from an adult to use the surface first) WHAT TO DO: 1. Walk around your garden or allotment and collect a mixture of different colourful flowers and leaves. Perhaps some edible flowers like daisies or calendula? A leaf from your tomato plant…

SEED SAVING ONIONS I wish to save onion ‘Rose de Roscoff’ and leek ‘Bleu de Solaise’ seeds as they are hard to come by. Will they crossbreed – do I have to keep them separate? Rob Hutt, Lincolnshire STEVE SAYS: Onions (Allium cepa) and leeks (Allium porrum) will not cross-pollinate. The flowers of both are also self fertile, so it is unlikely that your crops will cross with other leek or onion crops in the vicinity unless they are close to or surrounded by similar crops (such as an allotment). To be sure you could cover them with insect mesh and tap the stems to distribute the pollen. However, as another way of producing leeks which are identical to the parent (or just as a bit of fun) you could…

As a base for a salad, lettuce takes some beating and gone are the days of warm, limp lettuce leaves, because nowadays we can choose from a wide selection of crispy, crunchy leaves that come in many colours to brighten up our salad bowl. When it comes to growing lettuce, anyone can have a go. It can be grown in the garden, greenhouse, polytunnel, cold frame and it grows particularly well in containers on a patio or balcony. I’ve even seen it growing in window boxes where not only did it look good, it was easy to harvest by simply leaning out of the window! SOWING AND GROWING Sowing can start in early February under cover and as long as you can provide frost protection, the seed will germinate without…

APKIL-JUNE PLANT: JUNE-JULY HARVEST: JULY-OCToBER Trends come and go, but the runner bean remains one of our favourite home-grown veggies. These high-rise stars are popular for their flavour when picked young and tender, but also for the colour they bring to the patch. Flowers are produced in white and red and everything in between and are much loved by pollinators which will also go on to visit other flowering crops. WHERE TO GROW Growing good runners needs a certain amount of commitment; as climbers they need strong supports and space, preferably in the sunniest spot you can find. Since many of us are lacking space, this often means in practice that climbing beans are planted in the same spot each year. This rather flies in the face of the usual…

How long have you been growing your own veg? This will be my fourth season growing on an allotment scale, although I grew bits and bobs in a succession of small terraced gardens prior to that. Do you have an allotment or do you grow your veg at home? I have a full-sized allotment and a small garden at home. We have an old wall running down the side of our garden which has two cordon apple trees trained along it, and it’s also where I put up tepees for our peas and beans in spring/summer, but really I grow almost everything at the allotment, either in my polytunnel or one of my ‘no-dig’ beds outside. What prompted you to start? I’ve always had an interest in organic food –…

Following on from last month where we looked at growing strawberries in pots and planters, this month we are again looking at fruit which is ideal for growing in containers. Cranberries and lingonberries are excellent choices for pot culture, allowing fruit to be grown in even the smallest of spaces. You don’t need a vast orchard to grow your own fruit at home … just a couple of pots on a balcony or patio and you too can enjoy your own home-grown harvest of delicious fresh fruit. Whereas strawberries needed little introduction, cranberries and lingonberries are much less well-known, in this country at least. For most people their only experience of cranberries would be as an accompaniment to the Christmas turkey, or perhaps the sweetened juice drink available in cartons.…

SAVE UP To £41.75 FREE WITH EVERY ORDER AUTUMN HARVEST BRASSICA COLLECTION As you start to harvest some of your earlier crops and space becomes free on your plot, now is the perfect time to start plugging the gaps. Our Autumn Harvest Brassica collection offers some of the best brassica varieties, to give you an extended harvest and tasty supply throughout the coming months. The collection contains 50 plants, each one grown individually in cells of compost. When ready, we hand select, grade and despatch them direct to you, guaranteeing the best possible quality. Each Autumn Harvest Brassica plant collection contains: 10 x cabbage ‘Dutchman’, 10 x Savoy cabbage ‘Savoy Serve F1’ AGM, 10 x cauliflower ‘Sapporo’, 10 x kale ‘Nero di Toscana’ and 10 x calabrese ‘Marathon F1’ plants.…

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PINCH OUT BEANS Pinch out the tops of climbing beans once they reach the top of their supports. Ensure beans are properly watered to help them set their pods in hot weather. POLLINATE SQUASH Boost pollination of squashfamily plants. Detach a male flower, peel back the petals to expose the stamen, then brush on to the stigmas at the centre of the female flowers. HARVEST GARLIC Garlic is ready to harvest when around half the leaves have turned yellow. Lift bulbs with a fork then move to somewhere warm and airy to dry ready for storing. FINAL CALL This is your last chance to sow a number of vegetable garden staples: Florence fennel, beetroot for winter roots, peas and dwarf French beans. HARVEST TIME! At last! Bask in the warmth…

BE PEST SMART One of Wales’ cherished gardening experts, Terry Walton, is encouraging people throughout Wales to reduce their reliance on weedkillers and other pesticides to help protect the environment. The renowned gardener and grower has teamed up with Dwr Cymru Welsh Water’s PestSmart project to call on fellow green-fingered enthusiasts to make the ‘PestSmart Pledge’ by introducing simple changes to their gardening habits in a bid to prevent pesticides from entering rivers and streams across the country. Having adopted organic and natural methods of gardening from the early stages of his career, Terry explained that the PestSmart Pledge is a direct appeal to gardeners in Wales to take a more conscious approach to gardening by using natural methods that don’t rely on weedkillers, slug pellets and other pesticides to…

LAURA TWEEDALE FROM EAST CHESHIRE This month we meet Laura who is an author, blogger and passionate about living sustainably and growing healthy food for her family. Do you have an allotment or veg patch in your garden? We have a small, west-facing garden, measuring 8x12m (26x39ft), in a suburban town in East Cheshire. In a cottage garden style, we grow our edibles cheek-by-jowl alongside our perennials and cut flowers, the chickens and the children, filling every space in the hope of providing a garden that is both beautiful and productive. How long have you been growing veg? I’ve been growing organically here for the past eight years, but I was raised by a family of passionate gardeners, so gardening has been a part of my entire life in some…

My new no-dig garden is now three months old, and the beds are filling up. Every time I look out of the kitchen window I feel astonished that this abundant veg patch was a weedy lawn just a few months ago. The shallow 5cm (2in) mulch on top of cardboard, which I laid on the weedy grass, is working brilliantly. There is the odd weed sneaking through, mostly where there will have been gaps in the cardboard cover: no matter how carefully I overlap the card there’s always the odd bit. The cardboard layer acts as a light-excluding mulch, meaning that I can use a lot less compost on the beds as the weeds and grass underneath die off harmlessly. The plant roots have worked their way through the card,…

July certainly is a challenge for us gardeners. With so much to harvest, sow, plant and pick, it’s difficult to decide what to do first when you go in the garden. That said, one of my favourite things to do is harvest from the greenhouse in the morning with a cup of tea. If you started aubergines and tomatoes off early in the year, you should now be seeing the fruits of your labour, with ripening fruits starting to appear everywhere you look. I’ve grown more of the oriental type aubergines this year, the ones which are long and thin like a cucumber, rather than the large traditional types. I find them easier to slice and cook with as they can be thrown into a curry or added to a…

‘Why do the carrots have green leaves coming out of them, mummy?’ asked my six-year-old son, Tommy. I had purchased some beautifully fresh carrots from a local farm food shop earlier that day and they still had their little green foliage hats on. The thought that carrots were once living happily in the soil somewhere was a complete shock to my son, and it was in that moment that I realised my children didn’t really know where their fruit and vegetables come from. Our small garden had played host to an array of beautiful flowers and a couple of carefully pruned trees, but I had never really given much thought to the idea of growing anything edible. In early 2020, as we descended into the first national lockdown, I decided…

UNEARTH YOUR GARDEN’S FULL POTENTIAL This latest book by Generation Z gardener Huw Richards offers a detailed, enthusiastic and thoughtful approach to vegetable growing, with the principles of sustainability and biodiversity at its core. The aim of the book is to improve productivity and efficiency but first requires the reader to give some thought as to why you garden in the first place and to even create your own mission statement. For example: “To escape from a busy world and relish every harvest.” To support this reflective approach there follows a section on efficiency skills you might want to develop, with some complementary practices you can adopt. However, if you’re also looking for lots of hands-on advice you won’t be disappointed. There are really informative chapters on soil and compost,…

I was 21 and a recent graduate in ecology studies when I landed a job in public access. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I was studying, but it was outdoors so I was happy. I was working in Norfolk where the fields are vast, and the landscape is dominated by arable farming. Coming from the patchwork countryside of Devon I was fascinated by the enormity of the landscape and the endless skies. One day as I was walking through the middle of a sugar beet field, idly kicking out any crop that was encroaching on the footpath, I stopped, suddenly uncomfortable. I found myself far enough away from the hedgerow not to be able to hear the breeze in the leaves and standing here in the…

CULTIVATE WITH COBRA Cobra’s extensive range of garden machinery encompasses everything you need to achieve a perfectly maintained plot with ease … and one lucky KG reader is set to win a superb prize package of four key Cobra products that will set them up for efficient and effortless garden maintenance for years to come. To take the hard work out of preparing your plot for planting and clearing it at the end of the season, the Cobra T24C Cultivator (RRP £188.99) is equipped with a powerful 43cc Cobra two-stroke petrol-powered engine. It has a 25cm (10in) tilling width, allowing you to work in the tightest of areas, and variable speed controls. At just 16.2kg (36lb), this tiller is both lightweight and manoeuvrable, and the ergonomically positioned controls ensure it…

PEACH FOR THE STARS I enjoyed reading the success of Paul Manning’s apricot tree (April issue, Letters) and would like to share mine with peaches. I don’t have a big greenhouse but have grown my peach tree in the back garden in the Midlands since 2015. When I planted the tree, I deliberately chose the west-facing position with the protection of a big shed in the north and my house in the south. Two of my ornamental cherry trees bloomed around the same time, helping to attract enough pollinators. I harvest up to 45 peaches in the good years, perhaps a dozen or so when we have cold snaps. I grow organically, giving it wood ash and fish, blood and bone in spring, water it with seaweed solution in high…

WORTH £315 HOZELOCK SELECT CONTROLLER This Hozelock battery-powered water timer is simple to use and helps you to automatically water your garden – saving water, time and effort. The controller has 16 pre-set programmes to supply water from once a week up to four times a day – simply select your desired programme. Plus, it can conveniently be used with a water butt. https://www.hozelock.com/product/select-controller/ WORTH £55 NEMASYS NEMASLUG CONTROL The winners will each receive a season-long programme of slug control called Nemaslug, a biological control using natural nematodes. The prize is for six Nemaslug Slug Killer 100sq m packs which will arrive at intervals from spring through to early autumn to give good control of slugs for the whole growing season. The product is pest specific and so won’t harm…

There’s a lot of interest in growing your own fruit and veg and every new grower looks for the best starting point. The first thing to consider is what growing area you have available and how best to use it to create some useful growing spaces. A tiny backyard can be home to lots of pots and containers, a slightly bigger space may be ideal for a few raised beds, or a big garden may see you cutting and digging a vegetable patch from the lawn. All of these are perfectly good options, but bear in mind that garden beds have a way of staying put once they are created, so I would suggest a little planning before you get out the digging and DIY tools. Here are a few…

The predictions are that global warming will bring more extreme weather events, such as high winds and intense rain followed by long dry periods. For the gardener, this means a regular supply of water becomes less dependable, and it is more important than ever that we treat every last drop as a precious resource not to be squandered. LOOK AFTER THE SOIL When we think of conserving water, our minds always turn first to water butts, but we shouldn’t neglect the important role of a healthy resilient soil in storing water. A healthy biologically active soil with good levels of organic matter encourages deep rooting. The deeper the plant roots, the bigger reserve of water that the plant can access. For a typical silt soil, each extra 10cm (4in) increase…

There has been a lot of breeding work done on vegetables in recent years to create some compact varieties which are perfect for patio gardening or for people with only a small patch of earth. You can of course grow some conventional varieties in a different way to cope with smaller spaces. CLOSE SPACED VEG Many veg will just be small if you sow and grow at close spacings. It is actually a common problem if trying to grow crops to full size but you could use it to your advantage. If the seedlings are not thinned out well enough and the plants are not given room to grow, you can end up with the final pickings being diminutive. It can work in your favour if you only have a…

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OVEN ROASTED CARROT & ROOT VEGETABLES WITH FETA & COTTAGE CHEESE DIP A big tray full of roasted, freshly dug root vegetables is a great way to enjoy them at their best. Try these crunchy bites with a cool herbed cottage cheese dip on the side. SERVES 4-6 Prep time: 20 minutes Cooking time: 35 minutes ■ 1 kg (2.2lb) mixed root vegetables, such as potatoes, carrots, parsnips and beetroots ■ 30g (1oz) butter ■ 1 tbsp olive oil ■ 2 sprigs rosemary ■ ½ block of feta ■ 200ml (7fl oz) cottage cheese ■ 1 garlic clove, minced ■ A bunch of chives, chopped ■ Salt and pepper to taste ■ Basil leaves to garnish 1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C/fan180C/ gas 6. 2. Chop all the root vegetables…