Blueberries: grow your own superfood!

Outside of the tropics, the only place you’re likely to see a cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao, the trees that give us chocolate) is in a heated greenhouse at the botanical gardens. They can be grown as house plants, and seeds germinate easily when they’re fresh, but their size, their requirement for heat and the fact that you need two plants for pollination means that they’re unlikely to bear fruit. And even if they did, the process of turning cocoa beans into chocolate is a long one.

For my Masters dissertation last year I did some research into gardeners who choose to grow unusual edible crops. I settled on two species to investigate, achocha and oca. In the past I’ve written about how to grow achocha – it’s a nice, easy plant and in a temperate climate you should have no problems getting a significant yield. You may have more of a problem dealing with the glut….

Mrs Green has set herself a new challenge this spring – she’s aiming to grow her own luffa (or loofah) to use as zero waste pan scrubbers. Never one to shy away from new plant experiences, I’m going to join her!

Even the most experienced vegetable growers sometimes struggle with spinach. It’s a very fussy plant, demanding the best possible conditions and even then running to seed at the drop of a hat. Forget about transplanting your spinach, or nursing it through a dry season, or just forget spinach entirely and try one of the other leafy plants that are just as good to eat and easier to grow.

If it’s the middle of winter and there’s nothing much going on in the vegetable garden, or you want some easy and ultra-fresh salad greens, or a rainy day project to help keep the kids occupied, then try growing mustard and cress!

Grafting is a time-honoured technique for growing fruit trees – it allows gardeners and farmers to choose both the variety of fruit they want to grow, and the rootstock they want to grow it on. You can even graft more than one variety of fruit onto one rootstock, giving you a ‘family’ tree that saves space and spreads the harvest time, or gives you both ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’ from one tree. Grafting vegetables, on the other hand, is something relatively new that has burst onto the home gardening scene in the last few years. Last year T&M gave us the opportunity to grow the TomTato, a tomato plant grafted onto potato roots that grows both tomatoes and potatoes – catchily nicknamed the Ketchup ‘n’ fries plant. This year they have added a new dual-purpose plant to their range: the Egg & Chips plant grows both aubergines (AKA eggplant) and potatoes.

Some gardeners breathe a sigh of relief when the first frosts of winter arrive – the hard work of the season is over and they can tidy the garden up and leave it dormant until spring. There’s plenty to do inside, studying the seed catalogues and planning, in the dry and the warm. If, like me, your green fingers get itchy and want to keep on gardening then your vegetable plot may already be filled with wintry crops – Brussels sprouts for Christmas, winter cabbage and kale, leeks and over-wintering onions. They’ve all been in the ground for a while now, though, and you may be casting around for something else to plant. Planted the garlic? Sown the broad beans? Then it’s time to think about Jerusalem artichokes.

There can’t be a more iconic symbol of Halloween than a witch riding a broomstick. In olden times it wouldn’t have been a problem to wander out into the woodland and cut a stout pole and then find sticks to make the sweeping end, and then you’d have yourself a fine broom, or besom. I suspect most of them were used for more mundane purposes – they are jolly useful things to have to hand.

Many years ago, long before my gardening obsession began, I spent a season or two living in a ground floor flat in Newbury that had patio doors that opened onto a backwater. Shortly after moving in we made friends with the local duck population, to the point where we bought poultry corn from the pet stall on the market for them – bread not being the best food for ducks.

Although August is the height of the summer, and it’s worthwhile taking time to stop and smell the roses, the vegetable gardener also has to be aware that autumn is just around the corner. That doesn’t have to be a depressing thought! It just means you need to harvest any crops that won’t survive the first frosts, and that you may want to preserve some so that you can have a homegrown taste of summer during the winter months. You should have some new crops on the way to look forward to, and be thinking about potting up herbs to bring under cover for the winter.

As anyone who is anyone knows, the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) eats snozzcumbers. Because he refuses to eat people (human beans) he has to eat lots and lots of snozzcumbers. The snozzcumber is a giant vegetable, watery and bitter, but the BFG has a tasty drink called frobscottle to help wash them down.

Right now, 200 miles above your head, chilli peppers are growing on the International Space Station (ISS).