New berries

More and more these days, the media is full of stories of superfoods – usually fruits with high concentrations of antioxidants. The blueberry led the superfood charge, but has been left behind by newer and more exotic rivals, such as acai berries, goji berries and the yumberry.

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….

We’ve all been there. We’ve all read the marketing blurb for a shiny new plant variety, and decided that we had to have it. We may have been good, and waited for a few days, to be sure that we really had to have it, but we’ve all paid money for brand new plant varieties for the garden. And then we find out that they don’t quite live up to the hype. You don’t hear about ‘early adopters’ outside of the tech world, really, but that’s exactly what we are, and a certain amount of disappointment is inevitable.

Whether you made a New Year’s resolution to cut your carbon footprint, or the credit crunch is putting pressure on your food budget, now is the perfect time to try growing some of your own vegetables. You don’t need a lot of space, or expensive kit, to get started – and it doesn’t need to take up a lot of your time.

Things have been a bit quiet here of late, as we have been working on the garden rather than enjoying it – it was time for the new sheds (yes, there’s more than one!) to arrive, and they had to be painted and assembled. Now that they’re here, we have more storage space, which meant we could order a new toy, something I’d been longing for since we saw one at the Eden Project in spring.

Wimbledon fortnight coincides with the height of the strawberry season here in the UK and the humble strawberry becomes world-famous as tennis spectators tuck into strawberries and cream in front of the cameras. This year it even looks like they’ll be able to leave their raincoats at home!

We half-finished the back garden last year, in that we installed and planted half of the raised beds. In truth, we did a lot more than half, as we had all of the paving done and installed the two sheds. But the wet weather over the winter stalled progress, and it has remained unfinished. It has been frustrating, but has become even more so since the sowing season arrived and I faced the fact that the plants I wanted to grow this year had no home to go to. And so it is with great excitement that I can say that weather, time and energy coincided over the weekend, and we have broken new ground!

Everywhere I go lately, I seem to be tripping over the idea of allelopathy. The amaranths in the picture above might look like pretty, harmless and useful plants – but they’re hiding a darker secret. During our class field trip to the Eden Project in December I discovered that they produce chemicals that can inhibit the growth of other plants nearby. This is allelopathy – chemical warfare that gives plants a competitive edge over their neighbours.

Part of my dissertation involved immersing myself in the history of plants that have been adopted as crops outside their country of origin – novel crops, as I referred to them. It’s a long history, with recorded attempts to move plants from one place to another going back as far as the ancient Egyptians. Even before that, probably for as long as we’ve been human, we have been moving plants around, whether by accident or design.

It used to be that a ripe strawberry was a red strawberry, but things have moved on and there’s a lot more variety in strawberries these days. White strawberries, in particular, are becoming more common, and they offer up a challenge in terms of deciding when they’re ripe.

Well, we’ve been here a couple of weeks now, so it’s time I introduced you to the garden

Just about the entire northern hemisphere is in the grip of a prolonged heatwave, with wildfires raging and people dying. There’s disagreement on how much climate change is to blame, but a consensus that damaging heatwaves will become more frequent, and we really ought to do some planning for that now – changing the way that houses are built, and planting (and retaining) more trees and green spaces, for a start. Personally, I don’t do at all well in the heat. This week I have almost become a hermit, venturing outside only when entirely necessary. Ryan and I take it in turns to water the garden in the evening, and that’s pretty much all the attention it’s getting. I planted up a bed or basil and parsley on 11th July, and have just managed to keep some of the plants alive – one or two even look like they might be getting the hang of life now – but I have some climbing pea seedlings that really want to be planted out, but would scorch in about 5 seconds.