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Organic Gardening

It's time for some important planning in the Morris household. Lonnie is deciding what to grow and Richard is working out how to cook it

Learning from our experiences

I spent not hours but days, nay weeks, pondering my seed order. There are the usual suspects and the more unusual ones too.

I try to grow a variety from the different family groups to have a good rotation. These are easier to plan when growing commercially. Because of our tastes, it’s harder to choose a good spread across the groups. As hard as I try, I don’t succeed, so I think it through so that crops are not returned to the same place for a few years to prevent a build-up of pests and diseases. I try to make sure the hungriest and lightest feeders get what they need and that the pH is about right and I find crop records are important in this process.

Organic seed is readily available. Stock-free seed is still in its infancy. So I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Do I have seed raised on chemicals or do I buy seed that has used animal by-products in its production? I give up worrying and buy what I want. Then I’ll treat it veganically and collect my own seed, distributing it as widely as I can.

Potatoes are prepared

My potatoes are chitting in egg boxes and I have swapped with friends so I have quite a variety. I need white ones, speckled ones and coloured ones for the show bench and it’s good to go for different textures for the kitchen. I couldn’t quite work out how the surface cultivation technique (hoeing the surface only a couple of inches deep then adding layers of compost) would work for potatoes so they’re going into bags. As they need earthing up, I’ll use the molehills. These are plentiful and will also be mixed with compost, sand and leafmould, including comfrey leaves (which reduce slug damage) to use as a potting mix.

Later in the season, I plan to grow oca in the ground. These are a tuber that can be used in a similar way to waxy potatoes. Some of the advantages of these over potatoes are that they do not suffer greatly from pests or diseases; the canopy of foliage reduces the weeds and they are cultivated shallowly so they don’t disturb the soil so much.

I’m moving the permanent crops into the new beds and I’ll be growing as big a crop of soya beans as I have room for (very useful for us) and some sunflowers for Rich to attempt extracting oil. There’s no way we could be self-sufficient but it’s all helpful in the argument that everything we need comes out of the plot.

Richard's plans in the kitchen

A potential glut of aubergines looms on the far horizon. The common Mediterranean varieties are great all-rounders in the kitchen, but for curries and stir-fries, the long, thin Japanese varieties and the small, round Thai varieties come into their own.

In the past, it was thought necessary to ‘degorge’ aubergines (the practice of sprinkling salt over sliced aubergines to draw out bitter liquid). Modern varieties have had this bitterness bred out and I’m yet to encounter an aubergine that needed such treatment.

A taste of the exotic

I’m going to go for the more exotic crops under cover to give myself a challenge. With a little under heat, crops needing a long growing season will do well started off this month. On my list are dudhi and karela (two Asian vegetables that grow on vines and will be happy next to the cucumbers), a trial of several different types of aubergine, (they come in different shapes, sizes and colours from different parts of the world and for different uses), some melons, passion fruit and maybe dragon fruit (probably the most disappointing fruit in the world but it looks amazing and the hens love it!) The plan is to grow water chestnuts in a paddling pool, if I can find the corms, to prevent red spider mite that some of the others are susceptible to. What an exciting year it’s going to be!

 
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