Gardeners Tips

Mesclun is a name for a traditional melange of salad leaves. The name mesclun doesn’t feature in any of my gardening reference books before 1980 so old gardeners may not recognise the term.

Anything Goes Mixes

• Traditionally the mixture was a blend of wild and cultivated chicory, as well as lamb’s lettuce and young dandelion leaves.
• There are regional variations for mesclun, in Provence they use a blend of chervil, arugula, lettuce and endive.
• One particular  American special ‘Salad Leaf Mesclun Mix is lettuce based on a colourful mix of Red Batavia, Green Batavia, Little Gem, Tango, Red Salad Bowl and Cerbiatta varieties.
• An Italian equivalent for mesclun is misticanza, Thompson & Morgan’s Misticanza D’Insalate contains: Lettuce Bionda a Foglia Liscia, Bionda a Foglia Riccia, Verde a Foglia Riccia, Meraviglia Delle 4 Stagioni and Biscia Rossa.. seeds
• A speedy UK mix to be sown all year indoors contains Salad Rocket Victoria, Greek Cress, Mizuna, Mustard Green & Red Frills, Pak Choi Canton White.

How to Grow Mesclun

• Seeds should be sown thinly outdoors in summer or in an unheated greenhouse during the autumn and winter months.
• Sow little and often to get continuity
• Germination is quick and you can start picking within as little as 28 days.
• Thining out is not necessary or plant out quite close together as leaves are for eating young and fresh.
• Leaves are tastiest at the baby stage start cutting when  2-3 inches high. Cut and come again in a few weeks.
• If the weather turns hot many varieties tend to bolt.

Some mixtures include more exotic greens, especially those quite popular in Asian cuisine. One particularly flavorful variety is called mizuma, a delicate-leaved sort that is popular in Japan. Another is the Asian tat-soi, which has rather sweet dark green leaves.

Courgettes

Curcurbits are members of the 965 species gourd family that includes Marrows (Courgettes), Cucumber, Melon, Pumpkin and Squash.  

Courgette Fruiting

Plants produce both male and female flowers. The male flowers grow on a thin erect stem. Female flowers are recognisable because they contain an ovary within a swelling behind the yellow flower. Male flowers grow above the vine with a central stamen containing pollen with which to fertilise the female.

The fruit grows behind the pollinated femail flower eventually sheding the petals. Left to grow the courgette will continue into a marrow sized fruit. Some small varities have now been bred to produce small fruit.

 What can go wrong:

1. Male flower production will be favoured by low temperatures and or excessive shade. Give plants enough space. Choose a warm sunny position.
2. At the start of flowering often only male flowers grow. As days lengthen both flowers should be formed.
3. Fruit only swelling at the neck near the top indicates incomplete pollination due to cold or lack of insect visits. Remove these fruit to avoid end rot and shriveling.
4. Too many fruit on a plant will encourage shriveling and rotting of fruitletes. Remove all useable fruit as soon as possible.
5. Fruit allowed to grow to maturity as marrows will switch off the cropping as the reproduction is done.

Pollinating Tips

• Encourage insects to help move the mature pollen. Avoid insecticides.
• Wind can help pollination but the flower petals are more designed for insects making a funnel shape .
• In a greenhouse or cold frame the gardener can remove a male flower and manually transfer the pollen from male to female by tapping the male flower above the ovary.
• Do not pick male flowers  for hand pollination until the pollen is mature.

An apple a day is not possible if you only get an apple every other year and that is the fate of some trees. Biennial bearing or a high crop followed by virtually no crop is not the sort of apple production a gardener needs.

Causes of Erratic Fruiting

• Some types of apple cultivars are more prone than others to fruiting only in alternative years. Beauty of Bath and Laxton’s Superb naturally tend to fruit biennally.
• Trees can be tipped into biennial mode by frost when no pollination takes place.
• No crop, high crop, no crop becomes learnt behaviour
• Heavy crop during an on year depletes the resources and the tree takes a rest or year out
• Keeping too much old wood reduces new wood and can lead to biennial bearing.
• Cropping patterns are internally regulated by the tree.

Solutions to Erratic Apple Bearing

• Select varieties and pollinators with care.
• Thin out the flower clusters leaving only 10% of the flowers to shock the tree and modify its behaviour. It may take several seasons.
• Water your trees and look after them during both years.

Other Comments

• Apple trees  initiate flower buds for next season’s crop in the current season.
• An alternation of large and small crops can be caused by competition between the current season’s crop and the coming season’s flower buds.
• Seed-produced hormones from the developing ovules have an inhibitory effect on flower development. Apple may be prone to this floral inhibition.

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Demo for charity presentation

Growing well in ridges well hoed up to avoid green tubers

Typical solanum flowers of the potato

Wedges of potato sown with an eye in each chunk.

Not all flowers are white or blue for that matter – species vary

Dried up leaves in hard packed soil – not a good recipe for success.

Planted deep with granular fertiliser

Above soil fruit on the haulms look like miniature spuds

Small potatoes!

Test bed

Cleanish spuds

4 stage planting

Potato sack

Comfrey leaves make potato seed comfy

Small pots for new spuds

Another flowering spud now ready to harvest

Helpful gardeners for labour intensive crop planting

Potato Mash-Up

What are Grafted Tomatoes

• Grafting produces growth and fruiting of one plant on the rootstock of another.
• Currently over half of tomatoes grown commercially in the UK have been produced on grafted stock
• Grafted veg will grow when the days are shorter and the weather is cooler so they are easier to grow outdoors
• Tomatoes are very tender perennial plants and stand up well to grafting

Suttons and Dobies

• Suttons of seed fame are contacting all there trade customers with a new product offering for sale in 2012. ‘ Turbo veg’ are claiming up to 75% more crop from the Grafted Tomato plants that they will be offering for sale.
• 4 varieties including ‘Elegance’ and ‘Zebrino’ will be available using a new process that grafts above the first true leaf not below the cotyledons as most currently available grafts are.
• Suttons have identified a rootstock that has vigor and disease resistance missing from the scion (graftee). It claims to have greater vigour, higher yield, longer cropping and better disease and pest resistance.
• Following success with tomatoes you may want to try grafted Sweet and Chilli Peppers, Cucumbers, Melons and Aubergines
• Two plum-fruited varieties ‘Dasher’ and ‘Sunorange’ are available on one plant! Not my cup of tea!

See our Tips for growing tasty Tomatoes

You can learn to graft your own tomatoes from watching this you tube video (but why would you want too?)

MAIN PHOTOGRAPH Tomato by photon_de, on Flickr under creative commons license 2.0

March 11th and today I have finished harvesting my Leeks from last year. St Davids day whose symbol is the Leek is celebrated on March 1st every year so I am a bit behind the times.
I have also sown the 4th and last batch of this years seeds for indoor germination.
I may try some direct into the ground in early April.

Leek Easy Tips

• Prizetaker will be ready to harvest from September until December.
• Musselburgh I have sown for a later crop in November – February 2012. (It seems strange to be thinking about what to eat in 2012 but forward planning is part of gardening.
• I will not grow my Leeks in the same soil as the crop I am just harvesting just in case of fungus.
• I added some horse manure late last year and have a good moist soil bed ready when the seedlings need replanting.
• I will hoe and earth-up the stems to get a longer blanched stem. This was something I forgot to do last year.

 

Canny Leek Growing is a book available from Amazon by Dan Calderbank that describs the best methods of growing leeks for culinary use or for exhibition, together with the historical development of this garden crop. Dan has developed his own leek strains and new methods of cultivation.