It’s time to clean up the seed trays and plantpots.
I did buy a hundred 20 cell trays recently to start taking
early cuttings of lawn chamomiles for sale in spring and it was great just
having them there ready to fill with soil. The older pots and trays from last
year are in need of a bit of disinfecting though as they have been out in the
tunnel all winter. Add the fact the pots were put away dirty makes hygiene
extremely important for the new wave of seeds being planted. There are a lot of diseases that can easily
overwinter on old pots so it’s important to start by getting big bucket of
soapy water and a scrubbing brush and get cleaning the plastic trays.
It would be great if we could reuse all the plastic trays
and pots indefinitely, but they do drop
to bits after a few uses, even buying the heavier duty type as I did this year
they will still inevitably end up being thrown away, hopefully to be
recycled. I’ve tried growing seeds in
toilet roll tubes and newspaper rolls but they don’t do well for me.
As yet I haven’t ordered any seeds but I am thinking about
what we will be growing this year. I
always like to try growing something new. Last year it was lufas and the year
before that was asparagus. The lufa plants are long gone and didn’t leave any
cucumber shaped vegetables behind as I found the season wasn’t long enough for
them to mature. The asparagus on the other hand is coming back bigger and
bolder than before. It’s a few years until they will be large enough to pick
and throw straight into a pan of boiling water though (Some dedicated pickers
actually have the pan boiling before going to pick the spears) but when they do
they will produce every year indefinitely.
Perennial veggies
Asparagus are one of a large collection of vegetables that are
perennial plants. There is a wide range of fruit perennials too such as
strawberries, then fruit trees and bushes such as raspberries and
red/blackcurrants, but perennial vegetables sometimes get overlooked. There are a lot of benefits to these types of
veggies. The asparagus I have in the beds will mean that the ground doesn’t get
disturbed by digging. I can add mulch and compost to the top of the soil. There
is far less soil erosion in winter and the old unpicked shoots and plants roots
will be keeping the soil in place and the plants are now large enough to look
after themselves against any invading weeds.
I’m not sure why perennial vegetables aren’t more popular,
it might be something to do with being influenced by the farming industry who
like to produce the fast growing annual crops. Commercial growers rely on cheap
energy, once provided by horses and now by fossil fuels, to do all the turning
of the soil, sowing, weeding, watering, fertilising, harvesting and collecting
of seed that goes with growing annual vegetables.
This has reached such an extraordinary state of affairs that
the food we buy takes around 10 times the energy to produce as the energy it
gives us. According to research carried out by London’s City University (An
Inconvenient Truth About Food, Soil Association, 2008), its carbon footprint is
huge, due in large part to the use of man-made nitrogen fertilisers – a tonne
of which requires one tonne of oil and 108 tonnes of water to make, releasing
seven tonnes of greenhouse gases in the process. It’s a good reason to at least
put a part of the garden aside for both annual and perennial vegetables and
would be a good reason for some farmers to produce more perennial crops.
As much as I would like to go more perennial I find the
choices a little limited. There’s the
asparagus as mentioned, then we have rhubarb, kale (usually grown as an
annual), garlic, horseradish, globe artichokes and radicchio, but none of those
are something I’d like to eat every day. A scoop of mashed horseradish just
wouldn’t cut it on the plate on Sunday lunchtime.
We do have quite a lot of perennial herbs to plant in the
garden such as time, chives, sage, rosemary mint and you could even add the
walking onions to the list. Some perennial plants can get bitter if the leaves
aren’t picked young and tender. I for one wouldn’t like a pile of sorrel leaves
for dinner, I have tried to like them every summer but still think they make a
better ornamental plant than an edible one.
Sometimes I think the widest range of perennial plants we
have can be found in wild hedgerows. Yarrow, ground elder, damson, bramble,
watercress, mustard, chickweed, comfrey, nettle, vetch, sowthistle… the list is
endless. It makes me wonder why I even
bother planting the limited amount of choice we tend to grow.
Ask me again later in spring though. I’ll be out here in the
veggie patch planting the old favourites.
