Root trainers are an aid to vegetable gardeners which help plants establish quickly. New root trainers are on the market and worth investigating.

Root trainers are long pots, which encourage the growing roots to grow down, instead of becoming a tangled mass, going round and round a pot. Root trainers allow young seedlings to be transplanted with minimal disturbance to the roots.

A compact rootrainers pack from www.ronaash.co.uk contain separate books of rootrainers that fit into the rapid drip tray, which will fit onto a window sill. Read More »

The UK’s next new vegetable is likely to be the Mooli.

This long white Japanese vegetable is a member of the radish family. It has a crunchy, slightly peppery flavour, similar to watercress. But unlike other radishes it’s as good cooked as it is raw.

The Mooli is also known as the Daikon, and was recently featured in the Great Big Vegetable Challenge.

The Daikon, or Mooli, can be found in Asian or Caribbean food shops, and some large supermarkets in London. Next year the new Mooli may be available in your local vegetable store!

TopVeg is a vegetable gardening blog based in the UK on Sunk Island - a fertile area reclaimed from the River Humber, in a rural, isolated part of Holderness. The skies go on for ever, above the flat expanse of farmland.

We are below sea level, so look up at the boats sailing up the river at high tide.

The wild-life is diverse.

• We have wading birds on the mudflats and skylarks in the pea fields with constant birdsong.

• The downside is that the squirrels, rabbits and deer come into our gardens for regular meals.

Our proximity to the sea, brings a maritime climate, which helps our vegetable garden.

• Temperatures remain mild, never dropping to those of our neighbours, nor rising as high as those in the middle of the UK. Our bay tree survives outside in a sheltered spot.

• We are always damp - thanks to sea frets, and evening mists from the river, which help the vegetable garden grow.

But the best thing about our location is the quality of the soil.

• It is a rich, alluvial, estuarine sediment; classified as gleyic–calcaric alluvial brown soils (Soil Survey of England and Wales, 1983). This soil is very deep, extending down for many meters.
  
• A disadvantage of this soil is that it is very heavy, so has to be treated with great respect. We cannot work it or walk on it when it is wet.

• But when treated sympathetically our soil grows wonderful vegetables in the garden.

  

  >Sunk Island is a very special place to be and TopVeg is firmly based here.

  This has been written for the Garden Bloggers Geography Project which is endeavouring to place all the gardening blogs in the world.

Saxon is a good all-round potato variety to grow in the vegetable garden, suitable for mashing, baking or chipping.

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“King Harry” potato is just what American organic gardeners, plagued with Colorado potato beetles, have been waiting for.
The “King Harry” variety of potato has been bred to have millions of tiny, sticky hairs covering each leaf. This creates a very unwelcome surface for landing potato beetles, so the beetles move on to another potato plot which has more beetle-friendly leaves. Read More »

Each variety of potato grown in the vegetable garden has its own particular length of time between planting and harvesting. Potato varieties may be listed according to the number of weeks they need to grow to become large enough to harvest.

• extra early potatoes
  • ready 10 weeks after planting
  • varieties include Lady Christl, Winston, Rocket Read More »

Bramley Apple Week (3-10 February 2008) celebrates the Bramley Apple which is the best of all cooking apples.

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So glad Freddie of the GreatBigVegetableChallenge likes rhubarb, and has been eating it straight from the vegetable garden. Read More »

Barney Bardsley talks exclusively to TopVeg about her new paperback “A Handful of Earth: a year of healing and growing”.

Intrigued by the book, we were keen to explore Barney Bardsley’s relationship with vegetable gardening, and are most grateful to Barney for agreeing to participate in the following e-interview:

• TopVeg: You seem to be a natural gardener! Do you believe that you possess inherent gardening knowledge, or did you pick up everything you know from reading magazines and working on your allotment?

Barney: I garden entirely intuitively. I just get out there and dig like crazy, making shapes and sculptures from the plants - pruning where I feel like it - feeling my way through. It seems to work. When I started, I read all the gardening magazines, and I still like “Kitchen Garden” very much, but mainly I just “go with the flow”. Other gardeners on the allotment give me tips and clues. We all share advice. It’s easy enough, if you don’t take it too seriously. Read More »

When choosing seed potatoes for the vegetable garden, determining what seed to buy is a difficult task. Here are ten factors to take into consideration:

1. How many potatoes do you normally use? Do you cook potatoes every day or once a week? It is a shame to fill the garden with more than you can possibly eat!

2. How much space is there in the vegetable garden for potatoes? Think about the other vegetables you are hoping to grow, and work out how long the potatoes will be taking up their allotted patch. Read More »