Most gardeners consider ‘the wonder of the world’ from time to time, and they would probably agree with BB (Denys Watkins-Pichford) that the full quotation below is a suitable epitaph:
The wonder of the world
The beauty and the power,
The shapes of things,
Their colours, lights and shades,
These I saw.
Look ye also while life lasts.
The quotation appeared in all BB’s books as well as on his tombstone. He developed a great love of nature from an early age when he roamed the countryside around his home, Lamport Vicarage in Northamptonshire.
The verse was copied from a tombstone in a north-country churchyard by his father.
The craze for growing mammoth onions continues. In fact the size of the ‘biggest’onion is increasing.
In 1975, the world’s heaviest onion weighed 4lb 15oz. The record onion in 2010 is 16lb 8oz!!
William Robinson started the craze 100 years ago when he began developing giant vegetables on his father’s nursery. He prefixed all his large vegetables with ‘Mammoth’. Onions were one example of his mammoth veg. The seed company grew and W Robinson & Son still sell the mammoth seeds, including onions, all over the world.
Research published in May 2010 has shown that when children are involved with vegetables in their play, they eat more vegetables. If they help grow, prepare and cook vegetables they are more interested in eating them.
plantkids
Professor Chutima Sirikulchayanonta, who led the research at Mahidol University in Bangkok, said: “We got the children planting vegetable seeds, taking part in fruit and vegetable tasting parties, cooking vegetable soup, and watching Popeye cartoons.”
The more we involve children in our vegetable gardening, the more vegetables they will eat and the healthier they will be!
TopVeg has (inadvertently) demonstrated that potato blight spreads in warm wet weather.
Last week was warm and wet, and for some reason a cloche had been put over half the potato row, so covering those potato leaves and keeping the rain off.
blight-in-uncovered-potatoes
The covered potatoes are healthy,
healthy-potato-leaf
but those plants left out in the rain have been decimated.
blighty-potato-row
This all happened in a week, and it demonstrates that blight flourishes in warm wet weather, and it is really worth applying a protective spray to potato crops.
New to the GrowVeg.com garden planner this month is Weather Station data for the UK and Ireland. This means that the Garden Planner automatically adjusts the recommended planting dates when a user enters their location and gets accurate email planting reminders without having to know their local average frost dates.
We think GrowVeg.com are the only company in the world to have the ability to produce customized planting recommendations looked up using Google Maps since they have done all the statistical analysis of climate data themselves.
Australia and New Zealand are next on the list and GrowVeg.com will also be adding additional plants to the Garden Planner in the next month or two.
Having this weather station data on Garden Planner is a great addition the UK!
We are proud to offer these unique, hand-made greetings cards for sale; created by Gill especially for gardeners.
card7
These delightful hand made cards have modern designs depicting gardens, and are on high quality card with envelopes, inside a cellophane bag. We are sorry we are only able to post these cards to the UK.
Card7 above is only £1.97 including postage & packing.
Click the buy now button to buy gardening card7 ( UK only).
Perhaps you would like a card especially for the head gardener – or maybe the undergardener! Whatever, Gill will personalise the cards if required, with:
names
dates
greetings
special messages.
If you have a simple message, the total cost for a personalised card will be £4.55. Please contact us with your requirements by emailing topvegetables@googlemail.com and we will give you a quotation.
A collection of 4 gardening cards costs £5.00 including postage (UK only).
heart-collection
Click the button below to buy the collection of heart cards now:
Eliza has experienced leek rust for the first time & has asked TopVeg how this can be avoided next year.
For the first year ever, our leeks have rust disease. Have you any advise for the prevention of this disease for next season? Also is it OK to eat the parts of the leeks that aren’t affected by the rust, i.e. the white part?
Would appreciate your comments
bandit-cleaned-leek
TopVeg answered:
We are sorry to hear about your rust problems on leeks. How bad is it? Mild symptoms do not render the crop inedible – we just cut the affected leaves off before cooking. The white bit will be fine.
There are several rust resistant leek varieties, such as Bandit.
Bandit-leeks-growing
Causes of leek rust are:
* crowded plants
* high humidity
* excessive soil nitrogen
* insufficient soil potassium
* poor garden hygiene – all plant debris must be removed from the beds so that the fungus has nowhere to hide. Burn effected leaves rather than putting them on the compost heap, just in case the heap does not heat up enough to destroy the spores.
Sloes are in abundance this year, so we are using 2 recipes:
sloe jelly
sloe gin
fat-juicy-sloes
Our sloes are big and juicy, and ripe for picking now. Choose a dry day and fill a basket!
sloe-basket
The sloe jelly is a wonderful dark purple colour and a great jelly to serve with game, particularly hare.
Ingredients
at least 1kg sloes
granulated sugar – 75grams per 100ml of juice
water to just cover the sloes
Method
pick out the good sloes & wash them
place in a pan & just cover with water
bring to the boil, then simmer, for at least 30 mins, till soft
pour mixture from pan through a jelly bag or equivalent sieve & leave over night to drip. Do not push anything through – just rely on the drip.
measure the collected liquid & add 75grams of sugar per 100ml juice
stir in a gently warming pan until sugar dissolved
then bring pan to the boil and keep boiling until setting point is reached. Takes about 30 mins. Test by putting a drop of juice onto cold saucer – if goes jelly like it is ready
skim the scum off then pour into sterilsed, heated jars and seal
Mick Cowan’s Sloe Gin
break the skin on the sloes – either by pricking with a pin, or putting in the freezer over night
3/4 fill a bottle with sloes
cover the sloes with gin (cheap is OK)
add sugar (white or brown) 0.5 pounds sugar per pound of sloes. More sugar can be added, to taste, later if needed
top the bottle up with gin
seal the bottle
shake the bottle every day for a week, then every Monday until Christmas
put the bottle away in a cool,dark place
strain the fruit out when it has been in the bottle for 6 to 9 months
rebottle, and store until the following Christmas!
We ate the sloes left in the jelly bag for pudding – mixed with a little apple jelly and lots of yoghurt. The sloes strained from the gin are excellent when cooked in a special bread and butter pudding.
These 2 recipes for sloes are easy, but rewarding!
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sweet-chestnut-tree
