Caped treasures…

Only one more week to go before my growing season at Growing Communities is done. So I know I should be frantically sharing new knowledge with you but please indulge me here, for today I harvested the first of the Cape Gooseberries !!

Remember them? I introduced this fruit to you a while back and wondered how they would grow here in the UK. Well, it’s been mixed. At Allens Gardens there is a bit of a race against time as the warm weather comes to an end (though September’s being surprisingly summery!), while at Springfield, where the ample greenhouse gives them the shelter and warmth they need, the plants have grown in leaps and bounds.

So today, in an act reminiscent of my childhood, I crawled under these bushes to hunt out the ripened fruit. And there I learnt that the pure pleasure of my memory hasn’t dissipated with age: finding a perfectly ripened gooseberry, safe within its protective cape, is as much like finding a treasure as it was when I was a kid. Of course my adult size makes it harder to crawl quite all the way under! And it was also a very different and, I can tell you, a quite dissappointing experience having to collect the fruits and not stuff them immediately into my mouth.

You can tell they are ready by the colour of the cape, which turns from green to an orangey-purpley colour, then dries. The drier the cape, the more delicious the fruit. Here they are collected, the delightful fruits of my labour.

As my time as an apprentice at Growing Communities draws to an end, you might have noted the quantity of salad that we are harvesting is diminishing. We’re getting around 10kg of salad a week from the sites compared to over double that a few months ago. That’s partly because we are turning the beds over to winter crops – mustard leaves, cabbages, perpetual spinach etc – though the colder months will also bring less growth…hence the end of this year’s ‘growing season’…

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 10kg | Basil: 120g | Tomatoes: 7kg | Cape Gooseberries: 400g

Is a tomato, always a tomato?

Today I picked 37 punnets of tomatoes. There’s something really special about reaching through the vines and snapping off the bright red fruit, always careful to break the stem at the right point so it can heal properly.* In characteristic Ru-style, we are growing some unusual varieties, all in the greenhouses at Springfield Gardens. Each variety seem to be fairly good producers, though today’s harvest will most likely be their peak.

Most conventional is Early Outdoor. A bright red tomato with creases at the top to distinguish it (at least from the other ones we are growing).

Behind it, you see Tigerilla, a rather more interesting tomato visually. More orange-y than red, with green tiger stripes, which colour up nicely as the fruit matures. And it does have a more intense flavour. Here it gets centre stage…

The Kondine Red is another conventional looking tomato. This is a tomato that Ru’s grandfather used to grow years ago. Hearing tales of how good it was, Ru hunted down these seeds with some effort. Though they haven’t quite met Ru’s expectations on flavour, (even his granddad says they aren’t as good as he remembers) I think these are still rather good, if not overly special.

The next is the most unconventional tomato I’ve ever seen. If you’ve agreed with nothing else I’ve said on this blog, you have to agree with me that this, the Calabash tomato, is the weirdest looking tomato you’ve ever seen, unless, of course, you’ve seen this variety before! This tomato, pictured here…

…is not a strange one-off, an anomaly amongst its peers…for here it sits in the company of its rather ugly kin…

So, why, you might ask, are we growing this strange-looker of a tomato? Well, they cook up to be pretty damn tasty, are a great conversation piece, and, as you will see by the harvest figures below, they are especially rampant producers.

Once all the tomatoes were picked, support worker Annie had to do some interesting handiwork to get each punnet weighed up into 500g lots.

Here, in the greenhouses, is where we do all the weighing and packing up of the salad bags and other bits and pieces when the weather outside is unpredictable - which, of course, is most of the time!

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 1 (Bruce is still at Climate Camp) | Volunteers: 5 | Support workers: 1 | Dog: 1

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 17kg | 2 punnets blackberries: 480g | Basil: 90g| Tomatoes: 18.5kg!! | Shallots: 9kg | Chard: 5kg

Tomato breakdown…
Calabash: 8kg | Early outdoor: 4kg | Kondine Red: 1.5kg | Tigerilla: 5kg

* Thought I would share the harvesting technique with you. Have to demonstrate on my tomato plants at home, as didn’t think of this til now…

The Calabash tomatoes can pose a challenge to this picking style, as they grow up around the stems but with a bit of careful twisting, it can be done.

What can it be?

You probably won’t believe it, but here, in all its glory…

…is a gooseberry! It’s the first of the crop on one of the five Cape Gooseberry bushes we’ve planted in the wild section at Allens Gardens.

You’d be forgiven for not recognising it as a gooseberry, as it doesn’t at all resemble the English variety - neither the plant nor the fruit itself look the same. I had to share this with you though, because I’m really excited by their arrival.  Growing up in Zimbabwe, it’s just the sort of gooseberry that I do know, having spent hours crawling under the bushes searching out the berries that had fallen to the ground. It might be obvious to you, but the reason they’re called Cape Gooseberries, is not because they hail from Cape Town (as I thought when I was a kid) but because the berries, which ripen to a wonderful orange, grow within a small cape. Protecting them from the birds but not from me and my sisters who just couldn’t get enough of them! The cape also protects them from insects and other creepy crawlies when they fall to the ground, which means they can lie there and ripen to sweet, delicious, perfection.

Growing them at the site is a bit of an experiment. We’ve planted them in a really warm spot which gets a lot of sun. They seem to be doing really well there, in fact better even than the ones we’ve planted in the greenhouses at Springfields. Though, having said that, I hope I don’t jinx them - will have to see how they are tomorrow when I go to the site. Crossing fingers that they are still ok!

Summer pruning…in the rain

All along the central wall at Allen’s Gardens the fruit trees have been sending up shoots. Apples and pears in training. The trees are small but they already have fruit. They’re a little extra sideline on a site that’s mostly about salad, doing their bit for the biodiversity so necessary in a well rounded organic site.

Ru is back today. And with him comes a flood of volunteers, despite the unpredictable weather. Perfect timing as it means that while they plant up the new beds, Ru teaches me about summer pruning. A bit ironic as it hardly feels like summer – certainly a common cry at the moment – but the time is right as we’ve gone past midsummer, so there’s unlikely to be too much growth (gulp! can’t believe my stint here is already half over…). Summer pruning means we tidy up the trees and make sure they are growing the way we want them to. They’ll take a bigger pruning during winter.

We pull back the netting that’s been protecting the trees from the squirrels and birds and Ru shows me how to cut the new upright shoots back ( = you sharpen your secateurs nice and sharp and make a diagonal cut just above a leaf. It’s got to be really clean and well sloped so that it doesn’t rot ) and train the horizontal branches by tying them to the wires attached to the wall.

Along the wall, the trees are being trained in what is known as an espalier shape. This means they grow up close to the wall and are trained along the wires. In the bed away from the wall, we have a couple of stepover trees, trained to be low enough to, you guessed it, step over. It seems strange to have the trees so low to the ground but it means that we can plant salad plants around them and they don’t make much shade.

The branches of the tree are weighted down with a brick to keep them low. On this bed we are growing Red Orache.

It’s a strange job because you cut back all the upright shoots, take a step back to inspect your work and then see all the ones you’ve missed, despite being sure you had gotten them all the first time. It takes me all morning. All that’s cut away gets put into the compost.

One of the trees seems to have a bit of disease. We consult a tree book but can’t find the cause. Anyone have any ideas?

We then have a belated birthday cake for Ann-Marie, served up with fresh lemon balm tea.

After lunch everyone cracks on with the harvesting, determined to get it all done earlier than we have been. It’s amazing that however much we decide to harvest, we always seem to get away at the same time. With a record 20kg of salad to pack this week, we surprisingly manage to finish by 7.15, just a little earlier than usual, with a little help from a friend of Annie’s, one of the support workers. It would have been even earlier but we were kept longer thanks to the wonderful glut of black currants at Springfield. I wonder how much more they’d be enjoyed by the lucky consumers if it was known that Nat and Bruce spent over an hour in the rain picking them all – truly deliciously local.

Weekly stats…
Grower: 1 | Apprentices: 2 | Volunteers: 4 | Support workers: 1 | Helping friend: 1 | Dog: 1 | Fox: 0

Harvested from the site…
Salad greens & edible flowers: 20kg | Chard: 6.25kg | 10 punnets of black currants: 3.5kg + loads more which we didn’t package up as we ran out of punnets | 1 punnet summer fruits (red currants, black currants and logan berries): 300g | 1 punnet red currants: 350g | Mint: 30g | Basil: 30g | Thai basil: 30g