Hedgewizard's Lunchbox

I've just had the most revolting experience. For a while now I've been making my own yogurt on and off, using an EasiYo flask assembly. I like the EasiYo, and not just because it sounds like a fond farewell from a lovable street character from some gritty but ultimately facile cop drama set in Detroit; I like it because there's no faffing about with temperature checking. The starter goes in at room temperature, and you fill the jacket with boiling water and leave it to mutter to itself for eight hours. And that's it.

Yogurt is a clever beastie, oh yes it is. A litre of boiled and cooled milk (or a carton of sterilized) into a litre of creamy yogurt? Bargain! Usually a couple of spoonfuls of one batch can be used to start the next, and so on until eventually you leave it too long or something odd gets into the mix. Made this way, natural unflavoured yogurt is sweet and creamy with a fresh, tart tang to it. It goes a little more sour as you store it, but all the same it's good for at least four days in the fridge.

My question is this; why, when it's so easy to make and so good to eat, do the supermarket own label ones taste so irredeemably vile?

Stop Press - Mousie Innocent!

But who is this creature with blighterish paws
And an innocent seed in its blighterish jaws?
He's as hungry as Garfield and big as a house -
There's no doubt about it! It's the Kitchenwitch Mouse!

The recent disappearance of an entire bed full of peas had me incandescent (or perhaps leguminous) with impotent rage, but I read with some small comfort that I wasn't the only one to have this problem. Kitchenwitch's experience, though, set small bells of disquiet tinkling softly in my subconscious, and it wasn't until I was ready to re-sow the peas (this time pre-soaked for a speedy getaway) that what was bothering me finally emerged shivering from the warm blither that is my head into the cold light of reason.

Mousie leaving courthouse, yesterday

Blighterish paws. As in, there weren't any. A whole bedful disparu, and not a single sign of blighterish paws - and a lack of blighterish paws meant that a mouse was really no more likely than... I don't know, wolves. A quick scan (only a quick one, mind you) of the garden revealed no spilled picnic baskets or bloodstained red cloaks, so wolves seemed equally unlikely. So (a nasty feeling began to dawn) could it be something else? I lifted a spadeful of soil from the empty bed.

The soil seethed - no, boiled - with red ants. My nemesis!* The whole damned bed was a giant red ant nest, and the only reason I hadn't seen it was because their entrances were down the joins between the edging boards. Damn our light, sandy soil which is so easy for them to work!

If there's anything more likely to move me towards thoughts of a murderous and non-organic nature than ants in my raised beds, I have yet to find it. Moving them on was out of the question, so now a nice bedful of peas is warming its way steadily towards joyful germination and the ants are leaving them alone because they are too busy supping greedily on a paste of honey and borax powder provided lovingly by me. Borax is a naturally-occurring mineral and I think counts as organic but I've had come trouble finding this out... perhaps this should be the year of zero tolerance to ants, if I can summon up the energy.

*Second only to the badgers. And the moles. And the rats, and the caterpillars, and... oh, what was a talking about again?

Edwardian Supersize Me

I thought I'd trumpet for a moment or two, like a baby elephant stranded on a floodbank, in case anyone hasn't heard about this programme. Repeated on Wednesday next on BBC4 as part of their "The Edwardians - The Birth of Now" season, this was a very entertaining and quite shocking look at what the rarified stratosphere of Edwardian society troughed through on a daily basis. The entertainment came from fronting the show with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, both fantastically witty and famously up for it, and feeding them an Edwardian diet for a week by the end of which they're both wide-eyed and frantic. Worth watching, just to see a rather drunk Perkins threaten Coren with "the ultimate punishment - a bloody jigsaw".

The silver thing is a duck-press, and you don't want to know.

Breakfast
Porridge
Sardines on Toast
Curried Eggs
Grilled Cutlets
Coffee & Chocolate
Bread & Butter
Honey

The reason that I mention this on the blog is that it provides snapshot proof that things can change. Although it's been pointed out that the diet featured in the programme was only eaten by a tiny minority, make no mistake that this tiny minority ruled the country and indeed most of the world - and they had their minds changed. They said John Harvey Kellogg was a nutter at the time (and, okay, maybe he was) but within a couple of decades they were all munching away on American-style breakfast cereals having discovered, much to their surprise, that bowels were not just God-given pouches in which to carry around several pounds of partially-digested meat.

So it's been, a century later, with organic growing and eating; to begin with, it was derided as a senseless fad. Surely there could be nothing wrong with the present system that a few new chemicals couldn't sort out? And surely pesticides, that most wronged class of chemicals, could simply be washed off food with plain water to be whisked away into the drains and therefore out of existence? But finally we are realising that the natural world is much more complicated than we thought. Those pesticides end up altering fertility levels of animals in the water courses, then in the ocean, then finally in land animals such as humans - and that's just one example. Everything - everything - has a cost, and as we work it out... attitudes will change again.

PFJ launch looms

Now that I've had a chance to read up on food co-operatives on CAN, it's time to get a few more bodies together and bite the bullet. Tonight is my first visit to the West Dorset Organic Gardening Group so being pushy me, I'll be asking if any of them would like to join. There are eight families registered for interest (around 20 people) and I'd like another four before we start - but it's time to blow the whistle and wave the green flag on the Piddling Food Junction. I've added a handful of relevant links to the right hand column of the blog until things are under way.

Seems clear enough to me...

And the American version. er...

Chainsaw Whore

Oh yes, that's the Hedgewizard - money for nothing (and your chippings for free). This morning saw me up bright and early to brave town before the market madness began; coachloads of pensioners from Bournemouth who come for the day, buy a cup of tea and a dozen pansies, and then coach back home again. The only people who seem happy with this are the coach operators, since the marketeers all hate it. Except the bloke who sells the pansies, obviously.

Google. What would we do without it?
Wait - isn't that Anita Dobson?

My foray into town was occasioned by a request from a member of the local LETS scheme for some chainsawing. LETS, in case anyone's not familiar with it, stands for Local Exchange Trading Scheme and is basically a cashless trading co-operative. It works well enough as far as it goes, but our local scheme suffers from a fundamental flaw in that goods exchange at their sterling rate, transferred directly to LETS points (here called Marts), while wages are paid at a standard 5 Marts an hour (unless you're an expert at something). This is all well and good, but sadly drives away anyone who gets paid substantially more than £5 an hour unless they get very clever about charging, as with some folk who offer (hypothetically) a massage lasting an hour at 30 Marts. "It's not the time," they say, "it's a 30 Marts massage." See? Clever, and this bit that really annoys me is that because it's not real money people are willing to pay them. Regardless, LETS schemes always seem to be full of arts and crafts people (money-poor, time-rich) and very short on plumbers (money-rich, time-poor). There are exceptions of course, but sadly I've never been a member of one of them.

But I digress. Chainsaw in hand, I wandered round the corner into the cul-de-sac to which I had been summoned, not too sure of what to expect. The delightfully dotty lady who had called me wasn't sure what sort of tree it was, and had been very vague about how big it was on the phone. "About as big around as my hands joined together" was the best description I could get out of her, but she seemed disinclined to tell me exactly what she meant. Hey ho, thought I.

As I came into the cul-de-sac my heart sank. There at the end of the road stood a mature - I don't know, cypress-cum-leylandii thing. It was forty feet tall if it was six inches, and had a very spreading habit at low level that would have made it very difficult to work at. Here and there shadowy entrances into the foliage strewn with crisp packets indicated that it was the favoured haunt of many a local urchin. Surely I wasn't being asked to cut this down?

I rang the doorbell and after a long pause, said dotty old lady answered. At first I thought she was suffering from some terrible skin contagion, but as I was peppered with crumbs when she said "hello" I realised that it was actually shortbread debris, enthusiastically consumed. "I was just having a biscuit," she said, unnecessarily. "Shall I show you the tree?"

With sinking heart I agreed that this might be a good idea, and was relieved when she stepped outside and turned in the opposite direction to the massive specimen. She walked a few steps to a small patch of gravel bordering her driveway. "Here it is," she said, pointing.

I could see nothing. "Um, where?"

"There, look."

I followed her trembling, crumb-encrusted finger and at length discovered a slender naked trunk in the border. It was eight inches thick - no problem there - but hardly twelve inches high. I straightened up. "Er... this?"

The lady explained that the stump had been there since they moved into the house, and that her husband was worried he might hit it when reversing his car into the driveway. He had never done so, but was worried he might. I said I could understand that, and politely asked how long they'd been in the house for. Eight years, came the reply. Hmm. I know it takes me a while to get round to things, but eight years?? Anyway, two minutes later and I'm on my way home having asked for 7 Marts in payment; two for the actual work, and five for the travel. I'd have asked for more... but she did offer me a biscuit!

Missing, presumed moused

I'm thankfully not referring to the Hedgewizard's nuts, but to the Hedgewizard's peas. This year I was surprised by very low germination rates with my first load of peas - so low, in fact, that they're hardly there at all. Two peas, in a bed of maybe fifty. Hmm, thought I. Perhaps it's been too dry - so watered nightly for ten nights, and nada. After deciding to take a risk and dig a few up to see if they were rotting or something, the horrific truth dawned.

There are no peas. None.

Those thieving little bastards! Right. Remedies.

I don't care if you are a bloody gerbil. You're still for it.

1. Possibly module-grow my next lot. Trouble is, I want to grow a lot. I'll chuck this idea away I think...

2. Plant a catnip patch on the other side of the path, insuring that N2C will be there even if he isn't entirely... there. Hmm. Trouble is, the great ginger lump will kill the plants before they can be established so I'll have to protect them with a holly mulch for a month or two. And I wonder if there's any rain forecast? (Checks mirror and rubs frantically) ...not for another week yet, apparently. This is a good idea for the future though, so I'll pot out my catnip plants and let them come on a bit before taking them off the suspended shelf - N2C hasn't worked out how to get up there. Yet.

3. Chopped holly mulch on top of newly pea-planted bed, as recommended by Alan Titchmarsh. I was hoping to avoid this, but it looks like my best option: shredder, secateurs and band-aids at the ready!

4. Wait! I'd forgotten that I half-inched a "flat" of modules from a local grower (actually it was an old one and he says he doesn't reuse them, so perhaps it's more like quarter-inching). That settles it; half into the ground under holly, and half in modules in the tunnel. Ahhh. Result.

A lot of weather we've been having lately...

I'm finally reduced to talking about the weather, which I suppose makes me a naturalized Brit (I was actually born in Ireland). Or rather, about forecasting the weather.

I've actually got rather good at weathermancy, and using my patented system of suspended seaweed, human hair and small mirrors* I am now able to predict rainfall almost fifteen minutes ahead. For longer-range forecasts however, I have to rely on those clever meteorologistical chappies. (although they laugh at me and my seaweed - and they use meteors! I mean what happens if they want to foretell the weather when it's cloudy?) (Huh, I've just answered my own question. They just say, "it's going to rain".)

Organic seaweed, petrochemical bottle.

But which one? I can't listen to the BBC radio weather, as they clearly think everyone who's anyone lives in the SouthEast - no, scratch that, in London. Local radio ought to be a better bet since they're only eight miles away, but they can't even get what the weather's doing now right, which is something of a standing joke round here. The Met office (or BBC TV weather) should be really good, but for some mystical reason the weather they stick right on top of us on the map is always wrong - for a better estimate I have to read the weather for northern France. Plus, all of these options only go a day or two ahead.

A while ago I found a site called MetCheck which seems to be much much better at actually getting the weather right. You can go to your own locale and then bookmark it, so with one click you're getting the local forecast - just like at the Beeb, except right more often that not. Apparently this is down to them taking satellite data from NOAA in the states rather than just relying on Met office data, but I think a lot of it is how the information is presented. You can see the uncertainty involved, and it's sometimes a bit comedic watching the forecast change as an event comes up. It's going to rain on Tuesday evening! No, Tuesday morning! No - Wednesday night... oh wait, the front's stalled over France. Maybe Thursday?

Sadly, it's not going to rain at all down 'Edgewizard's Way. A smattering on Thursday, but not even enough to bother carrying a brolly for. What bloody good is that going to do my peas, eh?



*The seaweed's for rubbing on, and the small mirrors are just so you can see the human hair properly without hurting your back.

Newspaper pots

Another first this week, fuelled by my reluctance to use products made using peat which can't really be viewed as a renewable resource since it forms so slowly. I had seen these mentioned before on self-sufficientish, but frankly it looked a bit of a faff. String and jam jars? I'm all for recycling, but no thanks!

Without resorting to origami, which frankly ought to be illegal in my humble opinion*, I managed to find an excellent alternative method which just involves folding and using half of a double sheet of tabloid produces dinky little pots just a little larger than standard peat pots. I found the method on Wizer's website - thanks Wizer - and there's an older version on Geocities in case you'd like more photos.



Having done a dozen I've got it down to about a minute and a half each, and once the compost is in they behave themselves very nicely. Besides, aren't they cute? Awww.




*WP says I have to point out that although I have many opinions, none of them are humble.

Of Bands, and Grease

No, nothing to do with the hunt for the latest Danny Zucko nor even to do with my own experiment in S&M gardening*. This is much more dull.

Having tackled three of my Five Dreaded Tasks over the last week I decided to tackle a job from the opposite end of the spectrum; a minor task that would reap considerable rewards. I'd previously laid 50 metres of 16mm black plastic pipe round all the recently planted fruit trees, and the last thing I needed to do was punch little red micro-dripper caps into the tube either side of each tree. A doddle, despite my having lost the special tool for the job, and all done in twenty minutes. There aren't many gardening jobs you can say that about!

The point of the drippers is that once I mulch round the trees (this weekend), they'll deliver water right under the mulch where it can't evaporate away and so sloo-owly that there's no run-off; the tree gets the lot. The pipe is connected to my mains supply through a clockwork timer so that I can't forget to turn it off, and I'll run it for an hour twice a week right through this growing season, and in prolonged dry spells for a further few years until the trees are really going strong.



The problem was, while I was in there I was incautious enough to examine one of the trees and found ants already farming aphids before the leaves are even open properly. This Makes Me Cross. Option 1 would have been to go for the old borax and honey trick, but I decided to go for option 2 and apply grease bands instead; stops more than ants, no poisons required, and more environmentally friendly (if you can ignore the manufacturing process). Cue much fiddling about with string and transferral of "non-drying glue" (read: evil brown stupidly sticky gunk) to hands. In fact, I defy anyone to put grease bands onto even a perfectly cylindrical object without getting their hands covered in the wretched stuff. Cue much mime-style flapping of paper-encrusted hands.

"But it's all right," thought I, "because there'll be something on the packet that tells you how to take the stuff off skin, right?" Right?

Wrong.

Agralan grease bands are Evil because the manufacturers do not want you to get the stuff off your hands. They want you to besmear every inch of your body with it, and then get the box stuck to the front of your head and walk around like that for ever, a living advertisement for their Evil Product.

But not me, oh no. For behold, I have A-level chemistry and have been farting around with it ever since (perhaps I should write a separate post called Making a little knowledge go a long way). I know about solvents.

First off there was soap and water; no dice. Ah well, I hadn't really thought it would be actual grease, it was just worth a try. Next up the old mechanic's standby, washing up liquid and caster sugar - basically just the first option on acid. Again, no result apart from rendering the nail brush inoperable, perhaps forever. Now methanol; no - except I'm now a little flammable. d-Limonene (a constituent of orange oil); no, and since the stuff is marketed as "sticky stuff remover" I'm now a little worried.

But wait... I remember lab days, cleaning glassware. Brandy Anderson, he of the occasionally burning hair and strange speech patterns, said that if something didn't come clean with hot water or cold acetone then you might as well throw it away. Acetone = nail varnish remover. And it worked, leaving me 95% adhesive free (just slightly tacky in more ways than one) for the remainder of the evening.

My point is, why - why - would any one make a product that is bound to get all over their customers, and not tell them how to get the stuff off? I've sent them an e-mail on the subject, and if they can read it we'll see what they say. Trouble was I was still a bit tacky...


Deear Aggrlllllan ,,,, ,
I NOticce thhat thhe paackklaging onn ... (etc)

Update: For a wonder, Agrilan e-mailed me back the same day to apologise for the omission, and to advise me that vegetable oil followed by washing up liquid is the method they recommend. D'oh! With a bit of luck someone might actually remember to put that on the pack the next time they update it...

*Which was actually my mother's fault. When asked what I would like for a housewarming present I said something for the garden, and she said she knew just the thing; "some of those little S&M things". I must confess I was intrigued but on opening the box I found, not a XXXXX nor a XXXXXXXXX, nor even a fine pair of XXXX XXXXXXs, but a rather twee set of terracotta plant labels. She meant, of course, M&S. Bless.

The Perils of Bonfires

Some of the hazards associated with burning things are well known, such as smoke inhalation and accidental self-immolation (oh, look it up), but there are other dangers as well. Such as deciding that your garden clothes are too smoky to bring into the bedroom and leaving them on the foor of the utility room overnight, and putting them on again the next morning.

And experiencing a prickly sensation around your thigh.

"Bugger," thought I. "A bramble in my trousers."

It seemed to fall down a bit, so I jiggled the trouser leg gently to dislodge it, while doing up my waistband. To my surprise the prickly sensation moved upwards, and cut around to the rear. There was now also a definite warm quality to it, and the full horror of the situation dawned. I let go of my patented Girly Shriek.

There was Something In My Trousers.

Surpressing the images of hairy things with altogether too many legs that my trusty paleocortex threw up for me, I clamped one hand over the scratchy and now definitely furry object and then released it again in a hurry. Don't clamped small animals tend to bite, or sting or something? I've only seen this happen in Disney/Pixar collaborations before but given the circumstances I doubted a comedic outcome was likely and so shuffled hurriedly outside, where I dropped my trousers with an enthusiasm I can remember vaguely from my student days. Out hopped a mouse and legged it in the opposite direction, looking marginally more distressed than I was.

Why is there never a pussy around when you need one?

Five Dreaded Tasks

"So," said Hedgewizard, trying hard not to look as if he cared either way, "Side by side, or would you prefer either end?"

Kiwi vine in someone else's garden, yesterday

WP looked at the kiwi plants I had in my hand, and then at the wall. Kiwi vines are fairly distinctive beasties, with large pale and hairy leaves. In warmer climes they're grown onto pergola-type structures so that the fruit hangs down for easy harvesting; here, they're going to be trained along wires on my south-facing wall which is the only position they might actually fruit properly. I've got twenty-one metres of brick-and-flint wall, but kiwis take up to six metres each making them quite a bit space investment. Worst of all since the wall isn't in the working garden, technically they come under the purvue of the Artistic Director, to whom I happen to be married. Hence the question.

However, the question is heavily loaded (although I'm pretending it's not). Up at the west end of the wall the soil is absolutely crap and full of rubble, perfect for the Brown Turkey fig tree gifted to us by the in-laws, which apparently will not fruit unless it believes that every summer might be its last. At the east end of the wall lie the remains of a raised bed from the 80s, neglected for twenty years and now a bank of brick-strewn grass with leggy shrubs and brambles. I have successfully ignored this bank for eighteen months and the world has not ended. If WP says "side by side" the two kiwis go in the middle, and the bank can safely be ignored until the panic when the peach trees arrive in the autumn; if she says "either end" then the bank must go, today, now, and I'm in for a world of hurt.

"Hmm," says WP. "I don't know. What do you think?"

"It's up to you," I say, as convincingly as possible. "I don't really know either." Except I do. It's glaringly obvious to me that putting the two kiwis together will separate the peaches and cause a bit of a drop off in yield. Plus, it'll look odd. But do I say this? Do I consign myself to a fresh sinusload of dust and almost certain death by blisters? Do I heck. If WP makes the wrong choice it's her fault and I get off light. I'm such a coward. "Your call."

"..." says WP.

"Hu..." she adds.

"Oh, I don't know. Either end." And with that, she walks away.

And so it is that HWz comes to attack one of the Five Dreaded Tasks, in a sun trap against a south-facing wall on what turns out to be the hottest afternoon of the year so far. No drinks are forthcoming from the kitchen, and N2S insists that any breaks I have are spent playing football with him - an activity that involves "falling down like the men on the telly" at any challenge for the ball. Happily, that was yesterday and the Task is now complete; the two ends of the bed are clearish, levelish, and two 1.5m-long spit-depth beds of compost-enriched soil are now ready for the shallow roots of the kiwis, which will also need to be sacked against the frosts for their first year. This leaves today free for putting in the drippers for the fruit trees, clearing off the grass round them and applying mulch, and apologizing to them for not doing it last year like I promised. I just hope top fruit has a forgiving nature!

Detoxing the Tunnel

It's been nearly a year now since the polytunnel went up (and what a learning curve that's been!), and it's time for the annual bath. Like everything else under the sun that gets rained on, tunnels eventually accumulate a coating of algae - nasty green gunk that's always worse on the north side. This can reduce light transmission into the tunnel by a fair old amount; I can't find any actual figures for this, but both my eyes and my non-linear light meter could detect the difference with no trouble at all so it must be quite a bit.

On the outside of the tunnel the only thing that matters is to shift the algae, so a very dilute soapy solution is fine. On the inside, however, it's not possible to rinse the surface off so well without everything being awash, and whatever you use will end up in the soil; for that reason a naturally-derived bactericidal and fungicidal cleaner (such as Citrox or Armillatox) is a better idea.

So out the clan Hedge went, along with No. One Son's friend Ed the Fashionably Late, armed with various technical equipment such as a mop and bucket (not much seen around ours as WP's opinion is that Dull Women Have Immaculate Homes). The digitametronic camera came too, fulfilling its allotted role in proceedings by running out of battery power just as the first shot was lined up. "It'll only take five minutes," I opined, as we foolishly entrusted the hose to No. One Son.



The lower reaches of Mt. Polytunnel were reached easily enough with the nice soft nylon brush I very occasionally use for the car, and hosed down straight afterwards (along with anyone standing even remotely close by) by N1S. The upper section of the tunnel is a bit harder if you have anything larger than the smallest models of course. There are various strategies for dealing with this, but my favourite idea was to "floss" it with a sheet dipped in the cleaning water and wrapped round a knotty old bit of rope, which is dragged from side to side over the spine of the tunnel as you might dry your own back with a towel.



The technique itself worked really well, although we needed to put elastic bands round it at intervals to stop it from slipping; what made it a bit more difficult (once the fifteen-minute argument about how the sheet was going to be secured had been settled) was that the two tunnel-flossers couldn't see each other and were both shouting at once, so that they ended up pulling at the same time causing the tunnel to creak alarmingly, and also causing me to shriek like a girl. Eventually I had to stand astride the wall at the top end where they could both see me, shouting "Left! Right! Left! Right!" like the oarsmaster on a slave galley.

Once we got into the spirit of the thing cleaning the polytunnel was quite easy, bar a bit of poking around with a mop at the seams where the film was originally folded by the manufacturer. Actual duration of my "five minutes" was around two hours, but it'll be quicker next time as now we know what we're doing.

...er, don't we?

Set Point

Onion sets make up a fair proportion of my annual seed purchase (or at least they bump the postage costs up), so I decided to try growing from seed last year. I wish I'd read the Garden Organic research first, because it was bang on the money. This was a big experiment, using around 250 GO volunteers to try growing in three different ways; from seed, from seed in modular trays, and from supplied sets. The results were quite clear cut. Growing from directly-sown seed was a disaster, since germination and early failure rates meant gappy beds - hell, I could have told them that since that's exactly what happened to me! Not a reliable way to grow onions. Module growing came out rather better as you might expect, but the onions still gave lower weight at harvest, and a lower proportion of the harvest fit for storage. It seems that sets are the way to go, with a nice nutrient store ready to get the plants off to a quick start as soon as conditions allow. So can I grow my own sets?



It seems so. I've discovered some instructions which I'll be doing this year, for planting out next. Basically this means sowing seed very closely in April (commercially precision-sown at 200 per linear metre), harvesting in August when the tops start to die back. Growing them too close means that they are dwarfed by the competition for root space, hence the little bulbs. The tops and roots are twisted off once dry, and then the sets need to be graded into small (10mm-14mm), medium (14mm-17mm) and large (17mm-21mm). The larger the set, the later you plant it directly into the ground; anything bigger than 25mm will probably bolt.

Sets are stored commercially at 5 or 6 Celsius under dry conditions, but I reckon they'd be OK in net bags in my garage or failing that, in a dry airtight box in my fridge. They can be heat-treated to sterilise them (which prevents bolting), but it's actually useful to have a few bolt because this gives you seed for the following year. Wish me luck - and if you've done it yourself, please feed me tips!

Learning Curve - Kale

Kale is now off the menu for this year, following an excellent lunch. Kale has an undeserved reputation as being tough and bitter - a veg of last resort, you might say - but this is largely due to growers that have no idea how to harvest it and simply cut undescriminatingly. In fact harvesting kale is something of an art form, since only smallish tender leaves from near the crown should be taken so that the whole thing ends up growing on a woody "leg". Overharvesting stunts growth, of course, so some older leaves should be left to let the plant photosynthesize. Come the warmer weather it starts to bolt, but the tender flower shoots are delicious steamed and tossed in herb butter - so stretch your harvest out until the arrival of mealy cabbage aphids reduces the viability of what growth you have.



The "learning curve" part of this is what none of my books told me - that you have to keep on top of kale even if you don't need to eat it just now. Half of my row of kale was cut more in the midwinter than the other half, the intention being that the remaining plants would give a heavier yield for when we had guests. However, these plants had an increased tendency to bolt (requiring remedial cutting) and when I finally came to lift all the plants for lunch today I got a surprise. Due to side-shooting the plants that I had cut more often during the winter had more growth of small leaf* (which is good to eat), and were inexplicably less affected by the mealy cabbage aphids. I weighed the yields from the different groups of plants as I trimmed and washed it, and the more trimmed plants were more productive by around a third.

Next year I'll be trimming all the plants every few weeks - the chickens are grateful for any unused trimmings in any case!

*Hello to any Googlers who've dropped in at my mention of "growth of small leaf". Like, sorry.