Vegetable-growing leads to unpurchasable flavours

Press, 22 June 1978, Page 10

Vegetable-growing leads to unpurchasable flavours

GARDENER’S DIARY

Derrick Rooney

Flowers and foliage are where the fun is, but when gardeners get down, as the Americans say, to the nitty gritty it is vegetables that they look at. That is precisely what I will do this winter: look at a range of vegetables that will add to our diet, perhaps, a bit of flavour that you cannot buy. I choose my words carefully when I say “cannot buy,” because there are many vegetables that you can buy in name only; by the time they get from grower to consumer the flavour is gone, dissipated, and often, when they are mass produced and force fed with fertilisers, there is precious little flavour to start with. Sweet corn. for example, is a vegetable which, it used to be be said (and is still true), you should stroll down 'the garden path to pick and gallop back to the kitchen to cook. And asparagus: how can you compare a flabby, three-day-old bundle in a market with the real thing, cut fresh from the garden and put in the pot within half an hour?

Asparagus has the added advantage of being a perennial, and an attractive one at that. In summer it is a man-high fountain of filmy green foliage, and in autumn the manner of its dying is seemly, as the leaves turn first orange and then russet before dropping off.

Perennial vegetables, though there are precious few, have a strong appeal to the imagination, because most of them are quite decorative, and as they are harvested for a limited season they can be left to their own" devices to brighten a flower border for the rest of the year.

Asparagus is well known, and so are the huge grey leaves and thistle-like blue flowers of the globe artichoke (actually, it is a thistle). Put what about chicory? Its leaves can be blanched in spring, and the roots

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can be left to grow on; in summer they will make long spikes of blue, blue flowers. It is really a biennial, but if you prevent it from setting seed you can usually persuade it to survive for several years.

Only one variety (Witloof) is known here, but in Italy there are 60 or more, in all shapes and sizes (even some with red leaves). I wonder if any reader still grows seakale? This is a perennial member of

the cabbage family that grows wild on seacliffs in Western Europe and the British Isles. Even if it were not edible it could well qua'lfy for a place in the border, because it is a most handsome plant in summer, with huge silver leaves and, late in the season, clouds of white flowers. Its botanical name is Crambe maritima, something of a philological ragout: Crambe is from the Greek, ‘krambe,” meaning a cabbage, and “maritima” is Latin for “of the seacoast.” I used to grow it, but it dwindled away one wet winter to a wisp or two, and when we moved I failed to take any with me. I don’t know of any nursery from which it can be obtained now, but I suppose that if I had the energy I could rustle up some seeds from somewhere, such as Thompson and Morgan, of Ipswich, or Holtzhausen, of St Austell, Cornwall. Because it is a plant that grows in rocky, sea-

side places, seakale demands good drainage, but given this, and a dollop of manure (fish manure, naturally) it grows most obligingly well. The edible parts are the young shoots in spring, and these must be blanched before being picked. The method of propagation is by “thongs” — pieces of root about the thickness of a pencil and about as long as a piece of string (say 20cm). These are planted with the tops about two centimetres below soil level, and must have at the very least a full summer and autumn’s growing before they are ready to be harvested. I used to do this by waiting for a nor-west spell in August then covering the whole plant with a large flowerpot (upside down, of course): the kind that used to be known as chrysanthemum pots. A brick over the drainage hole kept out the light and helped to prevent the pot from being flattened by dogs or children. In a mild spring, the Albino shoots were big

enough to pick in three weeks or so; when the weather was cool, it took a week or two longer.

We used to cut them in bunches, with sliver of crown, like celery, and cook them immediately, treating them like asparagus and serving them with a little melted butter. And the flavour? Crisp, clean, nutty, and, not at all cabbagy. It is not a plant that you can grow in any quantity unless you have plenty ‘of room. Each crown provides only one cutting, but takes up" nearly a square metre of ground space in summer, so the yield is not high. But if you weren’t embarrassed to have chrysanthemum pots dotted about the borders, you could grow it as an ornamental plant, taking a crop in spring and leaving the root to grow on.

Nor is it a good proposition for a market gardener, except perhaps as a hobby: not only is it fiddly to grow and low yielding; it has no keeping power. If you do not believe that a vegetable can do a perfect imitation of flannel, try eating stale seakale.