Welcome to new vegetables

Press, 30 August 1985, Page 14

Welcome to new vegetables

Gardener's W DIARY i

Derrick Rooney

Broccoli is a group name which covers most of the winter cauliflowers, but in New Zealand its use is generally restricted to the multi-headed sprouting kind which has become popular in recent years. Nearly all the available kinds of sprouting broccoli have green heads, but a purple one is available. The strongly flavoured yellowish Calabrese, which is nominally perennial, used to be available here but has not been listed for some years, and we did not bother with broccoli for a long time because the available varieties have had poor flavour. However, we were impressed last autumn by a newcomer, Romanesco. This northern Italian variety has heads which are greenish cream and irregularly shaped, like coral. It is unusual, highly decorative

free place they keep for many months. You can bake Gem squash whole or stuff them. The seed is not available commercially but home-saved seed comes true if the plants were grown well away from other types of squash or pumpkin. Gold Nugget, which is similar but unstriped, is a commercial variety. New Zealand gardeners are becoming more adventurous in their vegetable growing and a number of “new” European and Asian salads have appeared here in the last few years.

Adventurous vegetable gardens

in the vegetable garden, and good to eat.

Sow Romanesco in late summer, and allow about three months for it to mature. While the weather remains mild small secondary heads will form after the main heads have been picked.

This broccoli likes to grow on into shortening days, and is at its best in late autumn and early winter. Frosts do not seem to improve its flavour.

Another newcomer in local vegetable seed lists is the naked-seeded pumpkin. This is a special type of pumpkin grown for its edible seeds. The plants and the pumpkins do not look any different from other types and their flesh can be roasted or steamed just like any other pumpkin, but the difference is in the seeds.

Normal pumpkin seeds have a hard outer covering which renders them inedible (even our hens do not show much interest) but the “naked” seeds have soft shells and may be eaten raw or (preferably) roasted like sunflower seeds or peanuts. Lady Godiva (who else) is a classic, nakedseeded pumpkin. Gem Squash, sometimes called Zimbabwe squash here, is a good pumpkin for small gardens (and small families). The plants are non-running and produce a large number (up to 20 per plant) of small, round, striped, golden-yellow squash from a small area. If stored in a dry, frost-

Choosing the right mixture of these and timing sowings for summer cutting can be difficult and one seed company this year has had the good idea of marketing a premixed seedling salad which includes an array of greens (and reds) — endive, corn salad, rocket, chervil, cress, mizuna, chicories, and lettuces. The idea is to sow the seeds in wide rows and harvest them in handfuls about a month later, while they are still very small. The mixture is marketed under the name mesclun, which comes from the South of France.

A good companion for mesclun would be a patch of spring onions or bunching onions (they are not quite the same thing). Ordinary main-crop onions are not worth growing in a home garden but spring onions give a quick return. Any kind of onion can be pulled while young and used as a spring onion, but bunching onions are a special kind that do not form bulbs but have long, white stems instead. The Americans call them scallions, and the French, ciboules. This year, for the first time, a variety with a red outer skin, instead of the usual white, is available.