Seeds and Veg

It’s planting season at last. Although we have enough runner beans saved from last year’s crop to plant out a whole field, there’s not much else, so that meant buying seeds. I put a bit more effort in that last year’s grabbing of packets from the racks in the garden centre, and the first batch arrived in the post recently.

These came from The Real Seed Catalogue, which has a great selection of proper seeds – none of your hybrid leeks bred for supermarket straightness here. Also, all this stuff should, in theory, produce usable seeds for future years. It all looks good on paper, but the proof will be in the eating and we have to wait for that.

It’s nice to be writing about growing vegetables, because unlike my recent highly controversial topic of children’s cutlery, there’s surely no way an army of clipboard-waving bureaucrats can stick their oars in and mess things up, is there? But wait, what’s this? There’s an official list of vegetable varieties. If a particular variety isn’t registered on that list, it’s illegal to sell it to ‘the public’. Needless to say, it’s expensive to get anything on to this list, what with having to pay for the hordes of ‘public servants’ needed to maintain this list, perform tests and tick the appropriate boxes. Then there’s the whole never-ending wonky vegetables fiasco. It’s probably best to ignore the whole lot of them and get back to the garden.

Here in vegetable plot #3, we have (from right to left) White Beetroot, Cabbage, Red Beetroot, Onion, and another row of White Beetroot. The first three were planted on the 27th of March, and in the beetroot rows the first seedlings have just appeared, I think – it’s hard to tell just yet, they might be weeds, but they’re in a straight line. The other two rows are newly planted today.

The strange arrangement of sticks is both so I know where I planted things, and to discourage the cat and dog from digging them up. I suspect the vegetable plots themselves are quite unconventional as well, being just rectangles dug out of the middle of the lawn, but the results have been perfectly acceptable in previous years. I don’t see any reason to make them raised beds, since the soil is extremely good, but they still have the advantages of raised beds, or at least the one I know of – you can reach everywhere from the side, which means you can plant everything closer together because you don’t need room to walk between the rows. Planting things closer together than the ‘experts’ recommend is a good idea anyway. Unless you’re trying to grow a giant version of everything to get one up on Fred and Percy at the village show, it’s a much better use of the available space to have things closer, smaller and tastier. Also, gaps are just places for weeds to grow.

Mind you, although I can’t help writing ‘experts’ in quotes and tend to ignore what they say, I have no idea what I’m talking about, so I wouldn’t advise listening to me either.