Vulnerable

Vulnerable

When you choose to garden without toxic chemicals your plants become vulnerable to insect attack. If you are at all identified with your crops you can feel under attack yourself. You might find yourself saying such things as “I put a lot of time and effort into that and now look at it “It is your food after all, you might even say something like, “dam it”.

However, before you go marching off to the shop to buy chemicals please look carefully at the picture bellow

I had been away for four days providing raw food cuisine at a festival with muriel and friends. When we came back our Brussel sprout patch was crawling with cabbage white caterpillars. What had been a few small caterpillars had in the few days away become an infestation. I am wishing that I had taken a picture then as it would have been a brilliant before and after study. I was too devastated to think of taking a photo. However, if you look at the scars on the lower leaves in the picture you can estimate how badly the plants were damaged. In fact, the whole crop was skeletal. And it crossed my mind to cut my losses and pull them all up.

I didn’t pull them up, trusting in the amazing powers of recovery that the cabbage tribe possesses. there followed a week of picking the caterpillars of by hand. It is amazing how cleverly they can hide at first it seemed that though I removed loads, they were back next day in undiminished numbers. Gradually though, through persistence they were visibly diminished, then just a few lingers, then the odd one or two then finally gone and my ragged patch began to recover. I guess it was a little over a month later I had that “oh my god” moment when I realised that the Brussel Sprouts had recovered beyond all expectation and We were going to get a crop after all.

The resulting picture is a great symbol of recovery of hope, of not giving up. Not only did they recover but (I don’t know if the picture really shows this) but with such tender new life

Another spin off of keeping to the “ chemical free way” is that I have a growing population of Ichneumon wasps. Look at the picture below. Not just an amazing insect in its own right, but also a valuable ally in keeping the cabbage white under control next year as these wasps predate on them.

If I had poisoned the caterpillars these wasps would have been killed off too, along with a small but highly significant part of myself, and my relationship with the environment, which brings us back to the beginning. Its…. vulnerable.

p.s I have just pulled this couple of photos of the internet. Our Brussels looked like this or worsre.

       

THE BEAUTY OF HERITAGE VEGETABLES

                                                                   

  THE BEAUTY OF HERITAGE VEGETABLES

Leeks and lettuce in their budding stage

This page is to introduce you to the joy of working with heritage plants. One of the pleasures of this pursuit is that you get to work with every stage of your plant's life cycle. The picture above shows some heritage leeks and lettuce, which have been allowed to grow onto the budding stage. What has happened so far is that we had a mixed bed of lettuce and leek which we harvested as a food crop. However, as we were  harvesting we were careful to leave the best specimens in terms of their type to go on to the next stage. 

The picture above shows the budding stage. The next phase (flowering) is very enjoyable, as the whole bed attracted so many pollinators; bees, butterfly, hoverflies, moths and beetles.

The second picture is of the final stage of the leeks life. It had grown so tall that I had to cut the head off to get it into the picture. So what you see here is the seed head and the roots. The seed head is still a little green, but I was running into very wet and windy weather so cut them a little early. They ripened up very well in a dry shed. Only when the seed heads have gone papery dry, and turned a whitish brown can you begin to rub out the seeds. It is surprising how abundantly just a few plants will provide seeds. However when you consider that leek seeds remain viable for a number of years, it is worth growing a good supply to meet your ongoing gardening needs. Furthermore, I like to have a surplus to swap or give away to my gardening associates, and have a few more again to be able to use some as a spice, where they work as onion seeds. Moreover, you need to have a minimum number to provide a viable genetic population. We saved about fifteen plants to twenty plants, which satisfied the above requirements as well as being a visually pleasing stand. It is nice to realise we wont have to bother saving seeds from this variety for a few years so we can save another variety of leek with out risk of cross pollination .Maybe we wont save any leek seeds at all for a year or two and have time and space for other things.

Another point of interest is that this variety of leek (Blu de Sol) was very willing to produce bulblets a couple of which can be seen as white balls amongst the roots in the above picture. I collected all of these bulblets up and have planted them, that was in he beginning of October. They are already very promising young leeks in the beginning of January.

These bulblets, and the abundance and vigour of the seeds speak to me of the determination of these plants to live. It speaks to me of the partnership between plants and our gardening ancestors,year after year, generation after generation, and that is the beauty of heritage vegetables.