How to grow watercress (the easy-peasy way)

Hello Friends,

I was in the veggie garden early this morning, watering & chivvying a grumpy courgette plant, & I spotted that the watercress was well ready for a substantial haircut. We've plenty of salad at the moment, so I decided to make it into soup. Several people seem surprised that I grow watercress in the garden, but it is very easy. It's a myth that all watercress-growing requires a stream, or any kind of special conditions. All it actually requires is the following bit of kit:

*1 old washing-up bowl (If you've got an old skankrous one you don't want to send to landfill, perfect!)

*2 plastic flower pots (as big as you can cram inside the bowl)

*Potting compost

*1 pack of watercress seed ('Aqua' is the usual variety)

There is no mystery to this. Fill the pots with compost up to about 2 cms from the top & water it well. Sprinkle on the watercress seed. Cover it with a fairly thin layer of compost & water again, gently this time, so that you are not spraying the seeds straight out again. Now stand the pots in the washing-up bowl & fill the bowl with water so that it comes about two thirds of the way up the sides of the pot. This is your mini-watercress farm. Stand it somewhere sunny, but not in daylong full glare of the sun.

If you have naughty blackbirds who beak up your seeds looking for critters, you might need to commandeer something like this to protect them........

 

That's all there is to it. The seedlings will emerge & you will be surprised how tiny they are, but have faith because they will grow into a rather lush bowl of watercress. To start with, just cut the occasional few sprigs, & as the plants grow bigger, cut more frequently. Provided you don't cut the stems too near the roots, they will grow back & provide plenty of cuts. As the weather warms up, you may start to see little white flowers appearing. It's best to snip them off, as the plant will start to concentrate on setting seed rather than continuing to provide you with leaves.

If you tire of watercress sandwiches, scones & salads, and your watercress farm looks like it could do with rejuvenating, cut it back to about 4 cms & water well to give it a chance to regrow. In the meantime, use the big bunch you've just cut off to make some soup.

I barely bother to look at a recipe for soups these days, but I do know that most of my 'green' soups were originally based on recipes from the old 'Crank's' vegetarian cookbook, published in the early 80s. I have adapted them over the years & this is how I make watercress soup:

Ingredients:

1 tbsp olive oil

1 vegetable stock cube made up with 3/4 pint boiling water

1 large bunch watercress (leaves & stems, of course!)

2 small to medium onions (chopped)

1 potato (I use a modest baking potato size, so about 8oz) (roughly chopped)

3/4 pint skimmed or semi-skimmed milk (can make up powdered milk if you are being economical)

salt & black pepper

Method (such as it is......)

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan, add the onion & cook until softened. Add the potato, watercress, stock & milk & bring to the boil. Cover & simmer it for 20 mins or until the potato is soft. 

Don't be alarmed if the milk goes a bit Mount Etna & seems to split. This is quite normal. At the end of the 20 mins, remove from heat, cool slightly, season to taste, before blitzing with a stick blender into a beautiful smooth, pale green summery soup. If you are feeling a bit 'Oooh, get me, aren't I a fancypants', then add a swirl of cream when serving. This quantity serves 3 or 4 people (fewer if one of them is my husband) and freezes very well.

So, if you have never tried growing watercress because you don't live in the sort of property which has its own freshwater stream trickling through the garden, despair not! One old washing-up bowl, 2 plastic flower pots & a bit of potting compost is all you need to start your own mini-farm. I sow my first seeds in April, but have also sown again around now (July) to give me some watercress for picking through the autumn. If you only have a balcony, you can grow it......you can even sit the bowl on your back doorstep, as long as it sees some sunshine. Seeds are not expensive, as you will get a good few cuts for salad plus some soup, & you can feel a smug glow that you are not buying bagged supermarket watercress in a non-recyclable plastic bag full of gas.

That's all from me, but for fans of Albert Whiskers, I thought I'd include the latest high-octane action shot.......

........well, to be fair, he IS almost vertical in this one. He's supposed to be testing some new cat treats for a market research project at the moment. Suffice it to say that after the first few mouthfuls, he cottoned on to the fact that they are not his Brand of Choice & the remainder of the evening's testers were left strewn on the floor. I tried to pick them up this morning but they crumbled to mush.....clearly he'd been back & licked them all (ewwww....) but still concluded they weren't up t'job!  OK, well, I had better sign off this post & get on with today's mighty job list.

Until  next time,

C x

Albert Whiskers' Anniversary.

Hello Friends,
Well, I am so behind with everything, including my blog, as our wonderful camping trip to Norfolk was unfortunately followed for me by a fortnight of the most vile flu. It seems most odd that as someone who hadn't had flu for 30 years, I should then get it two years running, despite having a flu jab. Bah!! 

Now, I have many cat-loving friends & couldn't let Albert Whiskers' anniversary pass unmarked. 28th June was one whole year since Gotcha Day. Remember that early blog post about him escaping from his cat carry-basket just 0.7 miles from the Cat Rescue, attacking Steve & freaking out all the way home? Can hardly believe it's a whole year since we drove home wondering why we always seem to adopt the weirdest cat on offer. Albert Whiskers had been a street cat. He was un-neutered & in a poor state when he was handed in to the Rescue. He'd clearly had some nasty fight injuries to his face, which had received no veterinary attention. Even a year later, the fur has not properly regrown beneath his ear, & his eye is still slightly closed as a result of a nasty untreated cat bite abcess. Minus his 'family jewels' & with his own humans, a house, big garden, good food & plenty of strokes, he has blossomed into a genuinely lovely cat albeit wilful & attention-seeking. He is also the most absolutely bone-idle cat we've ever owned. I've put together a selection of photos which give a good flavour of how Albert Whiskers likes to spend his time. Don't think I am doing him an injustice. I searched our photo files long & hard for some action shots. These were pretty much the most energetic I was able to come up with..........

Well, justice is very important here at The People & Cats Republic, so before publishing this catalogue of indolence, I thought it only fair to see what Albert Whiskers is doing at this moment. In fairness, he could have been out watching for frogs, chasing other cats, indulging in a little ornithology, guarding the leek bed, frolicking in our wild patch, climbing the pear tree or any number of other busy feline activities................................ Umm, nope!

BUSTED AGAIN! And taking into account the close proximity of the catnip tub, I'm assuming he is somewhat 'herbally assisted'.
Oh well, it beats life on the streets of Eastwood. I'm sure he thinks it was even worth losing his man-cat assets to gain such a life of luxury.
If you are thinking of adopting a cat, do please give these older ex-street cats a thought. They make fab pets, given the chance & tend to get overlooked at the Rescues in favour of kittens. With his beaten up face, Albert Whiskers wouldn't win any beauty contests, but he's funny, affectionate & characterful & we've really enjoyed sharing our home with him over the last year. He's got some odd habits.....particularly nibbling people's tights, which is part of his attention-seeking behaviour, & some annoying ones, such as licking all the jelly off his chunks then refusing to eat them because they've gone dry. He's onto a loser with this one.......we have a zero food waste policy here which also applies to cats, so this might yet be a habit he decides to give up as a bad job. So there we are....a whole year of living with Albert Whiskers. We haven't regretted adopting him for a single minute, so let's hear it for rescue cats & the many cat rescuers nationwide who give their time to rehabilitating street cats to start them off on a new life.
Till next time,
C x

Veggie garden - June 2015

Morning Friends,
I thought I'd share a bit of our progress in the veggie garden today. I've already posted up some pics of our colourful, tangled flower borders, so now for the 'business end' of the garden. It's not nearly as pretty, but is quite productive if we keep at it.

This area provides the main veggie-growing space, with a long bed which we divide into sections, 2 large raised beds built from recycled railway sleepers & a lorry tyre, which was left behind by the previous owners with plenty more of their detritus, but which we pressed into service for courgettes & squash. We like to grow food, so we later extended the veg space into another bed just in front of the clematis arch, & of course, we also use our greenhouse for tender crops. I think we've probably got just under half an allotment in size, as well as 3 mature fruit trees, which we inherited. So here's what we're growing this summer, so far:

Autumn sown broad beans have done well. They did object to the Boxing Day snow, but recovered quickly, & we've been picking these for a week or so.

The lightly cooked beans are lovely tossed with pasta, lots of garlic & a splodge of olive oil. Surprisingly the New Model Army of local slugs & snails seem to have left this crop well alone, so all the more for us!

This bed has courgettes (Gold rush & Black beauty) in the front, a couple of tomatoes, then potatoes (Winston). The courgettes were sulking when I took this pic - they'd sat in pots for too long because of the cold nights, but fruits are starting to set now.

Runner bean  - 'Snowstorm'. Supposed to be a good variety for damp, cool, iffy weather because they self-pollinate. Sounded ideal for East Nottinghamshire, & doing fine so far. The recycled muslin curtain from that well-known Swedish purveyor of household goods is to deter our large population of sparrows. I love supporting them, as they are a sadly declining species, but they are incredibly destructive, so barriers are needed here. They don't eat bean leaves, but peck them & spit out the pieces.

Newly transplanted leeks. Tried Monty Don's method last year & it didn't really work for me, so have reverted back to the old fashioned dibbing. 1 leek per hole, then puddle them in with the hose. I will have to micro-net these later, as we have sadly been hit hard by the allium leaf miner pest this year. It's quite a new pest, but is spreading north. My good friend Helen was only telling me at the weekend about the problems of this pest on her allotment & I said we were lucky not to have it. The very next day, the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship went out to harvest the garlic & we discovered that we not only have it, but that it's had a bit of a rampant spring. The garlic was mostly ok  - big cloves & a decent crop........

....but the shallots were badly affected & had to be lifted as a damage limitation exercise. We've hung up the best ones to dry, but several had already rotted due to the activity of this pest. It's now sadly in the red onion crop too. The plants still look ok & they're not all affected, but we will still have to lift them before they are ready. That's the thing with growing food crops.....you win some, you lose some. It's soul-destroying with the effort put in, but that's nature.

The greenhouse crops seem to be off to a good start.

I've got chillies ('Heatwave'), peppers ('Thor'), as well as cucumbers & aubergines on this side, & 6 tomatoes ('Ferline') on the other.

This is one of the 3 Jalopeno chilli plants I overwintered on a bedroom windowsill. They all survived, so it will be interesting to see what sort of crop they produce.

I always like to see the first cucumber appearing, as it reassures me that I haven't raised dodgy plants. Cucumbers can be so moody - there's no end to things they don't like - too cold, too dry, too wet, not enough humidity, if there's an 'r' in the month, if you look at them funny, etc, but if you get good plants, then homegrown cucumbers are so lovely & juicy compared to shop-bought, plastic shrink-wrapped ones. 

The rest of my tomatoes are grown outdoors - a row of 'Ferline' grown in large pots.......

........always companion planted with a row of Calendula to attract pollinating insects (& because I like making marigold scones).
At this time of year, I always take it as a personal failure if I have to buy a lettuce, so I grow loads of salad - currently lollo rosso & 'Lettony'. We've a bit of a glut at the moment, but it's not a problem, as we do eat a lot of salad & when they start to bolt, I'll make them into pea, lettuce & mint soup for the freezer.

Other edibles? Well, I've got the beetroot planted out, a few cabbages, 2 troughs of spring onions, 1 of radishes & a carrot box, also watercress, a thriving strawberry tub & a fussy butternut squash plant. The herb garden is also nicely productive at the moment. The main crop rhubarb is doing well, even though I've forced it 3 years running, & fruits have set on our apple, pear & grapevine. As we had to lift the shallots early, we now have a decent sized raised bed to get something else in this month. I'm thinking maybe a couple of pumpkins, so as not to waste valuable potential food-growing space. No time to grow from seed, but will pay our village garden centre a visit & buy a couple of plants to grow on. I hope fellow veggie growers are having a good year so far. My sympathies to anyone else afflicted by crappy allium leaf miner. I'm not aware of any natural control methods for it.......or any chemical ones for that matter........I think enviromesh will have to be purchased to ensure future crops here at the People & Cats Republic. Grrr.

Till next time, which will be a celebration (?) of 1 whole year of Albert Whiskers, the worst behaved cat we've ever had..........
C x

Cheap & cheerful, not Chelsea!

Hello Friends,
It's a month or so since the Chelsea Flower Show, but I've been thinking about it quite a lot. I watch at least some of the TV coverage each year. I don't follow any sport, so it's sort of 'my' seasonal thing before the endless ping, pong, 'come on, Andy' (or whoever it is these days) of Wimbledon. As for footie, I couldn't even tell you when there's any going on, until the St George flags start appearing, of course. 

I always look forward to Chelsea. I've never actually been in person. I suspect the mere fact that it is Part of the Social Calendar & thus a Place to be Seen, plus rumours of £100 tickets puts me off. I enjoy the TV coverage of the plants & gardens, but not the 'celebrity' interviews. Over the years, there have been some fab gardens. I can't hope to reproduce them at home - I just don't have that kind of budget, but I do get ideas & sometimes I see a plant which is new to me, so there are always things to learn. One thing I don't like, is that the whole show garden concept seems very artificial. Most people don't go to the garden centre or nursery & buy in everything at full size & already in flower. The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that the only personal thing about these show gardens is the design itself. I would truly miss the joy of growing my own plants from seed or giving pride of place to a plant which is special to me, if not to anybody else. My garden is often tangled, in need of deadheading, full of weeds & it was 'designed' (& believe me, that's stretching it....) by me on a piece of A4 scrap paper with a tin of old felt-tips. One of the things that makes our garden special to me is that I have actually bought very few of the plants that are growing in it. This means it will always look like a muddly cottage garden instead of a 'Chelsea' garden, but it is worth it to look at so many of my plants & think about where they came from.........gifts, swaps, cuttings from friends, 'guerilla rescues', home-grown from free packets of seed, not to mention those stray seed heads which 'accidentally' shed a few naughty seeds into my handbag on a day out.

So here's a selection which have made their way to my garden for free......my favourite 4-letter word when it comes to gardening, & very easy to achieve.......otherwise my life would be pretty expensive.

This is a Hebe 'Heartbreaker' in front of a Heucherella 'Solar power'. I promise that this heucherella will be the only plant featured in this blog-post for which I actually parted with hard cash. It was worth it. The acid green sets off pink & purple plants perfectly. The hebe was a birthday gift this year.

More gifts - my nephews gave me this pelagonium at Easter a couple of years ago, the pink verbascum was among a planty birthday gift from my Mum, & the huge-flowered fuchsia from my sister. It looks thoroughly skankrous every winter, then miraculously reappears!

This emerging alium christophii was also a gift - I usually find these don't like the East Midlands soggy winters, but am hoping it will deign to survive - as was the cornflower-blue centaurea, bought for me on a family day out to celebrate my Dad's 70th birthday. It self-seeds easily, so my borders are now dotted with this lovely blue, in memory of a good day.

As soon as fellow gardeners know that you like plants (& I LOVE plants!), then the swaps, cuttings, saved seeds & random potfuls start arriving. Turn nothing away.......it could be something good. I love that I have plants from ex-colleagues & friends I no longer (or only rarely) see. An ex-colleague gave me this huge yellow scabious jobber, which flowers reliably every year at the back of a border, & also this purple aquilegia (she swapped them for a borage & a pink aquilegia, which was a better deal for me than her, as borage carks it at the end of the summer).

When keen gardeners know you are setting up a garden, especially a fair-sized one, as we're lucky to have here, the planty offerings start arriving. I've had some clumps of great stuff from my Mum (very keen plantswoman), including this pink hardy geranium & blue-tinged penstemen.

Similarly, my good friend Helen has provided me with some fab bits & pieces including this lovely purple iris, aquilegia 'William Guinness' (aka 'Magpie') & Poppy 'Tangerine gem', the orange buggers' I can't even get to germinate. When they appear each year, I think of her growing them for me in yoghurt pots on her kitchen windowsill & it's just a whole lot more personal than buying it all in fully grown.                                                           

 Then there's seed swapping.....endless possibilities here. These maroon coloured aquilegias came from seed a friend swapped me - she was fed up with these & wanted some of my pale pink ones. I lost the seed she gave me for several weeks & became convinced I'd accidentally fed it to Steve by using the seed bag to wrap a sandwich! I hadn't, & they still grew for me..........                                                                                                            

........& the bright yellow flash here is a poppy grown from seed from another ex-colleague, given to me when I left some time ago now, but they still pop up to remind me of times past, & I like that. It's what makes a garden personal.                                                                                                          

                                                                                                          

   

                                                                                                    

Don't forget there are often lots of free seed packets around - whether offers, or I've occasionally known garden centres give away surplus or out of date stock, & I never feel shy about asking people for a seed pod or cutting of plants I'd like to grow. My biggest supply of free seed packets comes from my Mum's penchant for buying gardening magazines. They give away more free seed than she can ever possibly grow, so much of it heads north up the A1 to the People & Cats Republic. My fab white foxgloves & huge scarlet poppies were grown from 2 such free packets.    

                                                                                   

                                                  

                                    
Another great source of free plants is, of course, saving your own seed. I always save calendula seed & so the flowers I get are real mixture of yellows, oranges, different shapes & sizes, including some double ones........

                                                                 

.....there's nothing to lose except a little tray of seed compost if your saved seed doesn't germinate. Sometimes, you will find an unexpected invasion of your garden (I mean other than bindweed, brambles & Albert Whiskers' enemies).......a few years ago, I spotted what looked like a stem of honeysuckle poking through the hedge from next door. One careful tug, & since then, we've had an annual show of fab flowers, which are just coming out of bud now..............................

   

........& will bloom for ages. When they're finished, it will almost be time for my annual blackberry crop, acquired in exactly the same slightly nefarious way.

I don't think I'll watch as much Chelsea next year. I do like it for ideas & the clever garden designs, but it just isn't how I (& I suspect most people) garden. A garden is a living thing which grows & evolves with us. It isn't something which is bought in already perfect. The most important ingredient isn't money. I think we are proof that it's possible to create a natural-looking, meaningful garden using time, basic skills & all the many freebies which are out there just waiting to be discovered. For the price of a stamp, a little pinch of flower seed goes a long way, so spread some planty joy to your friends & family...........FREE PLANTS.......now't like 'em!!

Coming up: Veggie garden tour/Tadpole Armageddon/Albert Whiskers' anniversary

Till next time,

C x