With winter weather that can reach -30C, the Ottawa Gardener has started planning next year’s garden!
The blog is Ottawa Hortiphilia.
Celeriac Secrets
Many people don’t know what an interesting vegetable celeriac or celery root can be. It’s delicious raw or in soups. It’s easy to save seeds from. It’s rewarding and easy to grow.
There are 3 different kinds of celery plants; normal (sometimes called blanched or bleached) celery, leaf celery (sometimes called zwolsche krul) and celeriac (sometimes called celery root). These are all three related, and will cross pollinate if grown next to each other, so you can only save seeds from one at a time. Of these, normal and leaf celery are much more difficult to grow than celery root.
The two main ‘tricks’ for growing celery root are choosing the right variety and not planting it in the garden too early.
My favorite variety is Giant Prague, but I know several others do well too. The best thing is to ask fellow gardeners and find out what kind does best in your climate. If you are experimenting with different varieties, don’t be discouraged with some failures. There are normal and ‘smooth’ types. I don’t care for the smooth type, and in any case if you do grow it be aware that it is very different from the normal kind. Smooth refers to it’s texture when eaten.
Celeriac is a biennial. This means there are two seasons that make up the growing cycle of this plant. The first season it will grow and form the roots, and the second put it’s energy into reproduction, grow a flowers stalk and go to seed. The problem is celeriac gets easily confused, and if you transplant plants out too early into cold ground, it can think it has passed through it’s first growing season and into it’s second. What usually happens then is either the roots remain very underdeveloped or sometimes they will bolt (send up a flower stalk). In either case it is usually inedible. For some reason this is often not well documented, and it can be hard to understand what is going wrong with your plants if someone doesn’t explain it to you!
Because celeriac has a long growing season, the plants are best started indoors about 7-12 weeks before setting them out into the garden. I usually set them out between 15 May and 1 June, but this will vary according to your climate.
I prefer to start the seeds in a flat (seed tray) and after they have developed their first set of true leaves (after the cotyledons) transplant them into their own containers. The reason for doing it this way is the seed is very small, and it is easier to broadcast over a tray than plant 1 or 2 seeds at a time in pots. This way also allows you to more easily select the strongest seedlings and, if you have old or unreliable seed, you can easily compensate by sowing a little more densely. When transplanting them into their own containers, the soil can be loosened with a table knife or similar instrument, and the seedlings plucked out of the dirt with your fingers. While in the tray, a bottom heat source is not necessary, but can help the seeds germinate faster. Garden centers sell special appliances for this. Make sure you keep the seeds and seedlings moist but not soggy at all times. Make sure you provide the seedlings with enough light, either fluorescent tubes or a growlight.
Once in the garden celeriac appreciates good soil, rich in organic material. It is also very important to give it sufficient water. It can be dug up in the late fall, after the roots have grown to a good size. Celeriac is not very frost hardy, but it may overwinter in mild climates.
Storms
I read in the paper the other day the first 10 days of January this year were the warmest ever on record. The weather is still absurdly warm for this time of year.
The other thing that’s been happening here are wind storms. Of course everyone knows about Holland and it’s windmills, and let’s face it, it’s always windy here. This year we have had wind storms both in number and intensity that I don’t ever remember seeing before.
They measure wind here according to Wind Force, or the Beaufort scale. For me F5 means too much wind to work in the garden, and even F4 is a bit on the windy side. The scale is not linear, so as you get into higher numbers the wind gets stronger faster. F11 is starting to be hurricane strength. Already in the last 2 months we have had 2 storms that reached F9-10, and as I type this now a storm is brewing where the forecast is F10. They are expecting wind speeds of 130 kph. Germany and France are also expecting the same storm.
In Amsterdam I get less wind, because it’s a bit inland and the buildings block a lot of the wind.
In Fryslân, where the garden is, it’s on the north coast of the country and it gets much more wind. The past few storms have blown tiles off the roofs of nearby buildings. One night it blew the chimney cap off the house I was sleeping in and the same storm blew out all the windows in my friend’s caravan.
I gave up trying to stake my brussel sprout plants up a long time ago, and they are simply growing on their side. Amazingly there are still things growing in the garden, but at this rate I’m really wondering what will survive the winter.
Five Things
Okay, it’s my turn. Everyone has been writing five things people may or may not know about them, then ‘tagging’ five other blogs and inviting them to do the same thing. Jane at Horticultural recently tagged me.
- My shoe size is 43 (about 10 1/2 in US sizes, don’t know about the UK). I am about 181cm (5ft 11 1/2 inches) tall. I am about 190 lbs or 86 Kg.
- When I was a kid I visited the US mint in Washington DC. I thought the way they printed the dollar bills looked like so much fun, from that day on when ever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to make money!
- I have two ginger cats, named Ruby and Natasha.
- I drive a Honda Jazz
- My neighbors in Amsterdam always ask me what I have growing under the growlights that show through my windows in the winter, and always seem disappointed when I tell them it’s vegetable plants for my garden.
According to custom I now must pick five other blogs. Since this has been going around the Internet for a while now, most of the other blogs I might pick have already done this, or at least have already been tagged. In any case if you are on the following list, don’t feel obliged. The purpose of this list is more to name a few nice blogs, and nothing else. If you are not on the list, don’t take it personally, I’m only allowed to pick five, and had to leave some people off!
Bird Flu Season
As we come up on bird flu season again this year, it seems like a good time to post about the ‘other side’ of the story. We are all familiar with what’s in the news about bird flu. The basic theme is wild birds carry the infection along their migratory routes, infecting everything from chickens to cats and people. Large factory farms are vulnerable, but are also the best cared for places, as the chickens are all in one place. The biggest problem in the spread of bird flu are small farmers and individuals raising chickens outside, as these animals are difficult to track and slaughter in case of a bird flu outbreak. Chicken and eggs are safe to eat, we are told over and over! Eat more food!
What’s not frequently mentioned is the story behind these factory chicken farms. These indoor farms contain tens of thousands of birds and recently have been operated at levels of hundreds of thousands. They are very dirty places, and breeding grounds for diseases. Only a small amount of space is allocated to each bird, and their beaks are cut off to keep them from killing and injuring each other. In the case of ‘free range’, a small door on the side of the building lets the birds wander out onto a small grassy area if they choose. If they choose is the key word here, because the breed of chicken in these farms do not generally choose to go outside. The outdoor area is often not big enough, should the birds all decide to go out at the same time.
This special breed of chicken used in these farms is only suitable for being raised indoors, and one of it’s characteristics is a very weak immune system. It’s immune system is so weak, that generally at any sign of infectious disease all of the chickens must be very quickly destroyed or brought to market. Any human visitors to these farms must be carefully managed, and generally they have to be suited from head to toe in a plastic hazardous materials suit fitted with a respirator. In fact the risk of infection is so high that during bird flu outbreaks the doors on ‘free range’ farms have to be closed because the risk of a bird walking outside and contracting bird flu is so great.
It’s increasingly the view of scientists and other people involved in the bird flu issue that it is not so much of an issue of wild birds causing bird flu, but rather the factory farms are the source of bird flu and the wild birds simply spread the disease. It’s a growing travesty that people who raise small numbers of poultry outdoors are being victimized by bird flu because the birds they raise, with their normal immune systems, are the solution to the problem not the cause.
What about the farmers who operate these large farms? Last year in Europe chicken farmers were awarded substantial compensation because the bird flu scare resulted in low demand for their products. This would seem to suggest that whether or not we are even interested in these products, we still have to pay for them with our taxes, and farmers will continue to be paid for producing them.
If you are interested in reading more on this issue, GRAIN has a collection of articles here.
