Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
The sweet corn is starting to form tassels on the plants.
A few of the garlic plants are beginning to show their bulbils.
The seed heads on the quinoa plants are starting to form.
The amaranth plants have particularly pretty seed heads, brown and deep red.
The bulbils on the perennial onions are almost ready. This is the Amish onion.
Recently I posted about my hedge, and I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of plant it is. I suspect it’s something very ordinary, but I’m not sure. I also suspect it’s nitrogen fixing, because it grows fast, makes the ground around it very soft and is the source of a lot of weeds, but now I’m not 100% sure of this either. The leaf in this picture is about 4cm wide:
Normally it looks pretty healthy, but in the last few days we’ve had hot and dry weather, and it’s looking a little ratty. There is actually a lot of diversity in the shape of the leaves.
Old growth is green, and new growth is red:
If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them!
I’m not sure what variety the white one is, but the pink is Rosasport. These are among a number of plants I got from Lieven last winter.
Since it’s the first year for these plants the harvest is very small.
Red currants the previous owner left in the garden came and went a few weeks ago. I didn’t know what the plant was when I got the garden, and it was really growing out of control. I just pruned it down to the ground, and that turned out to be a mistake because currants form berries mostly on parts of the plant that are two or three years old, so I didn’t get much of a harvest this year.
Another plant I got from Lieven is a Josta berry, a cross between a black currant and a gooseberry. It’s supposed to be a very strong growing and productive plant, which makes nice juice. This plant didn’t have any berries this year.
Luigi over at the Biodiversity Weblog posted the text of a new EU directive on seeds.
It’s far from the end of EU Seed Laws we are all hoping for, but it’s kind of interesting because it seems to be vaguely worded and could let individual countries significantly relax their seed laws if they choose to.
The proof is in the pudding as they say, and we just have to wait and see what happens.
I’m growing these in a pot on my roof. Emma gave me tubers for these last year. The plants look sort of like grass, but the shape the leaves grow in is very precise.
The tubers of this plant are used to make Horchata de Chufas, a Spanish drink similar to rice, almond or soy milk.
This can be an invasive plant, so it’s usually best to grow it in a container. It’s not frost hardy, so in places with a hard winter it can also be grown outside.
This plant is similar to water chestnuts, and can tolerate very wet soil.
