Garden News March 21

GROW YOUR OWN SPECIAL! E!

BUMPER

ISSU

March 21, 2015

James Wong's guide to maximising favour!

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Inspiration The sweetest strawberries As with most crops, the single overriding factor that determines the flavour of strawberries is the cultivar.

With some varieties producing up to an astonishing 35 times the aroma compounds of others, this is worth taking the trouble to get right. I’ve munched through more than 30 varieties to bring you my round-up of the best for flavour.

June bearers Far and away the most popular group, June bearers have the biggest, sweetest fruit borne in one generous summer flush. Huge crops in a short window make these the perfect choice for jams and jellies.

The big downside is that their season is very short, lasting only about two to three weeks per variety.

Collecting a mix of early, mid- and late-fruiting varieties, however, is a nifty way to stretch the season to its limit, giving you a conveyor belt of fruit over several months.

‘Honeoye’ – early In early summer, this throws up a brief but massive harvest of fruit with a bright acid twang – perfect for jam-making. Uniquely among strawberries, ‘Honeoye’ contains the flavour compound hexyl acetate, also found in passion fruit and Fuji apples, giving them a tropical flavour.

‘Garigue e’ – early This French variety from the 1930s offers pointy, orange-red fruit with a rich perfume. It is a favourite of top

chefs, grown for direct sale to fancy restaurants, but for some reason all but absent from shops outside of swanky food halls. The plants lack vigour and yields are low, but the flavour is really exceptional.

‘Manille’ – mid-season With both ‘Garigue e’ and the celebrated ‘Mara des Bois’ in its ancestry, there was no doubt ‘Manille’ was going to be a culinary starlet. The fruits are high in sugar, low in acid and have a distinctive aromatic flavour, while the plants are even, conveniently, rather pest-resistant.

Candy Cane

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A delicious combination of ‘Candy Floss’ & ‘White Surprise’ alpine/musk strawberries, favourites of James Wong and ideal for hanging baskets, while packing a powerful favour punch. ● 3 Potted Plants – 241251 Only £9.99

A connoisseur’s collection, featuring six of the most fragrant and tasty strawberries each with their own distinct qualities (‘Frau Mieze Schindler’, ‘Gariguette’, ‘Honeoye’, ‘Manille’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Mara des Bois’). ● 36 Bare Root Plants (6 of each) – 247980 Only £12.99 (save £26)

8 Garden News / March 21 2015

‘Frau Mieze Schindler’ – mid-season Measly crops of small berries that require another variety growing alongside it if you ever want to see any fruit meant this German variety from 1925 almost never made it to market. Yet its irrepressible, winnertakes-all flavour has seen it become the most commonly grown in its country of origin.

Like ‘Mara des Bois’, it produces methyl

anthranilate, the same compound that gives woodland strawberries their unmistakable floral, candyfloss aroma. Because the plant’s flowers are male sterile, it is essential to grow a surrogate pollinator such as ‘Cambridge Favourite’, that flowers at the same time, nearby.

Ever bearers Some of the best for flavour in my opinion, their light cropping does mean, though, that you need quite a few plants to fill a punnet at any given time. Being smaller and tarter, the berries of this group often make up for their initial shortcomings with a rich aroma, which after all is the hardest fruit quality to fake.

As their name implies, they will give you a drip feed of fruit over an incredibly long season, from as early as late spring right up until the first frosts. Like June bearers, they won’t throw up runners all year, making pruning (by far the most labourintensive task) a breeze. With a sneaky dusting of sugar, I feel these beat the blowsy June bearers hands down in the flavour stakes.

‘Mara des Bois’ – mid-summer to mid-autumn Probably the most highly rated gourmet variety, this captures all the aroma of the best wild strawberries but has the size and succulence of modern cultivars. It contains large quantities of methyl anthranilate, resulting in a candyfloss, almost bubble-gum flavour. Frequently described as ‘heritage’, this French variety actually only dates back to the early 1990s, making it no more of an heirloom than a Nirvana album.

‘Snow White’ – early summer to mid-autumn All today’s strawberries descend from an accidental cross between a species from Chile and another from Virginia that spontaneously popped up in a French botanic garden centuries ago.

When a empting to create a variety with truly superior flavour, breeders went back to the drawing board to recreate the original cross, with some delicious consequences. The result was ‘Snow White’, whose knock-out aroma and unparalleled sweetness belies its ivory colour.

‘Candy Floss’ & ‘White Surprise’ – wild Adored by European foodies since the Stone Age, wild strawberries have an incredible aroma that has recently become all but lost. Since the large hybrids were introduced a couple of centuries ago, they have been slowly but steadily crowding the wild strawberries out of our gardens.

Actually a totally different species from the regular strawberry (Fragaria vesca as opposed to F. x ananassa), these alpine types are tiny by comparison but crammed with truly explosive strawberry flavour.

Floss’, whose flavour really does live Like ever bearers, these plants up to its name, and ‘White Surprise’, provide a steady trickle of fruit with a creamy-coloured flesh that throughout the summer. What they complements its pineapple-andhave in flavour, though, they lack in banana fragrance. monster yields, so plant up as many as you have space for.

Their compact plants ● Published in and ease of cultivation collaboration with mean they are enjoying the RHS and based a bit of a renaissance – on practical trials they are after all ideal conducted at Wisley, for ge ing maximum James’s 224-page flavour out of minimal book Grow For Flavour space.

Finally, I love the is out now, £20. lipstick-red ‘Candy

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Tips and tricks to supercharge the flavour of homegrown harvests

March 21 2015 / Garden News 9

W GRO UR YO

ON YOUR FRUIT & VEG

Sp e ci

Sow an early

E

crop of carrots Grow a tasty treat in pots indoors, says Clare

Photos: Neil Hepworth

ARLY CARROTS CAN be grown very easily in large pots of compost and when harvested the young roots will be tender and clean. If you have a greenhouse, they can be grown inside where the crop will be ready faster because of the added warmth.

Alternatively, stand the pots in a warm, sheltered position outside where they will also be fne, although germination will be a little slower.

Any types of carrot can be grown in containers, but bear in mind that if you want to grow long carrots, you will need deep pots to accommodate the long roots.

It is also worth choosing early varieties such as ‘Early Nantes’ as these are faster to mature then the larger main crop types.

For pots that aren’t deep, there are plenty of stump or round-rooted varieties to try such as ‘Paris Market’ or ‘Burpee’s Short & Sweet’ that are ideal.

To keep a succession of fresh, young carrots through the summer, sow a pot every two or three weeks from now until early June. One of the advantages of growing them in pots is that they are very easy to harvest and when you want a few, you simply pull exactly how many you need and leave the others to carry on growing.

Growing them in a greenhouse on a bench also helps to reduce the damage caused by carrot root fies which tend to fy close to the ground. Even outside, if you can raise the pots 45cm (18in) of the ground it will help.

To grow well, carrots need compost that is fairly fne so that the roots can grow straight without hitting bulky objects.

It also needs to retain moisture. A mixture that suits them is a mix of around two-thirds multi-purpose and one third John Innes compost. This will hold onto moisture and has a fairly fne texture.

PLOT

OWNa l!

How to sow carrots in pots

1

Fill the pots with compost, level and lightly firm to create a flat surface to sow the seeds. Sow the carrot seed thinly over the compost.

22 Garden News / March 21 2015

2

Cover the seeds with a thin layer of sieved compost. This covering should be around 6mm (¼in) deep to retain moisture.

3

Finally, water with a watering can fi ed with a fine rose. Don’t water again until the surface starts to dry and then keep the compost moist.

Award-winning garden designer, Chelsea Gold medallist and broadcaster

Chris Beardshaw’s

MASTERCLASS Guarantee successful transplanting with a surprise secret ingredient!

NE OF THE questions I get asked most often on BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time is how to uplift and relocate plants, particularly large woody specimens. My answer is if you can lift it before the buds break, it will probably be okay.

Given the pace spring is unfurling, there’s precious little time left to complete any lifting and transplanting. Do it now or leave it for another season.

What you must do is retain as much soil as possible around the rootball, water diligently and plentifully through the frst summer after transplanting, and give it a radical prune to compensate for the inevitable damage to the roots. And, as I’ve learned through experience, add copious quantities of leaf mould!

O

Turn autumn le aves into a rich, free soil co nditioner

Golden tonic

Fungi found in leaf mould works in unison with plant roots to help them take up water and nutrients scientists are now really starting to get excited about.

Surrogate roots

Shu erstock

high in cellulose and fbre, which attracts fungi that slowly attack organic residues too dry, acidic, or low in nitrogen for bacterial decomposition.

It’s the unique ability of fungi to create complex flamentous networks across the soil as part of fallen leaf decomposition that

Research suggests the fungi present in leaf mould are able to work in unison with the roots of our plants, efectively acting as a broad-reaching, surrogate root system, harvesting and releasing nutrients straight to the plant.

This, of course, can beneft all plants, but it does so especially those whose roots have been compromised by transplanting, and goes some way to explaining why plants lifted and potted on into pure leaf mould rarely wither and fail. In fact for the Gold medal-winning ‘Furzey

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GAP Photos

Generated from the decomposition of fallen deciduous leaves gathered in autumn, leaf mould is a gold tonic for garden plants due to the way it is formed.

General garden compost is green, moist and full of nitrogen. Plentiful bacteria rapidly attack the soft plant tissues to break them down and the result is a steaming heap of frenetic activity as millions of bacteria feast on the rotting plant material. Compost from such heaps is high in soil-improving organic matter, relatively modest in nutrient supply but low in micro-organism activity.

And it’s micro-organism activity that elevates leaf mould over all others as a perfect material for transplanted stock.

This is because dry leaves are low in moisture and nutrients but

Garden’ we exhibited at Chelsea Flower Show 2012, most of the mature woody shrubs were lifted from a garden where they had been planted 80 years ago. Once lifted, we potted them into pure leaf mould. Amazingly, of the 100 or more shrubs that were lifted for the project, only fve failed to make it.

Armed with this resounding success, I’m keen that my work on the themed gardens on the Beechgrove TV programme incorporates plenty of home made leaf mould. Try it for both plants lifted for storage in pots, as well as those transplanted into new homes in any soon-to-beseen redesigned borders.

March 21 2015 / Garden News 41