Your Top Ten List of Post Christmas Gardening Excuses

It’s after dinner on Christmas day 1991 and I'm wearing baggy cream chinos and slip on loafers. I still have all my hair and it's cut into a dodgy post new romantic era high rise. My aunt looks me in the eye and shakes her head as her children storm around the hall on a collective e-number berzerker. They are screaming, spinning, lashing at one another and leaving little explosions of Christmas decorations in their wake. - “Mark my words,” she warns. “One day it’ll all come back at you!”

The ghost of Christmases past will confirm that my then favourite pastime at the annual extended family get together was to dose my juvenile cousins with fizzy cola and brightly coloured sweets before handing out pressies of toy bows and arrows, sucker dart guns and plastic swords. 

Then I’d sit back and watch the show.

Fill em up with E numbers, hand out the plastic weaponry and ....escape!!

Later there’d be filthies from the aunts and uncles as they attemped to crowbar their still spinning offspring into the car to get them home.

Twenty years on I have three children under ten and I’m the one reaping the whirlwind. These days as I run around trying to contain my own annual pint sized post dinner Christmas frenzies, the aunts sit and smile contentedly from easy chairs as their adult children run around to fetch them a Baileys.

Which brings me to gardening.

Mark this: despite what any gardening columnist tells you, there are few reasons to go outside and start digging in. In fact there is only one real reason why people get out gardening at this time of year and it is this – cabin fever. They do it to escape from the festivity jaded holiday season household in which everyone is stuck indoors and killing one another. For certain the January garden doesn’t need you out there stomping around, compacting the ground and generally making a nuisance of yourself by disturbing its dormant perennials.

Let's Get Gardening!!! You'll need a damn good excuse to justify this one.

Gardening expeditions at the latter end of the holiday season are entirely selfish. You’ll desperately need to flee – the bored kids, Noel Edmonds Christmas jumper, omnibus soap opera depression, the tweets, whistles and brain beating electro tunes of the new electronic toys whose batteries are fading but haven't quite died.

But in your rush to get outside always remember this: You can’t possibly abandon a similarly fraught spouse to his or her fate just to go and do some gardening. Not at least without a truly plausible excuse - or a full cast iron set of them.

The problem is that many of the “ten things” list of gardening excuses for early January as provided by some gardening columns I’ve read are just not very good at all and won’t pass the muster for a handy exit. For example, one English based online gardening site I looked at had the following in it’s “ten things to do in January” list: 6. “Ask the council if they are having a Christmas tree shredding event….” (??!!!) Another advises: 8. “Polish your garden fork and spade with oil.” Ha ha ha.

Remember that the key ingredients to a good gardening pass excuse are (a) urgency - it needs to be done now and (b) there must be a tangible benefit for the household collective. So lookit. If you can’t get a pub pass and need to get outside before your head explodes, here’s a good and proper excuse list containing ten rock solid plausibles that will, with certainty, guarantee your post Crimpo fleedom to the great out back.

1.    Remember that beautiful garlic we were eating last year? Well if I don’t get the coming year’s crop planted by the end of the week, it’ll be too late.

Most say November or December is perfect for garlic planting, but early January will do at a pinch for a last minute effort.

2.   If I don’t trim back those dead climbers, they’ll start taking over the whole garden. The garden will look much tidier without them and it's best to do it when they’re dormant.

Free all trapped gnomes from dead climber webs

3.  The fence and raised bed planks are showing signs of rot, if we leave them like that through the months ahead they’ll be gone by the summer. I’ll need to clean them off and paint them up with some wood stain before I go back to work – I’ll just run out to the hardware shop and get some environmentally friendly stuff like Procol Fencecote.

4.  Did you see that scrawny sparrow just then? Those poor birds are starving God love them! I’ll need to get up to the shops to get some nuts and wood to knock together some bird tables and hangers to save the poor things.

5.   Oh no! I forgot to sprinkle some well rotted manure on the vegetable beds. It takes a few months for it to get drawn down into the soil by the earthworms. Our soil is a bit tired. Unless I get some manure sprinkled on soon, it will be too late and this year’s home grown veg won’t be as good. I’ll have to go up to the garden centre to get some.

Waiting for the table - a starving birdie yesterday

6.   I've just read in the newspaper that it’s best to get those remaining weeds out in January when their growth has been slowed and when the ground is clear of most other growth. Strangling chickweed in particular is more vulnerable at this time of year says yer man - their garden guy in the funny hat.

7.  Did you notice that the Autumn leaves have turned into a slippy guck on the paths? That’s a bit dangerous alright for the kiddies. But if I shovel it all up into a bucket and get it into the compost, it will not only makes the path much safer, but will sort us out for some great free compost.

8.  Dang! I just remembered. The greenhouse panes and panels need to be washed out inside with a mild bleach. Otherwise any mildews, mould spores or insect eggs will remain active into the new year and that could create problems for our tomatoes.

Get the disinfectant to cull those greenhouse spores

9.  That garden shed needs a bit of a spring clean. I think I’ll bring the radio down there and get that job out of the way before I go back to work.  

10 . Do you fancy some nice fresh home grown garden fruit this summer? I’m reading here in the newspaper that now’s the time to buy in and plant your apple, pear and damson trees. Why don’t I just pop up to the garden centre and get some before they’re sold out?

Time for an early Spring Clean in the shed. Now where is it exactly?

Now all you need is an excuse not to bring the kids out with you. 

Raised Beds - How To Lift Your Food Growing Yields

When I started growing vegetables, one of the first jobs I got stuck into was to build some raised beds in my back garden. A raised bed is essentially any structure or format which takes the soil up off ground level. A raised bed or a series of them is a basic yet profitable arrangement if you want to grow your own.

There are a number of benefits to be had in growing with raised beds. First off, in a back garden setting, they look good, particularly if you still have some herbaceous borders, flowers and shrubs and haven't turned the whole lot over to food growing.

Raised beds made of rustic timber, stones, blocks or even poured concrete can add some architectural design to a vegetable garden which can often look chaotic. While this isn't a problem in an allotment setting, the beds will allow you to grow food in your garden without ruining its structural aesthetics.

The second factor is that the soil climate in a raised bed environment is contained and therefore it's far easier to control. If, for example, you're growing acid loving plants like blueberries and cranberries and your soil is neutral or alkaline, you'll find that even despite dosing them with ericaceous compost, they'll experience problems as the main body of the soil around them continues to change the ph back to neutral or alkaline.

Plot 34's three year old Waterer of Everything (WOE) attending to the salads in one of our raised beds

Isolated in a raised bed however, the soil can be maintained steadily at any level of ph or consistency that your plants require.

Raised beds drain far better than ground level beds and will warm up quicker than their terrestrial counterparts, thus allowing you an earlier start to the growing season.

From a practical point of view, a raised bed is far easier to work on given that you have to do far less bending down.

You can build a containment comprised of simple planks, railway sleepers, stones, bricks or even corrugated sheeting or plastic. Some people just heap the earth up without any containing medium although this can be messy in the long run.

Planks are perhaps the easiest to work with

I used log roll for my first raised bed. This is a series of one and a half foot logs split in two and then linked together via double lacings of durable wire. This stuff has the advantage of being flexible like a linked chain, allowing you to create any shape you want. A kidney shape suited the curving beds in my garden (Her Outdoors says it's a heart shape but it's a kidney).




Herbs, salads and a miniature coronet apple tree in our log roll raised bed

 After creating the shape of the bed, I pegged the log roll into place using stakes hammered into the ground on at intervals on the outside to hold the shape into place. I then lined the inside with durable plastic sheeting all along the ground and then up to the lip of the containing boundary. This is designed to keep out pests who might burrow in as well as to help contain the moisture in the bed. Because I didn't want it to fill in the rain like a paddling pool, I made strategically located drainage holes all around the base with a garden fork.

Then I filled it in with a mixture of top soil, compost, agricultural sand (for friability and drainage) and  mature manure. Don't fill a raised bed exclusively with compost from a garden centre or you'll quickly find yourself with a dried-out nutrition starved mass in which nothing will grow. 

To the right, raised beds constructed from random rocks and stones

My log roll arrangement proved ideal for mixed salads as the slugs and snails didn't relish the prospect of scaling the rough chippy surface of the log roll.

A raised bed needs to laid out in a suitable size and shape. The ideal is one which allows you to reach every part of the surface area without standing in it - you don't want to have to walk across the soil as it causes it to compact and hinders your plants.

You'll also want to select the right location.Every part of the raised bed will need from six to eight hours of full sun each day to provide enough light for viable crop growth.

Some people recommend you only use wood that hasn't been treated with chemicals. I don't see why we shouldn't recyle scrap wood like railway sleepers which has already been treated. They last longer, and a plastic sheet skin between them and the soil prevents toxics like creosote leaching into it. Reusing them prevents them ending up in a landfill anyways.

If you like you can go all the way and build two or three foot high poured concrete beds which will last forever, can be painted in pleasing colours and used double as garden seating. In Havana, Cuba, which has perhaps the world's most developed urban farming culture, a combination of cheap corrugated sheeting holds the beds in place in larger communal areas while poured concrete is used where food growing is a full time fixture.

Concrete raised beds at an urban farm in Havana

Some people even like to build high rise raised beds in undulating layers and "steps" which can also look great in the garden, particularly in a bright corner where the highest level is set to the back.

If you're thinking of installing raised beds, don't go out and buy the expensive kits from garden centres. These could see you paying E80 for an installation the size of a kitchen table and which includes nothing more than four simple planks which slot or screw together.

If you can't salvage the wood, stones or sheeting you need, go to a lumber merchants and buy scrap timber or else to a builder's yard and purchase concrete blocks and cement. You don't need to pay through the nose to raise your food growing game.

Keeping Your Cauliflowers Suntan Free

Peter Ashcroft believes that his cauliflowers are wired to the moon.

Via Youtube I accompany the West Lancashire based cauliflower farmer on his rounds in the hope of gaining some clues as to when my own winter caulis are likely to start flowering.  He's just the latest in a legion of true characters from all over the planet who have taught me via the worldwide college that is Youtube.

Ashcroft tells the camera he’s been farming since he was very little and has been working at it ever since he can remember, helping his dad as a child and then leaving school aged 15 to join him on the land. “Some years you make money and quite a lot of years you lose money,” is his take on a life of commercial cauli farming.

And while I don’t glean any vital clues from the steady Lanc as to when my own Roscoffs are likely to start producing heads, he does provide me with a few pretty decent nuggets of cauliflower wisdom. Firstly that the cauliflowers we get in the shops are only white because farmers take measures to shade them from the sun, otherwise they turn a more natural yellow. They’re supposed to be yellow.

“There’s nothing wrong with yellow caulis-  just that people won’t eat them,” he opines. “People like bronzed bodies from the sun, but they won’t eat bronzed cauliflowers,” he asserts.  Indeed he has a point.

Lancashire cauli man Peter Ashcroft with a healthy handful

So he shows us his own little trick to stop his caulis getting a tan whilst simultaneously to keeping the birds from spotting them. He bends a big surrounding leaf over until the stem cracks and makes a sort of natural lid for the emerging floret.

Ashcroft also believes his caulis are influenced by the moon cycles. “The moon is very important for cauliflowers. As the moon is coming to the full, nine times out of ten you’ll get a lot of cauliflowers. When the moon is full, something in the gravitational pull or light levels alters the growth cycle in the cauliflowers.”

It’s been a blue moon since I visited Plot 34, which I haven’t seen now in a good many weeks and where, despite winter arriving,  I still have a few crops remaining. Cabbages, some spuds still in the ground, a large bed of celeriac and finally there’s the cauliflowers which have all grown ginormous – to about four feet high. But still no sign of a floret.

Back in the garden I have five or six more cauli plants of the same variety – an particularly Irish heritage strain of Winter Roscoff, the seeds of which I acquired from Irish Seedsavers.  Seedsavers in turn procured them from an elderly farmer in County Dublin who may or may not be aware that he has been instrumental in preventing the particular strain from being lost here in Ireland.

Because I’m not going up to the allotment too often these winter days, the handful of Roscoffs in the garden were put there as an early warning system -  to let me know when their siblings, five miles away, would be ready to pick. Like their same species sisters, the broccoli,  they can ripen and turn quite quickly and it’ll be a wasted effort if I don’t harvest them at the opportune moment.

My "early warning" garden cauli plants

The problem is that in the months ahead in the garden I’m replacing the old wooden shed in the garden with a larger steel version. We’re expecting again any day now and my office is about to be being evicted from the house. I’ll be rehoused in the steel shed which will come fully insulated and in the process I'll be joining the long tradition of Irish men whose domestic presence has been downgraded to ancillary outdoors accommodation.

But it’ll be built right on top of the home cauliflower bed. While I don’t mind losing these few plants, with them go my alarm system or their counterparts on Plot 34.

I haven’t grown cauliflower before because I heard they can be quite difficult.  My current batch were sprouted in the greenhouse last March and went into the ground a month or so later. And even at four feet, there’s still no sign of a small white curd emerging at their centre any time I go rooting in there in search of progress.

Without a sun tan

The "cauli" from cauliflower is the latin for "cabbage." So as the name suggests, they’re cabbage flowers. They always need a good rich soil as they're heavy feeders and plenty of water. Caulis like cool weather and I read that any jolts in their life cycle will effect their abilitity to flower. So I’m hoping the easter heatwave hasn’t thrown them out. The seed packet doesn’t say when they’re normally ready for harvest only “cut as heads develop.”

With a tan

The white curd is of course a flower, much like the broccoli head. Indeed there’s a sort of halfway house between the two – a green cauliflower some people call brocciflower.  Caulis also come in less frequent purples and oranges (fake tan?) as well as the familiar creamy white.

Caulis are low in fat, high in fibre and quite dense in nutrition. They contain a range of phytochemicals including sulforapane which fights cancer. Unfortunately the traditional Irish way of cooking them – boiling them to within an inch of their life – actually renders most of these useless. Ten minutes in boiling water kills half of these. So the best way to prepare cauliflowers is to steam it or stir fry it. Or even eat it raw. Another beneficial substance contained in caulis is the indole-3-carbinal a chemical which also blocks cancer cells and helps boost cellular repair.

However, another Youtube grower, chirpy Claire from the Claire’s Allotment series of segments explains that home grown caulis need a thorough examination before consumption unless you want to be eating mouthfuls of heebie jeebie passengers who like nothing better than to crawl right in there between the tight pressed florets. The solution it seems is to break your heads into smaller florets and soak them in salt water for a half hour before preparation.

There's Claire now

Claire also helps me figure out when the florets are ready to pick. How do you know when they’re fully grown? When the first ones start to separate it seems. Separated cauliflower is also quite edible, which is also good to know.

Another good reason to grow cauliflower is that the fresh heads are starting to disappear from the shops.

You may have noticed caulis have been missing from some supermarket shelves of late. This is because more and more farmers are refusing to grow them because the expense involved is no longer covered by the supermarket prices offered to them.

In Britain the National Farmer’s Union has already warned that the popular veg is will disappear entirely unless the situation in remedied and farmers get a fairer price, a concern also voiced here by the Irish Farmer's Association.  The NFU says that in the UK it costs a farmer like Peter Ashcroft 44p to grow one but the supermarkets there will only pay 36p even though they sell them at £1.20 that’s a 300% mark up.

This is the main reason why Winter Roscoffs are not growing all over the fields of North Dublin as they did for generations previous to ours and why local cauli farmers like Peter Ashcroft are fast becoming extinct in these islands. They're very definitely not a protected species and with them into extinction goes the lifetime of knowledge and skill that goes with dedicating a lifetime to one food plant.

Like anything else in this day and age, you’re going to have to try much harder in future if you want to get a head.