spring sowing take 3 1/2

Finally the best news this week: a parcel from GetSoiled in Florida (http://www.getsoilednow.com/) full of seed has finally, after being thoroughly searched by customs, arrived. Thank you once again! What a wonderful selection of interesting things! So, still being in the waxing moon phase, I got a whole load sown out this week. Here is whar I've sown:


Outside:

• Pidgeon peas & lima beans " Jackson Wonder butter bean". T11 next to the slenderette beans
• Golden Zucchini T13&14
• Amaranth "Red Stripe Leaf" (T13 rear bed). This is something I've only just heard about and sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to seeing this grow and finally tasting it.
• Giant Red Celery (T13 rear bed)
• Crisp Mint Lettuce (T13 rear bed)
• Thai Oak Leaf Lettuce (T13 rear bed)
• Orient Red Curl Lettuce (T13 rear bed)
• Orach "Magenta Magic"(T4 1/2 pot, T5 pot, T8 outside pot & T 9 1/2 middle pot) This is a completely new one to me. Apparently it's also known as German Mountain Spinach. I was brought up in Germany, but never heard of it, but then again I was in the flat north... It is said to make a good container plant, so I planted them in various pots dotted about and see what happens.
• Florida Cranberry (T2 tyres, T 4 1/2 front tyre T6 tyre). This is supposed to be a tall plant in the hibiscus family. You make a juice out of the flower bases in autumn which is said to taste a little like cranberry, hence the name. I gave it spaces in some old car tyres filled with compost to keep them a way from other crops.
• New Zealand spinach (Together with Florida Cranberries in tyres, T5, old watering can, T8 Middle & inside pot, T 9 1/2 tyre and T 10 amongst the strawberries). Another spinach look-alike not minding hot weather so much. It makes for a good ground cover apparently

In the cold frame

• Sweet peppers "Marconi", "Sweet Chocolate", "Perfection". My main peppers haven't shown this year. It may be a tad on the late side, but I think it'll just be ok. The chillies I had sown are ok though.
• Pepino Solanum muricatum. Another complete novelty to me. It seems to be quite closely related to aubergines, but the fruit is a bit smaller and is sweet, to be eaten raw.

This is going to be a really exciting year for new things! Many of Mr. H.'s tomatoes are already showing and things are generally growing at a rate of knots!

Spring Sowing Take 3 & Franco the bicycle repair man

Ok, so no fotos today. I wish I had had my camera with me this morning on my visit to Franco, but more of that later. First of all, mostly for my own record, the next sowing stage.

This is what we sowed in the cold frame, which even when open is actually quite warm:

• Tomatoes. It's actually a bit late to be sowing tomatoes, but with the almost complete failure of my main Marmande plants I panicked a bit. Mr.H from Idaho had offered me some seeds, including an almost bewildering variety of tomatoes. I asked for a few seeds of about half a dozen of the more interesting sounding varieties he had offered, but Mr.H in his infinite kindness has sent me 10 different varieties. Of course in the meantime it turned out that my back-up variety, Gigante Seedless is doing rather well, and as every year loads of volunteers are creeping up everywhere, so I'll have trouble accomodating them all, but I'll give it a damn good try! Also with our long growing season I'm fairly confident of getting away with the late sowing. The varieties are sowed into a window box in alphabetical order (without going into much further detail for the moment): #10 red, Black Cherry, Bursztyn, Gruntovi Gribovski, Orange Smudge, Purple Cherokee, San Marzano Roma, Targinnie Red, Taxi and Un-named Turkey.
• Tomatillos. Also supplied by Mr.H. Varieties Purple Coban and Green Round. I've never eaten or even seen Tomatillos before, so I'm looking forward to trying that
• Litchi Tomato. Mr. H keeps giving off ominous remarks about this plant. I think it may be man-eating, or at the very least little kitten eating! So that should be interesting too.
• Cardoons, bianco gigante inerme a foglia intera. Something else new to me, although not considered an exotic in our area.
• Melon Tendrale Verde. A late green melon with pinkish flesh. I normally get volunteers of yellow melons from the compost, but haven't spotted any yet

In the great outdoors I sowed the following:

• Red veined sorrel. At the back of some terraces where plain wild sorrel is quite happy too
• Mike's red lettuce and marjoram T8 amongst the gherkins near the almond tree.
• Courgettes. I sowed 3 different varieties this year Tondo Chiara di Nizza, a round variety and 2 long varieties Albarello di Sarzana and Genovese. Genoa is some 100km away from us and Sarzana only 5km, so both should be eminently suited to our climate. T9 amongst the left-overs of the brassica and T13 in front of the rows of sweet corn.
• celery green. T6 amongst the left-overs of the leeks. I sowed some celery late last year to get a winter crop, which only now is starting to be ready.
• Slenderette dwarf beans T11. I had sown some in Feb, because that's what the package recommended, but I thought at the time that it was a bit early. And right enough, they never showed, so re-sown those now for a later crop.
• Sunflower American Giant. T11. Mr.H tells me that everything in America is bigger. They have aphids the size of bumble bees which eat pizzas (!) and moles the size of small children! They also have sunflowers which grow to 4.8 metres tall! Last year's sunflowers were pretty, but also pretty useless in that the seeds were far too small to be useful, so I wanted something bigger. And Angelika sent me these monsters. Luckily I can plant them at the back of a terrace so I can harvest them from the terrace above.

In little trays, but outside the cold frame I sowed some spilanthes, which is known as a herb to combat toothaches apparently (I'll sometime give you a discourse on my theory of all dentists being rip-off artists. I have given up on them years ago!) and some Good King Henry.

Finally I sowed in the fridge (yes in the fridge! Mr.H tells me they need cold stratification...) echinacea and soapwort.

Right, if you people are still paying attention, here another episode of my visit to Franco the bicycle man. I have mentioned him before in this blog. He doesn't only repair bicycles, but also scooters, three-wheeler Ape vans, garden machinery etc. But bicycles are his passion. If my bike has a minor ailment, he fixes it in no time, and being an absolute perfectionist, he'll oil various parts, straighten your wheel, tighten a nut and pump up your tyres. When you offer him payment for all that he'll only accept a cup of coffee.

Today I went to see him about my petrol-driven strimmer, which wouldn't re-start after an idle winter. Now as you can imagine, he is always much in demand, so you have to wait your turn. In Italy a man getting his hands dirty over some mechanical job always attracts a crowd of onlookers, assisiting, advising, generally commenting, probing any piece of machinery which is being worked on and generally standing in the way. So this morning was no exception.

As I arrived Franco and 4 men were working on a bike. All that needed doing was changing the break pads and tyres, but with Franco being such a perfectionist and with all the "help" he was getting from the onlookers, this took some time. At some stage a lady pulled up in her battered Fiat Panda, who had bought a replacement bulb for her headlight. Couldn't Franco (not a car mechanic) replace that bulb for her quickly. His workshop sits right on a busy main road and this car was holding up traffic. So of course he did it and charged the lady one Euro.

The crowd of men in the meantime increased rapidly with the doctor bringing another strimmer and his chainsaw, some other neighbour, still in his work overall and gloves covered in grass cuttings pushed along a lawn mower, the "communist comrade" pulled up in his Ape as well as some cyclist friends of Franco.

At some stage a very old lady (she told me she was bor in 1916!) waddled by. Apparently she comes here most days just for the spectacle of what is Franco's workshop. She surveyed the scene for a moment, shook her head and went: "...6, 7, 8 assistants and the maestro. Does he need that many helpers? She proceeded to tell me of the beginnings of this workshop in 1956, when children could still play in the road. Now they would be risking life and limb! Then she was trying to tell me something in the local dialect, but Franco interupted her, saying I wouldn't understand. So she explained some terms used for a slightly upset tummy in the local dialect. I must find an occasion to use that in conversation some time!.

Anyway, at long last Franco got around to have a look at my machine. I had been waiting for the best part of an hour by then being thoroughly entertained though. After a few tests, he started shaking his head, saying "that'll cost you..." It was the starter motor that had gone. If back in the UK any handyman starts shaking their heads saying "it'll cost you..." whistling backwards through their teeth, it WILL cost you. You want to run a mile! With Franco though... After a good 45 minutes work, replacing a part that he found rummaging through the deeper recesses of his workshop which normally would have cost €69 just by itself, he sort of apologised to me for having to charge me €25!

So if anyone needing a repair of ANYTHING anywhere around here, I can thoroughly recommend Franco's workshop. And if you want to experience REAL Italian life, just come along and have a look over Franco's shoulder for a morning.

Oh and I fell in love... No not into the 94-year old lady, but a second-hand bicycle he has for sale. My old bike is going to give up it's ghost anytime soon. To be fair it has served me 10 years after only costing me £50 second-hand initially. This bike, with a strong, light-weight alumnium frame, 21 gears, a rear rack designed for proper loads was just smiling at me. I took it on a test ride. There was me thinking I was getting less fit with age, but it seems my old bike is just getting harder and harder to pedal, so that it feels like I'm going uphill even on the flat bits. I told him to put it aside until I've managed to rob the pension off an old lady to pay for the €180 he's asking for it.

Spring sowing take 2

Today's post is mostly my own personal diary entry on what I've sown during this waxing moon phase. So if you're not really into gardening, stop reading now. I don't want to bore you.

This week marked the second big sowing phase for this spring, as my neighbour Antonio helpfully pointed out last week. You just walk around the village innocently, when you are approached by your neighbours, telling you what to sow and when.

Anyway, the weather forecast predicted the Scirocco wind to start up again the tail end of this week, so we were quite keen to get the sowing finished before then. The Scirocco brings warm and moist air our way, so ideal for freshly sown seeds (indeed during the night there has been some rain and it looks like more in the air).

So to start off with I needed to make some room in the cold frame. As usual I sowed out far too many lettuce seeds and they were growing fast. Now I can't stand simply thining them out and discarding the extras. So I started transplanting some. I counted 57 plants so far which have gone partially amongst the leeks and onions on terrace 6 and partially on an empty bed by the Rennet apple tree on Terrace 10 (the locations are mainly as a reminder to myself, so you can skip over those).

The other thing that was screaming to be transplanted were the lentils. They had started to hit the ceiling of the cold frame. There were some 17 plants which had already developed an amazing root system:



I'm not sure if they need any support, but I gave them a bit of bamboo each, just in case and interplanted them with a few more lettuces.

Now for the sowing. In the cold frame I sowed the following:

• 2 types of tomato kindly supplied to me by Beck of http://greenspain.blogspot.com/: kumato, a brown tomato, which matures from the inside out and can therefore be eaten when still green on the outside and Campari a slightly larger cherry tom. Incidentally, my cold frame proved so effective, that during one of the sunny days last week my main tomato variety, marmande, simply frizzled and burned. So I'm glad to have some backup.
• 2 types of cucumber: Verde China and Market More
• 3 types of squash, 1 summer and 2 winter: Now, apart from courgettes, I've never really grown squashes and have rarely even eaten them. The varieties I went for were a pattypan squash called sunburst (mostly because it looked pretty on the picture of the seed packet, although I have no idea what it's going to be like or even how to cook it), a kind of butternut squash called violina lunga and an actual Halloween type pumpkin called Big Max. What possesed me to go for the latter I have no idea. I don't even particularly like pumpkin ever since I was introduced to sweet pumkin pies one Halloween I had the misfortune to spend in America back in 1979. And this fellow is said to produce 45kg fruit if you let it. How on earth am I going to stagger up our terraces with a pumpkin that size and how are we going to manage to eat it all!?! Well to solve the space problem that comes with these ginormous plants I have been gathering old car tyres and the like to place in little niches to small to dig a whole bed. So I'll just fill them up some compost and let them get on with it out of the way of other veg, just competing with their surrounding olive trees.
• Another chilli calledPiccante a Mazzetti, an Italian varietal growing upright in little bunches.
• more basil. You can never have enough!
• another lettuce called Romana verde

Outside I've sown the following:

• dwarf nasturtium amongst my brassica (T9)
• wild rocket (rear bed T2)
• Leaf chicory Catalogna Gigante di Chioggia (rear bed T2)
• 2 types of chard: Coste verde a costa bianco and bionda a costa argentata (T10 rear)
• flat leafed parsley (T10 amongst chard and onions)
• Endive Romaesco (T10 front amongst lettuce)
• and finally sweet corn mixed from saved seeds (T 13).
  

Then disaster struck. Just as I was going to untangle our long hoses for the first time this year to give the sweetcorn a good watering, I discovered that they had suffered badly during the winter and snapped in various places. Now our water source is on terrace number 5 (counting from the top, where the road access is). What remains of our hoses reaches Terrace 10 at a stretch, and the thirsty sweetcorn is on terrace 13. So yours truly had to run up and down the terraces (have I mentioned how steep they are?) with a watering can. So as a matter of priority, we need to invest in some new hoses, before the summer starts properly.

So for those who have read this far and haven't fallen asleep yet, here a pretty pic of some coltsfoot. Makes a good cure for coughs apparently. I'd gather some if ever I'd egt a cough.

Waning moon sowing

With my very much simplified understanding of gardening with the moon phases, I plant things growing up during the waxing moon phase and things growing down during the waning moon. In keeping with that I planted potatoes, carrots and leeks yesterday. The carrots, a variety called Karnavit, and the leeks ("long winter") I planted in the cold frame. I had already sowed some leeks of a variety called "Carentan" during the previous waning moon phase and they are coming along nicely.

During the spring-like weather until the weekend, the temperatures inside the cold frame hovered around the mid-twenties Celcius range, much warmer than any part of our house! However, the last couple of days the temperatures dropped noticably again and inside the frame it's now more like 15 C (still warmer than the house...just). I hope that it's not going to get much colder again, as it sometimes does with us. In some years we've had the coldest weather of the winter in mid-March.

The seed potatoes I've used are partially left-overs tiny ones from last year, which have sprouted nicely. They are a mealy type yellow potato. The others are from a local supermarket. They've reduced the price of a 10kg sack of red potatoes, because they had started sprouting. That's of course ideal for planting them and they only cost me €2.

I planted them on the terrace that last year had aubergines and some borlotti beans. The bigger ones I cut in half or even in quarters, because they had so many eyes on them.


Elsewhere in the garden the broad beans are looking well:

Note the bumble bee on the broad bean blossom! I feel another poem coming on. Something like: Bumble bee battering broad bean blossoms but bringing blenty bollen... no... no... something's not working here... Anybody with any better ideas?

In the cold frame the first seedlings are appearing:

gherkin

lentils (it's working!... so far...)

kohlrabi (old seeds, but still germinating)

A view underneath the glass to the half with the lettuces in the background and raddishes (also sown a month ago) up front,

Window of Opportunity

I was starting to get really itchy feet. Many a fellow gardening blogger had started spring sowing a couple of weeks ago whilst I was stuck on the wrong moon phase wondering if I was the only one following silly superstitions. It's not so much that I'm convinced this works, I just don't like showing a 'brutta figura' in front of my Italian neighbours. If they see you sowing tomatoes or the like during the waning moon period, they just tut and shake their heads at your utter foolishness. Only stupid foreigners evidently don't know about the cycles of nature.

The weather wasn't playing it's part either. According to local lore, today is the very day, half way between new moon and full moon, to start your spring sowing. And guess what: after days of miserable weather and lashings of rain, today the clouds parted and perfect conditions for sowing presented themselves! What's more, after a fantastic day of balmy sunshine, we were barely back indoors again, the rain returned giving everything a nice watering and more rain is forecast for the rest of the week.

On cue the almond tree opened it's first flowers too.

As I don't have a heated green house (not even a heated house for that matter), and the space I had created in front of an upstairs window for putting seed trays has been taken up by cats, who would cause chaos amongst my delicate seedlings, I have decided to sow straight into my newly built cold frame. More sensitive plants I sowed in trays covered with a plastic lid within the cold frame to give it a double glazing effect so to speak.

Incidentally, I had left a small gap during the construction of the cold frame, which I was going to block off anyway to avoid a draft. Today I had discovered that the gap was about cat-sized as a cat obviously enjoyed the nice warmth under cover.



Here is what we sowed today:

Outside:

• dwarf beans slenderette. I haven't tried these before, but according to the package they can be sown earlier (i.e. from Feb. onwards), so I shall stagger sowing.
• pea 'progress No.9'. I don't usually do well with peas. The autumn sown ones are struggling and in summer they don't like the sun beating down on them either. Maybe they'll do better this time. This variety sounds like a song from the Beatles' White Album!
  
• lettuce 'salad bowl'. A vigorous, easy and quick growing variety.
• Rocket. It normally sows itself out quicker than we can eat it, but this winter we suddenly found ourselves without any. Don't know how that happened.

In the cold frame:

• Tomato 'Marmande'. This one makes the bulk of my production every year, a large, fleshy and productive variety.
• Tomato 'Gigante seedless'. I don't know what posessed me to buy a seedless variety, it won't sow itself out in my compost. I must have just read GIGANTE and thought that sounds good. I didn't bother with sowing any other varieties as some cherry toms, salad toms and plum toms seem to usually spring up spontaneously anyway and I always run out of space to plant them all.
• Sweet pepper 'Feher'. This is a small pointy yellow variety ripening early and giving good crops for a long time.
• Pepper 'Quadrato d'Asti'. Large red peppers, very sweet
• Cayenne chillies.
• Chilli 'spicy cherry'. Great for stuffing with tuna or anchovies and preserving under oil.
• Aubergine 'halflange violette'. Obviously a Dutch cultivar meaning half long purple. Produced well last year
• Kohlrabi 'Delikatess Blue'. They were slightly old seeds, hope they'll come.
• Gherkin 'Vert Petit de Paris'. I love pickled gherkins. Last year I sowed some direct in the ground with only limited success, so I thought I'll start it off in the cold frame this year.
• 3 types of lettuce: 'meraviglia di 4 stagione', a reddish open head, 'gentilina', green frizzy lettuce and 'brasiliana', an iceberg variety.

Finally I decided to experiment with a few things. I love lentils and they are part of the Italian cuisine, but for some reason I have never seen lentil seeds for sale anywhere. A bit of research on the net revealed that they seem quite easy to grow and can even cope with some frost. So I just took a few brown lentils out of an ordinary packet of dried lentils and sowed them. Let's see what happens, eh?

Secondly I gathered some angelica seeds from the wild last year. I thought I'll try and grow some on one of my lower terraces where I can't do much else anyway in honour of my friend Angelika (Engelwurz) mentioned in the previous post.

Thirdly I was going to write something in the next part of wild food of the month about the judas tree. Both flowers and 'beans' of this apparently pretty tree are edible. Trouble is I haven't tried any myself yet and also I'm not sure I could identify one. In Arcola, near our land there are some pretty pink flowering trees which I thought might be it. So I picked a couple of pods with a view of sowing some out and making a positive id. It appears it's not a judas tree.

This is what the seeds and pods look like.


Like a judas tree they have an abundance of pink flowers in spring, but these specimen are trained in a pergola in a public park rather than growing upright. So I'm not sure what I've got there, anyone any ideas? I should maybe take a photo when it is in flower. I sowed a few of them anyway, it's a pretty plant.