Using the Tomatillos!

During the summer it became almost impossible to get into my greenhouse. Despite being planted in pots that were comparatively rather small, my tomato and tomatillo plants managed to grow to fill the majority of the volume of the structure, and having outgrown my somewhat inadequate bamboo-cane supports, proceeded to enmesh their branches together as they billowed ever upwards. It was as much as I could do to get in through the doorway far enough to water and feed them, so that was about all the attention they got.

Before we went away on holiday in September I decided the time had come to gather in the harvest, ripe or not (mostly not, no sun this year, grumble) because no one would be around to water the greenhouse. The tomatoes went into trays to ripen on a windowsill while we were away (which they did), but I ran out of room so left the tomatillos (still in their husks) in a crate in the greenhouse, hoping they would ripen too.

More than a month later I was beginning to despair that the tomatillos would never ripen. Some had turned purple, which I assumed was ripe, but most of them were still green or partly green. As a last resort to find a way to use them I did an internet search for what to do with unripe tomatillos, and as it turns out they are at their best when unripe! Immediately I set about preparing them lest they ripen any further!

First I removed the husks and washed the tomatillos to remove the sticky residue left on the skin. I had noticed this stickiness before and thought it odd, but as I discovered from my googling this is a normal feature of the tomatillo. I then tasted the fruit raw, one green and one purple. The green fruit was acidic and pleasantly sour without causing me to pull a face. The purple fruit was still sour enough to be tangy but with a more rounded flavour. Not really like a tomato but reminiscent of something similar.

As I had quite a few tomatillos I decided to make a salsa verde. I roasted the fruits first, then whizzed them up in a blender with chopped onion, lime juice, coriander leaves and seasoning. We ate some with roasted belly pork instead of apple sauce and the combination was delicious.

Chopped tomatillos ready for roasting

Propagating Jostaberries

Last week I bought a large, sturdy jostaberry plant as a birthday present for my Dad. The jostaberry is a cross between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant and this parentage is reflected in the flavour of the berries. Jostaberry bushes grow quite large and have no spines. They are vigorous and productive once established and are resistant to several diseases which affect gooseberries and blackcurrants. They flower early in the year so there can be a risk of damage to the flowers from late frosts, but I've not grown them for fruit before so I don't know how much this is likely to be a problem in the south west of the UK.

From previous experience (at work) I know that hardwood cuttings taken from jostaberries at this time of year are easy to take and root readily, so before I gave the plant to my Dad I took the opportunity to propagate a few free plants for myself for next year!

Using a sharp, clean pair of secateurs I took a cutting around 12 inches long from each of the main branches, making my cut just above an outward-facing bud on the parent plant. I then trimmed up the bottom of each cutting, making a horizontal cut just below a bud, and snipped off the tip of each cutting by making a sloping cut just above a bud. This left me with seven cuttings of around 9 inches in length, each slightly thicker than a pencil.

Bottom of the cutting

Top of the cutting

I pushed the cuttings into a large pot of compost (mixed with grit or perlite for drainage), watered them in and placed the pot in my greenhouse, which will remain unheated through the winter. A cold frame would also be fine. Now I just have to wait until autumn next year when they should have rooted well enough for me to separate them and pot them up individually or plant them out.

The parent plant left tidy and ready for planting.

Potting up strawberry runners

Strawberries always seem to me to be such generous plants. They produce some of the most satisfying and delicious soft fruits and they also readily propagate themselves, spreading by runners which form chains of young plants all linked to the parent.

My container-grown strawberry plants have been putting out plenty of runners over the last few months, which I've allowed to root down into the layer of composted bark which the strawberry pots sit on. This time of year is ideal for separating those runners from the parent plants and potting up the rooted plantlets as individuals ready to grow on for planting out next year, so I spent this morning doing just that.

All I had to do was cut the runner where it grew from the main plant and gently pull so that all of the roots of the strawberry plantlets came away from the bark chips (if the runners had rooted into the ground it would have been simple enough to lift them out of the soil using a trowel). I then cut the runner into separate plantlets and removed any excess bits of runner or any damaged and yellowing leaves, leaving three leaves on each plantlet.

Removing some leaves helps to minimise water loss from the young plant while its root system is still small (the more leaves the plant has the more water it will lose by transpiration). I did my potting on a damp, overcast day which helps to prevent the roots from drying out while they are exposed to the air. Sometimes there is some transplant shock if the roots do dry out and the plantlets may look wilted for a few days, but they will soon recover.

I potted up the plantlets into compost in small pots, firming the compost around the roots and watering in well.

I've laid out the potted plantlets in trays in my greenhouse to give them some protection while they root out and they'll stay in there through the winter before I harden them off in spring for planting out. As I'm growing four varieties of strawberry I've also labelled them so I can easily tell which is which.

This year I grew Honeoye, Red Gauntlet, Mara des Bois and Sophie varieties in large plastic pots on the sunniest side of my patio. I chose these varieties to give me strawberries to pick throughout the season, from early to late. Despite the difficult weather and hordes of munching slugs I did get some strawberries, although not as many as I'd hoped, and the plants were quite high-maintenance, requiring lots of watering (when it wasn't raining!) and I fed them with seaweed-based liquid feed weekly.

Honeoye was certainly the earliest to crop and the berries were quite large and fairly sweet, with good colour and classic strawberry shine and shape. Red Gauntlet cropped very disappointingly - most of the berries produced turned brown before they ripened so I only ate a few. They didn't ripen very well and weren't very tasty. I assume this is due to the weather and maybe Red Gauntlet simply needs more sun.

Mara des Bois was undoubtedly the star variety for me. Not massively productive but delicious - juicy with great flavour, and being a perpetual variety it carried on fruiting throughout the season. I even picked some in September! Sophie was the late season variety I chose and the plants put on lots of leaf growth through the first part of the season, looking very lush and healthy with huge, dark green leaves. They did produce some berries, although not many, which were large, juicy, sweet and had very red flesh.

Now that I have some more space on my allotment, I intend to grow strawberries in the ground next year rather than in containers. Hopefully by potting up the runners from this year I will have plenty of new plants for my planned strawberry bed, for only the cost of the compost I've potted them in.

Unusual Autumn Fruits

This week I have come across several unusual edible fruits. I'm always interested in alternative foods (including but not restricted to those plants which crop well without any particular human attention), because a diverse food supply will offer more resilience in times of unpredictable and extreme weather conditions.

I had read about but never seen the fruit of Akebia quinata, assuming that in this country our climate isn't warm enough for the plants to produce it, let alone ripen it, so I was astonished when Jenny (a work colleague) showed me the fruit she found on an Akebia 'Silver Bells'. The firm, fleshy, white capsule opened to reveal a dark purple, sausage-shaped fruit consisting of seeds surrounded by edible pulp, similar to the inside of a pomegranate. I broke off a section and sucked the pulp from the seeds (apparently the seeds cause digestive discomfort if eaten so I spat them out). It was very sweet, with a subtle floral taste, but definitely more of a novelty fruit than a dietary staple (even if it was available in quantity) because of the fiddly nature of trying to eat the pulp without the seeds. Perhaps sieving the fruit would be a better method.

I was also happy to see fruit on the young Ugni molinae 'Butterball' plants at work which have been growing on in a polytunnel.

I'm familiar with these berries and love their sweet and spicy strawberry flavour. Ugni is in the myrtle family and also has aromatic foliage. Its only drawback is that it grows slowly, but even a small plant will produce a reasonable number of berries when grown in a glasshouse or polytunnel.

Berberis thunbergii is another shrub which produces edible red berries at this time of year, so I tried some from this well-laden bush. They tasted better than I expected, and although rather bland, dry and mealy in texture they had a pleasant hint of sourness.

I also recently came across some small plants of Gaultheria procumbens, or Wintergreen and bought one to grow on in a pot of ericaceous compost.

The leaves have a strong, characteristic wintergreen smell when crushed and can be chewed for the flavour (although not swallowed). The berries are edible and have soft white flesh which is slightly sweet with a hint of mint flavour.

(Whenever I try something for the first time I only taste a small amount just in case it doesn't agree with me).