The turnip...

...is your friend.

Erysiphe betae in the bin

Today I removed a lot of leaves from my remaining turnips. They have turned white and moldy on the top side, so I suspect Erysiphe betae (I haven't found the common name). This irks me a bit; those leaves are good eating. Today I just tossed them. I have no idea on what to do with Erysiphe betae, neither do I know if it's possible to eat it. I need to do some more research!

Ain't that the life?

Today I took my first harvest from the turnip/carrot/scallion box and added nasturtium leaves to that. Unfortunately my husband made sallad of it before I had a chance to take a photo.

So, how's it going? 2007-08-04

Well, that's the question. I've taken pictures of all my working gardens to show the experiment in progress.

Here's my herbgarden. Currently I'm growing lemon balm, thai basil, parsly, chives and sage. As usual the lemon balm and basil are growing like crazy, but not the sage. The sage brought some kind of illness from the mall, and haven't recovered at all. The herbgarden is not to its best. I've been ill lately, and haven't been able to spray the gardens with water. The result is that thrips has taken over my lemon balm. Today I cut away the most affected ares (the buds, of course) and sprayed a lot. I'll do some extra spraying with water for three weeks to see if that's enough to scare those pests away.

This garden is also filled with gnats, who thrives in the moist soil. Their precense is probably stressing the plants, making them more vulnerable to other pests. One way of getting rid of gnats is to inplant nematodes, and I have tracked down the swedish company selling these things (worms, actually). It wasn't easy, since the full name of the company isn't "Predator" like everybody's calling them, they are called "Lindesro AB, parasiter och predatorer" and their website is minimalistic.

This week I cut down the thai basil and made pesto. It tastes like ordinary pesto, although more bitter since I had to thicken it with more pine nuts than was originally intended.

What I've learned from this garden so far:

1. Spray the plants with water at any cost.
2. Get rid of those gnats!
3. Learn to sow your own plants from seeds even for those cheap herbs available at the mall.
4. Do have some almonds at hand when you are making original pesto. (Oh boy, will the genovesians kill me for this...)

I couldn't resist this angle when I took this picture. This is the box where I grow tiger nut only. It's also the first box that is half the size of my ordinary boxes, and with a weed the garden seems to work fine. I may think these plants needs a haircut, but I keep my hands away. This is the special garden for my son. He has started to help me with the plants, and he's seen this ever since the seeds grew. Every day I bring it down from the shelf, show him how it's grown and then he sprays it with water. These are things twoyearolds like.

What I've learned from this garden so far:
1. A twoyearold can handle a spraying can and likes to see how the garden grows.
2. Using a box half as big is fine.
3. Weeds are growing like, well, weeds.

And here's my garden unbrushed. I've sown turnip, carrots and scallion close together and now the different leaves are tumbling over to each other making complicated braids. It's time to thinning this out for the first time. At this stage the roots are thin like threads, and pretty weedy, so I'll make a leaf sallad for the family. The scallions and the carrot leaves will be used raw, but I cook the turnip leaves like spinach (surprise!). In this box I have too few, and to much trouble picking them.

I have a few gnats in this garden too and one turnip leaves have a dry spot. On the other hand this is a lot less than I've had before.

What I've learned from this garden so far:

1. Spraying water to prevent thrips works.
2. Turnip should be grown in bigger quantities as single crop in their box.

Do you recognise my thripsgarden I complained about some time ago? Don't those nasturtium leaves look dashing? I sowed them after I'd torn up the garden and I've watched them like a hawk to see if any of the pest has survived in the tigernuts (which I left) and started to affect them. So far so good. The soft soap spray seems to have worked, eventhough I didn't follow the recipe to the letter.

I'm planning to thin this out a bit, but I haven't decided if I'll take entire plants or just cut some leaves. The tigernut plants survived their haircut, and are ready for another one.

What I've learned from this garden so far:
1. Soft soap and water is enough.
2. Tigernuts do survive haircuts.

And the calamondin. Since I started to spray it with water its leaves has stayed on the branches instead of falling off en masse. (I once swept the floor in the room and got a heap of leaves and some pine cones instead of dust...) It's still suffering from cloros and I have changed the water in my spraying can to softened water to see if that's making any difference. The water of Uppsala is heavy with calcium and I suspect the calamondin is absobing the calcium through the leaves. (Calcium makes it harder for the plant to absorb iron, which makes it 'anemic' - it gets cloros.) Most of the flowers has fallen off, and dark green fruitlings are hiding beneath the leaves.

What I've learned from this garden so far:
1. Calamondins wants to be sprayed with water.

As you can see I haven't included a picture on a gigantic pot filled with strawberries. I haven't planted it yet. My biggest challenge right now is to keep the plants alive untill I get started...

And don't forget the poll in the margin ;-)

Indoor gardening, some thoughts

If you read swedish you can take a look at "Livet i en lagom stor stad" (Uppsalaliv) has proclaimed Parkettodlaren (Indoor Gardener's mother blog) blog of the week. I'm honoured, and feel it's time to sum up the experiment so far.

My biggest enemy isn't a gardening thing at all. It spells boredom. You know; suddenly your interest in the subject dips and you start working on other things instead. I've had one serious dip so far. The causes were full time work and illnesses, but they could have been a need for playing the accordion, learning cymric or drinking non-alcoholic colourful drinks. These dips are one of the reasons I use selfwatering containers and long time working fertilizing tabs. In this way the basic needs are covered.

And how did my plants do during this dip. Not bad. My strawberry and iceplant seedlings died a dry dead. The others were replanted and lives pretty well. The nasturtiums I planted on the balcony are fighting a tough war against the pansies in the same container, on the other hand they are the healthiest of all plants. The nasturtiums inside are among the plants with thrips and are sprayed with soft soap every other day.

I've started to experiment with smaller containers - although I still build them myself out of plastic boxes from IKEA (cheaper that way). The bins you see on most of my pictures are dimensioned for growing root vegtetables - carrots, turnips and tiger nuts for exemple. The best crops for indoor gardening have turned out to be leaf vegetables, however, and they don't need as deep layer of soil. The question is if I ever will have patience to wait for a turnip to form its root. It doesn't matter that they grow fast, they grow very slowly anyhow. The last turnip I harvested had a root thick as a finger. The carrots did better though.

Two things have proved to be important; extensive notes and extreme hygiene. When it comes to notes I see myself bying a book with black covers and writing minute data with blue ink and longhand. Since I know myself the reality looks quite different. I write data with water proof black ink on paper tape and stick the strips directly onto the sides of the container. This really makes my gardens look like experimental cultivations, and for a long time now I've ponder on a way to make them look nicer. The plan involves fabric matching the curtains (which I plan to sew), velcro tabs and me getting off my butt...



Growing vegetables indoors are more like growing stuff in a greenhouse than outdoor gardening. You may know that a greenhouse should be washed thorougly at least once a year? You do that to get rid of different pests that are hiding in cracks and minute getaways. Perhaps it's good to do the same with indoor gardens? I've cleand the window where my thrips ridden garden is placed using soft soap. I haven't had an entirely problem free garden in years, so it will be interesting to see what'll come out of this insight.

The most important thing I've learnt is that nothing is A Big Catastrophy (tm). You are allowed to be the greenest of amateurs, and you are allowed to stay like that for as long time as you like, untill you feel ready for higher learning. You can even digest this higher learning in the smallest portions possible. As long as you provide the plants with enough water almost anything will grow.

A happy day

My bin haunted by thrips. I've just sprayed it with pesticide and am cutting away the leaves with most injuries.

I've had an outburst of energy today. Not only did I sterilize seven litres (two gallons) of leca (and I did it without burning down the house, jay!), I washed two plasticboxes, cleaned a window and boiled my bridal veil. (The veil is made of nylon and is normaly the separating barrier between leca and soil in my selwatering containers.) Appart from that I've treated my nasturtium/tiger nut/purslane garden for thrips. I was hoping to sow something in my boxes too, but the evening came faster than I thought.

You've reached an higher level of gardening when you recognize more pests than aphids and takes the trouble to fight them. It was a strange feeling to think
"Shiny, dry areas on the leaves... aren't that thrips?"
I took a look at the back side of an dry leaf, and when I knew what to look for I spotted those cigarrlike little animals at once. A quick glance in my small garden pest encyclopedia proved me right. I was right! I knew something! Spooky...

Tomorrow I'll plant a bin with vegetables - nothing special, just turnip, carrot and onions, if nothing gets in the way. When you spend your life together with a bearded man and a twoyearold anything can happen.

Smoke gets in your eyes

Right now I'm tidying up my little gardens. They have been abandoned while I've been battling flues and eyeinfections. Every now and then I stop and ask myself if I've really been that ill. In some cases I've been driven to desperat messures. To save the bigger part of my seedlings I planted the tigernuts and nasturtiums in the same container and the same soil as I used for the carrots and the turnips. You shouldn't do that, I've been told, and now I know why. Some desease in the soil, or perhaps some bug on the purslane, have now affected all of the plants in the bin. The leaves of the nasturtiums are all bumpy and have dry areas drained of all moist. Only now do I realise that I should spray them with something, or at least figure out what the problem is.

Unfortunately I'm not coherent yet, and the reason is my eyeglasses. They are sixteen years old. My last pair of contacts was infected with the eyeinfection so I'm forced to use my glasses instead, and they are not up do date with my eyesight. My brain has to put a lot of extra effort on interprete the pictures delivered, and less power are left to actual thinking. The last days have been full of Duh! moments. For one thing I've lost about five dollars paying doubble fees on the bus.

But the worst accident was with the aluminium pan I found in the metal recycling bin. You know; you need some kind of container if you are going to sterilize soil in the oven. I don't want to use our regular kitchenware, and it feels wrong buying new stuff. So, when I found the pan in the metal bin I thought "Bingo! Finders keepers!"

I won't be ashamed of using this pan for soil. The teflon layer inside has been ript several times, the outside is burnt black, and how does a pan like this end up with all those dents? What did they do? Slammed the cupboard door on it? Jumped on it? Ran over it with a car? Perhaps they did all this and some more too, but I can never know for sure.

The pan was smeared in something sticky. The dishwasher would take care of that (dishwasher detergent is extremely corrosive) so I didn't worry about it. On the other hand I smeard some of the goo around while carrying the pan, and when I used the kitchen cloth to remove it I didn't feel like using the cloth for kitchen chores any more. But a stRong woman knows what to do; I decided to boil the germs out of the cloth.

I've actually saved an old saucer just to be able to boil my kitchen cloths. I took the saucer out, filled it with water, added some washing up liquid and the cloth, put this on the stove on the hottest area and myself in front of the computer...

I woke from my computer coma about an hour later smelling smoke. I warned my hubby and returned to the kitchen to get some nose spray (to be able to detect the source of the smoke). I didn't need to sniff around. In front of me I found an dry saucer with a charcoal cloth glaring at me with its embers.

Duh!

I'm going to the optrician at tuesday, and then I'll have to wait a week for my new contacts. Untill I get them I'll try to stay out of the more firery chores of gardening. But I'll sterilize some leca tomorrow - those of you who can; pray for me.

The first salad

From left to right: carrot tops, common purslane and turnip tops.

When I started this experiment I had an idea of neat pots with vegetables growing to the right size and then stopped, kind of. Whenever I felt for it I could harvest a salad or perhaps some tigernuts to give my family healthy eating and my friends allergy friendly culinary experiences. Whenever I felt for it...

However, the project is more and more coming to this:
"Oh my GOD! The basil/purslane/turnip/carrot will soon ask for citizen rights! We have to have a sallad before they are taking over the flat!"
That's why we had a salad today.

The salad was a bit heavy on the turnip side - turnip tops are hairy and will probably do better in a warm dish (prepared "like spinach", no doubt). The son made faces. I was more prepared and mixed my greenery with the rice and got a kind of pilaff that was surprisingly filling. Can't recommend the taste, though, I'm looking forward to the day when my nasturtiums have grown big enough to loose some leaves. And perhaps I should sow some more purslane - and some more carrot tops would be nice too. Ice plant will be interesting to taste as soon as the plants are grown. Add some strawberry sticks to that...

If you ever read an article about a flat where the windows were burst by a galopping djungle, then you'll know it's about mine.

Curiosity stage

I can't resist posting a picture of the greenery part of the chicken casserole I made yesterday. All green parts have been grown in our flat. I put purslane, french tarragon and a turnip leaf in there. They look so good before the cooking has reduced them to green threads.

My gardening has reached the curiosity stage. I drink tea from my own mint ever so often and will soon cut the basil forest to make pesto. Small citrus fruits are occupying our kitchen while waiting to become marmalade. Or rather season marmalade, since their own taste are much too bitter. I think I'll dry the sage and hand it out in small bags to my friends - I have way too much of it. This stage is nice, but it's far away from supplying an entire family with vegetables. The good thing is that I'm now able to make a first count on how long it will take me to get everything going in full harvest cycles.

I think it'll take about two years, although the mileage will vary.

Progress so far

Here we can see my little seedlings, looking at themselves in the window. They don't seem to have noticed the added light, so I have lowered the lamp at their half of the window. The tilted armature gives our library a somewhat anarchisitic look, which in a way adds to the austere book cases. I'm not a friend of too much order.

Today I had to fill the magazines in my homemade selfwatering containers, and I'm overjoyed! This means they are working like they should. The box with the instant herb garden was empty, whereas the seedling box had a few drips of water left. I took the risk of giving both herb garden and seedling box fertilizer to see what impact it'll have.

And my carrots have surfaced. Jay!

Turnip Brassica rapa ssp. rapa f. majalis

This photo is called "turnips"
Photografer is Saidunsaid, and you can find more of her photos here.

Turnip seems to be a dream crop for the indoor gardener, it's fast growing and both root and leaves can be eaten. It prefers light soils, but I suspect it can grow almost everywhere. It's a coldclimate crop, which makes it most popular on the nortern parts of the globe.

Since I've found cooking tips both for root bulbs and leaves I conclude that they both are tasty. The plant contains a lot of vitamin C, as well as B2, B1, B6, folat and niacine. The leaves are the most concentrated and contains a comparable large amount of protein (to be a plant of that kind, that is).

The downside is that turnip contains oxalat, which - if you eat a lot of it - crystallize in the body and causes different kinds of health problems. What concerns me more is that turnip contains goitrogens that surpress the thyroid function. Any person with diagnosed but untreated thyroid problems should avoid turnip. Since many of our old cultivated crops do contain oxalats (spinach and rubarb) or goitrogens (most cabbages) I suspect that these 'back sides' can be balanced by a varied diet and by drinking an healthy amount of water (1-2 litres or 1/3 - 2/3 gallon).

A side note on thyroid problems; If you are suspecting that your thyroid are causing you problems you MUST go to a doctor and get a proper diagnose and treatment. Do never ever EVER think that changing the diet will be enough. Thyroid problems are deadly, and the treatments are often cheap and comfortable. Still, since I have an underfunctioning thyroid myself, I can't help but smile when I read that chocolate and saturated fat stimulates the thyroid. Turnip fried in real butter, mmmmmmm...

The turnip bulb is useful raw, in stews and casseroles and fried as an dish of its own. It gets wooden if it gets to big, so make sure to harvest before it's bigger than 10cm / 4" across. This should not be a big problem for an indoor gardener - I plan to harvest my first roots when they are as big as radishes. The leaves could be eaten fresh as salad, they are said to resemble ruccola in taste. In cooking they are used as - you guessed it - spinach.

Space-ious

This afternoon I opened the micro and found the milk my hubby warmed for me for elevensis (our forenoon snack). We've had little sleep these last days.

When I'm feeling soggy like this I do handywork, which means I spent the day putting up the added light for my little indoor garden. It's about time. The little purslane and turnip seedlings has reached for the light so much that they almost lay horisontal over the soil.

Setting up this lamp involved drilling, tampering bolts and electricity work. I'm as happy as a kid when I manage to do things like that and feel like a Super Strong Woman (tm). The fact that my son said one of his first two word sentences made it even better.
"Mom drilling."

Now I'm savouring this, looking out over an indoor garden that has truly reached space age.

Little things...

Today has been a Big and Serious Study day (tm), which means I haven't been able to do much with my garden. The good thing about studies is that you have to move around every now and then to prevent falling to sleep over the keybord. This is a the ultimate incentive to, for exemple, clean up the balcony after the winter. Our two HOL benches bought at IKEA last year have started to disintegrate, so I finished the process quickly and put the remnants inside to dry (I'm planning to make toy storage out of them for my son - I guess I have to start a new blog recording my interior design projects). I checked the roses and put the stuff I've stored in the HOL benches into plastic boxes instead.

The shelf for the added light is up, did it meself - mostly. It's become the perfect place for my geraniums. The garden geranium that was given to me when we moved here needed some water and general care, as well as the cuttings from my "Avatar of Roses" - a scented geranium I like much. They had formed roots pretty nice and should have been planted in soil long ago. Very long ago. In fact several months ago. The pot was filled with muck and the surface of the water had started to mold. So I cut the tips of the cuttings and placed them individually in new pots. Their leaves were light green with darker nerves, and I suspect they've lost their "body fat" (or whatever it's called on a plant) due to their long time in water. As an experiment I added two drops of liquid fertilizer to two of the pots. This will probably make some algae happy, but I hope the nourishment will be of benefit for the cuttings too.


A tip from Colleen made me remove the plastic from my little kitchen garden. Turned out that eventhough purslane and turnip had put up their little leaves the carrot still stays under the surface. Note to self; sow carrot in a separate container from now on. Let's see if this round grows anyhow. In other case, well, I prefer turnip to carrot every time...

In the beginning

One of the good things about gardening is that you get so many beginnings. I just took a peak into my box with purslane, turnip and carrot, and they all had put up little leaves above the soil. It's only two days since I sowed them. This time I did exactly as one should (instead of "this will do"...) and apparently this payed off. I have to look up if there are any instructions on when I should remove the transparent plastic, else I will be very nervous. What if I remove the plastic too early? Or worse, to late so the tender plants get mouldy. I'll watch this poor plants almost as close as I watch over my son...

The balcony season is beginning too. I'm writing this with my feet in a bath (aaaaaaaah) and the door open to the balcony. I can see the rose "Polstjärnan" ("polaris"). It's hardy up to swedish zone 7 (approx. US zone 4) and it will be interesting to see if it survives my recklessness. I have a feeling that roses should be covered in the spring to prevent them from budding early and then freeze in an late frost attac. This doesn't mean that I've got my acts together and actually done so. The other rose is a read hybrid rose I bought on an impuls because it was red. Unfortunately it doesn't smell right, so I wont shed any tears if it dies. I'll already decided to replace it with a "Dubbel kanelros" ("doubble cinnamon rose") in that case...

Most of my lavendar plants seems to have died. They were hybrids with the wrong smell too, so I'm not that sorry. Last, but not least; my strawberries and the cherry tree have survived! Yippeee!

Instant herbgarden

The two things that have worked well so far is 1. added light and 2 selfwatering pots. Today I took the consequences of this and built two giant selfwatering pots, using the plastic box "Flaj" from IKEA. (We have an enormous amont of these, and they are used for everything, from wind shield to foot bath.) I sowed common purslane, turnip and carrot in one, and planted herbs and sallat in the other. A small spot that's green already makes gardening more fun. I bought the herbs and the sallat in the vegetable section at ICA (like Walmarts or Tesco), which is both a curse and a blessing. A curse since you have absolutely no guarantee that the plants are free from pests. A blessing since the herbs are big in size and cheap. Right now I'm looking at the result of my efforts and wonder how many of the plants that will recover once they realise that they are in a new garden. Some of them seems to be weak (should have been more picke at the mall), so I've already made a replacement plan.

Sowed in box 1
Common Purslane
Turnip
Carrot

Planted in box 2
Sallat
Basil
Sage
Tarragon

Back to the roots

This image is called "just off the turnip truck"
Photografer is Darwin Bell, you find more of his images here.

Since my added light projects proceeds in a very slow pace I spend the 'lost' time researching the crops I've bought. You've already seen the result twice, since I've published small articles on common purlsane and ice plant on this blog. Now it's time for the different roots. I like roots. They're nutricious, can be harvested early and stays fresh for a long time. On the other hand I wasn't so sure that I could learn something more about them. The tiger nut are indeed exotic to a swede, but the turnip seems common enough. And the carrot! Is there anything worth to add about the carrot?

I always do my research on the net, using Goooogle and the common swedish name of the plant. As soon as I find a reliable latin name I do a new search on that. This is the best way to find reliable sources. Because the net is littered by plant heads, romantics and wannabe herb gurus, and you need to distinguish between them and the reliables. Read the reliable ones first to have a solid base of knowledge when you go on to read the articles written by plant heads, romantics and wannabe herb gurus. These are often more fun, and may contain some grains of truth.

Indeed, there were quite a lot to say about both turnip and carrot. There's even a museum dedicated solely to this orange root - I'm not at all surprised that there are englishmen and women involved. I'll publish my collected efforts on this blog during the week.

Happy gardening!