Spring in the Garden

Strawberries and Asparagus - rejoice!  As the days get longer and warmer, and the weather a bit more stable, both of these ingredients are synonymous with the beginning of spring in New Zealand. Between now and Christmas, they are prolific and I simply can't help myself from gorging on them. 

Here's a a really basic asparagus 'recipe' (if you can call it that) to start, which I recently acquired thanks to Hugh Fernley-Whitingstall from River Cottage.  I quite often have this for a quick, somehow virtuous breakfast (maybe except for the butter!): 

"drop a scrap of butter and a dash of white-wine vinegar into a soft-boiled egg, season and use asparagus "soldiers" to stir the yolk into instant, cheaty hollandaise."

 
Though I don't consider myself a green thumb, I have once again started planting my urban veggie patch with my usual overdose of tomato plants and various other summer treasures - fresh heirloom tomatoes with fresh basil and mozzerella are only a few months away.  Though I'm sure I don't plant them properly, or the right distance apart and many can't believe how many tomato plants I have relative to the size of the garden, I always manage to grow heeps of them and there generall aren't a lot left by the end of the season!  My sage and thyme have survived winter, as have a handful of my peppers, and I have decided to plant a few extra companion plants for the bees. 

I am not by any stretch a good gardener unlike my friends Jo and Elle who have a veritable vegetable forest which is well fertilised, well thought out and which produces an abundance of treats all year round.  Jo, who has previously written an article for my blog on lab night, has put together another post on life in the potato patch. I hope he will become a regular contributor to this post.  I'm sure you'll agree he has some interesting 'good life' perspectives:

Over to Jo.......

Yesterday my wife Elle and I dug up the first of our new potatoes.  We've been growing them for a couple of years now, and both springs have enjoyed delicious tender potatoes.  Its some kind of wonderful to dig through moist rich earth and dig out these cream coloured little morsels.

It would be an absolute crime to peel them - even a gentle scrub takes off a lot of the skin.

We boiled them for a few minutes (although with really fresh new potatoes we often steam them) and served them as an entree, tossed with some chopped chives, butter, and some fresh ground salt and pepper.  They were absolutely sensational, and proof (as if we needed more) that spring really is on the way.

The way we grow our potatos is a variation on a theme, and one I first read about in a seattle newspaper.  A lot of people grow potatoes in a stack of tyres.  As the plants grow tall enough, you add another tyre, another layer of seed potatoes and soil, and keep going.  The plants on the bottom layer will keep growing up and up every time you cover their stems.  The variation we use is a wooden box.  This allows the potatoes to be harvested from the bottom, while other layers are still growing above.

I've included plans for the box (which is a bit over engineered, but thats just me).

Here's how it all works:
You'll need:
A = 4 lots of 100x75x1200mm Rough Sawn H4 tanalised Pine
B = 32 lots of 50x150x600mm Rough Sawn H4 tanalised Pine
Lots of 75 or 100mm long Screws

To start with, screw four lots of B (the sides of your box) to your four A’s (the uprights of the box), and fill with a layer of dirt and a layer of seed potatoes (and possibly some special potato fertiliser).As the plants grow to about 200mm about the level of the dirt, add another set of boards, another layer of potatoes, and another layer of dirt.

You can carry this on until the box is completely full of dirt and lots of lovely potatoes.

When a layer has been growing for long enough (it varies on the type of potato you’ve planted), you can simply unscrew the front panel B on the appropriate layer, root around and pull out loads of lovely fresh potatoes. The dirt will be compact enough that it won’t all go everywhere.

At the end of the growing season, the whole thing can be unscrewed, all the potatoes you missed dug out, and then the box can be put in storage for the next season.

The dinner photo is from our second forage into the potato box and is a spring salad of salad greens, sauted asparagus, broad beans, sugar snap peas, a creamy herb dressing, and topped with a poached duck egg along with new potatoes tossed in butter, parsley and chives