Sweet bonus of accidental veg

Nostalgia is a feeling that often pervades at this time of year. I find that a smell, a combination of colours, or something about the weather will trigger it and I am back again in some part of my happy past – the gravelly granite of the Sugar Loaf in Wicklow beneath my feet. Then in a pub in Roundwood, or Johhny Fox’s, it was great to be by a warm fire after the long trek, with a hot cup of tea and a scone and getting a lift home in a warm car, a luxury, where we would all pile in.

Being outside in the garden at this time of year is no hardship. It has been remarkably warm for November, and there are new flowers on the dahlias, and the honeysuckle has new growth spurt. A group of us in Con Smith Park gathering fallen leaves were startled by a wasp woken up out of a snooze.

In the garden in Jampa Ling we are busy planting garlic. The crop is divided in two - with one lot in the polytunnel that will be ready about a month earlier than a second crop outside. You can buy bulbs for planting that look exactly like regular garlic only they are sold virus free. Split these into individual cloves and plant about twice the depth of the clove. It is long season crop which will be ready to harvest the following June and July. The bulbs we are using were bought rather than saved, because of a virus that attacked all the garlic and leeks outside this year, (the garlic grown inside was perfect, which indicates that it was something to do with the external environmental conditions).

Oca

The oca should be ready for harvesting after the frost has killed off the top growth, that is if it has enough time to produce its tubers - it needs at least eight weeks from the Autumn equinox before the top growth is killed off. Right now, it continues to grow with abandon. This little-known Andean plant that produces small starchy tubers has been grown to rival the potato, albeit not on this island; had it done so it might have saved us from a dreadful fate. It's very popular in New Zealand where it is known as yams. Oxalis tuberosa, has trifoliate leaves just as other oxalis species do, which gives us a clue as to how it might taste. It has no relation to the potato and would not therefore be subject to blight. The leaves and stems can be used sparingly as they are high in oxalic acid, and the tubers after harvesting should be left in the sunshine (good luck finding some in December) to sweeten up and lose this sourness.

Volunteer

I thought it might benefit from a little earthing up and as I was doing that; I discovered some volunteer potatoes that had been growing alongside it, some which were giant size, about 10” long and 6” wide. A volunteer potato or other plant is one that is left over from a previous crop or has ‘volunteered’ it’s seed to grow in unexpected place. I love them and expect to find them, especially in the windrow beds. ‘Windrow’ is a word derived from the practice of scything cornfields, when grass was left in long rows to be turned and dried and made into hay. A compost system that looks like this, is when instead of the ubiquitous New Zealand box, we arrange weeds and whatever we would usually put on a compost heap into rows. These rows eventually decompose (up to 3 years), into a beautiful bed of soil. Or indeed, the soil can be removed and used elsewhere. True, it’s a system suitable for large gardens only, and if the odd potato gets flung in, and a dahlia tuber or a mint plant start to grow out of the rows, all the better. The heaps are periodically covered and topped off with grass clippings. It is a haven for butterflies, small insects, frogs and even mice or shrews.

A word of caution though, we do not add any kitchen scraps – we have an alternative system for that.

That was a very long explanation of how the potatoes came to be growing beside the oca.

The oca is growing in the oldest of the windrow beds, where the soil is far richer than anywhere else in the garden.

Nothing has been added except weeds and grass clippings. The other volunteers (plants not people), to be found here are nettle, kale (of course) and honesty, which is very generous with its beautiful seeds.