Kitchen Garden Diary, August

August 9

Temperatures over the last couple of days have barely reached 15C, and my Florence fennel is clearly feeling as depressed as I am by the grey skies and cool winds. Having sowed it outside at the end of June, the seedlings got off to a flying start but half of them seem to have stalled, and a couple have done the opposite and bolted. So frustrating! Bulb fennel (as opposed to tall and willowy herb fennel) is certainly a temperamental creature, but most years I persevere because it’s something I love to eat. That fresh, aniseedy flavour and crunchy texture lends itself so well to salads, and it’s just as good roasted or braised in a Mediterranean fish stew. The bolting thing is something you just have to live with when you’re growing fennel. Like a skittish horse, it will bolt at anything untoward including cold weather and low light levels, but also dry weather and lack of water or soil nutrients. It can be even more likely to bolt if you sow it too early in the year, which is why I left it until June when the soil was warm. Unlike herb fennel, which likes a dry, baked soil, Florence fennel needs a moist, compost-rich soil that will help to swell the bulb. Water and warmth are the two key ingredients, and the latter is certainly in short supply at the moment. When the bulbs eventually start to grow, I’ll need to earth them up to blanche the bulbs and keep them stable and, providing the weather improves, I should be harvesting them by mid-October.

August 14

Three new troughs arrived today, and I’m delighted with them. Rather than buying expensive planters I searched on the internet and found some large agricultural water troughs, 1.5m long and made from galvanized steel - much cheaper and probably more substantial than some of the ready-made planters you can buy. They look smart and functional round the edge of the kitchen garden, and the plan is to use them for catch crops of salad leaves and herbs. I just need to drill holes in the bottom for drainage, and then the next step is to fill them with soil - quite a feat as they have a 60 gallon capacity. I’ll line them with gravel at the bottom and then use a mixture of topsoil and compost from the compost heap.

August 18

It’s mid-August but still perfectly possible to sow oriental salad leaves, as they grow swiftly and are reasonably tolerant of cooler autumn temperatures. An ideal crop for a container, peppery-flavoured mizuna is especially fast growing and you can be cutting the first leaves within three or four weeks. I’m running out of salad leaves now as most of my earlier sowings have gone to seed, so my mission today was to fill one of my new troughs and sow some mizuna. I bought green and red varieties from the garden centre to mix together, and then scattered them on the top of the wet compost. My plan is to sow pak choi in one of the other troughs, but I need to test the seeds out first as I bought them last year. As long as you keep seeds in a cool dry place, they can still be viable the following year or even beyond that, but germination becomes more of a lottery. Rather than wasting time by sowing them and playing the waiting game, it’s always a good idea to test the seeds out first for germination, which you can do by scattering a few on top of moistened kitchen towel on a saucer, and then put the whole thing in a plastic bag. Leave it somewhere warm for a few days and watch to see if they sprout. For other oriental leaves to try at this time of year, have a look at the Real Seeds website (realseeds.co.uk). I want to try Japanese flowering shoots and leaves (Tsoi Sim) and choy sum next year.

August 21

My runner bean harvest is phenomenal this year – probably because of all the rain we’ve been having. The more I pick, the more they come, and I’m freezing plenty by slicing and blanching them first, a task made easier by a nifty bean slicing gadget from Lakeland, a present from my mum on mother’s day (I know, surely it should be the other way round). This year I’ve grown ‘Scarlet Emperor’, one of the old favourites, and instead of supporting them in rows with a traditional A-Frame cane system, I used a circle of canes tied together at the top to make four obelisks. These certainly look more ornamental, but they aren’t necessarily as practical; one of them has become top heavy with too much growth and half blew down in the wind the other day. I should really have pinched the tops of the plants out before that happened, which would encourage the plant to produce more pods, but that’s just one of the many things on my to-do list that never gets done.

Checklist for August

Sow quick maturing crops such as oriental salad leaves, rocket, radishes and winter lettuce. Earth up leeks and fennel. Water regularly if the weather is dry. Harvest vegetables regularly to encourage them to keep cropping. Dig over beds where crops have finished, adding compost or sow with green manure. Look out for aphids, blight or mildew.