Alliums all over the place!

In the last few days I have been planting out the leeks and onions in the kitchen garden. We’re using Musselborough leeks, a traditional variety and Ailsa Craig onions – a large, bulbing onion which is also a traditional variety.

With the leeks I’ve been topping and tailing them – that’s where you take an inch off the roots and an inch off the top because you plant them using a dibber and you just drop the leek into the hole and water them in. I’ve planted over 50 so far since 8.30am this morning! I’ve got three crops of leeks to go in this year, plus my giant winter leeks so there’ll be plenty for the garden shop and soup-lovers everywhere!

I’ve been looking at reducing the amount of ‘thick necks’ that we have in the onion crop. This can cause ‘neck rot’ when they’re in storage. There are various reasons for this including the soil being too loose and/or too firm. If the soil is too firm the onion has to force its way through the soil, which is why it develops a thick neck. So in order to counteract this they have to be planted at the same height that the bulb is on the stem. However, if you plant it too high, it’s loose in the soil and it bolts. Tricky business! Onion varieties we’ve sown include Bedfordshire Champion, Red Brunswick and Red Baron.

I have over 60 baby pineapple plants now, of which there are probably ten ready for potting up to go in the Pinery. This is the largest number of plants we’ve had since the restoration of the Pinery and we’re now running two beds. One of the beds is a fruiting bed and the other is a succession bed, producing side shoots for potting up, that will eventually go into the fruiting bed. It is the usual practice to take the first two to three side shoots of each plant due to the fact that any produced after the third one usually has much less vigour than the first two or three (I found this out after some experimentation!).

The current fruiting plants are ready to be potted on and are likely to fruit in the next sized pot which will hopefully be in the next eight months.

John Hoxworth

Craftsman Gardener

The diagram above shows the layout of the restored Pinery. At present, the West Compartment is used for fruiting and the East Compartment is used for producing side shoots from plants which have previously fruited.