Vegetable gardening has been transformed in ways that suit smaller gardens and gardeners with no conventional garden at all. With them in mind, I have been sorting seeds and selections for the coming year, but first I need some advice.
By mid-April, my month was going grimly. The wet weather had made those stalwarts, universal pansies, rot in their window boxes; Oxford university’s crew was crushed in the Boat Race; an uninvited hare ate the buds off my tulips. I know from bitter experience what wildlife likes to eat in a garden. From bitter experience my guests know what I like to cook indoors. To change the tone and widen my repertoire, I decided to withdraw to the kitchen and experiment.
I am a fundamentalist cook. I follow a recipe to the letter, but I cannot think independently. One of my bibles is Katie Stewart’s The Times Cookery Book, in which I found a recipe that breathed sunshine in the April storms: “talatourie”, “a delicious recipe”, Stewart tells us, “from Cyprus”. I never remember seeing it on a menu in Cyprus. All it needs, she explains, is an onion, finely sliced, a carton of yoghurt (how big a carton?), freshly ground pepper (I opted for pre-ground paprika), salt, chopped mint (I bought a bunch of it in Waitrose as mine is not showing well above ground) and a peeled cucumber diced into cubes.
When stirred, the ingredients tasted like unintegrated sludge. The cucumber had no zing and the mint was far too pungent. Have tastes changed since this cookbook’s first publication in 1972, making talatourie a disappointment? I blame British supermarkets’ preferred type of mint, much too pepperminty and dominant, and their cucumbers, much too watery and soft.
Foreseeing the problem, I had chosen a Duchy Organic cucumber, expecting firm flesh like the flesh of those shorter cucumbers that are sold in the Mediterranean. It is a long way from Cornwall to Cyprus. A Duchy cucumber cannot compete with an Aegean original.
The herbal expert Jekka McVicar’s farm contains about 40 different types of mint: I can correct the problem of supermarket mint by using spearmint from the garden. Forget chewing gum: Mentha spicata, not peppermint, is the one which is aptly mild and makes the best sauce for spring lamb. What is the right variety of cucumber? The RHS mark of approval appears on Mr Fothergill’s seed packets of the hybrid cucumber Emilie, described as “succulent” and “smooth-skinned”: it is too bland for a good talatourie. I have yet to comb the seed lists, but can any of you tell me which named variety has the zing and flavour of a short, externally prickly Mediterranean cucumber?
Cucumbers are not frost-proof and in Britain need to be sown and grown in a warm greenhouse. Outdoors, ever more of us now grow vegetables in casual containers, whether buckets or old metal dustbins, or in raised rectangular beds, held in at all four sides by wooden planks up to 9in high and 2in wide. Single planks of seasoned wood will suffice for the sides, nailed to wooden vertical pegs at each corner and, if necessary, the middle. There is no need to make a deep box with sides made from several planks nailed on top of one another.
A 6in-9in depth of good compost, built up on top of forked soil at your garden’s existing level, will suffice for almost every vegetable, except potatoes. If in doubt go to see Kew Gardens’ excellent recent vegetable garden, whose beds are also built up above existing soil and planned with small gardens in mind.
In small spaces in yards, on balconies or flat roofs, possibilities have recently multiplied. Look especially for low-growing beans. One of the best is the dwarf runner Hestia, a bean that will thrive in a bucket. Its crop has the fine flavour of runner beans without need for tall stakes. At last we can grow runner beans on balconies or in pots on terraces, filling one of the gaps in supermarkets’ summer provision.
As for French beans, two low-growing, heavily cropping varieties have changed the game. One is Adoration, especially useful as its beans are a pretty shade of yellow, thin and only 5in long. A match for it is purple-podded Celine or the dwarf bean Mistik, an excellent newcomer which also has beans in elegant purple. When the danger of frost has passed, traditionally in late May, these beans can be sown directly outdoors, burying each seed about 2in deep and spacing them 9in apart. These varieties are offered by Thompson and Morgan, my first resort for the latest veg seeds.
Why grow your own now that seeds and compost are ever more expensive and carrot-fly shows no sign of decreasing? Unusually coloured vegetables are one answer, adding gaiety to a summer party. You can now buy a purple-podded mangetout pea with an excellent flavour, Mangetout Shiraz from Thompson and Morgan, which should be sown outdoors in rich well-watered soil, spacing the rows about 18in apart.
As for yellow courgettes, supermarkets stock them but in your garden they can be picked early and marinated in oil, lemon and vinegar for a lively start to lunch. There are two good ones now from Thompson and Morgan, Lingador, whose courgettes are yellow and cylindrical, and the useful Shooting Star, a yellow-cropping variety which will run up a trellis and produce freely as it does so.
What about tomatoes? Last week an émigré Russian emailed me from Cyprus to ask a question about Cassandra in Greek mythology and where to find seeds of tomatoes with a flavour worth sowing and growing. I directed him to the French haven for tomatoes of all shapes, sizes, origins and flavours, Cultive ta Rue. At a flower show at the Château de Saint-Jean de Beauregard, near Paris, I was amazed by the tables of fine tomatoes on display, although their proprietor supplies clients in the EU but not Britain. Even so, it is worth consulting the catalogue online (“Découvrez l’univers des tomates”) as it is full of advice and detail even if you cannot import the plants across the English Channel.
Grafted tomato plants have begun to appear in good garden centres, offering many times more fruit and better quality, but as each plant was priced at £6.95 last Sunday in mine, I reckoned I could buy most of a month’s need for that cost without the risk of whitefly and wildlife. A seed packet is still better value: Garnet is a recent arrival with dark brown-red fruits in long trusses, and Balconi Red is a fine choice for balconies and terraces, where each plant will eventually need a pot 12in in diameter. The tomatoes are cherry ones of a bright red.
Last, a no-fail tip for summer tables. Radishes come in ever more shapes, colours and sizes but Thompson and Morgan’s Misato Rose Flesh radish is special. The outside is rounded and off-white with a pink root, but when cut the flesh inside is purple-pink. Anyone can grow these radishes from seed, but they never appear in supermarkets. Maybe I should drop them into my mouldering talatourie in order to liven it up.
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