Weeding the Web

The bloggers speak - can you increase yields of potatoes in containers?

Growing potatoes in pots will certainly make your patio more productive, but is it, as suggested by How to Grow 100lbs of Potatoes in Four Square Feet, possible to create a bumper harvest by continually earthing up the plants?  The idea is that by earthing them up all the way to the top of a large container, the plants will send out far more stolons and the container will, by harvest time, be bung full of spuds, all the way to the top.

In Potatoes in Containers we looked at expert opinion, which takes a very dim view of the likelihood of this. However, a number of garden bloggers have given it a go. So, how have they fared?

Potatoes in containers - can you increase the yield?

Some activities are just plain bizarre. And growing potatoes in containers, when you have a perfectly good vegetable patch, seems like one of them. Especially as they have less space to grow and need more watering.

So, when my husband came home with two packs of these Haxnicks' potato planters (pictured) I had to bite my tongue. No point in discouraging food production, even on a bijou scale.

But would it be bijou? Floating around the Internet is the suggestion that if you earth up a potato plant well enough, it will send off more potato-producing shoots, or stolons, and you’ll get a much bigger harvest, distributed throughout the container.

The idea seems to stem (hah, sorry!) from a piece in The Seattle Times. In 2005 Greg Lutovsky was quoted as saying that, when growing potatoes in a box, you could “steal” the tubers from the bottom of the box (removing the bottom slats, then replacing them) throughout the season. “Unless you steal all of them during the growing season, in the fall you should end up with a box of spuds—as much as 100 lbs.”

Garden project : a DIY planter for succulents and cacti

Every so often you come across a design that is so basic that you can't believe it's so attractive (OK, so that's a subjective opinion - as Fred pointed out in CD Difference?), but over at the website of ReadyMade, the demised magazine, Kelly, who runs Succulent Love, a company specialising in designs with succulents, gives instructions for a brick patio planter and tealight that I think is charming. You need an old brick and a drill (and, possibly, a burly man on the end of it), but otherwise it couldn't be simpler.

Kelly fell in love with succulents while planning her wedding, and makes surprising use of them in her bridal bouquet . Possibly it works best in Californian sunshine, but it's stylish. If you're looking for inspiration on how to display your own succulents around the house, there are plenty of ideas in her gallery.

Weed Identification - or working with wildflowers

What do you do if you find a plant you don't recognise in a favoured spot in the garden? Do you pull it up (no insubordination in the ranks permitted) or do you leave it? If the former, how can you live with not knowing what it is?

Several summers ago, a plant moved into my garden, rampaged through the beds and has returned with enthusiasm every year since. Oddly, there's not a sign of it over the fence.

Actually, not oddly. It says much about my weeding (or lack of). With my inability to weed unidentified plants, just in case I discover something amazing, I discovered that this one produces prodigious amounts of seed. But even though I now know this, I still give it its head in places as It masses into clouds of tiny white flowers, on branched stems reaching as high as five feet, and creates rather an attractive backdrop to showier blooms such as autumn anemones. It also attracts lots of hoverflies. But what is it? 

Wild carrot sprang to mind and I got quite excited. Was I harbouring an abundant edible crop without even trying? Of course not.  

Wild carrot roots, according to Mrs Grieve's A Modern Herbal (first published 1931), are "small and spindle-shaped, whitish, slender and hard, with a strong aromatic smell". So far so good, but the flowers were wrong. Actually, it didn't matter. Wild carrot roots, says Mrs Grieve, possess "an acrid disagreeable taste" so they wouldn't have made it to the table.

At this point I found Botanical Keys, a super website attached to the Botanical Society of the British Isles. It takes you through a list of questions, explains any terms which might confuse, and then spews out suggestions of what your mystery plant might be.

Mine, it turns out, is almost definitely corn parsley (Petroselinum segetum, also known as corn caraway, and originally filed under Carvum segetum, according the information at Plants for a Future). Found on bare and cultivated ground, grassland, hedgerows and roadsides (are you getting a picture of my patch?), it flourishes in the lower half of England and in Wales, and its extent can (sometimes, as it doesn't always seem to work) be seen at the Online Atlas of British and Irish Flora.

Suffolk Biodiversity Partnership regards corn parsley as a rare arable flower which grows in cereal field margins (really, the garden isn't that bad), and the BSBI includes it on its Threatened Plant Database. This seems as good a reason as any for letting it stay, so, if anyone asks, I'm doing my bit for biodiversity.

It even might be an edible crop, after all. According to the French site, Toil' d'epices, it's known as Persil de Moisson, or Harvest Parsley (which tallies with its flowering period of August and September, though the leaves by that time have virtually disappeared) and they says it's edible, like its cultivated cousin, P. Crispum. The PFAF lists the edible parts (unspecified) as a condiment. I suspect that the edible bits are the young leaves, which are markedly different from the small, sparse spiky ones found on the blossoming plant (see picture on right and also at the Online Atlas). However, to find out, I'd actually have to eat some.  And no, I won't be doing that any time soon. 

But if you have any experience of consuming Corn Parsley, do let us know!