Weeding the Web

Dougal beats the Invisible Man for scarecrow stylishness

I was rather desolate this year to miss the Press open day at Mr Fothergill's, as my first foray into the nearer reaches of Cambridgeshire last year had been so enjoyable. (Never mind that I was on holiday - couldn't I have organised myself to do both?)

One part of the fun is  judging a staff competition. Last year, it was for the best unusual containers.This was my favourite:

 

Entry in Mr Fothergill's staff competition, 2014

 

Though this was the winner, and raised a smile too:

 

Winner of Mr Fothergill's staff competition, 2014

 This year, the staff were tempted into making scarecrows, which were set around the Newmarket trial ground. Laura Oakes and Katherine Watt of the mail order division were the winners with this rather splendid version of Dougal from The Magic Roundabout.

 

Though, I suspect, if I'd been there, I'd have voted for this rather ingenious character by the trial ground team of Carol Parsons, Brian Talman and Todor Paskalev:

 

 

The Invisible Man won second place

 

Commercial director Tim Jeffries' swagger of a pirate won third.

 

 

Though rumour has it that this fellow might possibly be the work of children from a Hertfordshire primary school...  Oh, Tim!

Jazzy potatoes - new and improved salad potato?

The last harvest: 15.5 oz, grown in SHL, "displayed" in a normal size Mason mixing bowl.

This year I've grown Jazzy potatoes - five tubers, each one in a small black plastic growbag. Thompson and Morgan, who handed them out in February, said of this salad potato, which is vaunted as an improvement on Charlotte, "We've been amazed at the high numbers of small tubers coming from Jazzy; we harvested over 80 tubers from just one 8 litre grow bag." 

It has an RHS Award of Garden Merit*, and isn't actually all that new, having launched in 2012 with a pretty heavy-duty PR campaign that saw it grace the shelves of shops, including the Co-op and Harrods, in distinctive, high-quality packaging. According to its very own website, "Market-men tell us that it’s 'doin’the business'. Whether that’s down to the good looks, versatility or entertainment value, Jazzy has wide appeal."

[Pause for thought... "entertainment value"???]

Jazzy is a waxy potato which, it is said, can be steamed, boiled, mashed or roasted. I neglected my duty here in only boiling them but, cooked this way, we found them to be a mild-tasting potato, without great character, that were perfectly pleasant with Sunday lunch merely buttered and salted. The skin was virtually non-existent. It's also just as well that they are waxy, as the spuds varied enormously in size, yet the smallest held their shape and texture when boiled as long as the larger ones. (Yes, I know you're meant to cut potatoes up to the same size, but when you've got a significant number the size of peanuts... Honestly, I don't bother.) There's no doubt that, grown in the right medium, they're a good-looking spud.

With five different bags in growth, I used this as an opportunity to compare composts. Here are the yields:

• Harvested 19th July. Grown in Sylvagrow. Weight: 15 oz.
• Harvested  26th July. Grown in SHL. Weight: 16 oz.
• Harvested 2nd August. Grown in mix of Dalefoot wool compost and garden soil. Weight: 17½ oz.
• Harvested 9th August. Grown in Sylvagrow. Weight: 16½ oz.
• Harvested 23rd August. Grown in SHL. Weight: 15 oz.

All the plants had pretty much died down by the time I started harvesting the first bag, so I doubt if the later bags increased much in weight, if at all, during the time they were waiting to be harvested.

The most notable difference was that the crop grown in the wool compost and garden soil had far more tiny potatoes and tended to a bit of scab. Those grown in the other composts had no scab and fewer potato "peanuts".

Is the yield disappointing? Well, after taking grower error into account (i.e. I'm an erratic waterer and they did occasionally dry out enough for the plants to wilt), it's worth considering that the blurb from T&M makes it clear that the excitement is around the number of potatoes, not the weight of harvest. Personally, I'd rather have fewer, larger potatoes. 

Over at Home Grown Veg, a comparison with Home Guard (22 potatoes, 1½ lbs) and Jazzy (30 potatoes, between 1½ and 1¾ lbs) shows that you'll get a pretty similar weight over fifteen weeks' growth. Given that Home Guard are first earlies and Jazzy are second earlies, this doesn't seem immediately comparable, but second earlies are generally ready in around 13 weeks, so they've had a fair crack of the whip and I'd say that the yield isn't exactly jaw-dropping.

Still, much effort has been put into making this potato a star. Fans can follow it on Twitter (@jazzy_potato) and watch it in its own video. My feeling is that this "small potato with a big personality" is more of an "average potato with a big advertising budget".

But perhaps you've found different. Have you grown Jazzy this year? What did you think?

* Report from 2014 can be read here.  Michelle at Vegplotting checked with Thompson and Morgan, who have had good reports of high weight harvest (as well as number of potatoes) - you can read what she made of them in her post, Potatoes: Heart over Head.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - hollyhock heaven

One of the staples of summer in my garden are hollyhocks. I sowed a "black" hollyhock and a standard pink one many years ago now, and have never sown again. The interest is that each year I never know what colours will be coming up. A couple of years ago, I was rewarded with this rather lovely wine and pink combination against the background hebe.

The black, which was really a very dark purple, disappeared after the first couple of years, and I wasn't sorry. Black flowers do rather disappear into the background, so it was difficult to tell they were there.

This year has presented more than the usual variety. I always love the pink ones which are pale enough to create a stripy effect when they're open:

Then we have a more solid pink altogether:

And a really pale pink. These are one of my favourite too. Thanks to the mysteries of genetics, all the hollyhocks this colour have, this year, been no more than two feet tall. Strange but cute. 

Last year I decided some hollyhocks on the other side of the garden would be welcome and sprinkled seed from last year's plants. Up came the only one in this rather determined colour:

And long may the hollyhocks continue to spread their seed, I say. Whatever the colour, they always look lovely, and they over a positive bounty of pollen to the bees.

This is part of Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gardens. Why not pop over and see what else is blooming around the world?

Garden mower review: EGO - battery-powered mowing, a view of the future

EGO v Qualcast. The back edges of the collection boxes are lined up, so you can see the difference in length.

"Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog."

I was reminded of this abortive invasion of Earth from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with the arrival of the EGO mower for review. Only, this time it looked as if the invading force might eat me.

Scale isn't obvious in a picture and, not thinking, but expecting the mower equivalent of a small saloon car, I was stunned to find that the new arrival was more in the category of an SUV.  Shiny, huge, rather sexy but, as with all SUVs, a total over-specification for its suburban surroundings.

Still, nil desperandum. For me, this turned out to be a revelation of new battery technology.

My usual mower

As you can see from the picture, it's a Qualcast. It's small, chosen for its extreme lightness and also because the front garden is a patch of grass surrounded entirely by flower beds, with no path access.

It doesn't give a a tidy result, needs emptying after a couple of passes up and down the garden, needs unclogging underneath at the same time, but can be tipped over and picked up with the crook of your little finger.

It will also, faced with grass nearing a foot high, close down for fifteen minutes while it cools down at the insult. Sometimes, shorter, wetter grass makes it do the same.

The grass I mow

A "lawn" that''s approx. 20 x 50 feet, with low-hanging branches on an small apple tree in the centre, more sweeping branches from an apple at the side - both of which tend to get a bit tangled in long grass as summer progresses - some stepping stones set into the grass, and the odd pot and table that I tend to mow round. 

You by now will have the image of someone not exactly lawn-proud who merely aims to keep it roughly under control. (It's a crop, OK? I feed the compost with it. Besides, I like a shaggy, country feel.) And who has never experienced a big, powerful mower.

The EGO trip

Enter the EGO.

First question - how on earth do I get it out of the cardboard box? This machine is heavy. Massively heavy (26.2kg). Lift it? You must be joking. I cut it out of the box. There is a lifting handle at the front for people who fancy a bit of variety in their weightlifting training, but I moved it entirely by pivoting it on its back and front wheels.

Second question - I've never had a battery-powered mower before; what do I need to know? To find out, I had to go online, to an instruction book that's the wrong way round onscreen (and couldn't be shifted 90 degrees, either).

For a retail price of £499 I expect instructions. On paper. I don't want to have to remember instructions from screen to garden, or print them all out, or squint as some tiny screen while I stand over the mower (assuming I even had a smart phone).

The booklet is stuffed with information of the type "Do not run over your foot while mowing", but I couldn't find any reference to battery care. In the end, it seems straight forward, but I'd like to know that before experimenting to find out.

But what about that battery? This is the clever bit. The biggest limiting factor for battery-powered equipment has been the size and weight of battery required. The EGO is notable for its 56V lithium battery. Most are 36V. And even more impressive? It charges fully in half an hour. This is very fast. It also means that you can decide to mow the lawn at almost a moment's, rather than a morning's, notice. Which is good. I don't mow that often, so I don't know how long the battery holds the charge, but certainly, whether I took the battery out or left it in the machine after mowing, it needed charging three to four weeks later (it's been very dry, so the grass hasn't grown much so far this summer). 

According to its publicity sheet, It should cut up to 800 square metres, have a tenth of the running costs of a petrol-powered equivalent, and operate for up to 1500 charges (around 8-10 years in an average sized garden).

The mower's size has advantages. Husband looked at it blankly and said, "Some people's gardens are smaller than that." But with a cutting width of 49 cm (the Qualcast is 32cm), it ate up the space. Mowing, which usually takes me a sweaty 30-45 minutes (depending on assiduity), was now taking about 20 (and I was being much more assiduous). 

For a machine that heavy, I thought it moved nicely. I was just so sorry I couldn't give it a good run. Suddenly the garden took on a new character - in fact, quite irritating in parts. Those low-hanging branches? How dare they block the path of the mighty mower! Cut out a corner of the lawn for a Bramley (which I have done)? No, we need more mowing!

The battery light shows green when the mower is happy. Overload it and it'll start to flash amber and then turn to red and stop. The only way I could make it do this was by lowering the height. It has five height settings (25-80mm), and the bumpy, tufty lawn was too much for the lowest two. I stuck with the middle height most of the time, but foot-high grass under the apple trees? Cut down like Man by the Grim Reaper, on setting no. 5.

This was my favourite feature - the height-changing gear-stick. And don't tell me it's not been fashioned to remind you of a racing car. A notchy gear change and the suspension rises and falls before your eyes. The stick needed a little effort at times to move it, but attacked from the right angle, slipped smoothly into place.

It comes with three grass collection options, two of which need a plastic insert (both of which felt pretty robust) into the back of the mower. One makes it into a mulching mower. The other directs the clippings to the side as you walk. The third is the 60-litre soft-sided collector which turned out to be easy to take off and rehang on the back, even though you had to lift the rear flap on the machine to do this.  This isn't a loud mower generally, but I was very taken with how quiet it was when set up to mulch.

What didn't I like about the EGO mower?

Hmm. It's an expensive machine and I just got the feeling that certain things had been skimped on, putting reliance on its good looks to carry it through. The see-through green lid on the battery compartment irritatingly wouldn't stay up on its own, so you had to manoeuvre the battery into position while it fell down and got in the way.

The battery itself is very neat but it's a large, heavy object with little to get a grip on for anyone with small hands. I'd have appreciated a design with some sort of handle built in to make both wresting it from its charger and slotting it in and lifting it out of its compartment easier.

The height-adjustable handle doesn't offer much choice. For the mower to work, plastic clips (that didn't feel as if they'd last too long) have to be snapped over the shafts. There are only two positions where there are holes to receive the clips - fully extended, and unextended (top picture). The former was slightly too high for me while mowing (with the handle sitting mid-chest level), the latter too low. (A good point about the handle, though, is the way it folds very neatly, creating a compact outline for storage.)

All the plastic bits (there's a starter "key" too) feel a bit flimsy.

And, of course, there was that lack of instruction booklet.

Would I buy an EGO mower?

I'm keen to try other battery-powered mowers, as I suspect that this is the one to match. EGO Europe’s marketing director, Steve Roskell said, “EGO is the first range of cordless outdoor powered gardening equipment capable of matching or surpassing the performance of petrol-powered machines without any of the noise, fuss or fumes." Well, I'm convinced.

And I've enjoyed having it. How things might change if I had it permanently! This is built to run down large areas of open grass. Its bag took all the clippings in one go in July, and in two goes when it was very lush and longer at the beginning of the year.

But I wouldn't get it myself. It's too big to store anywhere except the garage (the car was banished outside). Too heavy. And for the price I think it needs a few design tweaks. But it's certainly been a revelation as far as the possibilities of battery power are concerned.

The EGO range includes a blower, line cutter, hedge-cutter and chain-saw.

London's Secret Garden: Plant Portraits by the Florilegium Society at Chelsea Physic Garden

Any excuse for a visit to Chelsea Physic Garden is a good one, but the current exhibition, London's Secret Garden, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Florilegium Society won't disappoint.

Curcubita ficifolia by Kimiko Kambe-Gang

About the Florilegium Society

Set up in 1995 to record the plants in the garden, after a botanical art course run on site by The English Gardening School gave the students the desire to continue painting, it has only sixty members at any one time. Members visit the garden regularly and the society's Chairman, Dugald Graham-Campbell explained, with a twinkle in his eye, "In return for the kudos for being asked to be a member, you are expected to paint something from the garden each year."

The Society aims to catalogue every plant in the garden eventually, which is quite a task, given that there are five thousand different plants and their collection currently boasts 650 paintings. Combine this with the fact that, in reality, about thirty-five pictures are submitted in time for acceptance each year - and there's work for years to come.

Each November, submitted pictures are judged by an independent panel which includes doctors of botany from Kew and the curator of Chelsea Physic Garden. Artistic merit isn't considered; acceptance depends on whether a picture is scientifically accurate enough to be accepted.

Calendula officinalis by Dana Everett

The demands of botanical painting

Seventy-five pictures are on display in the current exhibition. The pictures are entrancing in their detail. Botanical art differs from flower painting in being strictly scientific in intent, providing an accurate record of the plant, sufficient for ID purposes. So, no vases, no insects, no dewdrops - though sometimes an artist just can't help herself on the latter (and yes, the majority of members are women).

Past chairman Judi Stone explained the finer points of the art and it became clear that, with too much artistic licence, you'd probably end up with a flower painting.  "If stems cross, it could be unclear and messy," explained Judi, pointing out the separate seedhead of the Calendula illustrated above.

Of course, rules are there to be broken and skilful artists manage it well. In another picture, an aubergine overlapped a slice of the fruit, cleverly linking the two, but nevertheless clearly separate. "You can see a very thin white edge has been left between the two to indicate separation," said Judi.

Yet, within such strictures there is remarkable artistry, not just in the accurate rendition of colour and shape, but, by clever placement, in making a subject feel anchored and its parts united on the page when there is no background to set it against.

If the demands of botanical art seem to put it far out of your artistic range, it's encouraging to find that the discipline can be an entry into painting. Gill Barlow, who is the society's archivist and has taught in her time, explained that you can teach people to see, to measure with compasses for accurate rendition, and to create a design. (She sketches the elements on pieces of tracing paper and arranges them to her satisfaction, before starting the actual work.)

Urtica dioica by Nicki Tullett

The artists have considerable freedom to work as they please. Some use watercolours (with a dry-brush technique to ensure accurate lines and colours), others pen and ink or pencil (145 pictures in the collection are in black and white). One in the exhibition (you're unlikely to spot which) is in coloured pencils. Paper can be of different textures; one uses vellum.

Do we need botanical art?

Isn't all this painstaking attention to detail rather an indulgence in this day of the digital camera? Andrew Brown, who wrote the accompanying book, Botanical Illustration from Chelsea Physic Garden, explained, "Botanical art has advantages over photos. Everything that is required for diagnosis of a plant is on the same page. You could put a whole lot of photographs together, but not everything would be in focus. The business of focus - that's the main point."

What botanical art certainly does is make the viewer focus. For some, the idea of concentrating so minutely (even through a microscope, for those artists who wish) is a dry view of nature. Yet, the enormous service provided by such painstaking efforts is it gives us, the viewers, a chance see the plants anew, and gain a greater appreciation through seeing with another's eyes. Even the dreaded Horsetail, an absolute bete noire of mine, and portrayed in tiny  monochrome pencil strokes by Guy Eves, received my grudging admiration.

London's Secret Garden information

The Chelsea Physic Garden exhibition is open until August 26th, from 11 to 4, free with entrance to the garden. On a Monday, the cafe and shop are not open and 2-for-1 offers are not valid. The exhibition is only accessible via stairs. 

This is the first time that the Garden has taken on the reproduction of products arising from the Florilegium Society. Six prints, fridge magnets, magnetic bookmarks and a scarf, featuring botanical art that can be seen in the exhibition, can be purchased from the shop.