Raised beds feature prominently in the catalogue and this started me thinking about the pros and cons of purchased wooden raised beds as I have never used them.  When I started growing polycultures it happened in a slow, organic sort of fashion, there never was a grand plan to commence; I just used the first part of the garden that lent itself to a few experimental perennial veggies.  After that I annexed other areas, all of them small and strangely shaped, as well as infiltrating veggies into flower beds and anywhere else I could!

I have used masses and masses of mulch materials on the polyculture patches effectively raising the level of the first patch well above the original ground level.  The difference in level is accommodated by a sloping edge, rather than a barrier.  A few experimental patches in the front garden that will be planted this spring / summer are currently mounded high with mulch and compost.  Unfortunately one looked rather like a small shallow grave and offended my partner who reduced its height a bit.  The others are more rounded and all of them will settle to some degree.  However I like the rounded nature of it all and feel that I am getting the benefit of providing deep soil for the veggies in a very natural way.

Of course raised beds are reachable from all sides and therefore don’t need to be trodden on.  I do walk on my polyculture patches, but only when absolutely necessary and along narrow, defined pathways – I know where they are, though it is not obvious to look at them.  This is a trade off due to the small areas available – if I made wider more obvious paths there would be precious little growing space left.

This spring the growing area is going to be extended, by dint of moving an area of decking into a shady corner and removing the remainder of the back lawn.  It is possible that I could use this extended area to experiment with a raised bed, but thinking about it I feel an innate prejudice against introducing something with such straight lines and which does not originate from the garden into it.

I believe that I am providing an effective and sustainable way to produce perennial veggies and don’t have any qualms about not using raised beds.  However I am very interested to know what other people think and what your experience is.  All comments are therefore very welcome.

Returning to the horticultural catalogue what bothers me a bit more is that with the raised beds they supply plastic liners and topsoil to fill the bed with.  As far as I can see the liners effectively isolate the bed from the soil it sits on, cutting off exchange of nutrients, soil life and water and making it like a giant pot sitting on the patch; and the notion of transporting topsoil around the place makes a mockery of reducing your food miles if there are transport miles implicit in the soil it is grown in.

This afternoon I had a walk round Attingham Park, a local National Trust property.  My favourite part – apart from today’s show of snowdrops in the woodland – is always the walled garden with its lovely display of organically grown veggies.  The adjacent yard used for raising young plants has an area of raised beds which are made by edging with hazel borders and shown in the picture below –.  I assume they are made on site and they seem to be a better solution than purchased wooden edges.  Some time in the past I did try to make some using branches cut from the hazel in our garden, but there was not enough for the job.  However I am going to cut some willow branches off soon and perhaps they would be able to be pressed into service.  I also noted that Attingham’s walled garden has no raised beds – they use deeply manured beds set between paths of woodchip and they grow huge crops during the summer.

Please do let me know your experiences of growing with and without raised beds and what you think of the technique.

But for the perennial veggies the weather can make no difference.  This wintry onslaught is but one of the extremes that the weather throws at them: times of excessive rainfall, of drought, unseasonally high temperatures (sometimes), low temperatures, high winds, sunless days with relentless cloud – it all has to be accommodated, with bursts of what we might consider “pleasant” weather in between.

I thought initially of the veggies being adaptable in a way that we people are not.  After all we have largely “adapted” by retreating into the comfort of weather tight buildings.  But perhaps adaptability a misleading word to describe the veggies – they are not sentient beings and I cannot attribute to them the discomfort that I feel, however much I respect them and their inherent life force.  Neither can they change their behaviour as conditions alter.  Maybe it is more accurate to see them as inherently versatile, they are “designed” to cope with a wide range of environmental conditions; and in that part of the year when conditions particularly favour them they burst into growth and productivity.

Excluding exceptional conditions (as experienced last winter) the perennial veggies face each change of conditions, as it comes by just living through it, this is just how “life” is. Whereas human nature tends to parcel life up into bits we like and bits we don’t, we yearn for and work towards the pleasant and disdain the unpleasant.

I grow perennial veggies as part of looking towards a future when I am likely to need to be more personally resilient and resourceful.  If life in general is resilient to the conditions in which it finds itself I hope that I can do the same!  And as even last winter’s exceptional conditions did not obliterate all life from the garden I aim to follow nature through the good and bad using the resilience that must be actually built into me by life herself.

I went outside just now to get some photos of the garden with her winter coat of snow on, with the kales hanging limp and forlorn and smaller plants buried out of sight.  It is but one extreme and it will soon enough transform into the spring that lies latent.

Whilst I was outside I caught sight of a robin sitting on a dead fennel stem.  He let me creep right up close and then hopped up to the rosebush and burst into song, you can see his beak open in the picture!

Yesterday I set about garnering as much produce as I could for this purpose.  I went for the Jerusalem artichokes first and dug one plant that grew to a great height last summer – albeit at something of an angle due to its shady position.  This yielded 390 grams after removing part of two tubers that had sadly rotted.  This part of the garden is always very damp – so damp I think that there may be water rising there, so I know now not to leave Jerusalem artichokes in there too long if I put them there again.

Amongst the Jerusalem artichoke tubers were a few Chinese artichokes that had wandered over – they are part of the mint family and spread underground like mint does.  I dug up a skirret plant and took off a number of roots to eat and also another five to replant.  I put the original plant back where it had come from, noting that small green shoots are starting to form and planted the five roots elsewhere, hoping to make five more plants, but not knowing if this will work.

I have a few beetroot plants which I am inordinately proud of as most annual veggies just get slaughtered by the slugs.  I pulled two of these and also gathered some apples from the ground.  Shamefully they have been lying there since last autumn, I assumed they would have been nibbled or started to rot, but surprisingly I found quite a few that were whole and wholesome.  To add some greens to the meal I gathered some shoots from Asturian kale, 1000 headed kale and Sutherland kale.  Sorry about the glove in the picture below, I have tried to crop it but can’t get that to work.

The recipe is based on one in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s veg cook book, but starring the perennial roots from the garden:

• Approximately 12 oca tubers from those previously harvested (sorry didn’t weigh these)
• 390 g Jerusalem artichokes
• 8 g (!) Chinese artichokes
• 246 g beetroot
• Approx 100 g skirret root (weighed but I forgot to write it down, may well have been more)
• 1 mashua tuber (supplied by another grower)
• 2 apples, skin on and sliced
• Plus purchased ingredients:
• 4 shallots
• 2 sticks celery
• 2 carrots
• 1 parsnip
• 1 slice butternut squash

The veggies were all cleaned (and peeled if necessary) and chopped / sliced into appropriate sized pieces.  Then they were put onto two trays with a dash of oil and a sprinkle of salt and freshly ground black pepper.  After 20 minutes at 180 degrees C the apple and a good handful of rosemary leaves were added.  Then back in the oven for another 20 minutes or so until cooked.  Roasting works really well to bring out the flavours of the veggies and there is no need for any additional flavourings.  We cook two portions of roast veg in order to use half another day mixed with cooked brown or green lentils and a salad dressing to make a really amazingly tasty salad dish.

I guess the list of ingredients above demonstrates that using what is to hand to make supper gives a less finely tuned recipe than one from a cook book but the satisfaction is immense both for the tummy and for the soul.

Now I have spent a few years growing perennial veggies I am finding out what works best for me and growing more of them.  I have saved some Jerusalem artichokes from last year (in fact I have not yet dug them all anyway) but wanted more plants than my own saved tubers are likely to produce.  So I have bought another twenty and planted them out this morning.  They are in a sunnier spot that last year, amongst a whole variety of other veggies and pictures of how they get on will no doubt appear later in the year.

Likewise with the Chinese artichokes, I want to grow more and in a sunnier location.  I have dotted them in clumps all over the place; as always happens there were more than I had “room for”.  But room has been made in amongst other things and some have gone into pots and flower beds to see what happens.

I planted both of these sets of tubers by making only very small holes; deep enough, but not wide, quite like the way I plant daffodil bulbs.  In the process I cleared away some things that were in the way.  This included nettles which are my garden’s friend but they need to be kept in place or they become too rampant.

All the while I had the delightful accompaniment of heart lifting birdsong.  In the same spring like vein a number of plants are stirring.  These are mainly in the onion family – garlic, shallots, perennial leeks, three cornered leeks and others – they are all sending out bright green shoots.  There is also lamb’s lettuce which has been growing (self sown) since Christmas and we have been eating the thinnings for weeks, field beans are appearing and the greens especially the kales are looking grateful for the mild cool, damp weather.

Although there have been a few light frosts this winter continues to seem unseasonally mild, but at least it has been raining to replenish the soil water.  The mild weather has encouraged flowers to appear in unusual combinations and today there are winter jasmine, snowdrops, crocus, daffodils, primrose, camellia (!), hellebore and clove pinks all in flower.  I will leave you with a picture of the bright green of the lamb’s lettuce (with a shallot poking through the centre) and a robust nine star perennial broccoli!

• I cannot expect all the food from the garden to look like it has come from a shop.  Appearance is not what counts.  It is vital that it is wholesome and nutritious but it doesn’t have to look the best, particularly before cooking.  Thus the leaf beet leaves I garnered a couple of weeks ago had been well and truly nibbled, nay munched – probably by slugs (ugh).  They had huge chunks taken out and some were more rib than leaf; however once chopped and cooked you could not tell and they tasted fantastic.
• I try to eat as much as possible of each plant.  Not ever being able to abide waste I have always eaten the green ends of spring onions and leeks and the leaves and stalks of cauliflowers.  So with perennial kales I try the stems as well as the leaves; some are okay if the outer edge is peeled off, others are just too fibrous.  If the rocket is going to flower I eat the flower stalks as well as the leaves.
• I need to be aware of what is growing all the time and when to pick or harvest it to make the best of the plant.  Leaving a perennial kale to grow bigger and bigger leaves only to find that they have actually become inedibly tough or actually started to moulder and the opportunity to eat that leaf has passed.  I am now getting better acquainted with my plants and have a better understanding of when to leave and when to pick.
• I need to plan the polyculture patches using plants that I like and that like the garden, that will grow well and produce a good harvest.  Experience is vital as is record keeping and I am thinking through what this means in practice.
• I also need to plan to maximise the seasons.  Food through the leaner times of winter and early spring is in a way more valuable than that which grows more readily through the summer.
• I have tried to get some food out of the garden each day, and there has certainly been something that I could have harvested and eaten each day.  One difficulty that has occurred is again a planning thing – if I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark I have no chance to get anything from the garden, except by torchlight.  In practice this doesn’t often happen!  So I have to remember to pick plenty of wild rocket, land cress, lamb’s lettuce and three cornered leek to adorn my lunch time salads for three days on the day before I go to work.  The same goes for leafy greens to go with the evening meal.  Even though the best intentions don’t always happen I am determined to get into new habits eventually.
• The other mistake I have nearly made but just got away with was not harvesting all the oca before we had some proper frost.  Earlier this week there were several days of hard frost that lasted all day in the north facing part of the garden.  With oca plants lingering there I was all of a sudden really worried about the little tubers as many are not far below ground and I did not know how susceptible they would be to frost.  The weather was warmer today and I managed to get most of them out this morning, with a few more to go tomorrow.  I was really missing the cold, bright, sunny and clear days of proper winter, but I must not risk the oca crop again like that.
• I have to guard against being lazy and leaving things that could be picked.  The wild strawberries go on for many months, but yield very small pickings at any one time.  Even though I do love furtling about amongst their leaves for tiny berries it can sometimes feel a bit slow going when I am busy.  But to make the most of everything does mean everything.  Likewise I did not manage to get out and pick up all the apples that fell from the trees which I normally do.  We stew those that are damaged or nibbled so as not to let them go to waste and whilst we did get some last autumn it was by no means all of them.

There is clearly more to making the most of the garden than I perhaps thought at first.  Being aware, planning, using things to their best advantage, not being too lazy to pick things – it all takes time.  However the advantage I have is that there is relatively little cultivating to do.  I don’t dig, there is very little in the way of “weeding” and other maintenance tasks – giving all the more time to enjoy and to harvest, and then to eat!

When I ran out of obvious and sensible places to plant out the young oca plants last spring I resorted to less obvious and possibly less sensible places.  This included planting some in the shade alongside the garden decking (previously the shady home of nothing very much) with one plant at the end quite close to a hazel tree.  The picture below shows a mix of oca, scorzonera (spire at the back), herb Robert (growing up the fence), ferns, baby brassicas, clove pink, wild rocket, yellow pimpernel, wild violets, wild strawberry and the hazel tree at the back.  An apple tree is beside where the picture was taken and casts shade (as well as the fence), you can see evidence of it from the tiny fruits that had fallen to the ground.

The ground was not prepared in any way beforehand.  None of these oca plants were watered and only one received any additional fertility during the growing season.  The plant near the hazel tree had some mulch put round it from unwanted plants (otherwise known as weeds) removed from close by during the summer months.

I have harvested two plants – one from beside the decking produced 239 g of mainly small tubers.  The plant by the hazel produced an amazing 930 g!  Just beyond it I have piled up a lot of mulchy type materials when I ran out of other places to put them, so maybe it got its roots into that because it is so far easily the most productive plant.

Anyway we have now had some light frosts; not enough to give one of those archetypal winter wonderland mornings but sufficient at least to kill the top growth of (most but not all) ocas.  Last summer was my second year of oca growing and I saved tubers and was able to plant more than the first year.  The saved tubers were a white variety and I bought a red variety as well.  Even giving some away I had more than I could reasonably manage to accommodate in the garden so some found themselves in places that were not planned.  I put the biggest into the prime spots and the smaller ones into other places and it is these that I have harvested first.

As well as planting some in the main polyculture beds others have gone into what was a flower bed and some into bags and a pot.  Whilst I do not have a great deal of room for growing in I am aware that some people do not have any actual garden and must use containers.  Therefore I have tried a number of perennials in containers and particularly wanted to try growing in bags as they are potentially easier to move about than pots.  I did not want to buy any custom made and expensive ones and used one large and one medium supermarket heavy duty shopping bags, each lined with a black sack with drainage holes in the bottom of the black sack but not the outer bag.  I used a good quality organic potting compost and the results in top growth were astounding.  I think that the plants responded particularly well to the depth of soil that was available to them in these bags.

This is the oca in the large bag planted also planted with some Cherokee Trail of Tears beans.  It is exuberantly lurching and spreading out of the bag in a fountain of growth.  The oca grown in containers were (of necessity) watered and fed, but those in the rest of the garden were only watered on very rare occasions if they looked wilted and unhappy.  We had a ridiculously dry summer last year and I am sure they would have appreciated more water but I am trying to find out what happens when nature is allowed to take its own course (as much as is practical).

When I harvest these and any other root crop I am very mindful to disturb the soil as little as possible.  Any disruption to soil kills untold numbers of beneficial organisms and as I really want a healthy soil and healthy garden I have no wish to do harm.  Therefore I do not dig as such to get the oca out, but rather explore with the end of a garden fork and a small trowel, pulling at the remaining top growth to liberate the plant and attached tubers, trying to make as little disruption as possible.  Afterwards I mulched the whole area with several inches of home made compost.  The plants harvested to date have yielded the following:

• 682 g white oca from two plants in the medium sized supermarket bag
• 182 g white oca from one plant in an unprepared (flower) bed with little attention bar some mulching during the summer
• 185 g from one plant under the same conditions as above
• 127 g from one red tuber under the same conditions
• 154 from another red tuber as above
• 97 g – unclear which plants they emanated from

This gives a total of 1427 g from 6 or so plants.  The white oca tubers seem to yield more than the red and the plants in the bag produced more and larger tubers than those in the polyculture patch.  I suspect this was because they had rather more favourable conditions.  It will be interesting to see what yields are obtained from plants grown in other beds and containers.

The plates below show the haul!  Red oca on one plate, on the left are the larger tubers from the bag and the right the smaller ones from the polyculture bed.

Some of the tubers were a little nibbled and one or two were bad inside, but most were very healthy.  Some of them came out as little more than slightly swollen stems and I have held on to these with the tiny ones and any that had turned green as part of the stock to replant next year.

Some of the remaining stems had tiny baby tubers beginning to form above ground and I have made a mental note to use plenty of mulch next year to build up round the plants, akin to the way potatoes are earthed up to see if that can help prevent getting greened tubers and maybe encourage the plants to produce more.

We have just eaten some of the oca tubers in curry, this is the recipe that my partner just invented and very nice it was too:

• spice mix made from one clove garlic, 1 teaspoon coriander seed, 1 teaspoon cumin seed, a dash of ready prepared chilli in a jar, 1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger root, 1 stick lemon grass, 1/2 teaspoon grated fresh nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 4 cloves
• this collection was mixed and mashed up together and gently fried with two chopped onions in a minimum of olive oil
• to this was added a tin of tomatoes and a few spare fresh tomatoes and a little stock and left to simmer whilst
• 500 g of oca was cleaned, cut into bite sized chunks and par boiled for 10 minutes
• the oca was added to the tomato / spice mix together with a handful of fresh coriander leaf and about 150 g baby spinach leaves and then left to cook for another twenty minutes or so.
• Next time a little lime juice is going to be added and also some squash.

Of course there is little point in having food available and not harvesting it.  Perennial veggies tend to have long periods when they are suitable for eating, as opposed to annual veggies that may have a relatively short time before they die or run to seed or need to be removed to make room for the next crop.  I can’t say that I will defintely go out each and every day looking for harvests, but I plan to try to do so most days. 

As a starting point I had a good look round this morning and picked as much as I could that we are likely to use today.  This list includes some annual veggies - grown as self seeding repeat performers or tested to see if they can be induced to become perennial so I am counting them and as you will see in the picture a few baby carrots, a spring of parsley and some seeds:

• Lamb’s lettuce (at least the second year as self sown annual.  Today’s plants were growing in the path with more just starting out in the polyculture patch).
• Land cress (second year of being self sown).
• Salad rocket (annual which is sprouting new leaves, probably courtesy of the mild weather, but which I will keep to see if it can continue into next year).
• Bitter cress (wild plant, self sown into one of the polyculture pots)
• All salad leaf  50 g
• Young kale leaves with aphids on (I might well have cut them off and discarded them, but instead decided to soak them in salt water and then wash the aphids off.  This easily removed them and they will be for tea). 125 g
• Wild beet leaves 50 g
• Spring onions sown last year, over wintered and re-planted in polyculture pot in spring.  I cut off what I wanted and left the partial stems in place. 50 g

This amounted to 275 grams, after washing and cutting off unwanted bits and pieces.  In addition there is plenty more left in the garden that could have been harvested if I had more than two people to gather for – other kales, more leaf beet, oca, Jerusalem artichoke, wild rocket, Welsh onion, buckler leaved sorrel, three cornered leek and possibly other goodies as well. 

The seeds are from wild rocket and salad rocket.  I don’t need any more of these plants in the garden and will use the seed to grow ‘micro-greens’ indoors in pots (like mustard / cress).

Freak weather seems to be becoming commonplace, which is worrying in itself, and of course it also disrupts the garden.  Some plants don’t know if they are coming or going.  I am eager to explore below ground to see how the oca and other roots have been doing.  I planned to be patient this year and wait until the top growth of the oca had been killed by frost, then leave a few weeks before digging them up.  Currently the top growth is still going strong. 

I have however had a bit of a peek below ground and dug one up one oca plant.  It had a nice cluster of baby cream tubers clinging near the base of the stem and some of them will probably be on the table for tea tonight!  I am hoping that the plants being left longer will have even more tubers attached. 

I have sown seeds of field beans in pots which I intended to plant where the oca had been.  However they cannot move in until the oca is removed and who knows when that may be?  I expect that it will sort itself out eventually.

On a positive note there are signs of new life stirring. Lamb’s lettuce has self sown a thick carpet of new plants which will soon be large enough to pick.  Even without it I was able to gether land cress, wild rocket, salad rocket (which has started sprouting again despite also running to seed on the same plant), buckler leaf sorrel and some new growth of three cornered leek to add to our lunch time salad today.  The three cornered leek did not appear last winter until late January / early February.

The Cherokee Trail of Tears french beans are still flowering and producing pods large enough to eat, seemingly in a few days.  Those that I have not managed to get in time are being allowed to mature for seed for next year.  I bought them from the Real Seed Company and they match their description of being prolific and cropping over a long season (http://www.realseeds.co.uk/beans.html).  Clearly they are not perennials like most of my vegetables, but I am trying to use as many beans and peas as I can for the benefit of their nitrogen fixing properties as well as obviously to eat.

It is a bit early for taking stock of the season as a whole with roots and tubers not yet ready to harvest. I have noticed tubers forming beneath some of the oca growing in containers.  They were bulging upwards and going a bit green, so I covered them with some soil.  An indication, I hope, of lots more forming out of sight.

I am hoping that the harvest from the truly massive Jerusalem artichokes matches the towering growth.  These pictures were taken a few minutes ago, the second with the camera held just above my head!