Kitchen Gardener Rob Smith’s keeps his crops coming for longer with clever pruning
Helping you get your best-ever fruit and veg
At this time of year anyone who grows vegetables will be harvesting something from their patch every day, yet with a bit of care and clever pruning you can ensure you’ll have bigger crops than ever.
One of the staple flowers that I love in my garden are sweet peas; their heady fragrance reminds me of my childhood spent in my grandparents' garden where my gran would be cutting flowers for the house while grandad would be tending his veg in his dark blue boiler suit – happy times! My sweet peas have been flowering for a while now, with ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘Earl Grey’ being two new varieties I’m growing this year. I always cut the flowers as soon as they open as this makes the plants concentrate on producing more blooms, rather than creating seed pods, yet you’ll notice the length of the flower stems starts to shorten as the year progresses, so its time to feed weekly with comfrey liquid feed so that the plants will still produce lots of shorter stems perfect for small vases.
I'm also picking remaining gooseberries that are ripe and summer pruning this year’s growth back to five leaves from the stem, unless I need any branches to grow to improve the structure of the plant or to propagate by layering later in the year. Older wood should be left until winter to prune. I'll also remove new growth from the base of my standard gooseberry, otherwise it will quickly revert to a bush.
Trained fruit needs attention and pruning now; stepovers should be tied in horizontally or vertical shoots removed a couple of leaves from the main stem. Tying in encourages the plant to send out more horizontal shoots, so snip them off as you see them as this will create a good shape to your stepover and will mean it doesn't become too untidy. Remove any suckers from the rootstock as soon as you see them.
When it comes to indoor grapes, it’s time to pinch out any growth that’s protruding from the plant and not needed for the overall shape of it, so if there are any new shoots sticking out the wrong way or any trying to escape through vents or windows, they can be cut back to two or three leaves from the stem.
Your bunches of grapes should also be thinned so that you end up with bigger, juicier fruit rather than lots of small ones. Snip off crowded fruitlets and any that are growing in
a strange shape – ideally you want a conical bunch – and remove any leaves which are shading your fruit. By doing this you’ll help reduce any fungal problems later in the year as you're increasing airflow and the grapes will ripen quicker now the sun can get to them.
Aubergines need the tips removed when they have produced five or six fruit. Doing this allows the plants to concentrate all their energy on ripening the fruit. While removing the tips, I noticed that the greenfly are back with a vengeance – so I’ve introduced a mix of five parasitic wasps which will kill the aphids, leaving
little mummified shells behind.
Over the years I’ve tried many ways of producing my own selection of large exhibition onion seed, with the intention always of maintaining the quality of the stock through uniformity, shape, size and vigour. It does pay to have a minimum of six bulbs planted up for seed in order to maintain the vigour.
I usually pick the best-shaped onions and simply sit them on top of some M3 compost with added slow-release fertiliser in a 10 litre pot. I’ll do this anytime during winter and once potted up I initially give very little water to prevent any rotting or disease getting at them.
Another way I've tried is to harvest the bulbs when they're smaller and of even shape, thoroughly drying them out and potting up in a similar way. The idea being that there's less flesh to rot and remove. I’ve also tried removing the outer layer of skins from the onion so that the root plate is exposed so when planted up there's less danger of rotting.
No matter how you do it, you need good pollination to make sure you have a good set on the bulbs. Once the flowers are open I go around all the heads every day with a fine cosmetic brush, which moves the pollen around the flowers. I try to do this around noon.
This year I've had really good heads that appear to be setting very well and should produce some really good quality seed. I grew the onions in pots using Canna Coco Professional fibre and fed with Canna Coco A and B. In all my years of growing onions for seed production, I've never had such powerful stalks on the flower heads. They were so big that I couldn’t get my hand around them! Once the seed start to appear through the seed case I shall place some paper bags over them just in case some seeds naturally drop off.
■ Why not follow me on Twitter throughout the season as I grow vegetables for show displays – @medwynsofangles.