TOP & FLOP CROPS

LEMONADES:

Mandarins are a school lunchbox staple in our house but now that my children have discovered zesty, sweet, easy-peel ’Lemonades’, the ’Satsuma’ may have lost its favourite citrus status for good.

This unusual lemon has round fruit with pale yellow flesh with no hint of acidity, so you can eat the segments fresh like an orange or squeeze the juice for a fresh drink that needs no added sugar.

RASPBERRIES:

These sweet berries thrive on neglect, as the less care I give them, the more fruit they give me. I didn’t get around to pruning the old canes out in winter but it hasn’t made a jot of difference and now the first crop is ripening just in time to make raspberry jam for Christmas gifts.

Raspberries naturally sucker and spread and both my berry beds are rather unruly. The plants can’t escape – one bed is contained by the concrete foundations of an old shed, while the other has wooden sleepers around it – but I swear they taste sweeter, like wild blackberries, the more out of control they get.

I grow three varieties: dual-cropping ’Aspiring’ and ’Waiau’ (both fruit in summer on first year canes, and again in autumn on second year canes) and the summer fruiting heritage variety ’Lloyd George’. It’s impossible to tell which is which anymore as they’re all tangled up together like a lolly scramble.

BULB FENNEL:

Have you ever wondered why, when you sow a packet of Florence fennel seed, some plants fatten up satisfactorily while others stay decidedly slim? I was moaning about my scrawny crop to Jenny Tregidga of Clevedon Herbs and Produce when she took me aside to reveal some surprising secrets about the sex lives of finocchio. “Did you know,“she whispered, “that fennel has male and female bulbs? “Apparently, the girls have fatter bottoms.

I’m not one to let the truth get in the way of a fun factoid but Florence fennel is a mighty hermaphrodite who swings both ways. To encourage plumper bulbs, sow early (it prefers cool spring weather to summer heat) and thin out the stringy, slender seedlings when they pop up.

DILL:

Growing coriander is a doddle compared to this feathery, anise-flavoured herb which seems hell-bent on bolting straight to seed a few weeks after germination. After a furiously short season in spring, all I can do is sigh and wait for the seed heads to mature to pack into jars of pickled gherkins in summer.

LEEKS:

Kunekune pigs have surprisingly particular palates. When our old sow Plum Chutney escaped from the orchard and headed off for a sightseeing squizz at my vege plot, the only thing she ate was a whole bed of leeks. She chewed all their tops off and the shock sent them all to seed.