Tim Foster
Baby vegetables certainly serve their purpose - and you still have time to get some great quick results
See, the idea with baby vegetables is that they are young and tender and fresh, which is terrific. But that suggests that ‘normal’ vegetables aren’t, which is not exactly true, they’re just bigger. For those of you not familiar with ‘baby vegetables’ it is a range of traditional vegetables that are simply small at maturity. I’m not saying I am anti-baby vegetables, you understand, but I have enough trouble with my fat fingers trying to hold a pen let alone a miniature carrot. Mind you, I find that, as I attempt to scrub the aforementioned orange midget, I clean my nails pretty well at the same time. The other thing I find is I have to pick twice as many to get a decent meal. Maybe that is the point – they’re not meant for me. These are child-sized vegetables; unthreatening, and just asking to be popped into the juvenile mouth. A definite useful property of baby vegetables is that they are quick to grow: because you are not producing a huge vegetable, it is in and out of the ground in no time. This is actually a big help if you’ve got a (temporary) space to fill before another main crop is put in, perhaps, say, before an autumn planting of onion sets (catch cropping). How about squeezing some tiny produce out of the gaps between widely spaced plants that go in now, such as purple sprouting broccoli (intercropping)? A fairly major reason for mentioning these things right now is because you have lots of time to get some results this year: yes, even starting in July. Vegetables that will produce a crop if sown this month include peas, spinach, carrots, radish, turnip and lettuce. Of course, not all of these will be baby vegetables; they’re just, well, vegetables. They also happen to be plants that are naturally small and quick. A good choice of variety is important. With the peas for example it might be best to go for a dwarf variety like Kelvedon Wonder or Progress No.9, just to make sure you get a pod or two. If the weather is hot and dry, spinach and other leafy vegetables can go to seed (bolting) so you might want to leave them even later. In a way, new and early potatoes are baby vegetables – quicker to produce and definitely smaller in stature than those great big hulking maincrop spuds. Try some now if you are desperate for home-grown tatties. In the same way, choose an early, quick maturing variety of things like carrots. Carrot ‘Rondo’ fits the baby vegetable description perfectly: quick, small, undemanding, orange (a characteristic I find most appealing in a carrot) and round. Let us continue in the positive vein. If you only have some pots in which to grow your plants, a window box perhaps, maybe baby vegetables are just what you are after. Small versions are less demanding on the rooting space and, how great is that, being able to pluck a carrot for lunch simply by leaning out of your window. It seems that including the word ‘baby’ in the name of a vegetable confers extra special properties. The marrow Bush Baby, for example, to me produces marrows that are equally repellent as the full-sized version. Anyway, one person’s baby marrow is another person’s courgette… You might have detected a slight tetchiness surrounding the topic in this article. Perhaps it is a response to the greeting I receive on unpacking allotment produce when I get home - ‘Aha! More baby vegetables!.’ Yes, the garlic got rust early this year and the bulbs aren’t as big as they could have been; the onions got slugged and were stopped in their tracks; the early potatoes weren’t quite as early as I thought they were and radishes are supposed to be small (though perhaps not so they go through the colander). Just as well I don’t set out to grow baby vegetables: they’d be invisible.