THE ART OF CELERY BLANCHING
It needs to be done for the show bench – but be careful how you do it!
If there’s one vegetable that can disappoint you at the last minute it’s celery. You can have good heads growing away, but then discover that the dreaded heart rot has finished them off. This can happen very quickly and is due, in part, to the way we grow for the show benches. To stage your celery to exhibition standards, the stalks, or petioles, must be well blanched. To achieve this criteria the stalks must be kept in the dark which makes them tender. You can do this in a couple of ways, the first method, and one that I generally use, is to cut builders’ damp course material to different sizes and wrap as a collar around the celery, as you would do for leeks. Another method I have used is corrugated paper, again cut to different heights. This does let the celery breathe better and allows plenty of moisture around the base of the plant. The only disadvantage is that it rots away quite quickly at soil level and will need recovering. I’ve also used some stiff silvery bubble wrap material that is excellent for dispersing heat away from the heart of the plant. Heart rot happens due to a lack of calcium at the tip of the young emerging central shoots, which can be restricted by collars that are too tight and on too early. This can be helped greatly by using calcium nitrate added to water and trickled around the base of the plant. This is supplied in powder form, and I dilute it first with hot water prior to adding it to the watering can. Another treatment you can use is Calmag, a liquid Canna product with a formula that corrects imbalances in plants caused by low calcium, magnesium, and/or iron.
Follow me on Twitter as I grow a range of different vegetables for exhibition – @medwynsofangles.