City Veg by Cinead McTernan

Author:Cinead McTernan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Peas from early sowing, which actually aren’t quite mature, so I pick whole, blanch them – pods and all – and then buzz them up into a perfectly sweet pea puree. A good tip is to plunge them into iced water after boiling, to help them retain that intense colour. Mix with ricotta cheese as a filling for cannelloni, or use as an alternative to pesto over pasta.

April 16th

Sweetcorn

I first grew sweetcorn on my allotment in London, much to the amusement of the lovely old chap in the plot next door. In those early weeks, my boyfriend at the time and I kept him entertained with our plot preparations. Against our benign neighbour’s advice, we had dug every inch of the plot – a full 10 rods (quirkily, allotment plot size is still calculated in ‘rods’, a measurement that dates back to Anglo-Saxon farming, where one rod was supposedly the length from the back of the plough to the nose of the oxen), the equivalent of 250 square metres, so no mean feat – and undertaken pretty impressive earthworks to level it, edge each bed with sleepers and create a series of weed suppressant-lined mulched paths. To my neighbour’s mind this was all wasted effort, and on reflection, while our plot looked pretty and neat, from a productive perspective his rough-and-ready beds and grass paths beat us hands down each season.

On this occasion, I had planted the sweetcorn in two rows, and was told by my neighbour that in doing so, I had ‘done it wrong’. He was right, of course, as sweetcorn needs to be planted closely together in a block to increase the chances of being pollinated by the wind. Lesson learned, and since then my sweetcorn plants, grown in the ground and in large containers, have always produced cobs. We picked up a great deal from our neighbour, and our competence (and crops) grew well under his watchful eye (well, critical eye if I’m honest, but time has diminished the effect of his harsh appraisals, and I prefer to look back on the experience through rose-tinted spectacles).

I’ve also discovered another trick with sweetcorn, and that is to soak the seeds in warm water for an afternoon before potting up. Some types of seed are fussy and require specific techniques to encourage them to germinate; soaking is one way to encourage larger, wrinkly seeds like peas, beans, corn, pumpkins and squash, while a quick blast in the fridge (stratification) works wonders for apples, sloes, plums and lavender (though you’re unlikely to start these off from seed), and creating a nick or rough patch in the seed-coating using a knife or a bit of sandpaper (scarification) can be necessary for beans, prior to soaking.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.