Round and round the garden, deciding what to grow

Choosing what seed varieties to grow can be the horticultural equivalent of 'Hell's Kitchen', writes FIONNUALA FALLON

IT’S ONLY recently dawned on me that gardening is, in many ways, an awful lot like cooking. Just consider for a moment. You rifle through your collection of cookbooks (think seed catalogues instead), carefully choose your recipe and your ingredients (ditto), prepare them slowly and lovingly (not a million miles away, you’ll agree, from the ritual of sowing, pricking off and potting on), carefully place said assembled ingredients on the hob/in the oven (replace the words “hob” or “oven” with “garden” and you’ll see what I’m getting at), and then you wait. And wait. And wait a bit more.

Every so often, you throw a slightly concerned, encouraging glance at said dish/plant, and examine it carefully just to make sure that it’s cooking/growing just as it ought to.

Depending on how experienced a gardener/cook you are, some level of success will, you hope, be the result, along with (inevitably, over time) various humiliating degrees of failure.

The similarities are striking. No wonder, then, that so many great gardeners are equally great cooks and vice versa (Darina Allen, Sarah Raven, Nigel Slater, Christopher Lloyd, Barbara Kingsolver, Hugh Fearnley Whitingstall, the list goes on . . .), while, conversely, it’s rare that lousy gardeners are ever especially good cooks.

Similarly, messy cooks are, generally speaking, messy gardeners. And of course, we all also know the saying, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. But is the latter generally true of gardeners? Hmmm, I wonder . . .

In the OPWs walled kitchen garden, there are two young gardeners in charge of its two-and-a-half-acres: Meeda Downey and Brian Quinn. In the two-and-a-half years that I’ve known them, I’ve been impressed (and surprised) by how rarely (almost never, actually) they come to blows when making decisions about the what, the where, the which and the when, of sowing, growing and harvesting. Take the important annual ritual of selecting which varieties of vegetables to grow – a task that you might reasonably imagine to be a very personal one, subject to the gardener’s individual prejudices and whims. Not in the OPWs walled kitchen garden.

By late last week, Brian was still surfing through the gardeners’ copy of the Moles Seed catalogue for 2011 (www.molesseeds.co.uk) , while Meeda was off planting sapling trees elsewhere in the Phoenix Park.

In front of him was a half-completed list, compiled by Meeda back in December. “While it was bucketing snow outside,” smiles Brian. “To be honest, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to what she was doing.” Now that spring is on its way, though, he’s having a good look at the list, and he seems happy enough.

Nothing he’d like to change then? “Nope, not really”. Nothing that he’d violently disagree with? Nope. Surely there must be something that he’d maybe like her to reconsider? No, again, is the simple answer.

The spring rite of choosing seed varieties is, it appears, a surprisingly democratic one where these two OPW gardeners are involved.

“We’re only halfway through the list, but we generally agree on what varieties we’d like to grow each year,” explains Brian.

“For example, when it comes to lettuce varieties, we’d always try and choose at least one with a nice red leaf colour as well as an iceberg-type. It’s nice to have that visual contrast. So this year, we’ve gone for Maserati (with curly, dark-red leaves) and Mohican (a hearted Batavian type with crispy, deep red leaves) as well as Saladin (iceberg).

“With carrots, you want to stagger the harvest, so we’ve chosen the earlyish variety Ulyses (sic) and then two maincrop-late varieties called Artemis and Major.

“We also always like trying out a few new or different vegetable varieties, so we’re going to experiment with a super-sweet variety of sweet corn called Fiesta that we haven’t grown before. It supposedly stores well and matures early. This summer is also going to be our first time growing the dwarf French bean Nautica, which is supposed to be very vigorous, tasty and high-yielding.

“And then there are the old reliables, the proven varieties that are very well-known and maybe have received an Award of Garden Merit from the RHS, such as the broad bean Imperial Green Long Pod, the climbing French bean Cobra or the runner bean Enorma, that we can always trust to do well.”

But what about any very strange or unusual varieties, such as the mouth-burningly awful toothache plant (Acmella oleracea or Spilanthes oleracea) that Brian delighted in growing in the garden last year?

“We’ll definitely be growing that again this summer,” he says with a grin. “Visitors to the garden were fascinated by it. And we’re also thinking about growing Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis), the perennial herb whose leaves and roots were once used to make a mild detergent.

“There’s a possibility, too, that we might grow some of the very old, heritage varieties of potato, such as the Lumper potato, which would be interesting. We’ll see.”

So all, it seems, is rosy in the garden, or at least when it comes to the OPW’s walled kitchen garden. But for some of the other gardening partnerships around the country, early spring will be one of those testing times – or the horticultural equivalent of Hell’s Kitchen.

If so, take some solace in the fact that you are not alone. And if the "discussions" between you and your other gardening half occasionally get that bit too heated (deciding the different tomato and potato varieties generally starts off the worst arguments), then I suggest you find yourself a copy of that gardening classic, We Made a Garden, written by the late, great English gardener Margery Fish.

The book tells the story of how she and her husband, Walter, (one-time editor of the Daily Mail) set about making a garden together in Somerset (East Lambrook), beginning back in the late 1930s.

Humorous and affectionate, its recurrent theme, as garden writer Graham Rice describes it in his introduction, “is the uneasy horticultural relationship between the pair”.

Despite their extreme gardening differences and the ensuing trials and tribulations, they remained utterly devoted to each other. The resulting garden (eastlambrook.co.uk ) wasn’t half-bad either.

What to sow, plant and do now

SOW: (small amounts, in gentle heat, to move to cooler but frost-free spot, before planting out in polytunnel from late-February onwards, using fleece at night for frost-protection): Sugar peas (Delikett), broad beans, carrots, oriental salad mixes, Mizuna, rocket, Swiss chard, spinach, Ragged Jack kale (for baby leaves), lettuce, white turnips, leeks and onions

PLANT: Very early, chitted potatoes into two-litre pots indoors, to move to cool, frost-free spot before planting in polytunnel mid-February onwards, using fleece at night for frost-protection)

DO: Start planning this year's vegetable plot, order seed (catalogues or online), weed polytunnel crops, sort through stored vegetables and discard any rotten/frost damaged ones.

The OPW’s Victorian walled kitchen garden is in the grounds of the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, beside the Phoenix Park Café and Ashtown Castle. The gardens are open daily from 10am to 4pm

Next week Urban Farmer in Property will look at the different GYO courses available around the country

Fionnuala Fallon is a garden designer and writer