Jared Brown's exploding garden

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Jared Brown’s exploding garden

Lying in the grass at the edge of the garden on a sunny day, I feel like Gulliver in a Lilliputian forest of daisies. A neighbour commented that we’d seen enough rain. A bit of warmth with the water butts full, she said, and the growing season will take off. Now all Britain is blanketed in an impossibly yellow and green patchwork of oilseed rape and young wheat. Even the wilder spaces alternate grass, dandelions and buttercups.

dandelion

Our plot has exploded. The largest angelica has already passed three metres. It might have been taller but a windstorm last month left it stooped and leaning on braces. I’ve never known them to grow so tall. Rhubarb has been more abundant than ever, but the flavour is flaccid. We reluctantly discarded a few litres of rhubarb liqueur in favour of purchased local stalks. I must track down the farm and find out why theirs is better.

salad burnet

New in the garden so far this season, welsh onions. Billed as a perennial green onion, they are delicious: part onion green, part chive. I hope the partridges don’t enjoy them as much as they did the shallot sprouts. Also new, salad burnet. With a vague physical resemblance to coriander and cucumber-peel flavour it will end up in many summer salads. Salad is never so fresh as picked for the table.

parsnips

Parsnips harvested in mid-winter are wonderful. But what happens if you leave them into spring? Another question answered. They launch a metre of dense vertical foliage topped with seed heads. When I mentioned it at the pub a quick show of hands revealed three others had not only done the same but admitted it happened nearly every year. Dandelions scatter seeds prolifically, ground elder springs from the smallest scrap of root. The weeds in one corner of the garden are simply too beautiful to remove. Could I select plants that would juxtapose quite so harmoniously? Perhaps I will pull these later, but not just yet.

weeds

We’ve been potting strawberry runners again as we clear the ditches along the bed. In two bouts, we’ve deposited at least 50 plants outside the local pub with a “free: take one or all” sign. Both times, they were grabbed in an hour. We don’t know where they went, but it’s nice to know others will be enjoying Cambridge Favourites this summer, too.

ducks

Fellow allotment blog contributor Sparclear cautioned us about bird feeders attracting large birds. She also recommended we keep a source of rainwater for them. This quickly attracted the largest and most welcome birds yet: a pair of mallards who strolled the garden as a couple of tourists might wander around Bath or Stratford on Avon, before stopping for a drink and a foot soak.

poppy

I’ve always loved the poppy’s voluptuous blooms. We started these from seed five years ago and moved them with us from Ealing. This is the first flower, with nine more fat hairy green buds waiting in the wings.

solomons seal

Some flowers are beloved for their colours, others for their shape. Solomon’s Seal is in the latter category, transforming simple green and white into a nature’s art. Cut fly larvae will soon hatch and swarm up the stems to defoliate each one, so we will enjoy them while we can.

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