In praise of Sak (spinach and chard)

The ultra reliable mainstay of our garden is always sak - which we consider to be best represented in the plants known as perpetual spinach and chard.

If you're not sure whether you like sak or not, there is a great recipe for Paneer sak - steamed spinach with fresh cheese (paneer) on this cookbook page. It is quite simple to make paneer, which you can then cut into cubes and deep fry - or you could use mild feta cheese instead.

Mange Tout and Asparagus Peas - seem easy to grow

Here are some of our mange tout (also known as flat pea pods) which are now about a foot high. They are in my experience quite easy to grow. I usually start some in pots inside under a light or in a sunny kitchen window, and also sow some outdoors whilst transplanting, just as insurance. In the end they all seem to come up together and just need a bit of netting around the edge of their narrow bed as they get bigger, so they can cling on and grow upwards to their full height of about three or four feet. Since they have their own tendrils, you don't have to tie them anything, so that is a real timesaver.

I planted my usually reliable favourite seeds: the Oregon Sugar Pea Mange Tout which you can find in most garden centres I think.

This year I am also trying out a new plant called "Asparagus pea" which is actually not a pea, but a vetch (the alfalfa family), forming low, bushy plants. The red flowers are followed by small winged pods. You saute them whole in butter and they taste very much like asparagus, so I am told. I planted seeds for about 25 plants in root trainers and planted them out in two batches, last week and today. We'll see how they so in this blistering heat.

Steamed and served with rice, in a veggie soup, or spiced up in a stir fry - I am hoping these pods will be a sattvic, healthy and tasty source of green veg over the later summer - and a change from chard and spinach beet (called sak in India) which are always the ultra reliable mainstay.

Built a Brassica Cage - but it looks like football posts!

Here is the brassica cage we put up, it is a wooden frame, held in place by 6 vertical stakes, (2 each side of the frame, in three places) tied on with wire, and with netting over the top. The netting was a bit too short (at 4 metres long) to reach the ground on both sides so I improvised with some enviromesh on the short side which you can see on the left.
The result however looks a bit like football goalposts - perhaps there is something in the air with the World Cup starting soon!