Visit our vegetable garden and see how we try to work with nature

The hotel vegetable garden 

So what can you see or learn from our vegetable garden lost in the mountains of Asturias? It certainly provides the hotel with many lovely ingredients for the restaurant but is our production system for vegetables really of any relevance to those who live and grow your vegetables so far away?

So many different vegetables coming from the garden

In my earlier years I worked in different countries advising on how to grow vegetables on a large scale, but that was using “industrialised” techniques where you try and “control” everything and work against nature. In these systems you try and use a one recipe fits it all ; plant a mono-crop, use one seed variety, control the weeds with herbicide, fertilizer with inorganic fertilizer and apply pesticides as much as needed (which is normally a lot.)

No artificial fertlilzer used here! just manure and compost

Times have changed and now I am lucky enough to have a small mixed diverse farm where the vegetable garden is a very important part of the enterprise. Now I try and work with nature, looking at what’s around me, trying different things and adapting to what’s best suits our particular site. Small scale diverse farming / vegetable growing is very site specific, one recipe doesn’t fit all locations.

Different young seedlings protected from the cats.

So when you come and visit our vegetable garden as well as seeing lovely vegetables waiting to be eaten (hopefully) your see; crops, techniques and planting dates which are specific to our site but when you want to work with nature there are a lot of general principles and practices which are valid for most organic vegetable gardens.

Here are some of the principals which I think are important to nearly all sites;

Most important plant the crops and choose the varieties which are best suited to your site. Do try different crops and varieties and see which perform best for you.

The yellow plant on the right is a blueberry but our soil isnt acid enough for it so we now have stopped trying to grow bluberries

These are "caiguas" the seed came from Nepal but they grow very well in our garden and now form a part of our cropping system

This leafless plant is a gooseberry but it gets devasted by saw fly so we have stopped growing them

This is amaranthus sometimes known as chinese spinach, in the dry summer it grows like a weed on our vegetable garden so we often leave patches and harvest it as a spinach.. and it's delicious

Plant a diverse range of crops. Nature inherently dislikes mono-crops and inevitably tends towards diverse systems.

Not only do we plant different crops but we plant different varities to increase the diversity and resilience of our plot. Here are different types of lettuce.

Use organic mulches as much as possible. This is nature’s way of fertilizing the land; leaves fall on the top of the soil, animals defecate on the soil surface and then this organic matter is slowly incorporated in to the soil by an amazing array of living organisms.

We make as much compost as possible; excellent for mulching

Organic matter, the more the better!

A coarse mulch being used for the pumpkins

Plan and follow a crop rotation to prevent the build up of pests or the soil becoming “tired” of any one crop.

Avoiding standing on the soil particularly when it’s wet. The physical structure of the soil is really important for root growth and biological activity so don’t damage it by compressing it unnecessarily.

Good soil structure prodces good crops

Use cover crops and avoid leaving the soil bare. Bare soil doesn’t exist in nature and is prone to leaching

We use oats as a cover crop in the winter

Look and learn from your own crop experiences and learn to understand what plants are saying to you. This takes practise but for example look how plant's appearances change according to different circumstances eg. how dry they are, time of day, how close they planted, when growing with lots of manure etc.

Two courgettes of the same variety; one is a lighter green than the other, what is it trying to tell you?

Also have a good long look at your site and try and understand any minor differences there may be; different amounts of shade, soil types, orientation, frost pockets etc. And take this into consideration when thinking about the positioning or suitability of any crop on your site.

Part of our vegetable garden gets more shade than the rest, here we tend to plant summer fruiting raspberries which dont llike it too hot.

Working with nature.

Caiguas grow in Asturias and they taste lovely.

The Caigua plants growing in the hotel vegetable garden

Although we give preference to growing local varieties and local crops we also like to try new varieties and new crops to help increase the range of home grown fruit and vegetables that we provide for our guests. Any new crop or variety  we plant has to be evauated to see how it grows under our specific conditions and to see if the fruit or vegetable has good eating qualities.

Fruits ready for picking

With this in mind we tried growing caiguas this year, from some seed which I brought back from Nepal where it is grown and greatly appreciated. This vegetable has many different names including achojcha, slipper gourd, stuffing cucumber, korilla, olochoto and kichipoktho  but the most common name is caigua which comes from South America where it is grown the most.

Fruits ready for eating raw, juicing or cooking.

From the information I could find I knew it was a vigorous creeping vine which likes a lot of warmth and water and needs between 90 and 100 days before it starts fruiting.

The young growth full of tendrils

The plant is certainly very vigorous but this last week, two months after we planted it in our vegetable patch, it is starting to produce an abundance of fruit. The fruit are lovely to eat raw but also absolutely delicious sautéed tasting something like a cross between a pepper and a cucumber. There are also many recipes from South America for stuffed caiguas which we have yet to try. And apart from tasting good according to all the literature caiguas are a miracle health food helping to regulate cholesterol levels and they even have anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects. 

The plant has both male and female flowers these are the clusters of male flowers

The female flowers are born singularly or in pairs in the leaf axle

The plant is hardy and disease free and unlike other cucurbits we grow such as cucumbers or courgettes the caigua doesn’t suffer from mildews.  This is where I see the interest in this crop for our vegetable plot; to start producing lots of fruit in late summer when our courgettes are starting to suffer and produce less.

It’s the first year we try the caiguas but we will definitely try them again next year and what is sure caiguas grow in Asturias and the guests love them.

Growing for Flavour

So we have an excellent group of chefs at the hotel but what do we do in the vegetable garden to maximise the flavour of what we grow and serve?

The varieties we plant

Probably the most important factor which influences in the flavour of the crop we grow is the variety we choose to plant. You must have come a cross a rock hard tomato in a supermarket which tastes like cardboard. This is because originally these varieties of tomato were bred to travel long distances and sit in the supermarket shelves for weeks. When the plant breeders produced these long shelf life varieties they had no consideration of flavour, but after the introduction of these tasteless tomatoes the overall sales of tomatoes actually started to decrease. That’s when plant breeders started to select for flavour and now there is a wide range of modern and heirloom varieties available which taste good.

The very tasty tomato Suncherry Premium grwoing in our greenhouse

At the hotel we plant the tomato variety Suncherry Premium in our greenhouse which I must say has outstanding flavour, not only is it sweet but it has an excellent sugar acid ratio. The fruits are slightly larger than a cherry tomato and the plants are easy to grow. If you’re after flavour I really would recommend giving it a try. Another tomato variety we sometimes grow is Sun Gold its claimed to be the sweetest tomato there is (and probably is) but lacks a little bit of acid and so flavour isn’t quite as good as Suncherry Premium.

Top tasting fruit varieties

Strawberries are another example of a fruit where breeding for shelf life came in detriment to flavour. How many times have you come across giant firm red strawberries which look great but are such a disappointment to eat? Well there is now an excellent variety called Albion available especially recommended for organic growers it’s easy to grow and tastes sublime. We managed to get hold of some plants a few years ago and since then we have replaced all our strawberry beds with this tastier variety and boy do you notice the difference.

We are also trialing some new blackberry varieties and again flavour is one of the major attributes we are looking for.

The flavour of leafy crops and root crops are also greatly influenced by the variety you grow. Little gem and Batavia lettuce are the best flavoured lettuce, Mona Lisa is an excellent tasting potato, the list of tasty varieties goes on…

The superb flavoursome potato we grow; Mona Lisa

If you’re interested in flavour before buying your seeds or plants try and find out a bit about the eating qualities of the different varieties, internet is an amazing source of information.

The length of time and conditions between harvest and cooking

However good a fruit or vegetable tastes when freshly picked from the plant once picked, its flavour will start to decrease. This is because once picked the sugars the fruit contains will slowly start to turn to tasteless starch and many of the other flavour components will start to break down into simpler less flavourful molecules.

Freshly picked vegetables to be prepared staright away.

Here at the hotel we normally harvest in the early afternoon and the cooks start preparing the food a couple of hours later. So our fresh organic food as well being healthy for you tastes incredible good.

The amount of sunlight they receive whilst growing

The more sunlight a plant receives the more sugars it can make and potentially have more flavour. There is not much we can do about the amount of sun we get but in general for flavourful food its best to have your vegetable garden in full sun and avoid shady areas.

Our vegetable garden in full sun 

The amount of water and type of fertiliser the plants receive whist growing

The amount of water and the availability of certain salts (or more correctly cations such as sodium, potassium and magnesium) influence on flavour. Plants grown with an excess of water tend to have larger more watery fruits with less flavour where as plants grown with more “salts” tend to have smaller fruits, lower yields but more flavour. When I worked with tomatoes many years ago in the south of Spain there was a time when Marks and Spencers actually asked the growers to irrigate their crops with a mixture of sea water to help increase the flavour of the fruit

Strawberries cope well with dry conditions and it makes them taste even better

Care needs to be taken as you can easily kill or weaken a crop if you use too little water or too much fertiliser, particularly if you have a clayey soil. But a practical tip for increased flavour is mulch with leaf mould as it is high in potassium and has none of the detrimental effect an inorganic potassium fertiliser might have. So start saving all you leaf falls this autumn.

Finally careful control on watering can improve flavour; don’t over water but at the same time make sure you water enough to maintain a healthy plant as a weak unhealthy plant will never taste as good as a healthy plant.

So as you can see the chefs play a huge role in the preparing the flavour of the food, but so does the gardener!

Our salad buffet; grown and cooked for flavour!

Happy eating.

Winter Vegetables

The vegetable garden basking in the winter sun

We got back from our holidays last week and the first job on the farm was tidying up the vegetable garden after 5 weeks of neglect. With the help of some good weather and a few days work it’s now looking more or less like it should do. So here are a few photos taken this afternoon showing what we’ve got growing at the moment:

Italian peppers

Amazingly we still have lots of  peppers to pick! In fact we have got so many peppers that we have been making lots of chutneys and relish to use them before the bad weather comes and spoils them.

 

Blocky "Californian" peppers

More normal winter vegetables for this time of year are members of the Brassica family like cabbages, swede, turnips and brocculi. We have different Brassica planted; some for us to eat over the winter and some hopefully will be ready when our first guests arrive next April.

Savoy cabbage for spring harvest

Early purple sprouting just ready for picking

Late purple sprouting which should be ready for picking in March and April

We have lots of swedes. Some are for us to eat over the winter, some will be for guests in early spring and if we have too many the sheep love them!

These are the last of our oriental vegetables which are also members of the Brassica family. They grow fast and can be used either in salads or in stir frys.

 

We also grow endive or escarola for salads over the winter; they are hardier than lettuce and this variety "escarola rubia" tastes really good!

A lovely bed of leeks heavily mulched with horse manure and ready for us to enjoy over the winter months

and for our guests our onion seed bed. These plants will be planted out in March and the dried onions should be harvested June July time.

Broad bean plants which we should start harvesting from for Easter

In the greenhouse we are still picking plenty of tomatoes

and last but not  least oats, not for eating but for a cover crop; we sow them rather than having bare soil over the winter. They will help to help keep the soil in exellent conditions ready for the next crops to be planted here in the spring.

Fruits on the farm

Physalis in the early morning sun

About ten years ago when we first started sourcing as much local and organic produce as possible for the hotel restaurant we realized there was a problem getting a selection of good fresh organic fruit.  So we started planting a variety of different fruit crops on the farm with the idea that some day we would be able to supply more fresh fruit for the hotel restaurant ourselves.

Here is a pictorial blog of the fruit on the farm and what we are harvesting at the moment.

Harvested physalis

We have been particularly successful with our soft fruit with huge harvests of raspberries. At the moment we are harvesting Polka an autumn raspberry

 We are normally cropping raspberries from late May to September and often have so many raspberries we  serve them for breakfast

Blackberries; we are just coming to the end of our blackberry harvest and last year planted two new varities with the idea of  extending the harvesting season

Strawberries; big harvests but we are in the process of planting new strawberry beds with a more  tastier variety Albion. The variety we have at the moment Selva has a disappointing flavour

About ten years ago we planted ten different cherry trees but there are also some old trees on the farm so we now have a good selection of both red and black cherries. All we need to do is harvest them before the birds do!

Summer deserts in the restaurante making the most of all our  home grown soft fruits

Blackcurrants; we have just finished cropping our blackcurrants but these we mostly freeze and use with meat dishes as well as in parfaits.

We are just about to harvest "Nashi" or Asiatic pears, our tree produces huge numbers of fruit, but they are rather small.

In the orchard as well as cider apples we planted a few pear trees and some eating apple trees, the fruits of which we will be harvesting from late august onwards.

This is how are persimons look at the moment, we always get an abundent harvest but they dont ripen till late November when the hotel is shut!

And finally here is our grape vine which adorns the hotel entrance. It produces masses of bunches of grapes but unfortunately they tend to split and rot before they ripen. This is due to mildew and we just havnt got to grips with organic control of mildew. You cant win them all!