Swedes - a disappointing result

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

I can’t claim to be very proud of my efforts at growing Swedes. They haven’t been a total washout, but not far off it. For reasons of lack of space, I only grew four of them. One turned out reasonably well (I wrote about it HERE), but the others have been a disappointment. Seen without anything to give it scale, this one doesn’t look too bad:

In all honesty though, it is tiny. Here it is on a plate:

Let’s not beat about the bush here: that is a 21cm (just over 8″) plate! It will be OK to eat I reckon, just not big.

When I harvested that one, I also pulled up the remaining two Swedes. I don’t think I can count it as “harvesting” them, because they yielded nothing useable:

That little one at the left is really weird. I don’t know what went wrong with it, but as you can see better in the next photo it produced two crowns and practically no root:

I think I will not bother with growing Swedes again. They have a very low VSR. They take a long time to develop, use a fair bit of space, and are very cheap to buy in the shops. I have explained VSR before, but here’s a reminder for you:-

That’s a photo of a page from Joy Larkcom’s book “Vegetables for Small Gardens”, to which I used to refer a lot when I was new to veg-gardening.

I’m not sure whether this is significant, but my records (i.e. this blog) reveal that these Swedes were grown in exactly the same place as where I previously tried growing Celeriac – with equally pathetic results!

To read more articles like this, on Gardening and Gastronomy, please visit * http://marksvegplot.blogspot.com/ *