Plant your own food for some sophisticated dishes says ALAN TITCHMARSH
GETTY Alan Titchmarsh has returned with advice on growing your own food
But if there’s a gourmet cook or an elaborate food fancier in the family, they’ll look for something a little more sophisticated. There’s no need to turn over the whole allotment, though. A few novelty varieties are enough to create some very impressive dishes. A fashionable crop at the moment is black tomatoes. They’ve been around as curiosities and grown by enthusiasts for some years. But they aroused media interest a while ago when they appeared briefly in a supermarket chain and now there’s a new strain, extra-rich in the antioxidants that tomatoes are famous for. And since it seems to be the deep colour that’s largely responsible for these benefits, you can win on both fashion and health fronts with varieties such as “black Krim”, “purple Russian” or “black plum”, all of which are available as seed or young plants from a specialist supplier such as Simpson’s (01985 845004, simpsonsseeds.co.uk).
GETTY Black Tomatoes have become a popular food recently
It has to be admitted they do look rather strange. They aren’t jet black but more of a muddy purple or maroon-brown shade, so don’t make them your only tomato variety. You could also grow a few yellow, pink or stripy toms, perhaps some that are green or white when ripe and a range of shapes and sizes, including cherry, plum and beefsteak varieties. You’ll end up with a succession of Jamie Oliver-style bowlfuls for your kitchen and some stylish salads that’ll do you a power of good. Multicoloured carrots in purple, yellow or white are popular, as are multicoloured varieties of Swiss chard, plus red onions, rose garlic and edible squashes. But a rather strange entry in the must-grow veg list is beetroot. Yes, I know. If you’re anything like me you’ll remember those lurid purple rings on school dinner plates alongside circles of rubbery luncheon meat.
But now TV cooks have got their hands on it, beetroot turns up in all sorts of elegant recipes. It’s baked whole like jacket potatoes and eaten with sour cream, grated raw in salads and even put in desserts – try apple and beetroot crumble or dig into mixed pickled beetroot – very on trend with nutritionists. I’d suggest you try several varieties. A tall, tubular type such as “alto”, which produces a lot of beetroot per row, or a yellow variety such as “golden” or “Burpees golden”, which have a superb raw flavour and foliage that can be cooked, and a good baby beet such as “Pablo” or “Wodan”. If you have undercover facilities for producing a forced crop, go for a variety that won’t bolt when it’s sown early. “Egyptian” is a turnip-shaped heirloom variety and is brilliant. It’s also worth adding a beetroot especially for use as baby salad leaves. Go for “Bulls blood”, which is pretty enough to grow in containers with herbs.
GETTY There are now several varieties of beetroot to choose from
When it comes to fruit, there’s no need to plant old faithfuls when there are lots of first-class new varieties with inbred benefits, such as disease resistance, longer picking seasons or heavier yields. Dessert gooseberries are brilliant as they give two crops for the price of one. Bushes start by producing a heavy crop of the usual small green goosegogs in May. Thin them out by about half and use the picked fruit in pies. Leave the rest and when they ripen in late June or July you’ll have a crop of delicious gooseberries to eat raw. There are several of these fab dual-purpose varieties, such as “pax”, which produces red fruit on thornless bushes, “hinnonmaki yellow” with its greeny-golden yellow fruit that tastes faintly of apricots, and “xenia”, which has large, sweet, red fruit, great mildew resistance and no prickles. It seems everyone now wants to grow raspberries, though, and you have only to look at the price in the shops to see why.