With expert broadcaster, author and long-standing AG columnist, Anne Swithinbank
Luscious leek, radiant rhubarb and dealing with this spring’s abundant molluscs
For a stand of beautiful leeks, now is the time to sow maincrop varieties. Throughout winter, they’ll be ready to lift and use for soups, stews, pies, flans or delicious leeks in cheese sauce. I’ve never been fussy about food and even as a child, ate pretty much everything I was given. Looking back, the veg I disliked all contained some degree of oxalic acid. When I was a baby, Mum was spoonfeeding me spinach puree and thought it was going down pretty well until she found herself covered in an explosion of green gunk. I didn’t eat spinach, beetroot or rhubarb until I was about 40 and even now prefer forced rhubarb, presumably as the stems contain fewer oxalates. The reason we consider rhubarb leaves poisonous is because they have a greater concentration of oxalic acid. The best season for enjoying rhubarb is from March to July, not just because plants are sometimes drought-stricken and the stems turn coarse, but they contain a higher concentrate of oxalates in late summer.
I had to laugh when last month, the Wildlife Trusts and RHS launched their ‘Making Friends with Molluscs’ campaign. Their noble aim is to challenge the ‘negative perception surrounding slugs and snails in gardens across the UK’ but maybe their timing could have been better, as following a mild, wet winter this must surely be the worst spring ever for slug and snail damage. The early warnings were there in shredded daffodil flowers, while broad bean plants hardened off and planted out in March were for many, immediately smothered in small brown slugs. While picking them off, my thoughts were not kindly. Yet on principle I agree that we should accept the presence of molluscs in a garden as natural, give up pellets and find ways of controlling them around vulnerable crops by using methods that don’t harm other wildlife.
The loveliest leeks
Among the many different ways of growing leeks, the traditional and perhaps simplest method is to sow the seeds thinly and evenly along a drill made in the soil. They are quite slow to show and grow but before they begin to compete with each other, thin to 2.5cm (1in) apart and let them carry on growing until around the beginning of June. They are then lifted and each dropped into a 15cm (6in) deep dibber hole set 15cm (6in) or so in rows 30cm (12in) apart. Some growers still trim the tops of the leaves but I’d only do this is they were tall and untidy. I’d be more likely to trim long roots rather than folding them up in the hole. They are watered in but the holes are neither filled or firmed b
