Digging for your dinner: Potatoes, Brussels sprouts and radishes - Gardening with Brendan

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There’s something satisfying and quite novel about going out to your garden and digging up or picking your own dinner.

Trying to grow some vegetables for the first time as a novice gardener this year was a bit of an afterthought for me but I’m glad I gave it a shot. In fact, I now see why so many people opt for the rough and ready vegetable patch over pretty floral spectacles as you get so much more out of it in terms of usable produce. And when I looked into it, there is just such a vast variety of vegetables and fruits we can grow in our own gardens year round here in Ireland that it would have been a shame not to try a few things at least.

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I’m not the healthiest eater in the world. A lot of people seem to think vegans are all munching on carrots and juicing kale, but I’m as partial to junk food as the next person and nowhere near as partial to healthy food as I should be. In fact, I’m what is well known in Derry as a ‘puke’, a.k.a a picky person, so creating a list of vegetables that I’d grow, cook and actually eat was never going to be a lengthy process.

As such, I only bought a few packets of vegetable seeds this year to grow alongside the flowering plants and the tomatoes and other fruits. These were things I know I’ll eat and things I thought I might like to try. I bought rainbow Swiss chard, lettuce, cress and broccoli seeds and some Brussels sprout plugs. I didn’t have great expectations for any of it but all of them produced strong, healthy plants with only minimal care and attention.

Spuds and sprouts fresh from the garden.Spuds and sprouts fresh from the garden.
Spuds and sprouts fresh from the garden.

Some of you may remember that back in the summer I also took some leftover shop bought maris piper potatoes that had gone way past the edible stage and which were sprouting roots and put them into a grow big full of compost. I placed them in a corner in the garden and basically left them to it, no additional fertiliser, no plant food and just whatever water fell out of the sky. I could see the potatoes had sprouted and put on thick foliage through the summer into early autumn but I had forgotten to check back to see if that experiment did anything. And it was amazing this week to find that there, just beneath the surface of the compost, numerous baby potatoes were growing away.

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I thought you’d need seed potatoes to make new potatoes, but it turned out that in this case at least, the ‘bad’ spuds from the bottom of the shop bought bag worked just fined and birthed a new generation of prátaí for the dinner plate. I felt a bit proud, like I’d finally graduated as an Irishman, growing my own spuds, even if it’s only a few! I don’t even like potatoes unless they are made into chips or crisps, but still, it felt good to grow them.

A little over a month ago I fetched an old box with my late father’s vegetable seeds in them. He passed away in 2014. The seeds were long past their use by date but I kept them anyway, and planted some 13 or 14 year old spring onion, beetroot and radish seeds. The onions didn’t grow but I got a couple of betroot and dozens of radishes to germinate. Radishes are great because from seed to harvest takes only about a month. They are rapid growers and you can use the peppery little round or oblong vegetables raw, grated or sliced, in salads or sandwiches to give a peppery kick or boil or bake them in a variety of dishes. You can also eat the leaves.

Digging up my Da’s little radishes on the day the clocks went back, as we are about to enter winter, it felt like my first annual gardening cycle had come full circle. I had no idea, when I started planting seeds while sick, bored and housebound back in February, that I would get so much out of it. I’ve learned so much about plants, nature, soil and the environment, created this column and a weekly video diary for the Derry Journal website. But for all I’ve learned about gardening, growing from seed has lost none of its magic, and it’s still mindblowing to me how a few tiny seeds can produce such a mass of colour, beauty and food for bees and other critters, including us, while also helping to improve the health of the fascinating world beneath our feet.

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The experiment with a few shop bought spuds going bad in a grow bag has paid off.The experiment with a few shop bought spuds going bad in a grow bag has paid off.
The experiment with a few shop bought spuds going bad in a grow bag has paid off.

In terms of foods, I’ve been trying new things too. There is something about growing your own that has that effect, so it’s not just a good strategy to get children to eat healthier and introduce vegetables and fruits, it can work on ourselves and other adults too. It’s also cheap. All you need is a few seeds, compost, a bucket with holes, a grow bag or a patch of earth with halfway decent soil. If you get a good harvest you can pick as you need so there’s not as much waste. And while I’ll never be on Masterchef, this year I have tried my hand at making an edible flower salad with fresh herb dressing, a green tomato chutney, gooseberry and strawberry jam, chamomile and mint tea, and now a Sunday dinner. All with fresh, homegrown ingredients.

Next week I’ll be doing my final column and vlog of the year before going into hibernation with the garden over winter. I’ll show you some of the (hopefully hardy) young plants I’ve already planted out for the spring and what I’m planning to sow early in 2025. There’s also been a surprising development in the ‘winter sowing’ cartons.

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