Growing low FODMAP vegetables in the garden in the UK

It's October, which means the vegetable garden is winding down and it's time to start planning next year's garden, or at least you need to start now if you're going to plant any onions or garlic that need to spend the winter in the ground. As onions and garlic are both high FODMAP, this isn't so much a concern if you only want to plant low FODMAP vegetables (to find out what FODMAPs are and why you might be interested in low FODMAP foods, click here). I'm thinking of going largely low FODMAP food next year, so I've compiled a list of vegetables and fruit that have no or only traces of FODMAPs in them that will grow in the UK, divided by crop type:

Brassicas

• choy sum
• collard greens
• kale
• rocket
• radish

Root veg (carrot family)

• carrots
• parsnips

Root veg (beetroot family)

• Swiss chard
• spinach (but less than 150g of baby spinach)

Cucurbits

• cucumber
• kabocha pumpkin (also known as Japanese pumpkin)
• pattypan squash

Daisy family

• chicory (leaves)
• witlof 
• endive (leaves)
• cos lettuce (also known as romaine lettuce - maximum serve unclear)
• butter lettuce
• iceberg lettuce
• lollo rosso (red coral lettuce)

Legumes

• bean sprouts

Potato family

• bell pepper (allow to go red/yellow, do not eat green)
• potatoes
• tomatoes, common (not cherry or roma)

Other

• bamboo shoots 

Fruit

• grapes
• rhubarb
• strawberries

And here's a list where 75g is OK, but you need to check the Monash app for how far you can go if you want to go above that level:

Brassicas

• bok choy
• broccoli (calabrese, not purple sprouting or tenderstem, no data is available on those)
• cabbage, common
• Chinese cabbage
• red cabbage
• kohlrabi
• swede
• turnip

Root veg (carrot family)

• celeriac

Cucurbits

• spaghetti squash

Daisy family

• chicory leaves
• raddicchio

Legumes

• green beans

Potato family

• aubergine 
• cherry tomatoes
• roma tomatoes

Fruit

• canteloupe melons (you can eat 120g, grow in greenhouse)

Additional notes: you can also grow chillies, as people who react to FODMAPS can typically eat up to 28 g of red or green chilli without it being a problem, and most recipes are likely to use less than that. Also, if you're not eating it, FODMAP is irrelevant, so you can grow loofahs (often spelled loufa or luffa when you grow them).

I'm not planning to go fully low FODMAP next year. For instance, I'm still planning to grow onions. But where there's a low FODMAP alternative to vegetables I generally like to grow, then I'm thinking about taking it. As for the raspberries, a serving size of up to 60 g of those can typically be tolerated, so they're already good in the quantities you usually get off by plants each day.

Making the lawn more bee-friendly

Our lawn is already fairly bee-friendly. I never use any pesticide there and although I pull up dandelions (because I find them really ugly - sorry bees, I know you love them) and anything prickly (so I can go barefoot on the lawn), I positively encourage other flowering plants there. This includes daisies, buttercups, clover - both white and red - and chamomile. OK, the chamomile never gets tall enough to flower, but the others do, leaving bees buzzing happily in their midst. You can't much see this in my blog photos, but you can if you walk out on the lawn in summer after it hasn't been cut for a while.

This year, however, I came up with a plan to make the lawn even more bee-friendly and to save me having to strim the edges. What I did was buy some bee-friendly meadow flower seeds. These include yellow rattle in the mix, which suppresses grass.

I then dug out a few centimetres with a spade all along the edge of the grass where I have to strim and turned the grass over. That done, I thinly scattered the seeds along the newly turned earth.

Cross your fingers that this goes well for me and we have beautiful flowers next year - or at the every least a return of grass. My other half is deeply unimpressed with me for destroying his neat edges, so a profusion of beautiful wildflowers buzzing with bees is just what I need to bring the smile back to his face. If not, watch this space for my desperate efforts to encourage back the grass!

Harvesting winter squash

I thought the squash on the left on the tray was the largest squash I'd grown this year. I'd been checking for squashes all summer and it was the largest one I could see. But then I checked the undergrowth in the middle of the squash patch, and discovered I was wrong. A monster squash was waiting for me.
I harvested it today because I wanted to bring in all the squashes that were sitting directly on the soil after my experience last year when two of my squashes split. It's possible sitting directly on the soil wasn't the problem and that too much rain was. Either way, I wanted to preempt the loss of my squashes by harvesting some of them before they turned fully orange, particularly the very large one.

The Internet seems a little unclear on the rules for harvesting winter squash, and in fact, websites often say that it's hard to tell when the squash are ready. Here are the rules I've managed to glean:

• winter squashes are ready for harvesting from September to October
• make sure you retain as much of the stalk as possible on the squash (ideally at least 3-5 cm), as this helps it stay good for longer in storage. Losing the stem isn't a disaster, though, you just can't store the squash for as long
• hardening of the skin of the squash is a good sign – if your fingernail easily marks the surface, it means the fruit aren’t quite ready to harvest. 
• the stalks drying out is a good sign
• colour changes to the skin indicate squashes are ready to harvest – pumpkins turn orange. If green and grey-coloured fruit may develop an orange or pink patch where they touch the ground, this is a good sign
• it's a good idea to "cure" the squashes for 10-15 days. You can do this my just leaving them outside if it's dry and sunny. Otherwise, you can do this in a greenhouse or polytunnel. However, in the past I have simply brought them into the house and kept them somewhere light and this has worked fine.

My experience is that it's fine to harvest winter squash sweet dumpling when they look like this:

They can be eaten like this as well. For extra reassurance, this one's bottom had started to go orange where it was sitting on the ground:

Eventually the whole winter squash sweet dumpling will turn orange if you don't eat it first and some of them might even turn orange while still on the plant, although none have for me yet this year. This is a picture from 2015:

Unfortunately the huge squash I harvested was so heavy that I ended up dropping it (albeit from a low height) onto the concrete. Hopefully any bruising won't ruin the whole thing, as it would be a shame to lose all that squash. I'm clearly going to have to start making squash recipes. Experience tells me that the little stripy ones (winter squash sweet dumpling) will last all winter indoors, but the long green ones, whose name I don't know, will go putrid after a while. For that reason I'm also planning to store them on plastic trays, so if they leak any putrid black liquid the tray will catch it all and it won't stain my table, like happened last year.

I highly recommend this savoury gruyere and pumpkin pie recipe from the Guardian, it's delicious.

Also, there are several delicious squash/pumpkin recipes in this blog, including:
Warming roasted squash and pepper soup

Leftover turkey curry with winter squash

Squash, lentil and onion soup

Autumnal winter squash and ginger soup

Smoky roasted pepper and squash soup

Cheat's version of Jamie Oliver simple baked lasagne

Review: wicks for watering while you're on holiday

I've been away on holiday twice this growing season and I needed a way of keeping the greenhouse watered. Having asked on a Facebook group and looked into a few systems I came to three conclusions:

1. Ideally you should have a neighbour who can water when you're on holiday and for whom you can return the favour when you're on holiday, but I don't. None of my current neighbours have gardens that need watering.
2. The best watering systems are complicated to set up and expensive, with no guarantee of success.
3. The simplest and cheapest methods (other than that helpful neighbour) are wicks or just leaving the plants to stand in a lot of water.

I decided to go with wicks, as my greenhouse plants aren't the sort to appreciate standing in water. In case you don't want to read this whole post, my overall conclusion was that these were adequate for short trips, but harder to set up than you'd think and prone to accidental over or under-watering. For the full story, read on...

I ordered 100 feet (i.e. about 30 metres) of self-watering wick cord for £9.99. It came all the way from China, so took a while to get here, but luckily I'd planned far enough in advance that it arrived in time for me to set everything up two days before I set off to check the system.

The wick came with instructions on how to set it up. Basically: 

• You need a container, such as a bucket, to hold the water and you run the wick from the water in your container to your plant pot, cutting the lengths you need from the single long wick they supply. 
• The higher your container is above your plant pot, the faster the water will run. 
• Ideally you should bury the end of the wick in the plant pot a little way under the soil to aid transfer.
• The wick needs to be soaked through before you do any of this to get the water flowing. 
• Also (not in the instructions, but something I found through experimenting), the nearer the plant pot is to the water receptacle, the faster the water will run, but conversely, the further away it is, the slower it will run. 
• If you need to slow the flow down, you can tie one or more knots in the wick to do this.
• If you need to deliver more water, you can use multiple wicks.

So I set my wicks up from three different containers in the greenhouse: two buckets between all my peppers and chillies and the huge tub I use for weeding for the tomatoes. Also, after I had cut the sizes I needed, but before I got them wet, I burnt the ends of each wick to stop them from fraying, as suggested in the instructions.

I automatically assumed that my tomatoes would need a lot of water delivered, so I gave them a huge container and set this up on a chair above them. The peppers got two buckets (in retrospect, 3 would have been better, but I didn't have a third bucket) and I propped the buckets up on a Pyrex dish and its lid. The Pyrex part was irrelevant, what was relevant was the fact they were a suitable size and shape for elevating my buckets. I laid out wicks to each of the pots, wetting them first, making sure they went all the way to the bottom of my water container and burying the ends of them in the soil. 

Fortunately I did all this two nights before we set off on holiday. I came back to the greenhouse in the morning only to discover that my trays of plant pots nearest the bucket were swimming in water, some to the point of overflowing, so I emptied these out and tied some knots in the worst problem areas and removed the Pyrex dish and lid from under the buckets to slow the flow.

 My tomatoes didn't seem to be getting enough water, so I added an extra wick to each tomato pot. I topped the water in the containers back up. When I came down the next morning, everything seemed to have had roughly the right amount of water delivered to it. So I topped the containers up again (the weather was very hot and my plants were thirsty) and then, with some trepidation, I set off on holiday for 4 nights. When I came back my plants had all but drained their containers.

Also, despite having some water left in each of the containers, the soil around each of the plants was much drier than when we went away on holiday, so it turned out that the rate at which water was delivered decreased as the containers emptied.

I then went away with even more trepidation for 8 nights in September, thinking that my containers would surely run out of water. They didn't - I had left them very full. But I did start out with my plants near the containers getting watered excessively at the beginning and all plants being parched of water at the end. Also, one of my tomato containers flooded while I was away (and not the one nearest to the water container either, so I don't know what I did there). An additional problem of the second time I set it up was that I had already cut the wicks to length and had to work out which one went where.

My overall conclusion is that wicks are far from an ideal watering system. They need setting up in advance and adjusting every time to get the watering levels more or less right, but even with adjustment they're not entirely reliable. They're also unlikely to be able to deliver 2 weeks' worth of water however large the containers, as if you start with that much water they're likely to flood the plants at the beginning and still leave your plants dry at the end. On the other hand, at £10 plus any cost for containers, it's a reasonable temporary solution to cover breaks of up to a few days in hot weather or slightly more than a week in milder temperatures.

Preventing powdery mildew on squashes, pumpkins and other cucurbits

To my great surprise, I have got this far into the season with hardly any powdery mildew on my squash or courgette plants, despite growing them right next to calendulas that promptly came down with mildew. Every year I fight a losing battle against powdery mildew on my cucurbits that involves removing leaves I spot with it before it can spread and spraying them with water mixed with neem oil or water mixed with milk. None of this has ever worked well in the past. My cucurbits have never made it long enough for their leaves to go old and a bit tatty looking without also having powdery mildew. So what did I do differently this year? Two things:

1. I have watered them quite heavily almost every day it hasn't rained.
2. I gave them canes to grow up.

I have, as usual, also removed any leaves where I noticed powdery mildew starting and disposed of them rather than put them on the compost heap (where they would spread their powdery mildew). I can't guarantee this will be successful every time, but this is the first year I've had any success preventing the dreaded mildew at all.
Giving them canes to grow up was quite a hit and miss affair. I didn't really know what I was doing. All I knew was that last year they enjoyed growing up my sweet corn - even though they weren't even supposed to be in the sweet corn's bed. And also, Monty Don gave poles to some of his cucurbits to grow up.
What I initially did was tie tall bamboo canes together in tripods, thinking I would need something really sturdy to cope with the weight of my squashes. Some of my squashes happily latched onto these, but others had to be given a helping hand by tying them on with garden twine.

However, this seems to have been unnecessary, as I later added a couple more canes just stuck in the soil at the front, then the squashes were making their usual attempt to escape the bed and spread all over the grass.

The squash plants have happily latched onto these themselves, just like they latched onto my sweet corn last year. So next year I will simply be sticking bamboo canes upright in the soil all over the cucurbit area. Also, this year I didn't give my courgettes any canes, as the plants looked so compact and bush-like back in early July. Next year I will be giving them canes as well, to see if they're interested. I have really enjoyed having yellow courgettes this year, they're much easier to spot, and this variety has remained tasty and tender to much larger sizes than my previous varieties - which is good, as I never manage to harvest them at the ideal time.

To finish, here are some photos of what else is going on in the garden right now:

Review: tomatoes to grow - Tigerella, Golden Sunrise, Garden Pearl, Marmande, San Marzano 2, Moneymaker and Gardener's Delight

Garden Pearl, Golden Sunrise, Tigerella, San Marzano 2, Marmande

Tigerella, Golden Sunrise and Garden Pearl

I've grown 5 different varieties of tomatoes this year. I got a multi-pack of 6 types of seeds from Mr. Fothergill's, which also included Red Cherry, but I thought two varieties of cherry tomatoes was more than I needed in any one year, so I only planted 5 of the varieties. I also have two tomatoes from previous years to review. This review was edited in late September to take account of the rest of the harvest season.

Here's my review:
Tigerella

This was originally by far my favourite of the tomatoes. In addition to having an attractive tiger stripe (not quite as prominent on the fully ripe fruit as I had hoped, but still a fun feature), these are a good size at about 3-4 cm across and have a tangy, strongly tomato taste. They're a joy to come across in your salad. They've got quite an acidic edge, but I enjoyed that. The plants grew well both in the greenhouse and outside, producing some of my earliest ripe fruit and not having any problems with its fruit or leaves, other than the greenhouse one getting scorched leaves on the hottest day of the year. By early August, both sets of plants had produced ripe tomatoes already and the outdoors one looked set to produce me a decent amount of tomatoes. However this early promise didn't last. By the end of the summer, it turned out to be one of my poorer croppers, both in the greenhouse and outdoors 6/10 outdoors. My outdoor crop may have suffered from being grown in a shadier than ideal area of the garden, so it might be worth me growing them again outdoors. 4/10 in the greenhouse, isn't producing enough tomatoes under my growing conditions in a large pot to be worth it. Might work better in a greenhouse in a cooler climate or straight in the ground in the greenhouse.

Golden sunrise

These were originally my second favourite type of the ones I grew this year, but moved up to become my favourite of this year's crop. Like the Tigerella, they had already produced ripe tomatoes both in the greenhouse and outdoors in early August. Like the Tigerella, they're also tangy with a good strong tomato flavour and a joy to come across in a salad. They make a nice visual change from your standard red tomato. Like the Tigerella, I haven't had that many from the greenhouse, although more than from the Tigerella. Overall, they produced me a small crop in the greenhouse and a larger crop outdoors, but not as good a crop as Moneymaker produced for me in previous years. Also, the later part of the crop was larger than the earlier part, reaching about 5 cm across in September. The level of the crop may have partly been due to being planted in an area of the garden that didn't get enough sun. 7/10 outdoors, will grow again - especially in a sunnier position. 5/10 in the greenhouse. Did not produce many tomatoes in my greenhouse growing conditions.

Marmande

I love the shape of these - all those ribs - and the tomatoes grow like that consistently. I haven't found any plain round ones. They're also lovely large tomatoes, probably around 8 cm wide. What I'm not so keen on is the taste and texture and the fact that by early August only one had ripened so far. I fried it up and served it with some pasta. This did not do it any favours. It was largely flavourless and its texture was floury (in the same way that potatoes can be floury), which was unpleasant. It was not an enjoyable food, which is such a  shame, as it looks so beautiful. They did subsequently ripen and I got a decent sized crop, but I hid their flavour and texture by putting them in soups and sauces. One soup was so flavourless due to these tomatoes that I had to add extra tomato puree to give it some taste. I hope that at the very least they had decent nutritional value. Like the other tomatoes this year, it may have suffered from being in a bed without enough sun and too many snails. 4/10, pretty unlikely to grow again.

Garden pearl

These are heavy-cropping cherry tomatoes that are only happy to grow outdoors. They achieve quite a nice pinkish-red colour and have produced an awful lot of fruit without any sign of blight, despite their insistence on growing low to the ground and despite me not allowing adequate room between plants. The packet alleges that they are sweet. I rarely eat refined sugar, so am highly attuned to natural sweetness. I didn't notice any. All I got was bland, bland, bland. Perhaps "sweet" was code for "neither acidic nor tangy". There was certainly no strong tomato flavour to them. The ones I've grown so far are a waste of space in salad. The only thing I can say in their defence is that I gave them the worst location of all the tomato plants with the least hours of sunlight, so maybe more sunlight would have produced a better flavour. 3/10 will very probably not grow again, except maybe to check my sunlight hypothesis.

San Marzano 2

This is a plum tomato and can be grown either in the greenhouse or outdoors, so I am doing both. By 9 August, the plants both in the greenhouse and outside had produced a fair number of tomatoes, but none of them had ripened yet. When they finally did ripen, the flavour was sweet and a little bit tangy - definitely at the pleasant end of tomato flavours, but the texture was floury, so these were not ideal for salads, but perfectly adequate for soup or stew. In the end, I hardly got any from the greenhouse and most of those got blossom-end rot, probably because I was growing them in containers and watering by hand rather than with an irrigation system. The plants outdoors did produce a decent crop in the end, but I lost a lot of it because I was away for part of September and rains in mid to late September pretty much destroyed the remainder of my tomatoes. 5/10, may one day grow again if craving variety, but am hoping to find better varieties.

Moneymaker

I've been growing Moneymaker tomatoes since I started this garden, but decided to try something new this year. Moneymaker produces nice, standard, red, mid-sized tomatoes that grow easily in the UK whether indoors or out. In fact, they grow so easily in the UK mine had a tendency to self-seed all over the garden. It was also a prolific cropper and I got a huge harvest. The flavour is good and strong. It's been a while since I ate one, so I can't remember precise details, but what I do remember was that I was very happy eating them in salads and they made an excellent chutney. Their only downside is that they lack the excitement of a fancy appearance. 9/10 will almost certainly grow again.

Gardener's delight

These are cherry tomatoes. What I liked about these was that every year I grew them they consistently ripened several days before Moneymaker, so I got an early start on my tomato season. I got a large crop from these and the plants were not trouble. I'm not a fan of cherry tomatoes in general, but as cherry toms go, these are good ones with a strong flavour, reliable ripening and easy to grow, whether in a greenhouse or outdoors. Putting aside the fact I'm not really a fan of cherry tomatoes - although they can be handy for lunch boxes and picnics - 9/10 (and if you're specifically looking for a red-coloured cherry tomato 10/10, I only docked them a point for not having any fancy features like unusual colouring or ribs). I'm not sure if I'll grow them again, but that's entirely due to me not particularly liking cherry tomatoes. If I find myself wanting mini tomatoes again, these will be top of my list.

And finally, here are a few bonus pictures of the garden to show how it's getting on. No powdery mildew on my cucurbits yet, despite the rain. They seem to like being up on sticks.