Monday 21 March 2011

The Edible Garden Show and interesting veg...

We're aiming to try and grow a few more interesting foods this year, it's all very well doing a load of onions, potatoes and beans but there's a lot to be said for trying to grow some things you can't buy quite as easily in the shops. To that end I recently bought a copy of A Taste of the Unexpected by Mark Diacono which has proven to be an inspiring read and I've now got things like Yacon, Egyptian Walking Onions, Daylillies and Kai Lan on my list of weird and wonderful veg I want to try growing this year.

With that in mind I was doubly looking forward to a trip to The Edible Garden Show on Saturday. Unfortunately all bar one of the seed companies selling their wares were offering nothing but the bog standard favorites which seemed a huge missed opportunity to me considering who the show was aimed at. Other than that though we had a fun day browsing through all the stalls and could have spend hundreds of pounds if only we'd had the spare cash.


The one company exhibiting that did offer some unusual seeds was Heirloom Tomatoes Ltd who had a great selection of tomato seeds and plants as well as a sprinkling of cucumber and squash seeds too. We came away with the four packs you can see above which were Red Pear Tomato, Sikkim Cucumber, African Horned Cucumber and some Hooligan Squash. I'm especially looking forward to seeing how the African Horned Cucumbers turn out, they look so strange they'll be very interesting to try, assuming we can grow them!

The plan is to get the new seeds sown tonight and then start focusing a bit more on the allotment for the rest of the week to get the first and second early spuds in and to make sure everything is still on track for when things need to be planted out.

8 comments:

Matron said...

Wish you well with your growing the more unusual veggies. I look forward to seeing your results!

Jo said...

Hope they all do well for you. I've grown Hooligans before, though we didn't eat them, they ended up being carved for Halloween even though they're tiny.

SepticTank.co.uk said...
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Patrick said...

There you go, Egyptian Walking Onions are to onions what babington leeks are to leek. They're the perennial versions...

I hope you enjoy all your unusual veg, it all sounds great to me!

Paul and Melanie said...

Thanks guys, stay tuned for pics and progress reports :)

Sue Garrett said...

We intended to go to the Edible Garden show - we booked last year when it was cancelled but were on holiday when it was held this year - was it worth the visit?

Paul and Melanie said...

@ Green Lane - Yeah, it was a fun day out.. However although there were thousands of seeds there they were all very obvious, nothing I couldn't get in my local Morrissons really, let alone my local garden center. Except the one stand I found where I got the seeds I mentioned in my post. :)