Subjective Scents Part Deux

Continuing on the theme of strongly scented plants, and to balance out the case of the unscented philadelphus, here's a picture of a plant whose scent was a bit unexpectedly strong:

It's sea kale. This is a plant I've tried to grow for years more for its use as a vegetable than anything else. The seed has a corky outer coating that floats but also makes germination a bit tricky. I managed to grow two plants from seed, but those never did well and died out pretty quickly. My current plants come from a very traditional plant nursery (no cafes, garden furniture or scented bath soaps!) that I visit when I get the chance.

What got these plants to thrive is being planted in a bottomless pot. I think sea kale needs better drainage that most of my garden offers and nice deep soil. The bottomless pots solve both issues nicely: I honestly don't know why you can't buy these more easily, but I made my own with an angle grinder.

And then after all that effort, this year one of my plants actually flowered. And it is very attractive: the thick grey brassica leaves and the masses of white flowers make it the equal of any other ornamental when in bloom. But the scent... I could smell it from three or four meters away, which I didn't expect, and I wasn't sure I liked it.

Most descriptions describe the scent as honey, but the combination of strong sickly sweetness with a slight hint of sourness brought to mind sweat or something rotting for me. It's the same not quite pleasant combination that many fly pollinated flowers have, although I'm not sure which insects the sea kale was trying to attract. I asked the other half for her opinion to check it wasn't just me, and she leaned more towards "honey" than I did, but "fake chemical honey".

So there you go.

Ephemeral Flowers and Subjective Scents

After a brief but very odorous time in the spotlight, the lilacs are starting to go downhill. The Palabin and Miss Kim are starting to pale and then go brown. Here's a picture of the Miss Kim in her pot, waiting to be planted in the front garden when it exists:

Miss Kim lilac in its pot

The flowering period might be short, but it is glorious. You can often smell the scent from 3+m away at the front door.

The plan is to take up a triangle of concrete at the front to make green space in front of the house. Over the last year or two I've been collecting shrubs, many of the scented, many of them for autumn/winter interest, for the garden to be.

The thing about front gardens is they're a different beast to back gardens. Unless they're very big they don't offer any privacy, so you're not going to sit in them, or stroll through them. But what you are going to do is walk past them every single day on your way in and out. Our back garden is very much a summer garden, filled with deciduous shrubs and herbaceous perennials, so I hope the front can be something to bring a bit of planty goodness to our lives when it's cold and dark.

There have been a few bumps in the road of this plan though. Scent is quite hard to prove before purchase. Unless you buy the plant in bloom, you're going on a text description of how scented it is. There's no such thing as a scent picture, and suppliers don't normally add scratch and sniff panels to plant labels. And it's also quite subjective: my wife, who otherwise has a good nose for scent, swears that Viola odorata is scentless, but I can smell it from meters away if the wind is blowing in the right direction.

Which brings me to Philadelphus 'Manteau d'Hermine'. Everyone knows that philadelphuses are strongly scented, and most suppliers claim that 'Manteau d'Hermine' is too. Unfortunately, the flowers seem completely scentless to me, and my wife can only detect a faint scent if the flower's right in front of her nose. Here is the offending shrub:

To smell or not to smell, that is the question

I can tolerance a short, single flush of flowers if the show is spectacular. Unfortunately, a scentless philadelphus is just disappointing. If this particular plant doesn't do better next season, I think it'll be off to the giant compost heap in the sky...

Hope

People who've read my previous blog will know that I'm a big fan of medlars, both the tree and the fruit. It's been a source of sadness to me that I've had very limited success so far growing the fruit at home.

It's not that I don't have a medlar tree. The very first winter after we moved in I planted a bare-root Iranian medlar, which is now in its fifth year. And it's not that it doesn't flower. It does, but in previous years fruit set has been poor and many of the fruits have fallen off before ripening.

This year, though, this year... it's covered in flowers, and they look bigger than in previous years. Hope springs eternal, and I'm crossing my fingers that this year it will actually produce a decent crop of fruit.

My medlar tree in bloom

If not, it's still a beautiful tree. Even my wife, who isn't always the most plant-aware person in the world, remarked on how nice it looked the other day. And I do have the backup plan of the Royal medlar I planted this winter just gone on the other side of the garden. Did I mention that I really like medlars?

A Very Continental Spring

Anyone who's been around the last few months has probably noticed the very abrupt transition between winter and spring this year. The 'Beast from the East' meant we had fewer warm spells in early and mid-Spring than usual, and was followed in late April / early May by a blast of heat which broke records on the bank holiday. In my garden, we went from regular night-time frosts to no frosts with basically no transitional period in between.

This is a very continental climate pattern. Great Britain, being an island at high latitudes, has an oceanic climate moderated by the sea but very influenced by atmospheric conditions like the polar jet stream. In the winter and spring we can switch between blasts of cold arctic air and mild air from the south in days. A continental climate, far from the sea, tends to have colder winters, hotter summers, and a much clearer break between the two.

Despite the late arrival of good weather, a lot of the plants in the garden have actually been pretty happy. My Actinidia kolomiktas have never had it so good. A. kolomikta, also called 'Arctic Kiwi', is one of the northern-most kiwi species, and can withstand very cold temperatures when dormant. Unfortunately, though, once it starts growing in spring the new shoots are not very frost tolerant.

The last three years, the plants haven't even made it to the top of the arches they're planted against and every year the flowers (and fruit) have been lost to frost. This year, they held off on growing until after the Beast and are growing a mile a minute. Flowers are open, fruits are forming, and I might finally get to taste some hardy kiwis!

Below are some pictures of the flowers. The species is dioecious (there are male and female plants), and most commonly the males are grown as ornamentals because of their green, pink and white coloured leaves. You can clearly see the difference in the flowers if you look.

Female A. kolomikta flowers

Male A. kolomikta flowers

The scent is lemony and definitely noticeable. It wafts through the air under the arches and catches you as you walk through.

I think the plants have earned a reprieve from the threat of removal. I am hoping that eventually they'll get big and dense enough that a bit of frost doesn't knock back everything, just the outer layer(s)...

Back

So, I've decided to switch back to Blogger. For a while I hosted my own blog on a Raspberry Pi in our sitting room, but limited time for maintenance meant it had a less than 100% up-time. I think it might be time for someone else to worry about routine maintenance.

And in honour of the switch back to Blogger, I'd like to mention a guest in our garden that's made an unexpected move. For the last two or three years I've had a couple of Allium ursinum bulbs (wild garlic) in a small pot, debating whether to plant them in the garden or not. On the plus side, they're edible, make a nice ground-cover in the Spring, and the white allium flowers are attractive. On the negative side, they really smell of garlic, so a dense carpet of them might just annoy the neighbours a bit.

Well, it looks like the plant itself has, unnoticed, made the decision for me. There are lots of suspiciously similar seedlings around the corner where I was keeping the pot, a few of which have even flowered. Here's a picture of a tiny plant with flowers.

It's funny how I found Allium ursinum so difficult to raise from seed in trays, but left to its own devices it self-seeds happily. And now they're there, I just don't have the heart to pull them up... I'll just wait and see if they come back bigger and stronger next year.

What do raw medlars taste like?

Today, I finally answered this question with a taste test. I'd like to say that the medlars were home grown, but my own tree unfortunately still hasn't produced any fruit, so I borrowed a couple from under the tree at Calke Abbey. After picking them up, I left them in a bowl in the conservatory until the first one turned brown and wrinkly and squishy, and here we are.

So what did it taste like? I'd summarise it as apple purée with a hint of oats and lemon juice. There was definitely a hint of lemon in there somewhere, and as for the oats... the texture and dryness of the fruit reminded me somehow of porridge. After ripening the flesh has a coarse, flaky texture, and the fruit was quite dry, both in the sense of not juicy and also due to a hint of astringency.

I'm not sure if leaving the fruit even longer would have sweetened it more, but I enjoyed it as it was. And having tasted raw medlars, I can definitely understand why people think that they go well with cheese. I think I still prefer medlars in cooked (jelly) form, but when my own tree starts producing I'm looking forward to eating more raw as well.

How Much Land to Feed a Person?

I've just been reading this post on Naked Capitalism, which raised the question of how much land you need to feed a person. In the past I've seen numbers in the range of 1 - 2 acres per person, but do you really need that much?

I think working out the answer is a bit complicated, but I thought I'd start with something simple. What yield would a 1 acre apple orchard give in the UK? Apple trees on MM106 are supposed to yield 30 - 60 kg a year on average when fully grown, and be about 4m wide. That means that one tree covers 12.57 m2.

Now, an orchard doesn't have a closed canopy, so lets say that the canopy area is 50% of the ground area. That means that in an acre you can fit 159 trees, with a yield between 4.8 and 9.5 metric tonnes. That is 13 - 26 kg of apples a day, and each kg contains about 10 apples. Of course, you can't eat the apples evenly through the year without some method of preservation, but let's pretend that you can.

Next, an apple contains about 50 calories. 13 kg of apples is therefore 13 * 10 * 50 = 6500 calories. The average intake for a man should be around 2500, so this is far more than required. If we only care about energy, and ignore all the other nutrients people need, then our hypothetical man in fact needs at most 0.4 acres, and perhaps as little as 0.2 acres.

Of course, this is a massive simplification, for a few reasons. These are:

1. No-one would try to survive by eating 5 kg of apples a day
2. This assumes that the yield can be consumed evenly throughout the year
3. It assumes that there is no spoilage in storage
4. It assumes that there is no need to worry about variations in yield due to weather etc.
5. It assumes that all that matters is energy, and not other nutrients
6. It assumes that there is no need for additional land to grow fertility / mulch materials

But allowing for some pessimism, land to grow a bit of food for chickens (meat/eggs) etc., 1 acre per person for a good diet does seem like it might be about the right answer for the UK.

Another way to approach the problem is to divide the total amount of agricultural land in the world by the number of people (it doesn't work for individual countries due to food imports, but luckily the world as a whole doesn't import any food) . This gives an answer of 1.8 acres per person, based on numbers from Wikipedia. But again, this answer is imperfect for any particular place because of wide variations in climate across the globe, and because the world's land isn't used to produce a healthy, sustainable diet in the most efficient way possible. This is obvious since on the one hand we have overconsumption of luxury foods like meat in much of the world, and hunger in much of the rest. In addition, the current agricultural system relies on massive injections of mined / artificial nutrients, so a sustainable system could actually require more than 1.8 acres per person at a global level.

So what's the right number? A minimum is probably at least 0.5 acres per person. A realistic number with a bit of meat/eggs is probably more than 1 acre per person. How much more I'm not sure.