What do you do when the days are slate-grey and muggy, when the pavements are damp-stained and puddles are slicked with substances you don’t care to think about? You make the most of it. Yes, June was largely a washout. In such weather, peppers sulk, tomatoes grow too green and hide their fruit, and slugs devour wet-handkerchief lettuce – but some things thrive.
Few vegetables like sitting in water, and it’s questionable whether you should eat anything that has done so. Flooding is part of our weather pattern these days: if your beds regularly turn into ponds, futureproof them by raising them. However, if it’s a case of wet soil rather than flooding, you must work with the right plants.
Perennial plants do better than annuals during strange summers. Once established, skirret, salsify, yacon, sweet cicely, jerusalem and globe artichokes, rhubarb, apples, pears, gooseberries, jostaberries and currants often do very well in wet summers, particularly if they are planted on a mound so water can drain away quickly.
Mashua, an ancient, perennial root from the Andes, goes bonkers in a wet summer, and unlike potatoes it won’t get blight. However, as exciting as mashua is, cooking with its tubers is less thrilling. Still, we’ll find a foolproof method only by experimenting, so please share if you’ve found something good. It’s a pretty-looking thing: give it humus-rich soil and something to scramble up so you can enjoy its scarlet flowers (which are also edible). It will survive anywhere, but you’ll get only marbles for tubers if you fail to feed it.
Watercress loves rainy weather, too. The finest is grown in crystal-clear water fed from chalk streams, but you can do pretty well with a bucket of rainwater. That said, although it loves water, it doesn’t love stagnant conditions, so grow it in a pot with a deep saucer and flush water through regularly if the sky fails to deliver.
Growing wasabi equates to growing gold, considering the price for which the fresh stuff sells. Getting there is tricky if you have lots of slugs, mind. For rooftop growers and shady balcony types (or anyone else who can outwit the slugs somehow), this may be your ticket to riches. Again, grow it in a pot, in shade, with a deep saucer. It loves humidity and won’t be happy at all drying out in full sunlight.
If the weather is warm and wet, amaranths are wonderful, but you’ve missed the boat for this year: they do best when started in April, in the way of tomatoes, and planted out as robust little plants; they will romp away. The Real Seed Catalogue has been selecting for years and has a strain called mixed grain amaranths, which is a riot of yellow, red and pink flowers: visit its website for detailed instructions for threshing and cooking the grain. Amaranth seeds are so small you can add them to rice for flavour and nutrition. Definitely a good one for the busy allotmenteers, since they are self-sufficient and big enough to outcompete weeds.
