Heritage vegetable review Potato: Shetland Black

Age: unknown, but probably early 1900s
Background: Native to the Shetland Isles. Traditionally said to have been picked up in 1588 from a Spanish Armada shipwreck, but there's no firm evidence of its existence before the 1920s.
Supplier: not readily available as seed tubers, except from Alan Romans
Pros: sturdy, quirky, colourful and full of substance
Cons: chewy skin and dry flesh won't appeal to everyone

Have you ever tried searching for buried sheep turds in a mound of soil? No, I thought not. But you'll at least get an idea of what that feels like if you grow Shetland Black potatoes. Because that's exactly what its tubers most resemble at harvest time. They are unfortunately so well camouflaged against the soil it can make harvesting quite a long and laborious task. It's very easy to put a fork or trowel right through them without seeing them until it's too late.

But once you've found them all and given them a scrub up, they look very handsome. The intense purple you see in the photo above only lasts for a short time after harvest, before maturing to a dull dark purple-black ... or more precisely a brown-black outer skin with a purply glow coming through from underneath. It is a rough-edged beauty and the skins are netted and covered in pale brown freckles, some of which are large enough to be more like little corky patches, but they are attractively different nonetheless.

They look quite groovy at planting time too because their sprouts are a glossy jet black, very distinctive and unusual. Once they're planted and the foliage starts to develop they look more normal and potato-like, but still with some dark colouring in the stems. Flowers are mauve and white, but this is another potato that only flowers when it feels like it and tends to be a bit half-hearted about it.



I grew two batches of Shetland Black in 2007. Although it's billed as a Second Early, the first lot I planted very early, in March when there was still a lot of frost about. I wasn't sure they'd survive in the frozen ground, but they just bided their time and came up when they were ready. The crop was trouble free and I got an early harvest of fine potatoes. The second batch started off well but when the blight came it totally massacred the crop in no time at all. The 2007 blight was exceptionally bad, but even so Shetland Black had no defence against it at all.

Yield wise, Shetland Black doesn't produce massive amounts, but it's about average for a heritage potato. The tubers are also smaller than a modern variety, and a slightly erratic shape, kind of oval but often thin at one end and bulbous at the other. When you cut the tuber open, the flesh inside is a pale creamy yellow colour with a ring of purple. The purple ring is more pronounced in some tubers than others. It looks beautiful raw but sadly the colour doesn't survive the cooking process. The purple in both the ring and the skin becomes a murky grey-brown. There's also a slight darkening of the flesh with this variety, which some people find offputting although it doesn't in any way affect the eating quality. It's quite a common thing in heritage potatoes, but we've all got unused to it because the supermarkets have focused on providing us with varieties bred to stay perfectly white after cooking.



There are several ways of cooking Shetland Black. It's a very floury potato, and quite a dry-fleshed one at that. You can boil it, if you don't mind the result being a bit grey and murky-looking, and possibly slightly disintegrated. My husband (who does the Sunday dinners in our house) recommends boiling them for no more than 15 minutes. Baking or roasting is much better, and it makes especially lovely roasties. I should point out that I absolutely never peel potatoes, so I can't vouch for what it's like if you boil or roast it without its skin. The dryness of the flesh means you'll probably want to eat it with gravy or some other source of moisture. This variety also has an exceptionally thick skin. Again this is a common trait in these older potatoes, but Shetland Black is thicker skinned than most and takes a bit of chewing.

The flavour is quite subtle, with the rich earthiness of a typical heritage potato but not as strong as some. It's a very good flavour, but rather mild. However it is very good at absorbing flavours from sauces and gravy, so that helps.

Overall, Shetland Black is great if you want a proper old-fashioned potato with plenty of substance to it. Not so good if you want something dainty for a salad. It's tough, rugged, eccentric and not hugely versatile, but if you don't mind its little quirks you'll find it's full of its own character. I certainly like it enough to keep growing it. It's as sturdy and rugged as a fisherman's woolly jumper, and just what you would expect from a spud belonging to the beautiful windswept Shetland islands, so far north of northern Scotland.

I've found that home-grown Shetland Black tastes better than shop-bought, but if you're in any doubt about whether this spud is for you it might be worth buying some to try first. It's available in Waitrose, possibly the only UK supermarket which supplies and promotes quirky heritage potatoes, but they only sell it when it's in season (autumn and winter) so grab some while you can!

Until recently this rare variety was only available to gardeners in the form of microplants, but things are improving and potato hero Alan Romans is now offering them as seed tubers. Hooray!

New Year's Eve Carrots

Surprise carrot harvest this afternoon, two fine specimens of a French heritage variety, Jaune Obtuse du Doubs

I'll be honest, I'm rubbish at growing carrots. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, or whether carrots just don't like me. Last year I managed to produce only two edible specimens, and the year before that I got half a dozen tiddlers. The ones I do grow are short and stubby and look rather sorry for themselves. I was getting on all right with some Chantenay last year, which are meant to be short and stubby anyway, but the slugs had the tops off them and then next door's dog got through a hole in the fence and dug them up and stuck a disgusting soggy bone in their place. So that was the end of that.

This year's cock-up involved me sowing a meticulous row of Jaune Obtuse du Doubs seed in a bed which already contained masses of seeds from my Somme poppies. The poppies grew quicker than the carrots and swamped them. And I couldn't weed them out because they're special poppies I collected in the Somme trenches, and they're probably the most beautiful thing in the garden, so I had to sacrifice the carrots.

Anyway, now the poppies have completed their life cycle and thrown out another few billion seeds, there's just a twiggy pile of debris in their place. I tend to let nature do its own thing in the winter and leave all of last season's mess quietly dissolving into the soil. But I happened to be rummaging about in the poppy twigs today and found two surviving carrot tops lurking underneath. I dug them up and they turned out to be rather nice carrots. Not only have they survived, they're in perfect condition with no pest damage at all.

So, at a time when I'm mainly having to post photos I took during the summer, it's nice to be able to post one I took today. As you can see, Jaune Obtuse du Doubs is not very jaune but it is moderately obtuse. It's also been known under the slightly less romantic name of Yellow Intermediate. It's really a pale orange colour, but it still looks quite distinctive. It's been around since at least the 1880s and was originally grown for animal fodder. I'll let you know what it tastes like.

How about that? Fresh carrots on New Year's Eve!

Heritage vegetable review Potato: Witch Hill

Age: uncertain, but tentatively dated to 1881
Background: Probably originated in the English Midlands. Also known as Snowdrop
My supplier: Organic Gardening Catalogue (microplants)
Pros: a flavour benchmark, good performer, nice looking spuds, early enough to escape blight
Cons: none that I noticed

I've been waiting a few years to be able to review this because I had to buy it as microplants (seed tubers are not generally available for unlisted heritage potatoes like this) and I had a lot of trouble getting the microplants to survive. It's now had its third full season and only now am I in a position to taste the darned thing properly.

Was it worth it?

Yes.

Witch Hill is generally classed as a Second Early but its significantly earlier than most other Second Earlies. That was a very useful characteristic this year when we had an exceptionally early attack of blight ... it was one of the few varieties which managed to produce a full yield before the lurgy struck.

It did very well in the garden, producing vigorous plants with bright green foliage. My crop didn't flower this year ... it produced a few buds but they soon dropped off. But last year it showed itself to possess very pretty and dainty white flowers. Some potatoes are a bit fickle in this respect and only flower when they feel like it.

The potato itself is very presentable looking, with a smooth goldy-cream skin and near white flesh. It has brown freckles but is otherwise quite smooth and shiny. The shape varies, but is usually somewhere between rounded and kidney shaped. Size is also variable, from bite-size to baker-size. Yields are pretty good for a variety of this age and the skin is much thinner and less chewy than yer average heritage spud.



Witch Hill is good as a general purpose potato because its dry matter makes it adaptable to lots of different cooking methods. It makes exceptionally nice roasties with melt-in-your-mouth softness. It makes smooth lump-free mash with minimal mashing action. It has a shorter cooking time than average potatoes (if there is such a thing as an average potato) but will go a bit mushy if overboiled, so needs a bit of vigilance.

The thing that makes this potato stand out from the crowd is its flavour. It's not easy to put into words, and really I just have to say it just tastes very potatoey. It's got a richness and complexity to it though. Potatoeyness elevated to a higher level of refinement, I guess. And it has a really smooth texture too, which is quite an important quality in a floury potato. Witch Hill is ultra floury, but it doesn't have that coarse dryness you often get in floury spuds. It's the ideal floury spud for people (like me) who normally only like waxies.

Definitely a superior variety and worth seeking out, although it's rare enough that it's a bit of a pain to get hold of.

A roundup of the rest of the year's beans

Bean of the Year. It's not a heritage variety as far as I know, but it's the hands down winner of best bean of 2007 in my garden. Spagna Bianco is sold as a "butter bean" but actually seems to be a type of runner bean. A tall and vigorous climber, it gave me a large yield of huge white beans which really do look and taste like butter beans, and superior ones at that. Flowers are beautiful too. Takes its time to mature but it's a real belter. Available from Seeds of Italy.

Last year after I harvested my crop of Mrs Fortune's I found I had four or five beans which were different from the rest. Their usual colour is a light tan (darkening with age) marked with flecks and whorls of maroon-purple. But these few odd ones were almost completely purple, with just a few flecks of tan. If you've grown a few heritage vegetables you'll probably have come across this. Many older varieties show natural variability, which is one reason they've become rare heirlooms, having failed to meet the criteria of a commercial market which demands uniformity. Variations can show up in any vegetable, but with beans it's often very obvious. Brighstone is another one which naturally produces a few darker beans among its numbers. This diversity is actually very healthy and should be considered part of the variety's character, so the odd-coloured seeds should be replanted along with all the others and not "rogued out".

However ... I do like to experiment, so I picked out the purple seeds and grew them separately this year. Just to see if they looked different.

Well they did. Mrs Fortune's is essentially a green-podded variety, and the pods develop blue-purple streaks as they mature, which can become quite dark if they're exposed to the sun. My 'dark' beans produced plants which looked much the same as normal but with noticeably darker pods ... they started to turn purple very early in their development, and (on one plant in particular) matured to a deep indigo with just a few remaining flecks of green (see photo). The flower buds had more of a purple flush than usual too.

And the beans? Absolutely normal. They looked just like any other crop of Mrs Fortune's, mostly tan but with a couple of unusually purple ones.

Unusually dark blue mottling on Mrs Fortune's (climbing) bean grown from unusually purple seeds.

The other experiment I tried this year was to give dwarf French beans (bush beans) another go, having not grown them for years. I've always had a preference for the climbing types, which seem to offer far more generous yields for the space they take up. And I must say, there's been nothing in my experience this year to make me change that view. Dwarf beans do have the advantage that they come in a very exciting range of shapes, patterns and colours, but their yields are miniscule compared to a climber. Part of that is due to my garden being exceptionally badly plagued by snails, which causes problems for any vegetable grown so near the ground. Most of the dwarf varieties I grew were lovely and I will grow them again, but I had so many losses of plants and pods the overall yields were not great, and I didn't even get to taste some of them due to the necessity of saving them for seed. But anyway, here are some pictures of the dwarf beans I grew this year.

One of the most readily available of the heritage beans, Purple Queen grows from very small brown mottled seeds which don't look very glamorous but produce attractive plants with darkest purple buds opening into lilac flowers. These are followed by shiny, elegant dark purple pods which taste lovely.

Another variety with some natural variability, these pods all came from Purple Prince. They have dark purple beans inside.

Newly harvested Canadian Wonder, a 19th century variety with green pods and pale rose pink flowers. The beans turn bright red as they dry and are good as homegrown red kidney beans. This variety is still available in some catalogues.

The most prolific of the dwarf beans I grew, Vermont Cranberry starts off the colour of strawberry milkshake before darkening to a deep red with pinkish mottling.

Normally white with a dark red-brown marking around the hilum, Nun's Belly Button is green with a pink belly when it's first harvested. Not the highest yielding bean I've grown but probably the oddest named.

Heritage veg summary 2007

Next year's seeds of Kent Blue peas, starting to develop purple speckles as they dry out

This year had such a bizarre growing season, with too much spring heat, extremes of wet throughout the summer months, and not enough light whatever the weather ... not to mention the mildew and the worst (and earliest) attack of blight I've ever seen. It wouldn't be fair to do proper reviews of most of the crops I grew this year. Some were clearly not in a position to provide their best.

I did still collect a lot of notes though, and here's a general summary of my crops for 2007, divided up according to their merits (in my own subjective opinion). It doesn't include the many varieties which had a total or near total crop failure, such as the tomatoes, which had only two survivors from the 20 varieties I planted and a total yield of 7 fruits. It also doesn't include anything I already reviewed last season.

Some of these varieties will get full reviews which I'll post in the new year, but most won't – they'll have to be grown again in another season and reappraised.

I hope you find these notes useful in choosing what to grow, but there's always a possibility your experience with any of these vegetables could be different from mine. Feel free to compare notes if you agree or disagree with any of the things I've said.

Rouge Crapaudine ... an antique elongated beetroot


SUPERSTARS:

Beetroot: Rouge Crapaudine
Seed source: Thomas Etty Esq
The root is a matte dark red on the outside, slightly darker than most beetroot, and the inside is a very beautiful intense dark blood red. It's one of the oldest beetroot varieties around, listed in catalogues in the 1850s. Unlike a conventional beetroot it's long, thin and tapered, basically shaped like a carrot. The flavour is sweet, refined and not too earthy, and exquisitely tender when cooked. I grew it as a novelty but it's instantly become a favourite on its own merits.

Potato: Salad Blue
Seed source: Waitrose
Vigorous grower with a dark blue flush on the stems. The flowers are a purply-sky blue and absolutely beautiful. It flowers early and for a long period and is a delight to have in the garden. Salad Blue is emphatically not a salad potato. It's pretty floury. But it makes the most fabulous roasties. Soft-textured and exquisitely flavoured ... and BLUE! Beautiful to look at and full of healthy anthocyanins. When fresh the potatoes are dark blue skinned with blue-purple flesh, and much of the colour is retained after cooking. Can also be used to make mauve mash ... and very tasty it is too. Not the highest yielder by modern standards but well worth it for all its other qualities.

Pea: Carruthers' Purple Podded
Seed source: Heritage Seed Library
This is my clear favourite of all the purple-podded peas I've trialled (with Mr Bethell's Purple Podded a commendable second). It's a winner on flavour and beauty. Tall, vigorous (about 6ft) and early, it has dainty lantern-like flowers in two-tone maroon and pink. Pods are a reasonable size with a lovely deep violet-purple colour. Eaten raw they're very juicy but have a slight bitterness. Peas inside are an olive green colour, large, square and about 8 to a pod. Fresh peas taste surprisingly sweet for a purple (bear in mind purple podded peas always taste less refined than a good green variety) and are very nice raw from the pod. They have a slightly coarser texture than a modern pea but that's actually rather nice. This is truly a superior variety. Its one fault? It seems to be the pea moths' favourite too.

Pea: Magnum Bonum
Seed source: Heritage Seed Library
This is among the tallest peas I've ever grown, quite readily reaching 7ft and beyond. It's vigorous too, and you get a lot of pods. Similar in appearance to other 19th century tall peas, with pure white (not cream) flowers. One of my plants produced two flowers per node, but the others didn't. Magnum Bonum is the only pea I've found so far about which I can say "tastes as good as Alderman", my flavour benchmark. It's very sweet, possibly a tiny bit less sweet than Alderman, but with a richness and refinement in it. Definitely one of the best choices for flavour, and it yields well too. It does lose the sweetness when fully mature though, so there is a "just right" time to harvest it.

Magnum Bonum peas in flower


EXTREMELY GOOD, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:

Beetroot: Egyptian Turnip Rooted
Seed source: Thomas Etty Esq
Very decorative in the garden, with bright emerald green leaves veined with deep red. It grows almost entirely on the surface of the soil, so at least you know how big it is before you harvest it ... none of that feeling of "beet deflation" when you excitedly pull one out of the ground and find a tiny stumpy root on it. Flavour is excellent and nicely balanced without too much earthiness.

Pea: Salmon-flowered
Seed source: Heritage Seed Library
Oddest pea in the garden, for sure. Looks like a cross between a culinary and a sweet pea, but could be anything. 4ft tall, it has very wide succulent stems and clusters of flowers all in a solid bunch at the top. The flowers are truly gorgeous ... a very dainty and pretty two tone pink, quite unlike any other pea I've grown. They bloom more or less all at once, so it looks absolutely stunning for a few days and then it's gone! Green pods develop rapidly, all sticking out in a big bunch at the top of the plant. You don't get many peas in 'em ... 4 to 6 seems about normal, and they aren't terribly big, but they're very sweet and flavoursome. As a bonus, if you save it for seed the pods go an unusual rosy colour as they dry out. Yields were relatively low, but it's such a great thing to have in the garden, I didn't care.

Pea: Kent Blue
Seed source: Heritage Seed Library
It may be premature to review this as I didn't get a chance to do a proper taste test (most of it was kept for seed), but it's too interesting to leave off the list. It's not a vigorous pea or a very high yielder. Flowers, produced in pairs, are small but have a beautiful two-tone velvety blue colour, with dark veins. Unique and very pretty. Pods are green, and small, and go extremely knobbly as the peas inside start to mature, and may even start to bend and fold. You can certainly see very clearly how well the peas are developing and you can count the bumps. The raw peas are quite firm and mealy and the skins are chewier than you'd get on a modern pea, but they have a very rich and full flavour with an overriding sweetness. When dry they become speckled with purple.

Climbing bean: Caseknife
Seed source: Beans and Herbs
An old variety from before 1820, which climbs and climbs seemingly to eternity. It ain't a beauty. The leaves are gnarled and the pods dull green and kind of lumpy and ugly, although they start off flat and knife-shaped. I didn't bother trying to eat them as green beans. But boy the shelled beans taste good ... fresh, dried or partially dried (I'm not fussy). They're white kidney type beans, not especially smooth or shiny or glamorous but they have a lovely firm texture when cooked. Caseknife needs tall supports but it's full of character and flavour.

Purple podded pea, Desiree


GOOD, BUT ... :

Beetroot: Golden
Seed source: Organic Gardening Catalogue
Different from other varieties in its rich orange colour, which is apparent right from the earliest seedling stage. The stems of the plants are golden yellow and the leaves a lush bright green. Root size is a bit on the small side though and the flavour is OK but not as refined as the red varieties.

Potato: Highland Burgundy Red
Seed source: Waitrose
Less vigorous than some and slower growing, with thin, fine foliage and a dusky reddish tinge on the stems. It's not the most graceful looking plant in the garden but it does have nice flowers. They're pure white, fairly small but dainty and frilly and borne in clusters. Tuber colour on the outside is a bright rich crimson, maturing to burgundy. They're slightly erratic in shape, often kidney shaped and tapering towards one end. Inside, there's a band of normal potatoey colour under the skin, but the bulk of the flesh is strongly infused with burgundy red, right through to the middle. It cooks to a rose pink and makes a lovely novelty mash. Growing conditions may be a factor, but I found it to be a bit coarse and dry in texture and the flavour was unremarkable.

Pea: Desiree
Seed source: Real Seed Catalogue
A purple podded soup pea, is probably the best description. The flowers are very pretty, and the pods are broad and a very dark purple colour. It doesn't really work as a mangetout unless you eat it very young, as the pods become very leathery. By the time they reach maturity the pods are so thick and leathery it's a job to tug them off the plant! Peas inside are green and so large they sometimes burst the pods. Shelled out and eaten raw, they aren't impressive ... the flavour is bland, the texture chewy. But when you cook them they are absolutely delicious, and have a lot more substance to them than a modern pea. Less versatile than other purples, but very good at what it does.

Pea: Ne Plus Ultra
Seed source: W Robinson
One of the old, tall Victorian peas, with flowers an especially bright pure white. Not much cop as a mangetout as the young pods taste quite bitter, but it's meant as a shelling pea. It soars to about 7ft, has an elegant form and the large pods are borne on long stalks and look very fine. The peas themselves are well packed into the pod, averaging 8 to 10 per pod. Pick them young and the flavour is pretty damn fantastic. But as they begin to reach a mature size they go starchy and firm of texture ... the sweet and tender stage is soon passed.

Potato in flower, Highland Burgundy Red


DUDS:
Beetroot: White Beetroot
Seed source: Real Seed Catalogue
This isn't actually a heritage variety itself, but a modern strain of the very old Albina Vereduna. It's a white beetroot, as you might have guessed, but above-ground parts go green with exposure to the sun. Grows vigorously and doesn't 'bleed' when cut. I wasn't impressed with the flavour though. It's very sweet, but it's not a very refined sweetness, and has a bitter undertaste which (to me) made it less palatable than a red beetroot. It is, however, rather more appreciated by ants and wood lice, who delighted in gouging great holes in most of my crop.

Salmon-flowered pea ... the strange pod clusters which follow the flowers. Notice how thick the main stem is.

Index of articles on this blog

Daughter of the Soil comprises a mix of articles, topic-related posts, reviews and diary-entries. Some of the more informative posts are listed here.

This information was formerly in the sidebar of the blog, but became too unwieldy, so it now has its own page.

Articles

Seed saving guide (veg)

F1 hybrids - what every gardener should know

How to hybridise tomatoes

How to hybridise peas

Breeding purple-podded peas

How to hybridise sweet peas

How to make a bamboo frame

Somme poppies

Cultivation info

Beans

Broad beans

Peas 1

Peas 2

Peas 3

Poppies

Potatoes 1

Potatoes 2

Tomatoes 1

Tomatoes 2

Reviews

Broad bean: Red-flowered

French bean: Kew Blue

French bean: Mrs Fortune's

Kirpi tool

Pea: Carruthers' Purple Podded

Pea: Champion of England

Pea: Golden Sweet

Pea: Ne Plus Ultra

Potato: Edzell Blue

Potato: Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy

Potato: Shetland Black

Potato: Witch Hill

Runner bean: Black Magic

Tomato: Black Plum

First gig ... heehee!

I have been a bit slack with my blogging in the last couple of weeks, but this is why!

I played my first gig on Monday at The Night Owl in Cheltenham, which means I got to play on the same stage as Jimi Hendrix (he played there in 1967).

I don't have a band at the moment so I had to make do with my own guitar playing, and all the other instruments were on an iPod! It worked though ... the audience loved it and so did I.

Green bean gallery

Caseknife, introduced before 1820

Caseknife pod. Shaped a bit like a caseknife, presumably.

I just had a comment asking what had become of my Spagna Bianco, so here it is. It does appear to be botanically a runner bean but instead of the characteristic long thin runner pods it has ... er ... these. There are only two or three beans per pod by the look of it but they will be huge, round and plump like butterbeans.

Purple Prince

Coco Bicolour, an old climber of French origin

Nun's Belly Button, a very old dwarf variety with several variants

Brighstone, from the Isle of Wight but of uncertain origin. Lovely purple flowers.

And after green beans you get other colours. This is Dog Bean.

I noticed some dark beans among my harvest of Mrs Fortune's last year which were almost totally purple instead of the usual tan with purple whorls. It was only three beans in the whole crop. I planted them separately to see whether they look different from the usual plants. And they do! They have more purple on them, the flowers are darker pink, and the pods develop a much deeper blue mottling. I don't think they've crossed with anything, I think it's more likely to be a spontaneous mutation or a hidden gene expressing itself. I will watch them with interest.

Garlic joy

Freshly harvested bulbs of Solent Wight garlic

As it's been a very strange season weather-wise, it's difficult to make any judgements about produce from the garden this year. One plant which always seems to be a rugged survivor is garlic. My crop was afflicted with the worst outbreak of rust I've ever seen (a fungus which chokes the leaves with rusty orange spots). It was so bad that for the last month or six weeks most of my garlic plants have appeared to be dead. The foliage was so rust-choked it just died off completely, and even the main stems looked like dry sticks, straw-coloured with smutty spots. You wouldn't think anything would survive being reduced to that state. But under the ground, the bulbs were still thriving and growing.

That's not to say I've had a perfectly good garlic harvest. Most of the bulbs are smaller than they should be, and some of them have burst out of their bulb wrappers so they won't be any good for long term storage. But in terms of having enough to replant next season, and plenty more to eat, it's been a perfectly adequate harvest.

Take the Solent Wight in the picture above, for example. It's a softneck Artichoke (I think) variety, very popular in the UK in recent years as it has been bred for our climate (from French stock). It's supposed to produce large long-keeping bulbs. Mine are not large, but then I've never had especially large bulbs from Solent Wight in my garden, for some reason. The white outer wrappers are thin and see-through like tracing paper and as you can see, the clove skins underneath are extremely beautiful colours! I don't remember them being this beautiful last year, so maybe the growing conditions have intensified the colours. The flavour is pretty good even straight after harvest, plenty of taste to it but not overly hot or strong.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Solent Wight was the only garlic variety I grew this year which was completely unaffected by rust. The plants remained completely clean for weeks while all my other garlic was choked solid. There was a very small amount of rust on the uppermost leaves by harvest time, but it was very minor.

Persian Star garlic, which originates in Uzbekistan.

I've harvested a few bulbs of Persian Star too, but not all of them because they seem to be later maturing than my other varieties and some are not quite ready. This is a Purple Stripe hardneck variety, but it probably needs to mature a bit more before the purple stripes become apparent (the planting stock I got from Patrick was certainly streaked with purple). It has eight fairly equal sized cloves around a central stem and a classic garlic bulb shape. We had some for dinner and the flavour was hot and spicy. It's difficult to judge garlic flavours on a single tasting because they vary so much with different growing conditions and harvest times, and even then they can change continually during storage. When eaten soon after harvest my Persian Star had a slight coarseness in its flavour, but it was probably harvested prematurely so I will allow the rest of the crop to mellow in storage for a while and see how it develops.

Still my favourite garlic at the moment, Music is a handsome and reliable variety with a wonderful rich flavour.

And no it's not just the name that made this one appeal to me! This is my third crop of Music from home-saved bulbs, and although it's not the most brilliant harvest because of the atrocious weather, it's proving itself to be a very sturdy and reliable variety. It seems to have originated in Italy and then developed in Canada, and it's a hardneck Porcelain type. The cloves are huge and plump with pretty pink-violet skins, and the outer bulb wrappers are smooth, porcelain-translucent and usually streaked with silvery purple. The flavour is fantastic, and this is the variety all my friends pester me for. It does change in storage though ... I harvested a bulb in June and we ate half of it and it was very nice. Last Sunday we ate the other half and it nearly blew our heads off. It had developed an intense heat during its time on the kitchen shelf, though it still maintained its sweet musky Music flavour.

On the whole the Music bulbs this year are smaller than they should be and less elegant and porcelain-like. They are also producing some small extra cloves within some of the bulbs, which they have never done before. So I think they have been a bit perturbed by the weather. I often find that smaller bulbs taste better than big ones though, so I'm not too bothered.

One disadvantage of Porcelain garlics is that they don't usually store for more than a few months. However, I'm amazed to say I have a single clove of Music on my kitchen shelf which is now one year old and still firm and healthy! I haven't the heart to eat it now, and as it has a fine and healthy set of root buds I will probably try replanting it in the autumn. There is probably a good reason for its long life ... with garlic there is a trade-off between scape removal and bulb storage life. If you remove the scapes (flower stalks) you get bigger bulbs but they don't last as long. With last year's crop I left some of the scapes on until they were almost mature, which compromises bulb size but gives them much better storage properties.

Oops! This is what happens when you leave garlic in the ground too long! They burst out of their bulb wrappers. This year I'm blaming it partly on the extreme wet weather through June and July, which made the cloves swell very rapidly and push each other apart, though in doing so they've reached a much more impressive size. Bulbs in this condition will not store for too long but that's OK ... I will use these for replanting, since they are literally bursting with vitality!