A bright bulb and a curly kale can defy the Puca

URBAN FARMER: Traditionally, crops should be harvested by Hallowe'en, but there are some hardy exceptions

AUTUMN HAS arrived with a bang in the OPW’s walled kitchen garden in the Phoenix Park, bringing fallen leaves, frosty mornings and brilliantly sunny days along with a host of seasonal chores that keep its two gardeners, Meeda Downey and Brian Quinn, as busy as ever.

This is despite the fact that in just a few short days, it will be Halloween or Oíche na Sprideanna (spirit night), the date in the Irish farming calendar that was traditionally believed to mark the end of the growing year and by which time most crops should have been safely harvested and stored away. According to the late Kevin Danaher, the folklore expert and author of The Year in Ireland, this was also the night when “fairies were let loose to visit every growing plant, and with their breath blast berries and hedge-rows”, while the Púca would spit on and blight any remaining fruit, rendering it inedible. “Yikes!”, as Scooby Doo would say.

Perhaps the OPW gardeners should keep their fingers crossed over the next few days and pray that the abundance of fruit and vegetables still growing in the walled kitchen garden survives the night untouched.

“We’ve got loads left, including raspberries (an excellent late-fruiting variety called Himbo), blackberries, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beetroot, cabbage, leeks, celeriac, Brussels sprouts, kale and Florence fennel,” says Meeda, ticking each crop off on her fingers with justifiable pride. “Actually, this is our second harvest of Florence fennel, from a late sowing that we made in the glasshouse back in July,” adds fellow gardener Brian, pointing to the neat lines of feathery foliage waving delicately in the breeze. “The plants did really well, even though they only went into the ground in mid-August. We’ve gradually been harvesting them since early October.”

Gently tugging one of the fennel plants up from the ground as he speaks, Brian carefully cuts away the foliage to leave just the plump, white bulb, which is placed alongside others in a box destined for delivery to the next-door Phoenix cafe. The discarded leaves, which fill the air with the pungent smell of liquorice, will be added later on to the compost heap.

While Florence (or Florentine) fennel has been in cultivation for several centuries in countries such as Italy and France, where it’s a native of the Mediterranean marshes, it’s still a surprisingly rare vegetable in Irish gardens. This is despite the fact that, as both Meeda and Brian agree, it’s a relatively easy plant to grow. “We never have a problem with it,” confirms Meeda. “We did the first sowing back in early May in modules in the glasshouse, the young plants (about 90 of them) went into the ground in mid-June and we were harvesting them by July. One of the great things about the crop is that it doesn’t really suffer from any particular pests and diseases, except maybe a little bit of slug damage when it’s small. It does have a reputation for bolting , but that hasn’t happened to any of our plants. All they’ve needed is regular watering in the early days, and then weeding.”

But perhaps Florence fennel’s relative lack of popularity amongst the country’s gardeners is more a consequence of its very distinctive taste, for the sweet, aniseed-flavoured flesh of its crisp white bulbs is not to everyone’s liking. Even the chef Nigel Slater, a fan of almost all vegetables, cautions that “overused, even slightly, it will dominate an entire dish and ruin your wine”. Others think differently, however, including the late food writer, Jane Grigson, who bought the celery-like bulbs whenever she saw them for sale, and who valued this vegetable for its unique flavour and its clean, crisp texture. Her favourite fennel dish – “the best one of all by far”– is one in which the trimmed and quartered bulbs are cooked in salted water until just tender, and then roasted in the oven with just butter and parmesan.

Another vegetable now being harvested by Brian and Meeda in the walled garden and one that’s equally capable of dividing opinion is kale, that leafy relative of cabbage that some dismiss as nothing more than a fodder crop fit only for animals, while others, such as Darina Allen, call it a wonder food packed full of nutritional goodness. This year, Brian and Meeda are growing a vigorous, hybrid curly kale known as Winterbor, which produces large, blue-green, ruffled leaves with a mild flavour. It’s a close relative of Redbor, a strikingly handsome, red-leaved kale that the OPW gardeners grew last year and whose foliage deepens to a shade of inky purple in cold weather. Other gardeners like to grow Cavolo de Nero, a tall, Tuscan kale with stiffly upright and heavily dimpled, green-black foliage, while Red Russian (also known as “communist kale”) is yet another lovely-looking kale that’s particularly prized for its blue-green, delicately flavoured leaves (harvested when small, these are even tasty in a salad).

Perhaps one of the very best things about all of these kales (particularly the curly kales) is their winter hardiness, because these colourful members of the brassica family can tolerate the kinds of winter frosts that would make a mush of many other vegetables (Florence fennel included). This makes kale an ideal vegetable to fill the hungry months of winter and early spring, particularly if you treat it as a cut-and-come again crop as the OPW gardeners do. “We pick a handful of leaves from each plant, working our way up along the stem of the plant,” explains Meeda. “That way, you can gradually harvest the leaves over time, rather than all in one go”.

Kale can be braised, boiled, stir-fried, or even deep-fried, but now, as Halloween approaches, is the traditional time to eat it as one of the key ingredients in colcannon. Boiled, drained, chopped and then mixed through mashed potato along with lots of melted butter, it makes for a very tasty meal. Add some of the other traditional “ingredients” such as a coin, a ring, a matchstick or a bean if you want the full festival fun of this dish. But just remember to make sure that the freshly-harvested leaves have been checked and then rechecked for any rogue creepy-crawlies that might be hiding amongst them. Because while Halloween divination games are always a laugh, there are few things more ghoulish than accidentally swallowing a mouthful of half-cooked Cabbage White caterpillars. Yikes and yikes again.

* The OPW’s Victorian walled kitchen garden is in the grounds of the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, beside the Phoenix Park Café and Ashtown Castle. The gardens are open daily 10am-4pm

* Fionnuala Fallon is a garden designer and writer

WHAT TO: sow, plant and do now

Sow:(Outdoors) Green manure, broad beans, hardy peas

(Under cover) Oriental leaves, salad rocket, Texsel greens

Plant: (Outdoors)Autumn onions, spring cabbage, shallots, garlic, hardy lettuce

Do:Continue harvesting storing, mulch celeriac and parsnips with straw to protect against frost, clear and manure beds, lift and store maincrop potatoes, pumpkins, onions etc, order fruit trees.