This week we have been harvesting the last of the French beans and picking our mini sweet corn cobs. Mini (or baby) sweet corn is great to grow,  and a bit different too! The plant looks just like normal sweet corn but produces succulent, little cobs. They’re best picked when the cob is 4-5 inches long. Don’t let them grow too large or they’ll lose their delicious sweetness and turn starchy.

Baby sweet corn adds a nice sweet crunch to stir-frys but is lovely raw too. Try it in a salad or use it for dips. Kids love them!

Kohlrabi: this week’s new addition to the garden

Kohlrabi is a great vegetable for the autumn / winter plot, and we’ve just planted our young plants in the demo garden. It’s an unusual and attractive looking vegetable which comes in green and great shades of purple.  Although it is often mistaken for a root vegetable it’s actually a member of the leafy green Brassica family.  The name kohlrabi means ‘cabbage turnip ‘and it has a sweet turnip-like taste. It produces a bulbous root which tastes sweetest when harvested young, about the size of golf ball.

As well as being tasty it’s a hardy vegetable, and is less prone to slugs and snails attacks and many other pests that attack winter greens.