-
Celery is valuable because it is one of
the few vegetables ordinary people will eat raw in winter with cheese,
thus gaining some catalase, though it is tar inferior to raw cabbage in
every vitamin and mineral. It has been regarded as a good source of
calcium (68 mg.) and iron (0.60 mg.) but the first is half that of
broccoli and the second a fifth as much, and because you eat only the
bleached stems it contains no vitamin A or vitamin C. Many people,
however, like the flavor and decide that this is worth the trouble of
growing celery.
-
The simplest celery is 'Golden
Self-Blanching', grown on the flat without trenches or trouble and,
from mid-May or June planting, ready to eat in late August till the
first hard frost.
-
Plants cost about 40p a dozen. Plant with
a trowel a foot apart with eighteen inches between rows, digging in 1
lb. of dried sludge or a bucketful of manure to a square yard. Water
for the first fortnight if the weather is dry; all that is needed
afterwards is hoeing against weeds.
-
Ordinary celery lasts till January. It
can be planted as late as July after early potatoes, saving room and
growing smaller sticks that are just as lasting and hardy.
-
Manure as for self-blanching celery, but
take out wide 'V's' with the hoe, four inches across and three inches
deep, two feet apart, and put in the plants at foot intervals along the
bottoms. Water week adding liquid manure to the water on poor soils. By
mid-AugustSeptember for July plantings-the plants should be about a
foot high and ready for any side-shoots to be broken off before their
first earthing.
-
It takes two people to earth a row of
celery-one to hold the stems of each plant bunched and the other to
heap soil shoveled from between the rows to fill the furrow and go
three inches up the stems.
-
The final earthing three weeks later,
right up to the leaves to ensure freedom from frost, is best done with
peat or leafmould. Break up the peat bale with a spade, and water to
swell it, or chop down the leafmould heap made last autumn and sift
before heaping either into tall ridges. Whack down firmly.
-
Both peat and leafmould need protection
from wind and rain. Black polythene strip, slit in the middle to let
the leaves through and weighted with stones each side of the ridges,
has been used, but it can tear off in gales and makes harvesting
awkward, apart from harboring slugs.
-
The best protection consists of
fifteen-inch squares of flat asbestos leant on the ridges. They store
flat in the shed and last for years. Lift off the asbestos sheets to
dig the celery as required, and spread the peat or leafmould to dig in
next spring.
-
Moving this trenchless bed to a new place
each year adds to a crop of simplified celery the gain of a generous
dressing of the good and lasting humus that town gardens need.
-
The chief garden pest is celery leaf
miner with grubs that make winding tunnels in the leaves. Pick these
attacked leaves off in July and August and destroy them, which prevent
a second-generation attack in October. If there is a great deal to pick
off, give a tonic of dried blood, about 2 oz. to ten feet of row, and
the same if the plants appear strangely stunted, for this will be Leaf
Spot or Celery Blight, which is rare in gardens and highly unlikely
from bought plants, for it is carried on seed, and today this is
sterilized with formaldehyde before sowing.