Does anyone bother to grow celery any more?
I would like to try next season and would welcome any tips people have as to best time to sow, varities and cultivation please
best tip i can give you based on my own experiences is .........don't bother!!
Although I seem to have finally cracked it... having table rather than soup standard celery I'd probably agree... and grow celeriac instead... :-X
Quote from: grotbag on December 06, 2009, 14:49:03
best tip i can give you based on my own experiences is .........don't bother!!
We tried this year and, although the plants seemed to look great, they were really stringy and horrible! Am not going to bother again ether.
Oh dear it's not looking very positive is it!!
I asked a similar question a couple of months ago - and got some interesting feedback and some tips, which might help you decide
http://www.allotments4all.co.uk/smf/index.php/topic,54648.0.html
1066
Have done really well. Lots of soup, stews and baked beans. But I like celery soup, and it does brilliantly in the pressure cooker. Great taste, very stringy. :o :o
Mulched mine with loads of recycled compost, earth them up to the ears. Forget the self blanching bit - the best ones were tied up with cardboard.
They have huge roots balls which have broken up the soil brilliantly.
Thanks for all the input.
I will think long and hard before trying I think but will let you know whether I do try in the end.
I think celery comes into the "challenge" category of veggie growing ;D
I'm going to give some a try........
Quote from: Digeroo on December 06, 2009, 16:24:43
st, earth them up to the ears. Forget the self blanching bit - the best ones were tied up with cardboard.
They have huge roots balls which have broken up the soil brilliantly.
Never could locate their ears :D wrapped mine in cardboard to the top, late in their development and they grew 10 x taller but kind of hollow with a lot of rotten branches and now they seem to have done growing. Cardboard never stayed on for long though because of gales.
Agree about the earth improvement, mulched so excessively that the soil's divine for next year.
I won't give up - but there has to be a better way...
Having got some OK though smaller than I'd like celeriac this year I'm going to try and grow some Par-Cel next year as well, though my celery was rubbish this year.... grew it in th eflower beds (probably a mistake, I don't think they're fertile enough for it) but the results were barely worth cutting to make soup....
chrisc
Strangely my Parcel was no better than my celery and I thought that was easy to grow. Ended up carboarding that too to make it grow upright and eliminate the cringing bitterness. Sort of worked, but too little too late.
I have been telling people not to bother for years because I have never seen a decent 'home grown' celery.
This year I gave away some surplus plants and produce to a fellow allotment holder who had planted out loads of celery and I suppose by way of exchange they gave me a few of their full grown celery plants. I thanked them for the celery and they told me that they had been eating them raw and they were very good.
Never one to waste anything, I did try them. They were small and too stringy to eat as salad in my view but made a decent batch of soup. Perhaps he should have left them longer to get frosted because I recall being told that the frost crisps them up.
I still would not bother to grow them myself but as they are something that you can put in later when some of the summer stuff is used and there is room , if you like celery soup (and it is dead easy to make) give it a try.
My best gardening tip is to ignore every one else if you want to try to do something go ahead.