Another species of pest - human vandals - have ruined specimen pumpkins at the OPW's walled vegetable garden, writes FIONNUALA FALLON

REGULAR READERS of Urban Farmerwill know that garden pests have been quite a feature of our weekly reports.

Certainly, most entomologists would have had a field-day this summer, keeping track of the various caterpillars, moths, flies, beetles, bugs and butterflies that have busily bored through leaves, siphoned off sap and tunnelled through roots in the OPW's walled kitchen garden in the Phoenix Park.

Gooseberry sawfly, aphids, cutworms, cabbage-white butterfly and carrot fly are just some of the creepy-crawlies that have thwarted OPW gardeners Meeda Downey and Brian Quinn's best efforts over the last few months. But now yet another pest has now hit the gardens - the only difference this time being that it's of the human variety. Brian's prized pumpkin crop, which he and Meeda have been carefully tending and nurturing over the summer, has been vandalised by "persons unknown", with the two largest specimens particularly badly damaged.

"I'm gutted," says Brian. "You just have to wonder at the kind of person who does something like that, it's just so bloody pointless."

It seems that the pumpkin-smashers climbed over the garden wall last Sunday evening after the gates into the walled garden were locked for the night, and then made a beeline for the pumpkin patch. One wonders if the pressures and strains of competitive pumpkin-growing suddenly became too much to bear, and some would-be urban farmer has instead turned pumpkin-saboteur. But Brian doesn't think so: "Just a couple of idiots," he says.

On the bright side, the damage could have been far worse, and there are still plenty of gigantic pumpkins growing happily in the gardens (more about these in a few weeks time) - they're just not quite as big as those two prize specimens that Brian was so particularly proud of.

"This week, I'll start cutting away the leaves from around the remaining pumpkins to allow them to ripen and colour-up in the sunshine," says Brian, "and then we'll start harvesting them in the week coming up to Halloween." He also reckons that he's beaten last year's record as regards size, even without his two prize specimens in the running. "Definitely," he says.

For those urban farmers who fancy their chances of beating the OPW gardeners' best efforts, there's still another few weeks before the formal weighing-in and measuring of the Phoenix Park pumpkins takes place - just no more dirty trick campaigns, okay.

Turnips & Swedes

Speaking of pumpkins and Halloween brings back vivid childhood memories of carving jack-o-lanterns out of turnips (I don't remember any pumpkins for sale back in 1970s Ireland, or if there were, they were both rare and expensive). To confuse things further, the vegetable that I (like many others) call a turnip is in fact a swede, a close cousin of the turnip but a distinct vegetable in its own right. Food writer Jane Grigson had little time for the swede which she remembered without fondness from her school days as "a watery, orange slush . . . unredeemed by drainage or butter". It was, she concluded, "a vegetable to be avoided".

But vegetable expert Joy Larkcom has more time for this humble root vegetable, which she considers to be superior in flavour to the turnip.

In the OPW's walled garden, Brian and Meeda grew both swedes and turnips this year, with the first crop of turnips going into the ground in late spring as young, glasshouse-raised plants.

"We grow just one variety of each," says Brian, pointing to the neat lines of Swede Magres and Turnip Snowball. "The turnips are much faster growing, with a crop ready about eight weeks after sowing. We pick them when they're tennis-ball sized, before they get hard and woody. With the swede, you have to give the plant a lot longer in the ground (20 to 26 weeks). We sowed ours back at the beginning of June and we'll try to leave most of them in the ground until after the first frosts because low temperatures help convert the plant starches into sugars, so the flavour is much better. We don't leave them in the ground later than December, though, as otherwise they begin to get too tough."

Next year, the OPW gardeners will try growing the smaller, Japanese-type turnips, also known as Kabu, which crop very quickly (seven to eight weeks) and produce particularly sweet, miniature-sized roots not much bigger than a golf ball. This type of turnip can be eaten raw, in salads or in soups and stir-fries also.

While it's now too late to grow main-crop swedes or turnips (they should be sown from early spring until mid-summer), you can still sow turnip seed for turnip tops, or turnip "greens" as they're also known, giving you a tasty springtime harvest of tender green leaves to use in salads or stir-fries.

Joy Larkcom advises using main-crop varieties, such as Green Globe, Orange Jelly and Veitch's Red Globe for autumn-sown crops, while early varieties such as Snowball, Purple Top Milan and Ivory are more suitable for late-winter/early spring-sown crops. In mild gardens, these can be sown outdoors but in colder areas it is best to sow under cover.

Treat the plants as you would any other CCA (cut-and-come-again) crop, picking the leaves when the young plants are no more than 15cm (6ins) tall, and continuing to regularly harvest them as they re-sprout. Alternatively, any urban farmers who still have swedes growing in their vegetable garden by mid-winter can then lift and trim the roots, replant them in a box of soil and force them under darkness. The swedes will then sprout young, tender, semi-blanched shoots, which can also be used in stir-fries or salads.

As members of the brassica family, both the swede and the turnip are grown alongside other brassicas in the walled garden, with the OPW gardeners practising careful crop rotation to prevent a build-up of diseases in the soil.

As a result, the only pest to affect the swede and turnip crop so far this year has been the previously mentioned cutworm, which the garden's resident pet robin has been helping to keep under control. But he now has to compete with a rival robin, who is muscling in on his territory.

"They both follow us around the garden and feed from our hands," says Brian, adding that student gardener Georgina Byrne was the first to spot that a second robin had appeared on the scene. "But robin number two is a bit of a lady's man when it comes to feeding," says Georgina, explaining that he only takes cutworms from either her or Meeda.

Robin number one has a few other tricks up his sleeve, however, including the ability to spot a photo-opportunity just as quickly as he spies a cutworm. Nobody told him that this week's Urban Farmer was all about swedes and turnips, but somehow or other he just seemed to know. And so, like a natural star, he posed most beautifully for the cameras. Robin number two still has a lot to learn about staying in the limelight.

- 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 from 10am to 4.30pm

- Next week Urban Farmer in Property will cover growing garlic

Fionnuala Fallon is a garden designer and writer