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Pic Olive Harris
Known to Victorian head gardeners as Trombonecino (and perhaps it is possible to see why it was likened to the musical instrument), this member of the squash family survives in the Cornish walled kitchen garden at Tresillian thanks to R J Harris's determination to help in the global fight to maintain ancient varieties. As many as a dozen fruits -- each 30cms to 40cms long -- can be taken from the one plant, which happily climbs or sprawls. The South Americans grew the ancestors of this Victorian-developed specimen as long ago as 9,000 BC. Archeological digs have unearthed 5,000-year-old remains of it in Mexico. Through the centuries, a myriad of ways has been perfected to prepare it for the table. Most of today's chefs use it as if it were a courgette. Mr Harris (practising professionally in the UK's less than friendly climate) started with seeds from Peter Grayson's Heritage collection sown in pots in February in an unheated greenhouse. He developed them into potted seedlings and then into potted plantlets -- still in the unheated greenhouse -- and then transplanted them into one of his deep-trench beds during the first year of the bed's four-year life span. This was done when all risk of frost had gone and the moon's first quarter had just begun. The timing enabled him to catch the vital fortnight or thereabouts of water-table-generated increase in top-soil moisture content. It also provided the plant with the whole of the deep-trench bed's unspent nutritional support. The head gardener's manual, 'R J Harris's Moon Gardening', explains the technique.
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