Garden Centre

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Growing for beauty and store cupboards

When I had a real job, I enjoyed several long phone calls with Professor Tim Lang, a man who knows more about food policy, I genuinely believe, than anybody else alive.

And what’s that got to do with gardening, you may ask? Well Tim is a government adviser and his advice, right now, is that one way most of us can fight the ‘credit crunch’ is to turn some of our garden over to vegetable cultivation. What he actually said was, ‘… people have to take more control of their food systems. If you depend on Tesco or Sainsbury's or Waitrose, you are a consumer. In other words your food supply is under their control. But if you garden and can grow at least some food to eat, however little, then you are injecting a little food democracy into your food supplies and asserting your food citizenship.’

Brilliant concept, not least because I’m way ahead of him. If you grow beautiful fruits and vegetables you get the best of both worlds. On my list of favourite garden plants for consumption are:

• Fennel – lovely foliage, lovely aniseed taste
• Fig tree – great plant to cover an ugly wall and in a good summer produces premium price fruit in massive abundance
• Nasturtiums – cost pennies for a packet of seeds, self seed from then on forever, and both leaves and flowers taste great in salads while you can pickle the unripe seedpods to make capers
• Lavender – harvest the flowers to make lavender cakes and cookies
• Angelica – looks like the most expensive structural plant in the world, something like a tree fern in miniature, but can be used to make wonderful cakes and preserves
• Strawberries – look pretty, smell divine and taste so much better than supermarket berries when you pick them fresh and warm from your own borders

And if that doesn’t influence you, think about this. At present, Britain produces only 50% of the vegetables it consumes and less than 6% of the fruit!

Labels: angelica, fennel, fig, lavender, nasturtium, strawberry, Tim Lang

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:33 PM 0 Comments

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Sunday, August 10, 2008

Herb gardening again

The uses for herbs in the garden aren’t limited to food, although fresh herbs do improve the taste of any dish. Here’s some ways I use herbs to improve my garden or my hospitality!

• I have a lovely Angelica which thrives in semi-shade. The plant is supposed to reach six feet tall – mine never gets over two because I harvest it so regularly. You can candy the stems of one variety, angelica archangelica which you then use to decorate cakes, but I don’t have time for that – instead I make ice bowls with one smaller bowl (with its outside covered in a layer of cling film) inside a larger one, and water poured between the two. In the water I arrange the huge and delicately cut angelica leaves, so that when I take the ice bowl out and fill it with punch or fruit salad, the tracery of the angelica shows up like a wonderful Byzantine design. The flowers are gorgeous too, as this picture shows.

• Curly-leaved parsley looks brilliant as a lawn or bed edging and is particularly good when set against reds, oranges and yellows. It’s also a potent barrier against slugs and snails. If you find it difficult to germinate, dig a very shallow trench, sprinkle in your parsley seed and then pour boiling water on top – it works, believe it or not!

• If you find you have a gap in your garden, you can divide a clump of chives: either the common purple-flowered or the white-flowered garlic chive and plant them in the gap – cut them down to about two inches as soon as you’ve planted them and they will make a neat little clump within two weeks. They seem to thrive on this kind of behaviour.

Labels: angelica, chives, garden herbs, parsley

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:18 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, August 4, 2008

When is a garden not a garden?

When it’s a herb garden! I was lucky enough to find an absolutely brilliant herb stall at a local fair and came home with two bulging (recycled) carrier bags full of plants and seeds.

There’s a real advantage in growing herbs – you get to eat or otherwise use the produce from your garden. There’s also a disadvantage though – many herbs are annuals so there’s quite a lot of work to be doing in sowing seeds and digging up old plants that are past their best, and also that gives you some bare patches at different time, although you can always plonk down a potted plant to cover the bare earth.

So, on the perennial side I already had: bay, lavender, rosemary and angelica (okay, not perennial, but biennial and self seeding, so all I have to do is dig out the old exhausted parent plant every four years or so and let a youngster fill in the parent’s place) and some chives (both ordinary and garlic). I bought lemon verbena (a windowsill plant, but worth it for the glorious scent and to make lemon sugar for baking and a couple of leaves will scent bathwater as nicely as the most expensive bath oil) and a couple of self seeding salads like orach and mizuna which should just keep filling up their space year after year. And I fell in love with chocolate mint – which doesn’t taste as good as ordinary mint in cooking but smells like chocolates and is great in summer drinks and cocktails.

On the annual side I have now added dill, chervil (same family) basil and oregano. The problem is … where am I going to put everything!

Labels: angelica, bay, herb garden, lavender, lemon verbena, mizuna, orach, plant sales, rosemary

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:42 AM 2 Comments

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