Making lingonberry jam in Sweden - picking and eating the 'red gold of the forests'

In 'The Scandinavian Kitchen' by Camilla Plum, berries get a whole chapter of their own; they are the star ingredient in a host of mouthwatering, jewel-coloured dishes which demonstrate the importance of berries in northern European cooking. I love trying to understand a culture by exploring its food, so it was wonderful to discover fruiting lingonberry bushes on a walk in the forest in southern Sweden last week while on honeymoon. The berries were almost too easy to pick, tumbling off the bushes so readily we often had to recover them from the moss below.

Lingonberries (also known as cowberries) are in the same genus as the cranberry (Vaccinium) and grow in similar peatland conditions. They don't make for very good eating when raw and unsweetened but when made into jam they are very versatile and can be eaten with meat, with fish or with dessert. The berries contain a high level of benzoic acid, a natural preservative, so they keep extremely well, and they are also high in anti-oxidants and vitamins.

We picked several handfuls of berries (only a small amount in jam-making terms) and followed Camilla's straightforward recipe for raw lingonberry jam, maximising the flavour and beneficial nutrients which would be lost if the berries were cooked. I simply added an equal amount of sugar to the berries, mashed them a little and stirred several times a day until the sugar had dissolved. 

I think I used slightly too much sugar (I was without weighing scales in a self-catering cabin and measured by volume rather than by weight) and so it took about five days to dissolve, producing a jam sweeter than I would have liked, with only a hint of the lingonberry bitterness, but we ate some with our elk steaks and it was a very good match for the flavour of the meat.

We brought the rest of the jam home in our suitcase (hence the intention of making only a small quantity) and intend to keep it until Christmas, to use as an alternative cranberry sauce perhaps!

Planting a bed of useful perennials

There was already a raised bed built from old railway sleepers in the garden when we moved into this house last November. Deep and square it seemed ideal for growing a few vegetables suited to a small space; spring onions, radishes, salad leaves and so on. The apple tree at the back of the bed had been planted in a rather wonky way (not by me!) but at least that meant it would lean over the patio rather than the soil and wouldn't cast too much shade.

In spring I sowed some rows of seed, marked them with sticks and waited for shoots to appear. After the initial promise of good weather early in the year things went downhill and my continuing efforts to grow annual crops in the raised bed never seemed to come to much. Most seedlings were eaten by slugs. The ones that did grow got stretched by the late afternoon shade and they were soon overtaken by weeds as the rainy days of summer turned into rainy weeks and months.

So, as of a couple of weeks ago I was faced with a bed looking as it does in the picture above. The bindweed had engulfed everything and I had no choice but to clear it all out and start again. I pulled up most of the plants and dug through the soil several times to remove as many of the bindweed roots as possible. I left in the Hemerocallis plants either side of the apple tree, as well as the oregano, chicory, salad burnet and bronze bugle. Although generally I am a no-dig gardener (perhaps rather obsessively since attending an inspirational workshop at Charles Dowding's place last year), perennial weeds have to be an exception, especially bindweed, as I refuse to resort to chemical means of control. This inevitably means that there will be some bindweed roots left behind (it's almost impossible to get all of it out), but I have resolved to be vigilant and pull up any shoots as they appear, in the hope that this will keep things under control and eventually weaken the roots.

I have a rather utilitarian approach to my garden and unless a plant is useful to me (edible, medicinal, nitrogen-fixing etc...) it doesn't get in. Happily there are plenty of plants that are beautiful as well as useful and books such as Plants for a Future by Ken Fern are a constant source of inspiration. I had a few herbs ready for planting which I bought at Frome market and a collection of recently purchased bargain plants from a local garden centre plant sale which made a suitable starting point for a herbaceous bed of useful perennials, so in they went. I planted some lupins near the apple tree to get the most benefit from their nitrogen-fixing potential, and placed everything else according to height.

The planting included:

Herbs

Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca)
Goats rue (Galega officinalis)
Anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum)

Edible perennials

Ice plant (Sedum spectabile 'Brilliantissimum'
Campanula poscharskyana
Campanula persicifolia
Hemerocallis (unknown variety)

Nitrogen-fixing

Lupins