Cooking with Nettles

Stinging nettles are abundant, nutritious, and free. All good points to recommend them for dinner, as long as you are prepared to take certain precautions to protect you from stings until they've been cooked! They contain lots of vitamin A and vitamin C, as well as iron and protein. The best time to collect nettles is between March and early June, while the leaves are still young and tender. Older leaves are bitter and gritty and should not be eaten.

I regularly drink tea made from nettles but had never tried eating them, so I headed out to a local nettle patch with gloves and scissors to snip myself some greens. I collected only the tips of the plants, and considering how much spinach shrinks when cooked I did my best to fill a carrier bag so that I would get a decent amount of cooked nettles.

Back in the kitchen, I followed the recipe for cooked nettles in Richard Mabey's 'Food for Free'. I trimmed the leaves from the stalks (wearing rubber gloves), discarded the stalks and washed the leaves well. After draining the leaves I heated them in a covered pan for about five minutes until they had wilted down. I then added a knob of butter, some chopped onion, salt and pepper and mashed it all together, cooking for another five minutes.

The resulting nettle and onion mash was certainly palatable, although the main flavour was onion as the nettles didn't taste of much. The nettles had an interesting texture, a little fibrous but not at all unpleasant. I made enough to have some the following morning to fill an omelette for breakfast, which worked very well. The mash would also make a good base for nettle soup.

Cleavers Spring Tonic

One of the simplest herbal tonics I can think of, cleavers spring tonic makes use of the abundant early growth of this hedgerow plant. At this time of year the base of every hawthorn hedge I pass on my cycle to work seems to be filled with the vibrant, green, upright stems and leaves of cleavers.

Cleavers (Galium aparine) is familiar to most people, especially children, as the 'sticky' plant which readily attaches to hair and clothing. Herbalists use it as a gentle but effective cleanser of the lymphatic system which is helpful in clearing up skin problems. I have heard its action described as 'a pipe-cleaner for the body', and its appearance seems to echo this!

My interest in making and drinking this tonic is to clear up a few spots on my face in time for my wedding at the end of May. I'll be taking it every evening until then and hopefully in concert with changes to my diet (such as avoiding sugar) I'll have lovely clear skin on my wedding day.

The tonic is made by filling a glass jar or other similar container with chopped fresh cleavers (stems and leaves) and adding water to the container until the plant material is covered. The container is then put in the fridge overnight and can be drunk the following day, when the water will have taken on a pale green hue and the flavour of the plant. It will keep for two to three days in the fridge.

Before collecting any plant material consult a good field guide and ensure that you can identify exactly what you are picking. Cleavers should only be collected from places away from vehicle fumes, where you can be sure that no dogs have urinated on it, and it's good practice to collect a little from a number of plants rather than stripping an area entirely, so that the plants can recover.

Surprisingly, cleavers is in the same plant family as coffee, and later in the year after flowering it produces seeds which contain caffeine.

Spring hedgerow and garden salad

Dandelion leaves and petals

Jack-by-the-hedge

Hawthorn leaves

Bittercress

Yarrow leaves

Claytonia

Mustard leaves

Parsley

Chard

We may be in the 'hungry gap' as far as vegetables are concerned, but while out for a walk this morning I found plenty of fresh young salad leaves in the hedgerows. I added some leaves from the garden for a lively spring salad which I seasoned and dressed with vinegar and good olive oil.

New Year, New Garden

There's no denying that a blog about growing edible plants is likely to become more about contemplation than action through the winter months. Having moved into a new home in November the seasonal hiatus has been a perfect opportunity to observe the bare bones of the garden, even if the unusually mild weather so far has kept many plants greener than they would be normally. So instead of leaping into planting and sowing as I might have been tempted into doing had we moved in earlier in the year, I now have to consider what I would like to grow and where without the immediate pressure of having to get on with it.

Reading around the subject of growing edible and useful plants, one book has been a real source of inspiration and advice. Ken Fern's 'Plants for a Future' approaches food production in a sustainable and intelligent way. In what is essentially a list of plants with descriptions of how they can be used, he manages to convey the beauty and potential fecundity of forest gardening as a basis for growing our food.

I only have a small area to grow in, although I am very grateful for it having moved from a flat with no garden, but I am hoping to fill it with some of the perennial plants that Ken Fern discusses, as well as plenty of herbs and a few annuals to fill in the gaps. By filling my flower-beds with edible perennials in a system of layers with its basis in the layered growth of a woodland ecosystem, I hope to have lots of tasty leaves, fruits and so on throughout the year without the need to repeatedly dig, till, sow and protect seedlings as I would with more traditional vegetables. Although I can't experiment with forest gardening on any sort of scale approaching that of an actual woodland, I'm hoping to find out a little about what works and what doesn't with the space I have.

In my next post I'll write about some of the plants I'm keen to grow - old favourites and new discoveries.

Less urban, more space!

The wait for a garden is over! Despite my best efforts to make the most of having barely any outdoor space, mainly by cramming our windowsills full of pot plants, my partner and I have decided that much as we love our flat we would really like to live somewhere which has a garden. I'm itching to get my hands into the earth and extend my growing beyond the limits of containers and He would like a sunny seat on which to drink a beer and relax whenever the weather allows. After some searching we've found what we have hoped for, but for what we can afford it means moving out of Bristol, although not too far.

This means that our excitement about the new house is tinged with sadness at leaving the city location we've enjoyed so much over the past two and a half years, especially walks along the harbour-side and meals out with friends in fantastic nearby restaurants. There is also the feeling of connectedness which comes from living in a city you love. We're both countryside folk by birth and upbringing, with formative years spent on farms and in woodlands, but have found ourselves stimulated and at ease with Bristol's combination of creative buzz and relatively relaxed pace of life. Our mutual passions for good food and good wine have brought us into contact with so many talented and inspiring people - connections which I hope we'll be able to sustain.

Listen to me! We're only moving five miles out of the city and it sounds like I'm moping, when in reality I can barely contain the excitement of what this change will mean. I will have a garden to play with! Not huge, but big enough to grow all sorts of useful plants; herbs, vegetables, fruit, flowers. What's more, we may even be lucky enough to have escaped the lengthy allotment waiting lists in Bristol and get our hands on a plot at the site just down the road.

So, it looks like a significant change for this blog too, as my horticultural horizons expand. I have an aim in mind, to only grow plants which are edible or medicinal, or perhaps useful in some other way. I'll try to find heritage or little-known varieties and unusual species, but not for novelty value as much as for the joy and trial of experimentation, with an emphasis on sustainable growing methods, craft and fun.

Home-made cloches for winter salads

Well, these little home-made polythene cloches haven't exactly stilled my envy of those with space for a full-size polytunnel, but at least they should enable me to extend my growing season for salads into the winter months.

A little while ago I decided to get a new shower curtain as the one in place at the time was definitely past its best. Rather than throw the thing away I thought I could probably use it somehow as the plastic was still transparent enough to let light through and I hit on the idea of making some 'tents' with it to put over my wine box growing containers. I found some metal hoops in a garden centre which fit the size of my wooden wine boxes perfectly and cut pieces of the shower curtain to cover the hoops which I then stapled in place with an ordinary stapler. I did the stapling while the hoops were in place in empty wine boxes so that I could be sure everything would fit together.

After filling the wine boxes with compost I sowed a few rows of hardy salads and winter greens in one, and planted previously grown seedlings (of the same) in the other. After giving the compost a good watering I slid the metal hoops into the corners of each box so that the compost surface was completely covered by the cloche. At the same time I planted garlic cloves into another box, but left this one uncovered.

Seedlings of mustard and lettuce have germinated well and need thinning out now. Older plants of salad onions and chard are further back.

Land cress and Claytonia (miners lettuce) were planted as plugs grown in module trays.


So far, the weather seems to have been unseasonably warm this autumn and everything under the cloches has grown exceedingly quickly without any real need for the protection they provide. It will be interesting to see how the cloches and the plants hold up as the weather turns colder and whether or not I can keep them cropping on into the spring.

Sprouting a sweet potato

This is my first blog post in a while. Having started a new job at the beginning of October I've been getting into a new routine and the last few weeks seem to have flown by. But while watering a few dry spots on my windowsill today I noticed how well the sweet potato I've been sprouting is coming on and felt compelled to write about it. My partner is trying to fill his large and sunny office windowsills with plants while spending as little as possible, so I've been trying to grow all sorts of interesting edibles from scratch. Apparently, you can eat the leaves and young shoots of sweet potato plants so even if we don't get any tubers we'll still have something to munch on.

As the nights are starting to draw in and temperatures are getting colder it may seem an odd time of year to be growing a sweet potato, being that the plant originates from South and Central America and generally prefers warm growing conditions with plenty of light. However, when I decided to try sprouting a supermarket-bought tuber back in August I was more concerned with whether I could persuade it to produce a shoot than how I would keep it alive through the winter!

After some research on the internet it seemed best to try sprouting the tuber by suspending it in a container of water, pointy end down. I used corn-on-the-cob spikes stuck into the sides of the sweet potato but I think skewers or cocktail sticks would work just as well. I also used an organic sweet potato as I thought it would be less likely to have been treating with some kind of anti-sprouting compound. I read that scrubbing the tuber beforehand can also help to remove any anti-sprouting treatments.

The shape of the tuber and the arm-like spikes I had stuck in its sides made my sweet potato look a bit like  a creature so I gave it some eyes too!

The growth you can see in the picture has taken around two months to develop. Most of that time the tuber was only growing roots, which took a while to get going. Now that leaves have sprouted the growth seems to be more rapid. I now have to decide what to do next - should I just pot up the tuber into one container of compost or slice off come of the shoots and try to get those to root? Maybe I'll do both and write a future post about which works best and whether I can keep the sweet potato alive through the winter.