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.

A week in the herb field

                           The herb field at The Organic Herb Trading Company


In my previous job I spent over two years growing a range of different herbs, and for most of that time I was propagating them - starting off new plants from seed, cuttings or division. The work was enjoyable and absorbing and my experience of the plants was deepened by the intimacy of helping them to procreate. We were producing herbs for sale and to make sales easy everything was grown in containers. This enabled me to develop an understanding of a certain way of growing, one requiring a high degree of care and attention to the plants and a number of artificial measures to ensure their healthy growth into maturity, but I found it limiting in that I had no practical experience of how to grow these plants in the soil.

With some time on my hands before starting a new job I decided it was about time I tried to get to know herbs on their own terms, with their roots in the ground, leaves in the rain and flowers in the sun. After making some enquiries, a friend recommended that I spend some time at The Organic Herb Trading Company in Milverton, Somerset, where I could work as a volunteer in return for food and lodgings.

I arrived in Milverton just after eight on a Monday morning, having spent the previous (rainy) weekend staying in Exmoor. Driving just out of the village we turned off the main road into a lane which ran up a hillside and into the car-park of Organic Herb Trading - I was surprised to see a number of cars and a reasonably large building which I later found out housed the main part of the business; offices and space for the processing of herbs which were imported from various parts of the world.

The caravans were tucked around the corner above the car-park, and it was there that I found Sarah, the only employee paid to work in the herb field full time. She welcomed me and showed me to the caravan which would be my home for the week and where I unloaded my bags. It was well equipped with its own kitchen and plenty of space, plus an outdoor covered area with a table and seats and decking made from pallets. The compost loo and shower I would be using were over in a building beside the factory, and I was glad I'd brought my torch for making the journey after dark.

              The seating area outside my caravan surrounded by a bed of culinary herbs



Our main job for the day was weeding - there isn't much else to do in the herb field when it's raining because the herbs can only be harvested in dry weather. The herb beds are organized in blocks, with rows of herbs running across a south-facing slope. At this time of year most of the plants have finished flowering, but there were still the bright orange flowers of Calendula to contrast with the fading purple-pink petals of Echinacea. 


The funny thing about weeding in a herb field is that so many of the weeds are herbs themselves, growing either from seeds already in the soil or from nearby crops which have seeded around. Sarah decided that the Sheep Sorrel weeds could stay as they would be useful and could easily be transplanted to another bed for cultivation. She'd recently needed dandelion to harvest for a pet food producer so there were plenty of these around too.

Our weeding the following day was more heavy-duty, clearing brambles and nettles from the sides of two blocks of beds and cutting back overgrown Buddleia. And the rain continued. Happily, the weather changed on Wednesday which meant we were able to get some harvesting done, so we spent several hours cutting comfrey into harvest sacks, weighing and recording. In total we harvested 149 kilos of comfrey leaf! We then had to process the comfrey by chopping it (using an old chaff cutting machine) and dividing it up into boxes to go into the dryer.

Thursday was spent with the compost heaps. We turned one between us and built another, using a mixture of wood chippings and herb waste from the factory - bags of powdery material made up of anything from nettles to ginger. It was a physical and satisfying day. Friday was sunny and perfect for harvesting Calendula flowers, which was probably my favourite job because I seem to get great enjoyment from picking things. Spreading out the flowers on screens to dry was such a joy - the bright orange petals are exquisitely soft on the fingertips and I felt like I was experiencing one of life's most innocently sensual pleasures.

              Calendula flowers laid out on a screen before being transferred to the dryer


Another great pleasure of the week was how good everything I ate tasted when I was truly hungry from physical work. Sarah and her partner Mike grow lots of vegetables around the caravans and I had the privilege of being able to use whatever they had grown. The tomatoes were astonishingly good, as were the cucumbers - warm and fresh and all the more delicious for having never seen a refrigerator. I think I ate more tomatoes in one week than any human probably should, but saw no ill effects from it!

I also had the pleasure of a tour around the tincture-making department with a herbalist. Although new herbal medicine legislation has greatly reduced the number of tinctures made at Organic Herb Trading, there was still enough going on for me to be fascinated by the equipment and the smells of the oils and tinctures.

All in all it was a wonderful week. Sarah was fantastic company and taught me a lot about field-grown herbs. I have never seen such healthy sage and rosemary plants, and the whole field buzzed with life and vitality. The plants showed me that they don't need to be fussed and mollycoddled when grown in the ground - given healthy soil they will go on producing crop after crop, some of them for years on end. I have come back re-inspired by herbs and how they can help us to heal.

Saffron on the Windowsill

Growing herbs in a limited space can be more rewarding than growing vegetables for the simple reason that they offer the chance of a kind of self-sufficiency. No matter how productive my tomato plants or my radishes are I know I will be buying many more of them to eat than I can grow in the space that I have. This means that while my home-grown produce takes a star turn at the occasional meal it is never more than a fleeting accompaniment to food from further afield. Not so with the herbs! The intensity of flavour in each rosemary leaf, sprig of mint or cup of chopped parsley means that a little herb goes a long way - or at least far enough that my containers provide enough for my needs. I won't be harvesting any horseradish until autumn next year, but when I do there should be plenty of root to see us through a winter of roasts with homemade horseradish sauce.

To extend this herbal self-sufficiency further I have decided to try growing the spice renowned for its flavour and expense, saffron. I've only cooked with it once before, but my reasoning is that as most recipes recommend it is used sparingly, I may be able to grow enough to serve my needs.

I ordered corms online, trusting that I would be sent genuine saffron and not any other kind of crocus, as saffron is the only species which produces edible stamens. Hopefully, when they flower it will be obvious whether they are true saffron or not from the size of the stamens and from the look and shape of the flowers. The corms are rather beautiful in themselves, heavy for their size with a silky, papery surface. Some of them have rather promising-looking small white shoots beginning to push outwards.

I have planted the corms a couple of inches deep in three-litre sized pots, five corms per pot. Hopefully, this will give them enough space to grow a decent root system without swamping them in a container which is too large. I gave them a light watering to settle in the compost and put them on a sunny windowsill - now all I can do is wait. Apparently, they will flower sometime between October and December of this year, fingers crossed.

Late Summer Harvests

Growing in containers means I've got limited space to play with, and I can't really get going with autumn and winter vegetable crops until the summer ones have finished. I have to decide how long to keep the summer crops growing before I remove them to make way for the next batch of vegetables. My windowsills are crowded with seedlings which need to go outside so that I can keep them growing while it's still relatively warm.

At the moment I'm harvesting tomatoes from four large plants growing in two bags of compost, but they're taking their time to ripen and I'm considering picking them green for chutney or ripening them indoors. I'm also picking radish pods whenever I go out to water the containers. They're juicy and crunchy and sometimes surprisingly hot, with a hint of the flavour of raw cauliflower. Chard and red mustard leaves are now large enough to be picked for salad.

Happily my late nasturtiums are flowering - I thought I hadn't sown in time but I now have rich blood-red flowers hovering amongst the dark green leaves like snake heads. The name of the variety is 'Cobra' which now seems very apt.

As for the herbs, the peppermint is forming a large productive plant which is giving plenty of tips to pick now for tea, and will give me lots of leaves to dry for tea in the winter when I cut it back in a month or so. I've already cut back the lemon balm, garden mint and feverfew. Yarrow and skullcap are both still flowering under the shade of the tomatoes, and the horseradish is producing large, leathery leaves. Winter savoury and rosemary are looking less happy, as they love hot, dry weather. I will try potting them up with plenty of grit to give them a boost.

On the windowsills, my next batch of parsley is coming on, as well as salad burnet, which has a lovely cool cucumber flavour. And I'm growing Plantago coronopus as a new perennial salad leaf to try, which is nearly ready to pick. My little myrtle bush is covered in green berries which I'm hoping will ripen, although I'm not sure what I will use them for as I won't get enough for myrtle gin. They are purple when ripe, quite tasty but somewhat astringent.

I'm also bringing on some tree onion bulbils ready to go outside next year. This is an interesting perennial onion, Allium cepa proliferum, which forms bulbils at the top of its leaves in the summer that will root to produce new plants.

Hawthorn Berry Tincture

I've never made a herbal tincture before, but I had the opportunity to taste a number of tinctures while participating in a herbal medicine evening course in the spring, and while most of them tasted somewhat less than delightful (as you might expect) the hawthorn berry tincture stood out as being rather more pleasant. The hedgerows are full of haws at the moment because hawthorn trees, most commonly Crataegus monogyna in the UK, are often abundantly productive.

Of course, herbal tinctures are not necessarily supposed to be delicious, but instead beneficial in terms of promoting health and well-being. Before continuing I should state that I am not a herbalist and not qualified to prescribe or recommend any herbal medicine, I simply intend to share my thoughts and doings regarding my use of herbs at home. The advice of a qualified medical professional should be sought where any health problem is of concern. As for foraging for herbs, plant identification is crucial - you must be confident that you know what you're picking. And it makes sense to tread lightly at all times, be grateful for what you find, never take more than you need and don't strip a wild plant or dig one up.

Hawthorn is a remarkable plant which is renowned as a heart and circulatory system tonic, especially when taken regularly over a long period of time. It appears to improve the circulation around the heart and helps to support and maintain the health of the heart muscle. I've never suffered from any heart problems, but after learning more about the heart and how it works (worth a post in its own right) this incredible organ seems to be so crucial to general good health, both physically and psychologically, that I'm very happy to look after mine a bit more!

Hawthorn's beneficial effects are only seen when a preparation is made from the whole plant material - laboratory efforts to isolate specific chemical compounds have been ineffective. According to most of the information I have read, it is best to make a tincture from flowers, leaves and berries, but as I've missed the flowering stage I'm making a tincture from the berries which I will use to steep leaves and flowers that I'll pick next year.

My first task was to head out and pick some haws. I found plenty in a hedgerow in Ashton Court Estate, Bristol, and commenced picking. It was a pleasantly meditative way to spend an hour or so and I was intrigued at how the berries varied from tree to tree, some were round, others more elongated and their colour ranged from bright red to deep maroon. I also picked some blackberries as I went along.

Starting off the tincture itself was just as easy. I filled a jar with the berries and poured in enough vodka (40% proof) to cover them, before putting on the lid and giving it a shake. I'd saved a brown glass bottle with a screw cap which made a perfect tincture jar, as the dark glass helps prevent light damage to the tincture. I labelled the jar with the date and what it contains and put it in a cupboard. All I need to do from now on is shake the mixture once a week for six to eight weeks and then strain off the liquid, which will be my tincture.

I'll blog about the first tasting when it's ready and include some of what I've learnt about the heart and how it works.