Growing Watercress

Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) is one of my favourite leafy greens, with its rich, dark colour and spicy, pungent flavour. It goes well in salads and soups and I'm even eating it in omelettes at the moment, just wilted by the heat of the eggs as they come out of the pan. My home village in Wiltshire has a fascinating history of growing watercress, providing local employment for the villagers until as recently as 1970. It lies in a flat-bottomed valley with meadows which were once flooded by river water, although now the watercress beds are gone and the land has been drained, only flooding occasionally in winter.

But I read recently that although watercress thrives when planted in gravel beds under clean running water it can also be grown in soil as long as there is plenty of moisture. Apparently, the obliging watercress plant will also root easily when placed in a jar of water providing it has been freshly picked. As I buy watercress regularly (in bunches of stems and leaves, not just bags of leaves) I thought I may as well try rooting some stems to see if I can grow some, so I took several of the most sturdy-looking out of the bunch, trimmed off the base and put them into a pot of water on the windowsill with a clear plastic bag over the top (to stop the leaves wilting too much).

Less than a week later the stems have grown lots of spidery white roots and I have removed the plastic bag. They are even growing new leaves. My next step will be to pot up the stems individually and grow them on into sturdy plants so that I can try planting them outside, probably at the allotment. It will be interesting to see how they grow and how much water they need to give a good crop of leaves.

Strawberries in Pots

I'm growing strawberries for fruit at home for the first time this year. Most of my previous experience of growing strawberries has been with wild strawberries, propagating them from runners to sell as plants when I worked at a herb nursery. So now, trying out more commercial varieties with the aim of producing fruit feels like a leap of faith - will the berries get eaten by pests? Will I get a reasonable crop? Will the plants produce anything at all? The thought of eating home-grown strawberries, juicy, sweet and sun-warmed, was enough to convince me that the expense of buying the plants was worth it, especially as my previous efforts to grow alpine strawberries from seed have always failed (not enough constant heat I think).

The next leap was to decide which variety to grow and where. When I bought the plants I didn't know I would be lucky enough to get my hands on an allotment, so due to lack of flower-bed space in my garden I thought it better to grow my strawberries in pots. This also meant I could make the most of the sunniest aspect of the garden, which is largely taken up by a patio.

Rather than pin all my hopes of glorious fruit on one variety I decided to grow a range of different strawberries, both as a way to extend the cropping season (hopefully), and to try out a selection of types to find my favourite.

So this year I'm growing:

'Honeoye' - An early season variety with tolerance of powdery mildew and botrytis. It is supposed to be productive and vigorous. Hopefully tasty too!

'Red Gauntlet' - This is a mid-season variety which may produce a second crop later on (in September) if the summer is good. Apparently it is really sweet and tasty and has excellent disease resistance.

'Mara des Bois' - I'm most excited about this one, a perpetual-fruiting strawberry which combines the flavour of a wild strawberry with the yield and fruit size of a modern cultivar. It is resistant to powdery mildew, but may not be as productive as other varieties.

'Sophie' - A late season variety producing high yields of good quality fruit.


I bought my strawberry plants in 9cm pots from the garden centre where I work, but many varieties are also available as bare-root plants by mail-order ready for potting earlier in the year.

At the beginning of April I potted three plants of each variety into multi-purpose, peat free compost in some large plastic pots and watered them in well, picking off any flowers on the plants to encourage root growth. As they grow I'll feed them with an organic liquid plant feed and make sure the compost doesn't dry out - no problem at the moment with so much rain! They all seem to be putting on plenty of growth so far, especially the 'Sophie' plants which are producing very large leaves.

Strawberries from left to right: Red Gauntlet, Honeoye, Mara des Bois, Sophie

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.