theediblegardenshow :: James Wong's Tips

Recipe: Lavender, Lemon Balm & Chamomile Cordial

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Tip: July - Lavender, Lemon Balm & Chamomile

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It’s the height of the ‘grow your own’ year and in the flurry of weeding, watering & harvesting, you might think that you’ve missed your last chance to add to your outdoor pantry, but it’s still not too late. While regular gardening text books would have you planting cabbages and cauliflower this month however - leaving you with nothing to harvest for a good season or two - there are crops that you can plant right now and gather straight off the bat from day one, and to my mind by far the best of those candidates are perennial herbs. Most can be bought and planted at virtually any point in the season, including high summer, providing you with not only great flavour, stunning colour, scent and wildlife value, but of course really practical medicinal use.

All through July my three enduring favourites are lavender, lemon balm and chamomile, which combine as well in the border as they do medicinally, also adding a unique flavour cocktail to all sorts of dishes. I just love how the powdery purple lilac heads of lavender are set off by the delicate yellow and white meadowland look of chamomile blooms, framed perfectly with a lush backdrop of fresh green lemon balm foliage as a backdrop. I grow all three in a large trough providing interest right through until the autumn.

The trio perform best in sunny, well drained sites that mimic their original Mediterranean habitat, requiring far less water and feeding than most crops, making them very easy to grow. Treat them mean and keep them keen! In fact the vast majority of traditional European herbs are originally weed species in their native habitat, being the first plants cropping up in dry, disturbed environments due to their vigorous growth, so there could be little better place to start for a beginner. The only attention apart from the occasional water on the hottest days of the year I pay to them is a quite hair cut in Autumn, slicing them down to about half their height with a few snips of the shears, to promote nice thick, bushy growth.

All three herbs are traditionally used to help reduce feelings of stress and anxiety, helping relax the mind and induce restful sleep. Growing herbs with a similar use like this together is a really useful idea particularly for herbal remedy newbies, as you don’t have to remember what each is individual species is for, and of course harvesting means a quick trip to one pot instead of a hunt around the garden. I like to combine this trio to make a wonderfully fragrant floral cordial that is the perfect antidote when keeping on top of the weeding all just seems too much. It is as deceptively easy to make as it is wonderfully calming & tastes far more like something off a fancy London hotel cocktail menu than the chopped up contents of your flower border. Enjoy!

Remedy: Garlic, Chilli & Soap Pest Fighting Spray

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Tip: August - Grow Your Own Organic Pesticides & Fertilisers

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Tip: September - Growing Your Own Micro Veg Patch

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As the leaves just start to turn & the nights get that crisp chill, you might think the ‘grow your own’ year was drawing to a close. Yet there is one group of crops that you can amazingly sow at any month of the year & can uniquely be harvested in as little as 4 days from planting! Welcome to the world of microgreens.

Uber trendy with high end chefs, microgreens are basically a new generation of posh ‘cress’ that come in a huge range of dazzling colours & interesting flavours. While their fashionable foodie status means that they can cost a fortune to buy, their rapid growth makes them some of the cheapest & easiest crops to grow. The really exciting thing is that almost any plant with an edible leaf can be grown as a microgreen, meaning you can experiment with species and even formulate your own blends of seeds to grow your very own premixed fancy salad.

You don’t need a garden either, just a sunny windowsill, a couple of sheets of kitchen roll and a shallow plate. Simply sprinkle the seeds over a double sheet of moistened kitchen paper laid on the plate and keep barely damp for the few days until harvest, just like growing cress at school! Harvesting is simply a question of a couple of snips of the scissors, however you can also buy all sorts of fancy growing kits, which often need no paper, cotton wool, etc so you can simply tip the seedlings out - a little more investment but no fuss, mess & you can eat the whole plant too.

While most of us are familiar with mustard and cress, there is an immense range of species that lend themselves perfectly to being grown as microgreens. In fact supermarket punnets of ‘salad cress’ are actually 95% rape seedlings, containing little or no cress at all. Many of these seeds are also available cheaply in the herb or pulses section of your supermarket. I love sowing dried peas and mung beans for sweet pea shoots and crunchy bean sprouts. For a bit of colour you can try scarlet leaved, spicy radishes or ruby red amaranth. Herbs like coriander, basil, dill & fennel add an extra depth of flavour, with their seeds being sold in huge, and incredibly cheap, packs in the spice section of ethnic stores. Even grains like quinoa and chickpeas make wonderful crunchy, exotic sprouts. As long as you are sure to check that the leaves of a plant are 100% edible (unlike the toxic leaves of kidney beans, tomatoes, etc), the sky is the limit with mixing and matching these gourmet miniveg.

Tip: October - Planting Quince Trees

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As the leaves start to turn & the nights draw in, before you start hunkering down for the winter there is one last planting opportunity, which for just 20 minutes work could give you well over 20 years of reward – the simple act of planting a fruit tree. And right now is exactly the right time of year to do this.

But instead of the ubiquitous apples or pears, why not try something a little bit more exciting? From medlars and quinces to mulberries & figs there are a huge selection of rare and exotic tree crops that are just as easy, if not easier to grow than an apple, but a huge amount more fun to eat.

My current favourite amongst these, although to be honest this does change by each month, has to be the richly fragrant yet unfairly obscure quince. Once as common a feature in British markets & orchards as the humble pear, quinces were grown all over the UK as a highly-prized staple fruit for hundreds of years. Yet for some reason nowadays it seems to have become unjustifiably relegated to a lucky find at farmers markets or labelled specimens in the heritage orchards of stately homes.

Closely related to both apples and pears, quinces bear such a strong family resemblance to their more common cousins that many people might over look them as a particularly large, yellow pear. In fact to the non- plant geek, the only striking giveaways are a downy layer of peachy fuzz that is dusted over their golden skin and the powerful spicy, fruity scent that the fruit emits– so intense that a bowl of quinces was once a favourite room fragrance. The trees are also grown in the same way as an apple or pear, bearing large white flowers in spring on small trees with spreading, character-filled canopies.

Bite into a fresh quince however and all resemblance comes to a sudden end. Uncooked, the fruit has an extremely tart, astringent flavour that sucks all the water out of your mouth in a split second, probably part of the reason why their culinary renaissance has been rather delayed. However, cook the fruit, poached, grilled, or boiled with a little sugar and it suddenly becomes rich, sticky and fragrant, with the golden hue transforming into a deep blood red.

Traditionally these were cooked down into a jam, made thick enough to slice by the fruit’s sky high pectin content and served with cheese. Fortunately in Spain this medieval tradition continues, where it is known as Membrillo, available at the cheese counter in high end supermarkets (although this only costs pennies to make at home). They are also delicious roasted, served with chicken, pork or game, juiced and made into jelly and mixed with apples to spice up a fruit crumble. The owl and the pussy cat were definitely onto something good.

As the leaves start to turn & the nights draw in, before you start hunkering down for the winter there is one last planting opportunity, which for just 20 minutes work could give you well over 20 years of reward – the simple act of planting a fruit tree. And right now is exactly the right time of year to do this.

But instead of the ubiquitous apples or pears, why not try something a little bit more exciting? From medlars and quinces to mulberries & figs there are a huge selection of rare and exotic tree crops that are just as easy, if not easier to grow than an apple, but a huge amount more fun to eat.

My current favourite amongst these, although to be honest this does change by each month, has to be the richly fragrant yet unfairly obscure quince. Once as common a feature in British markets & orchards as the humble pear, quinces were grown all over the UK as a highly-prized staple fruit for hundreds of years. Yet for some reason nowadays it seems to have become unjustifiably relegated to a lucky find at farmers markets or labelled specimens in the heritage orchards of stately homes.

Closely related to both apples and pears, quinces bear such a strong family resemblance to their more common cousins that many people might over look them as a particularly large, yellow pear. In fact to the non- plant geek, the only striking giveaways are a downy layer of peachy fuzz that is dusted over their golden skin and the powerful spicy, fruity scent that the fruit emits– so intense that a bowl of quinces was once a favourite room fragrance. The trees are also grown in the same way as an apple or pear, bearing large white flowers in spring on small trees with spreading, character-filled canopies.

Bite into a fresh quince however and all resemblance comes to a sudden end. Uncooked, the fruit has an extremely tart, astringent flavour that sucks all the water out of your mouth in a split second, probably part of the reason why their culinary renaissance has been rather delayed. However, cook the fruit, poached, grilled, or boiled with a little sugar and it suddenly becomes rich, sticky and fragrant, with the golden hue transforming into a deep blood red.

Traditionally these were cooked down into a jam, made thick enough to slice by the fruit’s sky high pectin content and served with cheese. Fortunately in Spain this medieval tradition continues, where it is known as Membrillo, available at the cheese counter in high end supermarkets (although this only costs pennies to make at home). They are also delicious roasted, served with chicken, pork or game, juiced and made into jelly and mixed with apples to spice up a fruit crumble. The owl and the pussy cat were definitely onto something good.
As the leaves start to turn & the nights draw in, before you start hunkering down for the winter there is one last planting opportunity, which for just 20 minutes work could give you well over 20 years of reward – the simple act of planting a fruit tree. And right now is exactly the right time of year to do this.

But instead of the ubiquitous apples or pears, why not try something a little bit more exciting? From medlars and quinces to mulberries & figs there are a huge selection of rare and exotic tree crops that are just as easy, if not easier to grow than an apple, but a huge amount more fun to eat.

My current favourite amongst these, although to be honest this does change by each month, has to be the richly fragrant yet unfairly obscure quince. Once as common a feature in British markets & orchards as the humble pear, quinces were grown all over the UK as a highly-prized staple fruit for hundreds of years. Yet for some reason nowadays it seems to have become unjustifiably relegated to a lucky find at farmers markets or labelled specimens in the heritage orchards of stately homes.

Closely related to both apples and pears, quinces bear such a strong family resemblance to their more common cousins that many people might over look them as a particularly large, yellow pear. In fact to the non- plant geek, the only striking giveaways are a downy layer of peachy fuzz that is dusted over their golden skin and the powerful spicy, fruity scent that the fruit emits– so intense that a bowl of quinces was once a favourite room fragrance. The trees are also grown in the same way as an apple or pear, bearing large white flowers in spring on small trees with spreading, character-filled canopies.

Bite into a fresh quince however and all resemblance comes to a sudden end. Uncooked, the fruit has an extremely tart, astringent flavour that sucks all the water out of your mouth in a split second, probably part of the reason why their culinary renaissance has been rather delayed. However, cook the fruit, poached, grilled, or boiled with a little sugar and it suddenly becomes rich, sticky and fragrant, with the golden hue transforming into a deep blood red.

Traditionally these were cooked down into a jam, made thick enough to slice by the fruit’s sky high pectin content and served with cheese. Fortunately in Spain this medieval tradition continues, where it is known as Membrillo, available at the cheese counter in high end supermarkets (although this only costs pennies to make at home). They are also delicious roasted, served with chicken, pork or game, juiced and made into jelly and mixed with apples to spice up a fruit crumble. The owl and the pussy cat were definitely onto something good.

Tip: November - Growing Exotic and Hardy Arbutus

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Unbeknownst to most gardeners, lurking in many of our beds and borders is an exotic fruit tree. Although prized as a unique delicacy by the Moroccans and Spanish, in British suburbia it seems to have remained an undiscovered culinary treat. Not only is it highly ornamental, with fruit like yellow, orange and red orbs that drip off its evergreen bows, but is the key ingredient of my very favourite tipple – creating instant flashbacks to holidays in sunny Madrid – the famous Licor de Madrono. What is this wonderful tree? Believe it or not it’s the humble Arbutus.

Native to isolated stands in Southern Europe, North Africa and, strangely, a small corner of South West Ireland, the Arbutus tree is both impossibly exotic and bone hardy. Once one of the dominant species in an unbroken forest covering most of Europe, their sporadic present day distribution is due to the enormous glaciers of the last ice age which came down like a huge curtain wiping out much of this primeval forest. The current habitat of the Arbutus, quite unbelievably still marks out the Southern-most extent of this ice sheet.

Like most other ancient tree species, Arbutus are extremely unfussy about site and soil, and will reward the grower with shiny evergreen leaves, peeling red bark, delicate lily of the valley-type flowers and of course delicious fruit. Every part of this plant really is beautiful. The only down side is that these are extremely slow growing, so pick the largest specimen you can when buying one and have patience.

The fruit have a delicate, tropical flavour somewhat reminiscent of melons and conference pears and are used extensively in the rural parts of the Atlas mountains of Morocco and in Spain, where it is part of the Madrid coat of arms. This icon depicts a bear reaching up into and Arbutus tree to eat its fruit. This is in fact a relatively common behaviour, with bears doing this not because the fruit are particularly rich in sugar, but because they have a habit of alcoholising on the tree. Yes bears do seem to seek them out for recreational rather than purely nutritional benefits – sensible animals.

Naturally the people of Madrid have capitalised on this property to make my aforementioned favourite liqueur, which is sadly pretty much un-buyable in the UK. The great news is that it is extremely easy and cheap to make. Simply cook up some of the ripe red fruit in an equal quantity of sugar to make a smooth syrup, then stir in vodka and water to taste, bottle up and leave to rest for at least two months to create a taste of Madrid summer in a bottle. Given how common these are as a garden plant there must be hundreds of tons of this delicious fruit going to waste every year in the UK. Not bad for a fruit that no one knew you could eat hey?

Tip: December - Edible Houseplants

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Not even a window box to garden in? Well, there are a surprisingly large range of crops that can be easily grown as edible houseplants in any average living room.

The key here is to give them enough light, so choose the sunniest windowsill possible, ideally south-facing. With fruiting plants like tomatoes, make sure you choose a self pollinating variety & maximize your chances of pollination by gently tapping the flowers with your finger. Once you have this, the world is your oyster in a growing space that’s warm all year round and barely has a single pest!

Good candidates for indoor agriculture include chilli plants (their size will be restricted by keeping them in a small pot), miniature tomatoes like ‘red robin’, dwarf cucumbers like ‘muncher’ & a large range of herbs. Apart from regular allotment-type produce, indoor growing opens up a whole range of non-hardy options like citrus, miniature guavas, cardamom (simply sprinkle the seeds from your spice rack into a pot) & gardenias (their flowers are wonderful for scenting green tea.)

In fact many standard Dutch houseplant growers are now releasing a line of weird and wonderful edibles, sold for their ability to put up with the low light levels and erratic waterings they receive in the typical living room. These include plants as diverse as cinnamon, green tea, coffee (I grow these more for their delicious red berries, rather than roasting up their seeds) and even vanilla orchids. While you won’t get an enormous harvest from these, they will almost certainly add life to a couple of meals each season which is far more than your rubber plant ever does! Ask any good independent garden centre and they should be able to order these in for you within a fortnight, as pretty much all their stock will be arriving weekly from Amsterdam anyway.

If you are as impatient as I am, trendy and oh-so-easy to grow micro-greens and baby leaf salads in shallow trays of compost are a great solution for fresh, flavourful produce, fast. Even if you have no light what-so-ever, any empty kitchen cabinet can be used to grow a crop of fresh oyster mushrooms for a seriously fresh risotto ingredient, cupboard to plate in less than 30 seconds.

Tip: January - Store Cupboard Gardening

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January is a month for plotting and planning in the veg garden & there is nothing more fun than pouring over the newly-arrived seed catalogues to piece together your living menu for the coming year. However seed packets and plug plants are by no means the only way to get hold of new crops for your garden, with a huge variety of delicious edibles being perfectly easy to start from the contents of your kitchen cupboards and shelves of your fridge. No agonising wait for the post, no hassle and virtually no cost, all you need to do now is get up and check out what you might have already sitting there, just waiting to be sown.

A good place to start is your spice rack, home to collections of seeds for herbs like dill, fennel and coriander, as well as spicy mustard seed for growing trendy microgreens or baby leaf salads. If you have a pack of quinoa, the hopelessly fashionable ‘superfood’ grain, you can sprout these in a tray to make a wonderful exotic ‘cress’ for salads, or let it grow further and cook the fresh adult leaves just as you would spinach. Staying on the theme of sprouted seeds, any stray pack of green mung beans can be soaked and used to grow oriental bean sprouts for adding to salads and stir fries, going from seed to plate in just 3-5 days.

Peer into your fridge where chilies, peppers and tomatoes can all be used as a source of seeds. These will sprout even quicker in their fresh form than that of dried packets, with the added benefit of you knowing exactly what you are going to get from the variety before you sow them. You can even go exotic and plant seeds of Physalis, those edible Chinese lanterns that despite being flown in from Colombia are easy for anyone with a sunny, sheltered spot to grow in the UK. Fish out a couple of sprigs of watercress from your packet of ready mixed salad, and root these by simply popping these in a glass of water as you would a bunch of flowers, before being potted up in some damp compost, sat in a saucer of water to give them the moisture they crave. The same treatment (although kept a little less soggy) works brilliantly for mint, lemongrass and even those wonderfully aromatic curry leaves. You can even sprout an avocado stone, which although will never give you a harvest of fruit, will give you a constant supply of leaves, which are prized as a spice in their native Mexico for their unique laurel with a hint of aniseed-type flavour. The sky really is the limit when you start experimenting, all at absolutely zero cost to you. You can’t say fairer than that!

Tip: Five of the best new introductions for 2012

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It might be freezing outside, but now's the perfect time to pore over seed and plant catalogues to construct your horticultural ‘fantasy football’ team of edibles for the year ahead.

Having trawled, perhaps rather obsessively, through all the new introductions released by the major companies this year, here are the top five that have perked my attention.

Pineberry ‘Anablanca’

A quirky-looking, snow-white strawberry with the flavour of fresh pineapple. Hardy and early-cropping, the lack of red pigment in these berries also apparently makes them virtually invisible to our feathered friends, meaning no need for rigging up netting and complex bird scarers. Thank god! Don’t worry, their unusual flavour and appearance isn’t down to high tech genetic tinkering. The origins of this variety hark back as early as the 18th Century. Pick them up now at www.suttons.co.uk & www.dtbrownseeds.co.uk

Cucumber ‘Crystal Apple’

Think you need a greenhouse to grow cucumbers? Well think again. This fascinating heritage variety find its origins Downunder in the early 1900‘s, producing prolific crops of crisp, yellow-tinged, golf-ball-sized fruit. With a sweet flavour, no hint of bitter aftertaste and being perfectly happy outdoors, if you are going to try one cucumber variety this year make it ‘Crystal Apple’. www.thompson-morgan.com

Melon ‘Emir’ - Grafted

A couple of years ago the RHS conducted an exciting trial growing melons outdoors, something everyone once thought was entirely impossible outside of a greenhouse. One of the best performing varieties that emerged from this rigorous study was ‘Emir’, producing up to 6 ‘personal sized’ salmon-fleshed fruit even in our dull UK summers. Suttons, who have pioneered a whole new generation of grafted plants in recent years, have gone one step further by ‘turbo charging’ Emir by grafting it onto a superior rootstock. This promises to give plants increased vigour and even earlier crops, thereby further improving its chances of succeeding in our temperamental summers - making it probably the best outdoor melon from growing in the UK. Check it out at www.suttons.co.uk

Shark’s Fin Melon - Chinese Pumpkin F1

Hailing from the highlands of the Andes, you might think that this would be a tricky specimen to get away with in our blustery maritime climate, but surprisingly they are actually one of the most cold-tolerant of all cucurbits - a perfect option for us Brits then.

Their creamy white flesh also has the curious property of flaking out into thin, gel-like strands when cooked, meaning that it has been used in all sorts of unusual recipes around the world, from being cooked with spices and sugar to make the ‘angel hair’ jams and tarts in Spain to even a veggie, eco-friendly form of shark’s fin soup in Vietnam! Even the tips of the young foliage are delicious, cooked up like spinach, which is frankly quite necessary considering what vigorous growers these are. Find out more at www.dtbrownseeds.co.uk

Purple Mangetout 'Shiraz' (Mangetout)

Purple mangetout ‘Shiraz’ is the first purple mangetout, produced by British breeders (code for the fact that it is perfectly adapted to our climate). Stunning, edible flowers, coming two-toned forms of purple and pink soon give way to strangely chestnutty flavoured pods on downy mildew resistant vines. You really couldn't ask for more. Find out more at www.thompson-morgan.com