LEARNING TO recognize which plants are related makes it easier to recognize their seedlings and meet their needs. Individual species of plants belong to a genus, a group of plants having characteristics in common. A genus, in turn, belongs to a larger family of genera, but, in practice, the word family is used for genus, like the peas and beans family.
A quick read of these three pages gives you much information in a nutshell to acquaint you with the nature of vegetable plants, so you can choose accordingly. They are grouped under their family, sharing specific growth habits.
Aizoaceae/ice plant family: New Zealand spinach (Warrigal greens).
Alliaceae/Allium/lily family: Around 500 species of chives, leeks, onions, and all sorts of shallots—grow from seed. Grow garlic and bunching onions from division of bulbs. Grow day lilies (Hemerocallis) for lily buds. All produce one seed ball per stem.
Apiaceae/Umbelliferae/carrot family: Grow from seed. Flowers range from white and pinkish to yellow. These plants hold their seeds in “umbels” like flat umbrellas, helipads for beneficial flying insects. Let them set seed throughout the vegetable garden in spring, and predators will come in enough numbers to keep pests in check. Caraway, carrots, celery, chervil, cilantro, cumin, dill, fennel, parsley, and parsnips are friends to food plants under attack.
Asteraceae/Compositae/sunflower family: Artemisia species (the wormwoods). Some are grown from cuttings, but the following are grown from seed: chamomile, chicory, dandelion, endive, lettuce, salsify, scorzonera, shungiku (chrysanthemum greens), sunflower, and tarragon. Yarrow can also grow from root division. Asparagus, globe artichokes, and Jerusalem artichokes are perennials grown from crowns or roots.
Brassicaceae/Cruciferae/mustard family: This large family grows seeds in small pods like mini peas. Most have yellow flowers with four petals forming a cross. Includes many Asian greens and all gross feeders loving richly manured soils. Kale and brussels sprouts like a touch of frost. Although most brassicas can be grown throughout the year, they do better when planted late summer/autumn to grow through winter/spring. They tend to go to seed in hot weather, although some remain edible throughout summer. Most of the flowers and seed heads are edible: bok choy, Brassica juncea, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage (pe-tsai), collard, cress, horseradish, kale, kohlrabi, mustards, choy sum, radish (white and mauve flowers), arugula, rutabaga, tatsoi, turnip, watercress. Swirl seed heads in a wok with sesame and olive oil.
Protecting brassica plants from cabbage white butterfly is achieved by indicating that the territory is already occupied. Invisible thread such as fish line would work even better.
Chenopodiaceae/goosefoot family: Beets (leaves edible), Swiss chard, English spinach, perennial spinach, red orach, rainbow chard.
Convolvulaceae/morning glory family: Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), originally from Peru. Prefers warm weather and are liable to become unwell when nights are cold.
Cucurbitaceae/gourd family: The genus Cucurbita comprises twenty-five species. There is pumpkin on one end and zucchini on the other end. In between are cucumber, gherkin, gourd, marrow, melon, and squash. The terms gourd, squash, and pumpkin are often used interchangeably, depending on local usage. One gardener’s butternut pumpkin may be someone else’s squash. All are vines, rambling or climbing. Sow late spring through summer.
Fabaceae/Leguminosae/pea family: The nitrogen fixers. Beans and fenugreek (eat bulb, or use leaves and seeds in curries) grow from late spring through summer. Broad beans and most peas from autumn through winter/spring. Direct sowing. When harvesting, cut plants at ground level, leaving roots with nitrogen nodules in the soil.
Malvaceae/mallow family: Okra. Tropical/subtropical and needs a long frost- free season or a greenhouse. Grow from seed.
Poaceae/Grass family: Comprises most grain crops and sweet corn (all beloved by grazers). Grow sweet corn in summer to fix nitrogen.
Polygonaceae/buckwheat family: Buckwheat (from seed), rhubarb (grow from crowns). Both love summer in high altitudes.
Solanaceae/nightshade family: These plants mostly grow in spring/summer. They have five-petaled flowers—white, mauve, and purple—with prominent yellow anthers. The family includes eggplant, Cape gooseberry, bell pepper, chili, goji berry, pepino, potato, tamarillo, tomatillo, tomato, and inedibles like tobacco and belladonna. The latter indicates that toxic solanins exist in all solanum plants to various degrees. They are believed to aggravate arthritis. A Solanaceae-free diet may make a difference to a sufferer. That said, tomatoes are claimed to be essential in the prevention of prostate cancer. But any potatoes showing green patches, from exposure to light while growing, are toxic and must not be eaten by humans or animals.
Urticaceae/nettle family: Stinging nettle, essential plant food in compost and a delicious wild vegetable (stir-fry in olive oil), or herbal tea. Tibetan sage Milarepa (11th century) lived most of his life in a cave on a diet of mainly nettles. A much maligned food worth growing.
Summer vegetables and herbs are mostly sown in spring, although repeat sowing of quick-growing vegetables like radishes, lettuce, and beans are possible until it gets very hot. (For “under glass,” read also “behind glass or plastic or indoors.”)
Since local climates differ considerably, the starting dates of spring and autumn will vary accordingly. However, the following lists are useful when planning twice-yearly plantings.
PLANT |
NOTES |
| Amaranth | Leaf, some are grown for grain, sow direct |
| Arugula | Early, outdoors |
| Basil | Tropical, after frosts in late spring to early summer |
| Beans | After frosts, repeat sowings until mid-summer |
| Beets | Plant spring, summer, or autumn |
| Bell peppers | Start under glass, plant after frosts |
| Broccoli | Summer variety |
| Brussels sprouts | Plant mid–late summer |
| Cabbage | Summer varieties, plant early |
| Carrots | All seasons variety |
| Cauliflower | Summer varieties, not in hot climates |
| Celery | Start early indoors |
| Chard | Sow thickly for young pickings |
| Chilies | Start under glass, plant after frosts |
| Cucumbers | Start under glass, plant after frosts |
| Dill | In shade, or wait for early autumn |
| Eggplant | Start under glass, plant after frosts |
| Globe artichokes | Sow seed in pots, transplant in autumn |
| Lettuce | Summer varieties, part shade |
| Melons | Start early under glass, plant after frosts |
| Mustards | Will bolt (run to seed) early in hot climates |
| Onions | In cool climates, sow spring onions and other small varieties in early spring |
| Potatoes | Mulch thickly |
| Pumpkins | Start under glass, plant after frosts |
| Radishes | In between other plants, or mix with carrots |
| Rhubarb | Mulch, regular watering |
| Snow peas | Plant early, only in cool climates (check packet) |
| Squash | Summer varieties |
| Sweet corn | Sow direct when soil warms, re-seed failures |
| Sweet potatoes | Start indoors, plant after frosts |
| Tomatoes | Start under glass, plant after frosts |
| Zucchini | Start under glass, plant after frosts |
Hardy butternuts for small families.
Winter vegetables and herbs are sown middle to late summer and into autumn while the soil is still warm. Establish perennials like artichokes, asparagus, rhubarb, sorrel, perennial spinach, and strawberries in early autumn.
Fruit trees are best planted in early winter while trees are dormant, but citrus trees should be planted when soil is still warm or in spring—consult your local nursery.
PLANT |
NOTES |
| Arugula | Annual, save seed, grows on till early summer |
| Asian greens | Greens and flowering tops |
| Asparagus | From crowns |
| Beets | Greens and beets |
| Broad beans | Beans and tops |
| Broccoli | Flowering stem |
| Cabbage | Most varieties |
| Carrots | All-season variety |
| Cauliflower | Winter varieties |
| Celery & celery herb | Stems and leaves |
| Chard | Grow rainbow colors |
| Cilantro & coriander | Grow as a fresh herb or for the spicy seed |
| Dill | Greens and seed |
| Endive | Hearting variety |
| Fava beans | Plant in autumn |
| Fenugreek | When seedpods dry, harvest seeds for curries |
| Garlic | Plant while soil is still warm |
| Globe artichokes | Plant roots |
| Kale | Eat leaves and flowering tops |
| Leeks | Plant in a row while soil is still warm, transplant when 4 inches |
| Lettuce | Winter varieties, like radicchio, lamb's lettuce, oak-leaf |
| Mustards | Including giant red |
| Onions | Plant sets or seeds in a row, transplant when 4 inches |
| Parsley | Seed or division, biennial, re-sow every second year |
| Parsley | Peas Winter peas, or check seed packets |
| Radishes | Including daikon |
| Rhubarb | Plant crowns |
| Rutabagas | Japanese |
| Snow peas | Check seed packet for climate directions |
| Spinach | English, perennial and others |
| Strawberries | Late autumn to early spring |
| Turnips | Purple top |
All-season vegetables and herbs are best sown in spring and autumn, as most seedlings won’t take off in summer’s heat or winter’s dread. Some appear in previous lists as summer or winter vegetables, but can manage in all seasons. Others have special “all-season” varieties.
PLANT |
NOTES |
| Asian greens | Most leaf vegetables |
| Beets | Greens and beets |
| Broccoli | Depending on variety |
| Broccoli rabe | Flowering stem—winter and mild summers |
| Cabbage | Depending on variety |
| Carrots | All-season varieties |
| Cauliflower | All-season varieties |
| Chard | White or rainbow stems |
| Herbs | Can be planted any time, except tropical ones, although cilantro, dill, and arugula do well in the cool season |
| Jerusalem artichoke | Plant roots |
| Lettuce | Romaine, mignonette, radicchio, and mesclun mix |
| Mustards | Including giant red |
| Radicchio | Red or green |
| Rutabagas | Japanese |
| Turnips | Purple top |
For more on how the weather affects growing, see The Seasons and Climate, Weather, and Microclimate.
UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED, these vegetables are grown from seed. Some food plants are known as both vegetable and fruit, like melons. Some large herbs are also known as vegetables, like sorrel. Brief cooking suggestions are included, especially for lesser-known food plants.
Green vegetables contain chlorophyll. Carotenes are found in orange and yellow vegetables like carrots, red bell peppers, melons, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. Anthocyanin colors red-purple vegetables and fruit; these are important in preventing cancers. They range from red and blue berries, cherries, and plums, to purple Siberian kale, red-brown lettuces and radicchios, red cabbage, and beets. It has been claimed that antioxidants in reddish plant foods eradicate harmful free radicals ten times faster than do green vegetables.
Plants carrying officinalis as their second botanical name were used as medicine before modern pharmaceuticals appeared. Some officinalis plants are once again being used in medicines after a period in exile.
Soils that are acidic rather than alkaline need a dusting of lime, particularly when growing peas, beans, and onions. But amaranth, eggplants, blueberries, celery, and potatoes don’t like lime.
Found in commercial fertilizers and concentrated manures, such as poultry manure. Nitrogen generates abundant growth of foliage. Reduce applications for fruiting crops after plants are established, or they will grow more leaf than fruit. Fruiting crops are eggplants, beans, broccoli, brussels sprouts, bell peppers, cauliflower, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, tomatoes, and so forth.
For root crops, like beets, carrots, onions, parsnips, rutabagas, and turnips, very little nitrogen goes a long way—too much, and you eat leaves. Peas and beans fix nitrogen from the soil, leaving enough behind for root crops if pea and beanstalks are cut off at soil level rather than pulled up.
Asparagus is for the patient gardener, as you must not pick any spears for the first two years.
Sowing seasons are only a guide. Across the country, there are vast differences in climate and elevation. Climatic conditions have become unpredictable, and freak weather occurs everywhere. Watch seasonal cycles where you live, and be prepared to sow again if first sowings fail due to bad weather. Keep a garden notebook.
These are described here in greater detail than more experimental varieties. Consult seed catalogs for organic seed of more unusual varieties, or try aquatic vegetables in a pond or a water pot.
Sow in spring, after frosts have ceased. A prehistoric plant with a variety also known as love-lies-bleeding. Amaranth grown for its leaves is sometimes known as Greek spinach, although similar amaranths appear in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
These tall, green-maroon plants have a counterpart (A. caudatus) grown in South America for its small grains that are ground into flour. There are more varieties, with maroon to yellowish feathery flowers, producing the best leaves or best grain, and all are very nutritious. Pick young leaf tips for salads or mix mature leaves with milder spinaches. The plant doesn’t like lime, fancies a little nitrogen, and accepts poor soil. Being drought tolerant, self-seeding, and easily removed where not wanted, amaranth’s glorious colors would grace a bare spot in an ornamental garden.
For a first crop, sow the fine seed indoors in a tray and transplant at 3 to 4 inches. Plant outside after frosts cease, keeping a few reserves in pots. Success in the garden means self-seeded plants next year, but do harvest some grains. This is a plant whose time is yet to come.
Sow in late summer. From the Mediterranean. Also rocket or Italian cress, roquette, rughetta. There is also a perennial wild arugula (Diplotaxis tenuifolia) with long serrated leaves, a self-sowing sprawler with a milder taste. Arugula has moderate water requirements, grows profusely, and produces enough lobed leaves to be treated as a tasty standby vegetable. The only gardeners complaining about arugula’s fecundity are those who restrict its use to decoration on salads or risotto. The plant is easily pulled up where not wanted, appears disease free and bug resistant, and loses its bite when cooked, making it suitable for soups and stir-fries.
Arugula is still a wild plant, like sorrel. It grows in the cool season, going to seed when the heat arrives, self-seeding freely so that, by autumn, you can start picking lush, deep green leaves. It starts small, barely higher than a lettuce, but can shoot up suddenly, which may have given rise to its English name. One plant produces hundreds of tiny, pale-cream flowers, and sets thousands of seeds in tiny pods. Although arugula can be relied upon to drop enough seed to re-seed itself, pick enough dry pods to store for a thickly sown arugula bed in spring or summer.
Arugula can withstand some warm weather and still provide handfuls of fresh leaves for salads and pastas. During overproduction, make amazing arugula soup served with a dollop of yogurt. Chickens love a meal of arugula. We all need arugula. It is one of the antioxidant green plants that boost our immune system, keeping us young. Let it set seed in at least two places because the flowers attract good insects.
Plant crowns in autumn or sow in spring. Companions: nasturtiums, parsley, and tomatoes. A perennial indigenous to Central and Western Asia, Europe, and North Africa. The Greeks have cultivated it from ancient times, and the English pluck it along their coasts.
Asparagus has male and female plants. The females are slim and pretty, too thin to cook, and produce tiny vermilion-seed berries. The familiar fat spears come from the male plants. Buy male crowns and be done, or buy seed and raise a mixture. The female spears are tasty enough raw, and the seeds will produce more plants. Spears are broken off underground at the point where they can still be snapped by hand.
Fork over a deep bed of extra-good soil in autumn, as asparagus are perennials and remain permanently where planted. Shore up the bed with planks or sleepers to hold layers of compost and straw mulch. Sprinkle lime three weeks before planting crowns deep enough to cover with compost and thick layers of animal manure and pea straw. Plant nasturtium seeds in pockets of soil in the straw to grow a groundcover on autumn rains. This bed is permanent, so the rest of your Pasta/Pizza Plot needs another square. I have seen an asparagus bed that had been producing spears for sixty years and gave no sign of quitting. It is something you pass on to the kids or the next owners of your property.
The test as to whether you are serious about your love for asparagus comes when the first spears appear in spring, because you must not pick any spears for the first two years. Just let them grow and die down to build up the crowns, otherwise they will never be vigorous. Remember the origin of asparagus in the steppes, where plants need to gather courage to establish themselves. In the third spring, you may pick a few spears here and there, mainly the female ones. Leave the rest till the fourth spring, then have a feast! But never pick the bed bare, as this exhausts the roots.
After the harvest is over, push nasturtiums to the edges and cover the plot again with compost, manure, and straw. Nasturtiums usually drop enough seeds to recover the plot.
Chefs boil and steam asparagus spears in bundles, standing them up to their waists in narrow pots of boiling water. They garnish them with sauces and herbs, cheese, or eggs, or include them in frittatas and fancy dishes. My asparagus seldom reaches the table. Like the nomad I am, I pick it fresh and nibble the juicy spears as I work in the garden. Try that before rushing to the cookbooks.
Plant late spring after all danger of frost is over. Companions: feverfew and marigold. From South America as well as the Mediterranean and Middle East (Vicia spp.).
A few are perennial, dying down late summer and returning in spring. There are climbing and bush varieties and many different-colored flowers, pods, and beans. Old World beans have mostly black and white flowers, the best-known being fava beans. Fava beans and the scarlet runner bean have separate entries below, as they thrive in different conditions from most other beans.
The history of beans and their travels between the Old and the New Worlds is quite fascinating. Choose from borlotti, blue lake, broker bean, lima bean, noodle bean, redland pioneer, French bean, Spanish runner, stella bianca, snake bean, to name just half of those I’ve tested. Grow climbers on a tepee, trellis, or wire cylinder. Green soy beans grown from dried soy beans are called edamame, a nutritious addition to rice, salads, and vegetables. Beans are the peasant’s great standby.
The Seed Savers Exchange offers many old-fashioned varieties never seen in shops, as do small seed companies. Plant a few dried beans from European and Asian groceries, like borlotti beans. Buy packets of different beans, cook, and taste them, and if you like them, plant some. See Useful Addresses for more on seeds.
Apply lime to the soil three weeks before planting, but don’t overdo the B&B. Plant seeds in toilet paper tubes at the same time. In a wildlife-free zone, you can plant beans directly in the soil after frosts. Otherwise, beans sown directly are likely to attract night-feeding prowlers who dine on the sprouting beans. To foil freeloaders, germinate beans indoors, in a cold frame (aired during the day), or under a wire rack—see Hardware in the Food Garden. Prepare four margarine containers with six toilet paper tubes each, filled with seed-raising mix or potting soil. Push in four different types of beans, bushing and climbing. I love the way beans pop up a week later. First, the bent swan neck pushes up the earth, then two leaves unfold, remarkably big for having been folded up inside a small bean only days before. Start preparing their plot, away from onions and garlic. Soon, the next set of leaves appears, and, when you lift out the rolls, you will see root growth protruding already.
Do not plant out until they have four well-developed leaves and roots are hanging out. Dig a hole slightly deeper than the roll, pour in water, push the roll into the wet soil, and pack earth around it. Surround with CMC. As they grow, provide initial B&B between plants and douse every two weeks with LS. It seems a long wait for flowers, but once they appear, beans are not far behind. Pick twice a week to encourage production. Steamed fresh beans are delicious on the plate, in salads, almost raw in a garlic-chili-coconut dressing, and in stir-fries.
Plant new beans every month, as long as three months of warm weather can be expected. Climbing beans take longer to fruit than bush beans, hence sowing times are critical. Cut old plants at soil level to leave nitrogen in the ground.
Grow more beans than you need and dry them on the stalk. When bone dry, shell and store in jars for winter. Soak overnight and next day rinse and cook in fresh water for delicious bean dishes, soups, and salads. Vegetarians eat beans and lentils instead of meat for excellent protein. Combined with rice, their food value increases dramatically. Next time you want to give a friend a present, make a little box with four to six different bean varieties. Your friend may thank you years later!
Plant spring, summer, or autumn. From Europe and Western Asia. Apply lime on acidic soil, but no nitrogen fertilizer—use LS. Sprinkle wood ashes around plants, but never coal ashes. Beets belong to the same family as chard, and leaves can be eaten two or three times before harvesting the root. Beets come in colors of purple, bright red, gold, white, or red-and-white stripes. Golden beets have a delicate flavor, but white beet is soapy to some taste buds. Choose from round, long, and flat beets. In common with other red-colored fruits and vegetables, red beet contains betanin and rates high in anti-cancer diets, especially as a daily serving of fresh beet juice.
The seeds, like chard seeds, produce two or three seedlings each. Plant seeds 4 inches apart to allow for two or three beets to grow sideways. They don’t fancy being unraveled and transplanted. A hundred beet seeds fit on a square, but by planting ten seeds to grow twenty-plus beets and repeating two months later, you will get a continuous supply. Beets like compost with animal manure, but using poultry manure will produce more leaf than root. Withhold nitrogen fertilizer to prevent forked roots. This goes for most root vegetables. Harvest beets as they grow, pulling the bigger ones. They can remain in the ground a long time before setting seed and getting woody.
To pickle, boil beets in the skin until a fork just goes in, but don’t let them get soft. Cool, then rub off the skins. Cut into slices and pack into jars, alone or with onion rings and black peppercorns. Pour in a good vinegar, close the jar, and leave for one month.
Beets served hot are delicious. Boil beets as above, cool, and slip off their skins. Grate the beets coarsely and put aside. Finely cut an onion and some parsley and fry in olive oil. When the onion just browns at the edges, add grated beet and toss until thoroughly heated. Sprinkle salt, pepper, lemon juice, and a little sugar and stir again. Serve with potatoes, as a hot salad on mignonette leaves. Or pop mustard seeds in olive oil, sauté onions, garlic, and ginger, and add ground cumin, grated raw beets, and chopped beet leaves. Toss well before adding coconut milk to simmer until tender.
Try a dip made of boiled and pureed beets, mixed with yogurt, salt, pepper, and ground cumin, served with wedges of fried pita bread.
Saving seed from beets can take two seasons. If you also have chard setting seed, protect the beet flower head with a tied paper bag to prevent cross-pollination.
Solanaceae family. Also known as sweet pepper or capsicum, they originated in South and Central America. Paprika is a milder and thin-fleshed variety. Choose from Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, or American. There are yellow, orange, red, purple, and black bell peppers, but they all start off green. Sow seed early under glass or indoors, and feed LS. Build up the outdoor plot with CMC. Plant out after frost ceases and days are truly warm. Keep up feeding every two weeks with LS or OF, and always water well. If your summer is short, cover plants with thick straw to overwinter, or transplant into pots and bring indoors. They can be returned to the ground next spring. Pick bell peppers for size rather than color to keep the plant in production. They can be eaten raw, grilled, baked, or fried. Preserve bell peppers by pickling in oil and vinegar.
Sow late spring to summer. Also known as bitter gourd or foo gwa. This native to India and southern China is not so much a melon as a warty, bitter-tasting cucumber. Growing on vines, it likes warmth, good soil, and B&B. I’ve only grown it in a greenhouse at 2,000-foot elevation, where it climbed delightfully up the rainwater pipe against the sunny side of the house. The ferny leaves of bitter melon are lime green, their aroma heady and addictive.
The fruit is picked unripe when pale lime green. Let them ripen for a feast of color, as they turn a rich yellow-orange, split open, and reveal bright red seeds. At this stage, they are no longer edible. I thought growing bitter melon was worthwhile just for the aroma and visual delights! When traveling in Lahoul, in Northern India, I thought I saw bitter melon vines everywhere, but they turned out to be hops, a cash crop.
Use bitter melon sparingly in Asian stir-fries, and they can be pickled. The seeds must be removed, as they may cause a purge. To reduce the bitterness, Asian cooks blanch them for a few minutes in boiling water. Alternatively, cut, sprinkle with salt, and leave twenty minutes, then rinse off. Prepare with salt, pepper, sugar, and vinegar, or serve with green onions and black bean sauce. Or, add to fresh chutney with bland and sweeter ingredients, including garlic.
Plant autumn, winter, spring. From China. When bok choy first became available, I gave some seedlings to a friend who soon exclaimed: “I don’t know how we lived without bok choy!” It can be grown in all seasons, but bolts to seed quickly in hot weather. This versatile Chinese vegetable has crisp dark green leaves shaped like a ping-pong paddle with a strong white central rib. The entire rosette makes a great wok meal, but it is more economical if you pick outer leaves from several plants until they go to seed. Use also in pastas, soups, and salads. A bok choy stir-fry with garlic, ginger, onions, and a handful of other leaves such as amaranth, giant mustard, or the like, makes a fine meal with rice noodles and crispy tofu.
Avoid early bolting by providing manure and water. Let one plant set seed, and next season, sow thickly for a bok choy carpet.
Plant in autumn. From Japan. Add manure and lime, feed LS. Sold under this botanical name in Japanese seed packets, as well as by local seed companies, Brassica juncea stands for a group of mustardy Asian greens ranging from mild green to burgundy. All are favorites with me if grown quickly and picked young, excellent for steaming or adding to winter salads. Sow a half or quarter square by raking in seeds and patting down. Water regularly, and when plants are 4 inches high, begin pulling the biggest, making room for others to grow. Eat it twice a week—you will buzz with energy. Save the best plant for seed, tying red yarn to it.
These include bok choy, Brassica juncea, Chinese flowering broccoli rabe, kale, cabbage, giant red mustard, mibuna, mizuna, choy sum, and tatsoi. Also see separate entries.
Alan D. Cook of Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record’s publications, writes that no matter how proficient you become at raising Asian radishes, yard-long beans, cucumbers, and water chestnuts, “you can’t be a good Asian-food gardener if you can’t handle the Brassica rapa gang.”26 The problem lies with the quick-bolting habit of Asian brassicas when the weather changes to warm and/or humid. In Guangdong Province, China, where the climate is more often warmly humid than cool, I observed bunches of flowering broccoli, cabbage, and kale on sale everywhere. In cool weather, brassicas don’t bolt. By not waiting, but cutting and eating before they do so, you get more value, and the flowering tops are excellent.
Sow regularly. The best way to get on with the “Brassica rapa gang” is to sow varieties at different times and record the results in your garden notebook, remembering the best season for each variety—easy. Not that I do this. I sow them all year round as fillers for spaces coming to hand, and use them as (and when) they please to come for salads, stir-fries, seed, and chicken food. Adjust planting times given for Asian brassicas to your own microclimate. Experimentation is advisable.
Plant summer, autumn, or spring, depending on the variety. Companions: cilantro, dill, young nasturtium. From Europe, especially Italy. By preference, a cool-weather plant. Varieties include heading, sprouting, green, purple, Italian, or Chinese broccoli rabe (with long edible stems). Commercially grown broccoli normally needs a flavored sauce or a generous helping of grated cheese, but home-grown broccoli has a taste all its own.
A gross feeder (see Plant Food and Soil Food) broccoli needs plenty of organic matter. Lime the soil if acidic. I mention broccoli in the chapter on attitude (see here), as it is half wasted when growers only cut the head. This cancer-fighting brassica can be eaten all year round with regular plantings and picking of the plentiful side shoots, if also fed and mulched well.
Plant in late summer to get it on its way by winter, developing rosettes of blue-green edible leaves and a gorgeous head. The art is to judge the state of swelling in hundreds of individual buds and pick the head before any lose their deep coloring, but not before it has reached maximum size. When the first yellow flower appears, there’s not a day to spare. At moments like, this you will remember that growing a variety of food plants is one of the most intelligent things a human can do in life.
Yet I am duty-bound to report that broccoli side shoots with half the buds in flower are easy pickings, eminently edible, and good for you as well as tasty. But edible stems must be cut shorter as they go woody. Use shoots raw in salads. Sauté stems and florets in olive oil, adding lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Should you care more for stems than heads, grow Chinese broccoli rabe with edible leaves and flowers. As long as it is picked tender, broccoli is suitable for almost any mixed-vegetable dish. Try zucchini, broccoli, and grated carrots, with a Vietnamese-style dressing, or soy sauce with Dijon mustard.
When the plant flowers profusely, give it a severe pruning, saving the best flower head for seed, and you will still pick shoots for another month. Make sure no other brassica (see An A–Z of Vegetable Families) is setting seed simultaneously, as they may cross-pollinate. Cover one with a tied paper bag, if necessary. Strange new varieties don’t necessarily combine the best of both parents.
Sow late summer to early autumn for growing in the cool season. Originated in Belgium. Said to be the latest development of the cabbage, brussels sprouts first appeared only a few hundred years ago in Belgium. They look like mini cabbages clinging to a tall stem with an open, cabbagy head. I have been spectacularly unsuccessful with this vegetable so far and plan to make it a special project next year. My sprouts opened up, perhaps due to too much nitrogen, but we still ate the heads!
Sow in spring. From Central Asia. Buckwheat can be seen growing at very high altitudes in Asia, where it is sown in late spring and matures through the short alpine summer, which can still include snowfalls. I have grown it through sunny winters to accommodate its liking for cool climes, yet one frosty winter, it died. It can grow on poor soils. Try it out if your climate approximates a Himalayan summer—hot days, cool nights. Or do small test sowings every season.
This increasingly important plant is not a wheat at all; it is gluten-free. The small grains are ground up to make flour for pancakes, noodles, and mixed baking flours. The reason I list it under vegetables is twofold. The triangular leaves can be eaten as a tasty spinach. Second, buckwheat is an excellent cover crop to grow on a bare plot. Harvest the seed or dig in the plants before seed sets. The plant has whitish to rose pink flowers. Buy seeds from small seed companies or try buckwheat from health shops. Use cooked buckwheat in soups and as filling for a colorful winter vegetable salad, using a rudjak dressing (see here).
Plant autumn, winter, spring, or summer varieties. Native of Southern and Western Europe. Companions: plant celery herb, mint, pennyroyal, tomato, sage, and southernwood to confuse predators, with aromas of chamomile, sage, southernwood, and thyme to repel cabbage moth. (Place the mint in pots between cabbages so that it doesn’t get any ideas of taking over the plot.) Generally, they like cool weather. Choose from green, white, red, savoy, and sugarloaf cabbages.
Summer and winter varieties are planted respectively in late winter and spring, or late summer and autumn. A cabbage is a gross feeder (see Plant Food and Soil Food). It can also sit still and wait until the time is right. And that also goes for its cousins, cauliflower and broccoli. Cabbage seedlings can sit for two months without developing until the weather or other conditions change to their liking. Then they take off as if they’d been waiting for a starting signal—which, of course, they were. They still develop a head, even tardy specimens. Never abandon a cabbage, and it will not abandon you.
Sometimes, winter is too warm, no rain falls, the soil dries out, and you hope the cabbages will get by on dew. Then a few will suddenly bolt and produce seed heads out of a well-developed plant. Use them as broccoli, steaming the seed heads. The plant will produce shoots for a while. Pick leaves for chicken or worm food, saving the ribs for juicing with carrots and ginger. Thus, a cabbage that missed its vocation is still a very edible plant.
Although modern cabbages grow all year round (check seed packets), water deep in summer or they won’t produce. They are easier to grow with winter rains. Grow plenty and pick outer leaves for stir-fries, saving the plant’s energy for the cabbage head.
The main enemies are cabbage moths, pretty white butterflies with black spots. They lay eggs on the underside of the leaves, and the grubs eat the cabbage head hollow. When you pick and cut the head, all you find is a gray mess in wrappings. Heartbreaking, I assure you. What to do? Some years ago, a viewer sent in a clever idea to a TV gardening program. I tried it, and it worked for me. Hammer in four stakes around your cabbages. Cut butterfly shapes from a white plastic container and fasten at hand-width intervals to thin thread. Tie the thread to each stake, crossing diagonally through the middle of the square in both directions. I have used Styrofoam twists from packaging as butterflies before, but have learned to avoid the edible kind made from corn as the birds make short shrift of these.
Why would it work? The answer appears to be that the cabbage butterfly is territorial. Seeing the plastic butterflies, it thinks the patch is already taken and flies on. I have used the method several years in succession after half my cabbages were eaten hollow, and although cabbage-white butterflies dance around my garden, they’ve left the cabbages for me. I have no idea where they now procreate, but not in my cabbages, thanks to an unknown gardener passing on a great idea.
Plastic butterflies protect cabbages from the worst damage cabbage moths can do. They spell out “territory already occupied.” Outer leaves have been attacked but the heads are firm and clean. Include a pot of mint as a companion plant.
Sow spring to autumn, or an all-season variety. Companions: chives, cilantro, lettuce, onions, radishes, sage, shallots, and violets. By mixing all these seeds together, you can have your entire salad growing in one spot, as none of them need much nitrogen. Leeks and parsnips are carrot buddies, too. Originally from Afghanistan, Pakistani carrot seed produces a deep orange carrot with a purple top, close to the original. Great source of carotenes. Only feed a little OF. Choose from long or stumpy, pale or deep orange.
Old garden geezers will tell you growing carrots is dead easy, but many a gardener has troubles with this indispensable root vegetable. The main requirement is deep, light soil so carrots can penetrate downwards. If you have concrete soil and no supply of sand to lighten it, go up instead of down. Dig over one quarter, then knock the bottom out of a waxed cardboard banana box, or use a tub. Fill with potting soil, preferably lightened with sand and a pinch of lime. Be careful with nitrogen—it produces forked carrots. Don’t overmanure carrots, although they may need a top dressing with OF when reaching adolescence.
Sow half to one packet of carrot seed per box. Conventional carrot wisdom dictates they must be thinned out. Thinning out seems such a waste. Just when a healthy little plant has surfaced, it gets pulled up by the roots and thrown on the compost because it hugs its neighbors. Instead, mix carrot and radish seed, pulling the quickly maturing radishes to leave room for carrots to take up. Carrots seem able to postpone growing until room becomes available. Carrots tell you when they are well developed underground by developing a large tuft of greenery above ground. By carefully pulling those large tufts—pushing back smaller ones—you make room for others to grow. If the soil sinks from watering, top off with compost to prevent carrots turning green.
Germination is guaranteed by covering soil after sowing with a tea towel, T-shirt, or jute bag. Fit the carrot plot to the size of the cover. Water well and in two to four weeks, green sprigs will push up. Remove the cloth when sprigs are ½ inch tall. Now cover with wire, to keep off the birdies. Sow one tea towel of carrots per month to always have three to four plots on the go from which to pull. Collect deep boxes with strong corners, tea towels, T-shirts, and old racks, and you shall eat baby carrots, sweet and juicy.
When the carrots go woody, give the biggest one its head and reap the seed. The flowers are as pretty as Queen Anne’s lace. Carrot tops will be greedily eaten by geese. In former days, farming families seem to have eaten them, too. You can replant carrot heads, after cutting short the tuft, to grow several small carrots.
If you were born during the last half-century, you may never have savored real carrot taste. Carrots used to be yellow and purple in 16th-century northwest Europe, and the Dutch developed orange carrots. But modern carrots must grow faster and taller, rendering them rather tasteless. Restaurants use them mainly for color and fill, scarcely for their unique taste.
Pakistani carrot seeds I bought from a small seed company hardly came up or they started dying off. Those sprigs found themselves in the wrong place and climate, and were, perhaps, only a few generations removed from their source. I raked the ground and grew something else. The following winter, a strong carrot plant rose between the broccolis. The Pakistani. Did I pamper that carrot! As it grew huge, I staked it. As it burst into flower, I fed it. I talked to it daily in plant lingo. When the weather warmed considerably, the seed heads formed and dried off. As they ripened unevenly, I harvested heads for weeks, drying the seed indoors by daily stirring.
That home-grown seed produced seedlings that decided to grow in my garden. The resulting carrots were a deeper orange with purple tops, tasting like pre-war carrots. There are Japanese and Nepalese carrots also promising better flavor. Do not grow them simultaneously if you want to save seed.
Companions: cilantro, cumin, dill, lemon balm. Originally from Italy. From the Mediterranean, but widely grown in India where hot-climate varieties have developed. In the Indian Himalayas, I came to appreciate curried cauliflower. Winter, summer, and all-season varieties are available, as well as purple and mini caulies. They are gross feeders, needing plenty of organic matter like CMC and lime. See Plant Food and Soil Food.
Cauliflowers are real teasers. They grow large gray-green leaves, then fold them inwards so you can’t see what’s happening inside. After months of tending, you begin to think they’re having you on. Nothing seems to be happening. Then one day, you see a snow-white or creamy bit of cauliflower peeping between the leaves. If you then go away for a two-week vacation, you may return to find that the whole lot has collectively matured or bolted. Therefore, plant half a dozen periodically throughout the year, and keep an eye on these most secretive of all brassicas!
Cauliflowers can be petulant about when they form a head, usually for lack of choice food. Once, I left an unproductive one in a bed where it wasn’t in my way, just to see how long it would take to make up its caulie mind and head up. The year came and went, and she still stood there in full leaf, barren. It became a contest. She had time? Well, so had I. Then, in a very cold winter, she started to bulge, and after an eighteen-month pregnancy, produced a respectable medium-size cauliflower. It was difficult to cut her down after such a long contest of wills. Perhaps I should have let her go to seed for a breed of long-life caulies. Instead we enjoyed her valiant effort one chilly winter’s day and she tasted very good. One cauliflower to remember.
When a caulie ripens in warm weather, snap the great outer leaves and fold over the flower head to protect the color. You can tie the leaves at the top. Keep up manure and water. In autumn and winter, they grow slower but more happily. Raise one seed per toilet paper roll, and plant out when the roots come out the bottom. Never sprinkle seed in a container, because you disturb the roots when transplanting, and they may go dormant.
Depending on your microclimate, sow seed from late summer until late spring. Should three caulies bolt in one week, make thick cauliflower soup with cumin, and freeze. Dilute as needed. Peel and slice the thick stem for stir-fries—tender and tasty.
Sow in spring. This relation of stalk celery produces ball-shaped roots with a delicious celery flavor for soups and stews in the second year. Grow like any root vegetable, in light soil with CM and LS.
Sow in spring. Companions: bush beans, tomatoes. From Europe and Asia. See also Celery Herb. The celery we know best is stalk celery, obtained by blanching wild celery by heaping soil around the plants to grow longer stalks. But growing celery in a trench and filling in as she rises is easier and holds the water better. Dig a 12-inch deep ditch, fork in CMC, plant seedlings, or seed in more compost at the bottom, and gradually refill the ditch as plants grow. The stalks are eaten and the leaves are excellent for stock, soup, or stir-fry.
Plant any season. Companion: parsley. Also known as silverbeet. From Europe and Western Asia. The homesteader’s perennial standby, these tall, green plants have hung around many a backdoor for a quick grab of green to add to a stew, soup, or casserole and, these days, a quiche. Chard is tough and survives neglect. Trouble is that when it does, the leaves become as edible as old slippers. Yet the plant possesses the means to overcome this and be a true gourmet vegetable. Read on.
Chard comes with stems in plain cream, deep red, golden yellow, orange, and purple. Those with thick, white stems and broader leaves tend to be known as French or Swiss chard. Chards have a fine taste, and the stems can be steamed or baked as a separate vegetable and served with a piquant sauce. Steam green leaves with a bouquet garni, touch of lemon or a lime leaf, and black pepper.
Chard going to seed is a sight. A heady aroma of honey issues from a plant that may be 5 feet tall. The stem becomes a trunk with hundreds of branches bearing rows of seeds. You don’t need that much. Prune lower branches to feed the main seed head. Maturation takes time, and you can’t grow much under this chard tree, as its roots spread far. When seeds start drying off, cut them quickly, as hanging in the sun for weeks won’t improve them at this stage. Hang seeds in an old pillowcase or paper (never plastic) bag on a shady veranda for wind drying. After a few weeks, strip the seed off. You will fill a shoebox. Share some out and, with the rest, grow chard in gourmet style.
Prepare half a square, or whatever size your protective cage is (see Hardware in the Food Garden). Dig in plenty of manure or other organic matter and B&B. Take a handful of seed and rake thickly through the bed, patting it down with your hand. Push under any seeds still showing. Place the cage over the bed and water in. Soon, you’ll see a forest of young chards standing shoulder to shoulder. Start picking a bunch of the larger leaves when 6 to 8 inches long. These have short stems and take but minutes to steam to superb tenderness. The manure will keep this bed going quite a while, providing tender greens even during heat waves. To ensure continuous supply, plant a batch three or four times per year. Never eat old-slipper chard again!
Since I started growing gourmet chard, I’ve noticed that one plot inter-growing with parsley was much less nibbled by tiny snails than one without. This may work where you are. Trim parsley regularly for soups, stews, and tabouli, and let only two stalks go to seed.
Use this gourmet chard instead of spinach in recipes for quiche and spinach loaves. Dice and steam leaves and drain. While still hot, stir in a few eggs, herbs, and spices, and firm up with breadcrumbs until the mixture sits comfortably in a baking dish. Bake in a moderate oven. Add to a basic spinach loaf: onions, garlic, capers, and beets, chopped nuts and citrus zest, zucchini and carrots, and grated white radishes or mashed potatoes. Replace breadcrumbs with cooked rice and rice flour or chickpea flour—see Cupboard Self-Sufficiency. Get creative with chard.
From the Mediterranean and Western Asia, where it grows wild, and the brilliant blue flowers make a nice change from the usual yellow of roadside herbage. Linnaeus, who cataloged all plants in a comprehensive system, found that the chicory flower opened and closed with the regularity of clockwork.
Italian cooks, accustomed to many varieties of chicory, sauté the young leaves with garlic in olive oil. For the salad bowl, pick leaves before the plant sets seed and always from an unsprayed location. The Italian chicory “rossa” adds purple stripes or blushing greens to a salad—see Radicchio. Blanched chicory is popular in Western Europe as witloof or chicons. Apparently, certain chicory roots, tossed in a box with earth and covered with a layer of manure and sand, will start shooting within a month to produce what is known as Belgian endive, a tender, greenish white salad vegetable. Ground chicory root makes a pleasant coffee substitute. Chicory is not choosy about soil; an underrated vegetable.
From South and Central America where they grew wild thousands of years ago. There are hundreds of varieties, hot or mild, red, yellow, or purplish black. Long ones are milder. The tiny bell pepper frutescens is hot-hot-hot, grown in the tropics, and turned into hot sauce and cayenne.
Start seed off under glass in spring. The seedlings are very small and may get lost in a garden bed still full of cabbage giants and garlic. Tease them out and plant two to a small pot and fertilize. After a few days in the shadehouse, they come out in the sun and, once they show four leaves, they can be replanted into a plot in full sun. Add CM plus a dusting of lime. After harvesting, use chilies fresh, removing seeds and white lining, or string them up to dry in the shade. Pickle chilies in vinegar and oil, or store in the freezer. Plants can be overwintered indoors.
Jalapeño chilies in Paul Zabukovec’s seaside garden, with “Goldrush” zucchini in the background.
Sow all seasons. Also known as pe-tsai, wong bak, Shantung, Tsientin, Nappa, or Manchurian. There is a short variety, but the 12-inch long, light green, crisp, tightly folded cabbage is the most versatile Chinese vegetable of all, used in all manner of dishes. Its delicacy results from quick growing in rich soil with plenty of water. Hence, it is a matter of experimenting to find what the optimum seasons are in hot, cold, dry, and wet climates. In some areas, shade may be beneficial. Build up soil around plants to blanch the leaf base. Experiment.
For a sweet-and-sour dish, fry red bell peppers, onions, and shredded Chinese cabbage. Sprinkle with dressing of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sugar.
Sow autumn to spring. Companions: cabbage and lettuce. Also garlic chives (Allium tuberosum, mauve starry flowers) with flat stems and mild garlic flavor, Chinese chives (Allium odorum, white starry flowers), and Chinese garlic chives (Allium tuberosum). Native of the Northern Hemisphere. Chives repel aphids and are easy to grow. Cultivate like onions. European chives have purple spiky flower heads. Plant seeds, or buy a pot of chives, split the clump, and grow more. Find yourself adding chives to almost everything from salads, soups, and roasted vegetables to dainties like deviled eggs.
Sow in spring. From China. Chinese greens with pretty yellow flowers that are eaten with the juicy stems. Sow fairly thick as it is a quick grower, and you will pull whole plants, although it sprouts again if you use parts only. Steam, stir-fry, or mix in salads.
Sow late summer. Native to Europe. A cousin of kale with a strong cabbage flavor. Cabbages and kales have finer flavor, but collards grow so readily that if you have trouble growing anything, try them. Water and feed well, picking leaves from the bottom up. Use young leaves for salads or sauté with onion greens, ground cumin, and quartered kumquats.
Companions: bush beans, radishes, lettuce, savoy cabbage, sweet corn, sunflowers, and stinging nettle. Use horse manure compost.
Possibly originated in the Himalayan foothills and was already growing in ancient India, Egypt, and Greece more than 3,000 years ago.
Although lovers of hot weather, cucumbers like protection from scorching heat, either from taller plants or shade cloth. This prolific producer diversified as it spread across the globe over centuries. Choose from green, yellow, white, crooked, straight, long, short, round, striped, horned, and baby-skin smooth. Or go by country: African, Armenian, Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Lebanese, Russian, Syrian. Or by flavor: apple, lemon, or . . . cucumber!
Grow only one variety per season if you save seed, as varieties cross-pollinate. Cucumbers grow well on a trellis or draped over a cane chair, saving space and preventing mildew—thanks for that, Chris Watters!
Sow seed in toilet paper tubes behind glass; apply LS. Prepare bed with CMC in a warm spot with dappled shade, in a poly tunnel, or under a plastic “roof.” Plant out when the danger of frost is over and plants have several leaves on a strong stem. Avoid root damage. Keep up LS, mulch, and water as fruit forms, to make the difference between a sweet cucumber and a bitter one. You’ll be amazed how many cucumbers one little vine produces. If vines are long and many, pinch out the tips. Pick cucumbers twice a week, or they’ll stop producing. Some gardeners claim that two vines are more than enough. Plant herbs and flowers to attract bees for pollinating. To save seed, let one cucumber ripen fully on the vine. Wash seeds before drying.
If your red onions ripen in cucumber time, make a salad of the two with a dressing of rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, and tamari or soy sauce. German immigrants brought cucumber pickle recipes to America. After sprinkling sliced cucumbers and hard onions with salt and leaving overnight, they went into jars with oil, vinegar, black pepper, and mustard seeds. If you like sweet pickles, try oil, vinegar, sugar and spices, mustard, celery seed, ground cloves, and turmeric.
Sow in spring. Companions: green beans. Also known as aubergine, the eggplant hails from India. By nature a tropical perennial, eggplant will still grow in temperate zones in warm spots. If the summer is short, or elevation causes cold nights, grow them in pots and bring indoors to mature. Eggplant does not like lime, but needs extra nitrogen. Choose round, egg-shaped, long-thin, or lavender varieties. They are a popular choice for home-cooked dinners.
Start seed off under glass with LS. Prepare the bed with plenty of horse manure and compost. Plant out when the weather has truly warmed up. Tie plants to short stakes when growing and protect from strong winds.
Writer Rana Kabbani wrote the following Syrian recipe for eggplant dip in Antonia Till’s book Loaves and Wishes (see here).
Roast three eggplants over an open flame, sprinkle with salt, and cool, before scooping out the flesh and blending it with a little olive oil, garlic, and Greek yogurt. It should taste smoky. Serve with hot bread.
Sow in autumn. Known in ancient Egypt and Greece and related to chicory (same blue flowers). Several varieties—all easy and hardy.
Apply LS plus a dusting of lime. As a kid in Holland, I had a love-hate relationship with endive, which in that damp climate grew into large bunches, like non-heading lettuce. Mum used to wash, cut, and cook it with just the last rinsing water hanging on, and serve it with a white sauce sprinkled with nutmeg. I gradually grew to like it, but its bitter tang is not for young children.
Appreciate endive as a salad vegetable, picking outer leaves while young so that half a dozen plants are plenty. Later in the season, pick the yellow hearts. Endive is easier to grow than related witlof, which has to be blanched (see Chicory). To get new plants, rub a handful of dry seed heads between your hands and rake in. This will ensure endive coming up in its own good time.
Plant in autumn. Also known as broad beans. From the Middle East. Fava beans help control wilt virus and can be planted after tomatoes. This native of Afghanistan and Western Asia became the main bean throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa until Columbus discovered the land of other beans. Known since Neolithic times, the cooks of the Levant ground fava beans to create falafel, now a global fast food. The post-nouvelle cuisine movement rediscovered young fava beans to garnish spring dishes. Flowers are white and black, or red.
The versatile fava bean, the only bean that grows in the cold season, can be eaten at all stages: first as young, finger-length pods, steamed with oregano; then as shelled beans when not too old. You can even tip prune the plants when they are in full flower and toss the tender leaves in a stir-fry. Later, shelled beans can be frozen.
Finally, dried shelled beans can be reconstituted or ground up to make falafel. Dry them in the pods on the plant. After soaking and cooking, coarsely puree beans with an onion, a raw potato, garlic, chili, and parsley. Add pepper, salt, cumin, and coriander. Enjoy your own falafel made with home-grown ingredients!
Boil, steam, or fry fresh fava beans from one to four minutes, depending on their age. Serve with pasta, seasoning, olive oil, quince paste, and sour cream. Team beans with sweet potato mash, or roasted carrots with lemon and Italian parsley. Or, serve with crumbed goat cheese. Some cooks peel the skins off beans after cooking, which is like eating only the heart of the artichoke. The skins are flavorsome and good roughage.
If last summer you grew the Aztec Plot, or just sweet corn, plant fava beans in autumn to put some nitrogen back in the soil. Plant five seeds every two weeks in autumn for a staggered harvest.
Companions: appears to be a loner and may inhibit other plants. Probably from the Azores. Grows less than 20 inches high (for tall field fennel grown for seeds and foliage, see Fennel).
Florence fennel needs rich soil with added lime to form the half-submerged fleshy leaf base, the most edible part. The flavor has a hint of aniseed, favored in Mediterranean cooking. Eat steamed with pasta or as a salad with orange slices and chives. Try raw with cherry tomatoes and a cool dipping sauce. Cinquaterra cakes from Genoa are flavored with fennel. When Florence fennel forms seed heads, cut off all but the central stalk to produce seed.
The ferny foliage is used as bedding for colorful foods. Place freshly picked leaves on a blue platter, arranging cubed cheese, tomatoes, olives, and red onions on top. Serve al fresco with crisp bread and good wine.
Plant in autumn. Originally from Central Asia and cultivated in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, now worldwide.
Garlic is a natural antibiotic, protecting you from colds and infections, and is indispensable in most vegetable dishes. The price is high enough to consider growing this delicious condiment yourself. To get 100 knobs from a 3-foot square, plant cloves 3 inches apart in ten rows of ten. You will be able to use the greens, use garlic young and fragrant, serve whole baked garlic, and store a few plaits at the end of summer! Grow enough garlic for cooking, drying, pickling, and replanting. Grow different varieties in boxes filled with compost, placed on underfelt.
Do not buy imported garlic to plant out, in case of disease. Search farmers’ markets for organically grown garlic, even if they carry names of waves of immigrants. Russian garlic is the biggest and mildest. Red Italian has a fine taste. Try Vietnamese, too. Save the best of each for replanting.
In autumn, fork over a plot one spade deep, adding B&B. Break up bulbs and push cloves half a finger into the soil, spaced 4 inches apart in both directions. Dust soil with lime. Cover with CMC and a thick layer of teased-out straw. Water in well. Green spikes will appear soon. As most garlics don’t fully mature until the tops die off, the ground may be occupied for the best part of the year, but start using bulbs from spring onwards.
Sometimes, I grow so much garlic that full-grown bulbs left in the ground start shooting as many spikes as they have cloves. These I use as a whole bunch in stir-fries for a delicious young garlic flavor. Garlic just bulbed and not yet fully cloved tastes mellow. Simmer three sliced bulbs in oil, green tops included, before adding other vegetables. Use green tops for soups and salads. Use fresh or pickled garlic to make traditional Mexican salsa. In a mortar mash four or five garlic cloves with half a teaspoon of sea salt; add finely chopped onions and tomatoes, fresh chopped cilantro, lemon juice, and black pepper. For a really hot one, use minced red pepper.
Store garlic in net bags hung in a cool, dark place or between newspaper in a box in a dark cupboard. When some start to sprout, it is time to pickle the rest. No need to peel. Just rub off loose skins and place whole bulbs in jars. Fill up with white vinegar, and top with olive oil. The taste remains great and the vinegar is fine for salads. Garlic braids of three to five bulbs are a welcome present for friends who like cooking, so you can never grow too much.
Gherkins are from Africa and possibly traveled to the New World with the slave trade. They are cultivated in the West Indies and Eastern Europe, which exports gherkins. Seed can be bought specifically for varieties suitable for pickling due to prolific cropping and texture.
To pickle, sprinkle gherkins with salt and leave overnight. Dry off. Pack in jars with bay leaf, chili, peppercorns, dried ginger, fennel, and dill—whatever you fancy. Evidently, one grape leaf per jar gives a gourmet touch. Pour on white vinegar and a layer of olive oil, closing the lid tightly. Save jars with plastic lids for pickling, as these don’t corrode.
Sow autumn to late winter. From China. This stunning plant prefers cool seasons, yet will grow any time, although it bolts to seed quickly in summer. The leaves are the most superb burgundy-maroon and green with fine nerve undulations like a map of rural Guangdong Province.
The taste is pleasantly hot. One leaf cut in strips makes a personal salad or a piquant addition to mixed salads. Use shredded in pastas. One plant produces so many leaves that you can afford to cook it as spinach or in stir-fries, where it loses its bite but still adds flavor. A head of yellow flowers attracts good insects. Cut off side shoots to let the central stem produce seed.
Plant roots in autumn or sow seed in spring. This high-fiber perennial grew in North Africa where Roman conquerors learned to enjoy it in the 1st century. The Italians have been cultivating artichokes for at least six centuries. The French eat them cold for lunch, with vinaigrette, or hot with garlic butter.
Globe artichokes are thistles, and, if not picked, will produce a brilliant blue flower followed by seed. The globe is the flower bud.
Seed is available from small seed companies and germinates easily in late spring to summer. When seedlings have two good leaves, pick them out, plant in individual pots (in part shade), and start feeding LS. If your soil is acidic, work in lime three weeks before planting out in autumn in a composted bed, and when the plants have six leaves. They grow to be tall, handsome plants of decorative value, looking great along a picket fence, and will produce globes the next spring.
I pick from the first day of spring until the beginning of summer. Once a week, pull off decaying leaves and lay these as mulch around the plants. If night prowlers gnaw stems underneath the globes, pull an orange net bag over the top, and tie it down.
When all globes are harvested, cut down the stalks for the compost heap. Cut off leaves and arrange between the plants. Place fertilizer underneath and top with straw. Soon, new plants will sprout from the old stumps, and the whole process will start again.
The following year, carefully slice off new plants with a spade, including a piece of root, and replant elsewhere to ensure continuous supply of this Old World delicacy. When cutting down old stalks, some may separate with new white shoots under the earth. Carefully saw the stalk into as many pieces as there are shoots and plant each in a pot with compost. They will soon form new plants to be set out where there is space to grow. Thus, you continually renew your stock and create designer hedges of these toothed, gray plants of classical elegance.
I drive past a farm where, one year, they had a marvelous 6 × 30-foot stand of globe artichokes. At the end of the picking season, the whole hedge disappeared. I wondered why they would dig up this superb stand. But next winter, it was back in the same spot. I concluded that, in typical farm-management style, the farmer mowed the stand down after harvest! However, setting out a new hedge every few years is a safeguard in case old roots with deep fissures rot in wet winters.
To prepare artichokes, boil the globes in plenty of water. I like eating the inside of the bitter stems as well and cook these separately in the same pot. Rich people only ever eat the hearts of artichokes, which is what you buy in tins. But apart from the stems, the outer leaves have much to offer.
Boil globes for thirty minutes, then with two forks pull off a leaf, and scrape the inside with your teeth. If you can’t scrape yet, boil till tender. Each leaf has a tasty, fleshy base. Peel off each leaf, dip in vinaigrette or garlic butter, and scrape with your teeth. Green and purple globes taste the same. This is real peasant food, slow food, to be enjoyed. As you come to the innermost parts of the globe, the whole leaf can be eaten, but it is the heart—after removing the “choke” of hair that covers it—that is your reward for approaching it so slowly! To eat the classical way, cut in halves and remove the heart and soft leaves to eat with lemon juice, olive oil, and sea salt.
Japanese greens available as seed tend to belong to the hardy and easy-to-grow Cruciferae/Brassicaceae group of vegetables. Gourds, pumpkins, and root crops are also available and more will no doubt appear. As the text on seed packets is usually in Japanese, use garden sense and experiment with planting times and LS. See also Brassica Varieties from Asia.
From North America. This root vegetable gives some people unfortunate bowel symptoms. But if you have tried them without ill effect, do obtain a root, cut it in pieces, and plant. Soon, you will have lots of edible roots. Any piece left in the soil will grow again, like horseradish, which is so hard to get rid of it can take over entire plots. If your garden thrives on neglect and sweet chaos, think twice before planting Jerusalem artichokes. Boil and eat like potatoes.
Sow in autumn. Native to Europe. Named varieties of this non-hearting cabbage plant exist, including ornamental ones. One of my childhood delights was boerekool met worst, a Dutch one-pot winter meal of potatoes mashed with finely cut curly green kale and a smoked sausage on top. My love of the invigorating taste of kale remains, and I grow green curly and Siberian purple kale. Kale needs to have a touch of frost to taste really good. By planting in late summer or autumn, they just catch a night frost when they are ready to eat.
Siberian purple kale is not curly but scalloped. It can stand low temperatures, but, strangely enough, is also quite happy in summer, even surviving heat waves. It is more tender than the somewhat tough curly kale. The leaves lend a wonderfully engaging taste to horta, salads, soups, or stir-fries. The young seed heads can be eaten as broccoli shoots. Whereas curly kale grows to broccoli height, Siberian kale can reach 6 feet, setting thousands of seeds in order to survive Siberia’s winter. The seed keeps well. Use it to grow a green crop for digging in or chicken food.
Pick leaves young—wonderful stir-fried in olive oil with ginger, garlic, and onions. For Siberian kale soup (not purple but green) that even my grandsons used to eat with relish: cook leaves with an onion, cool, put through the blender, and season with soy sauce. This soup stands alone in terms of nutrition as well as having a convincing taste impossible to describe. When served to guests accustomed to pale soups with dollops of cream, some are likely to break into praise songs. As Siberian kale is not always available in shops, you have to grow your own to experience this amazing vegetable, also known as Russian red kale.
To grow kale, allow a quarter of your square. This big, beautiful, decorative plant may need staking. No one need go hungry as long as we grow on the seeds of Siberian kale.
Sow in all seasons. From Europe, but also grown in China (gai lan tau) and Vietnam. Prepare soil with CMC and lime. Kohlrabi can develop rather quickly and goes woody if left to linger, so pick them young. A greenish white or purple swollen stem base is the part normally eaten, but young leaves can be used in stir-fries. A taste all its own. Use in soups, as a cooked vegetable, or eat raw.
Sow late summer to autumn, and don’t count on using that plot for more than half a year. The Egyptians grew leeks in 2000 BCE. Leeks can be expensive as they occupy ground for so long. But they are easy to grow from seed, planted out like onions. Apply CMC and lime.
Don’t wait for the tops to dry off as with onions. Harvest leeks when young and tender, when medium sized, and when tall and fat. If you see the flower bud—a papery sheath containing a ball of mauve sparklers—you’re almost too late, as they get woody, but you can still make a batch of concentrated leek soup to put in the freezer. Let the best leek go to seed. When black seeds begin to pop from the sparklers, these are ready to be cut and dried. Old leeks pulled up may have little bulblets at the base. Plant them between cabbages and lettuces, as they take time to become “leeklings.”
Make leek-and-potato soup or use sweet potato; dress it up with a dollop of yogurt garnished with chopped chive stems and young flowers, onion greens, or arugula. Use leek with other greens in dhal and pies, or as a vegetable with hard-boiled-egg sauce.
Leeks in seed are quite decorative.
Sow in all seasons. Companions: beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, radishes, and strawberries. From Asia Minor and the Middle East. Small seed companies may carry more than a dozen varieties: hearting and non-hearting. Some lettuces grow better in winter (butter lettuce, romaine, oak-leaf), others in summer, so you can eat lettuce all year round. Easily grown from seed. As commercial lettuce is grown with human-unfriendly chemicals, it’s worth growing your own.
The smaller, non-heading lettuces are picked from the outside while they keep growing; ideal for the single vegetable gardener. A packet of mesclun mix contains some of the following: green curly, coral leaf, coral curly, romaine, butterhead, oak-leaf, green and red mignonette, Lollo rosso, radicchio, rabbit’s ear, lamb’s ear, and more. See also Chicory, Salad Greens, and Radicchio. To make the plot look pretty, sow lettuce in a small bed, then transplant, alternating red/brown varieties with green ones. This is basic kitchen gardening, where the eye wants to be pleased as much as the taste buds.
Size is important when planting out lettuces. Romaine is tall and erect. Once I saw Romaine 24 inches tall in an organic garden supplying restaurants. Start picking before they become so big. Other lettuces are ground hugging, good for borders until they send up seed stalks with tiny yellow flowers. Lamb’s ear or mache is the smallest, sprawls, and is not a true lettuce. Radicchio, the tough, bitter, and beautiful Italian standby, is a variety of chicory, sending up a tall stalk to produce seed. Before it does, enjoy masses of bright blue flowers.
Collect seed heads when dry, drying further indoors, rubbing between the hands to release seeds into a bowl. Dry another week before storing in screw-top jars. No need to separate different types of lettuces if they will grow in your microclimate through summer and winter. Sprinkle seed mix three or four times a year.
Companion: bush beans. Use horse manure compost. Melons probably originated in Africa but found their home in Central Asia. Hami, near the Turpan Depression in Xinjiang, is known as melon heaven, thanks to ancient irrigation methods and plenty of sunshine. Afghanistan also once grew and exported beautiful melons.
Easily grown from seed in early spring, indoors. Plant out when danger of frost is over. Melons dislike cold nights, so choose a warm spot. Select cantaloupe or green-fleshed honeydew, or heirloom varieties from the Amish, Ukraine, France, or Israel. For a Hami melon, you need a long summer, hence the need to germinate seed under glass. Yet the melon called “Collective Farm Woman” ripened in Moscow. If you tried growing melons and failed, seek out seed to complement your climate. They need CMC, B&B, and good drainage.
To create a warm plot, dig a pit, fill it half with compost, plant melon seedlings, and cover with an old glass door or rigid plastic held down by bricks. Provide ventilation and open up on warm days. Or make a small plastic poly tunnel. Check drainage. Commercial growers use black plastic to warm up the earth and plant seedlings in punched holes. As the vines grow, apply B&B monthly or old chicken manure between plants. Sprinkle lime to deter snails and slugs.
Either grow vines on a wire trellis, supporting melons in net bags, or put planks under rambling melons to stop rot. When ripening, protect melons with cages or cloth bags against rats and possums. In my dam-watered garden, melons stood up to brackish water longer than most other vines. Harvest melons with a piece of stem. If you run out of warm weather, use immature melons for a honey and yogurt desert with roasted sesame seeds. See also Watermelons.
Sow just a pinch of seeds late summer and late winter. This is a quick-growing hot salad green from Japan, widely used in restaurants. Pick leaves from the bottom up. Let one plant set seed.
Sow autumn to spring. From Japan. In its small form, a salad plant, but the larger mizuna, or Japanese endive, is a deeply indented green-leaved plant for cool weather. In summer, it bolts easily. Rather than space out seeds, grow one densely seeded patch so plants shade each other, don’t dry out quickly, and, provided you pick twice a week, continue to provide tender leaves instead of bolting to seed. Add young leaves to a tossed salad for their peppery flavor. Use mature leaves as a steamed vegetable to accompany baked pumpkin or carrots, or mix into a stir-fry.
Sow all seasons, but cool weather preferred. Will grow in acid soil. Natives of Asia and Europe. Giant red (see here), Chinese, black, white (Brassica alba or Sinapis alba syn. Brassica hirta). For others, consult the Seed Savers Exchange website. All have yellow flowers. Easy and hardy. Mixed with legumes, they assist fruiting trees, vines, and tomatoes. Grow yellow mustard as a quick green crop after vegetables; dig in before flowering. Mustard is grown as a vegetable in many countries, as well as for oil and condiments, being a prolific seed producer. They can grow to 4 feet with dinner-plate-sized leaves. Collect enough for your kitchen and the Wild Greens (Horta) Plot. Don’t be without these fast-growing, maintenance-free, tasty, and healthy additions to meals.
Sow autumn, early winter, and spring, depending on whether they are early or late onions. Companions: carrots, nettle, parsley, tomatoes, and violets. (Onions and garlic are not always compatible with peas and beans, but are pest repellents where aphids cause problems.) From Western Asia. The Egyptians grew them in 3000 BCE.
Enrich soil with compost. For acidic soil, sprinkle lime three weeks before planting out. Choose from brown, white, or red salad onions, shallots, and green onions. Grow heirloom varieties from bulbs. Since onions need a long growing and drying off time, consider growing them in boxes to maintain a faster rotation of vegetables in your square. Or, dig an onion square. Or, plant a row of shop onions to sprout along a path and pick green straps for half a year!
Sowing onions directly and then thinning them out is a waste, unless you replant the thinnings. Better to punch holes in a margarine container, fill with fine soil, and sow enough seed to cover. They come up like a forest! From a whole packet, you may obtain a 3⅓-yard onion row. Calculate how many containers to sow for half a year’s supply. When seedlings are 4 inches high, make trenches with a hand trowel, pushing the earth higher on one side. Place seedlings at intervals the size of an onion along the low side of the trench, then fold in the high wall of earth. They will straighten up in a week. Water well.
Since onions look like grass, weed carefully. Top dress with CMC plus straw. Sprinkle OF. As they grow, heap compost around bulbs poking above ground. Pick greens sparingly for salads and stir-fries. Begin harvesting as tops shrivel. Most onion varieties store for several months, braided on a rope and hung in a cool dark place. See Chives for more onion material when stored onions run out.
Onions have one mystery habit. Some grow nice greens before drying off prior to harvest. Others set seed, handsome balls of white or mauve sparklers. If the onion is a good size and you want to save seed, let it happen. Seed growing will completely waste the bulb. Harvest seed when the stem goes yellow. Alternatively, snap flowering stems to let bulbs develop. Why do some onions set seed and others not? Different varieties are sensitive to planting time, too early or too late, and behave accordingly. As your garden’s mini-climate needs to be factored in, you do best to follow general rules and experiment from year to year until you know what your onions tend to do where you are. This is what “knowing your onions” means.
I adore heirloom Welsh bunching onions (Allium fistulosum) from Germany, where welsche means “foreign,” as they arrived there from Siberia. Also known as Japanese bunching onions. Each bulb planted grows a bunch of elongated small onions. They can be propagated from seed or root division. Potato onions also bunch and grow from divisions. Pick green straps sparingly. Find them in markets or at heritage seed outlets. Grow shallots from bulbs. The Egyptian onion, or tree onion, grows a bunch of minute onions, no bigger than your pinkie nail, at the top of the stem. I’ve never quite known what to do with these. I have pickled them, but peeling so many midgets puts me off. They can probably be roasted in the skin like garlic.
Sow in spring, summer, or autumn. Known as mountain spinach, it is native to Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Grows like amaranth. A decorative red or yellow vegetable that stands hot or cold weather, grows to 6 feet high, and provides plentiful spinachy leaves.
Sow in autumn. Companions: carrots, radishes. From Southern and Central Europe. Add some old chicken manure and lime to the soil a few weeks prior to sowing. Sow parsnips like carrots. Pull the biggest ones to make room for little ones to grow. The main problem with parsnips is that the seed does not remain viable very long. Buy seed in a foil packet and sow soon thereafter. Let one parsnip go to seed—the beautiful umbrella head of flowers attracts beneficial insects. Sow new seed straight away; wrap excess seed in foil after drying, and store it in a jar in the bottom of the fridge. Use as soon as convenient.
Slice parsnips and carrots in a baking tray, cover with red onion slices, orange or lemon slices, ground coriander seed, sprinkle with sesame oil and olive oil, and bake under foil in medium oven until al dente. Remove foil to brown. Serve with noodles or sweet or mashed potatoes and a green salad.
Plant September to November and again in early spring. Companions: turnips, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, radishes, and beans. Cultivated as long as 10,000 years ago in Western Asia. Today, most peas are shelled and frozen, but snow peas and sugar snaps are eaten fresh in the pod. The latter two need climbing support, but a bush variety of sugar snaps is available.
Dig in old horse manure and lime. Don’t use a high-nitrogen fertilizer. For climbing peas, rig up poles, wire tower, tepee, or trellis (see Hardware in the Food Garden). Plant peas ½ inch deep and 2 inches apart in a shallow ditch and press earth down by hand. If you have rodents digging up germinating seeds, raise peas indoors in toilet paper tubes. Plant outside when roots hang out the bottom. Tuck in seedlings with compost and cover with leaf mulch, grass clippings, wood ashes, compost, or a mix of all these. Add B&B if plants are slow to develop.
Podded peas are best for freezing and can be used in many decorative ways, in almost any dish you care to prepare, as well as be served as an instant green vegetable when you’ve run out of greens.
Similar to bean sprouts, but grown outside. Easily harvested from peas left in pea straw. Cut them when 4 inches tall and use in curries, stir-fries, and salads. Pea straw peas are called fodder peas but are common podding peas quite suitable for human consumption.
Plant when no frost is expected for four to five months. Companions: nasturtium, corn, or grow after a fava bean crop. Potatoes date back to 11,000 BCE. Their homeland is Peru, where some 3,000 varieties are still being grown on family farms. That’s biodiversity! That huge collection may be needed in the future, if today’s artificial farming methods smite one after another potato with blight, causing a new-age potato famine.
As quite a few plants are inhibited by potatoes, even its cousin the tomato, there is a case for growing potatoes somewhat separate. As potatoes are an important staple food—used baked, mashed, in snacks, soups, salads, and as wedges—it is vital to grow heirloom potatoes to keep strong old strains in the system. Source them from the Seed Savers Exchange. Potatoes return your investment tenfold. Choose from yellow, white, red, and purple varieties, each with its own flavor and properties for cooking, baking, or salads. Select shop- or market-bought tubers you like, grow them, then test how well they keep. Try another variety the following year.
If you can eat potatoes, you are lucky. People with arthritis may not want to eat the fruits of the Solanaceae family (see An A–Z of Vegetable Families). Do make sure growing potatoes stay underground, for any exposed to light develop green patches, a sign of the toxic alkaloid solanine. Do not eat potatoes with green patches: they are toxic, especially for little people.
Growing potatoes in straw: if you have it, grow potatoes in soil, as friable as possible. Potatoes do not like lime. But you can grow them by spreading a thick layer of wet newspaper and a very thick layer of pea straw over a rocky hump where nothing else will grow. Make gutters in the straw and fill with compost, then bury cut potatoes or peelings, covering again with straw and sprinkling B&B. When plants are big and healthy, stick your hand under the straw, feel around, and steal the biggest potatoes for dinner without the plant even noticing. Keep covering this arrangement with more compost and straw. It’s a different potato game from the wholesale ripping out of plants on commercial farms, after all tops have been sprayed to die off simultaneously. Eventually, your plants will flower and stop growing. Harvest all and replant baby spuds. Do not plant potatoes in the same place year after year. Make a fresh plot or tub each time. Store potatoes in a cool place away from light after rubbing off any eyes.
Growing potatoes in tubs or wire cylinders: This method also works in winter, as it elevates potatoes above the frost line. Use a plastic or wooden tub, or make a chicken-wire cylinder lined with thick layers of wet newspaper. Or, use old buckets without bottoms or the body of an old washing machine. Place in a warm spot on high ground or stack between biscuits of straw.
For the tub, cut one potato with eyes into pieces, place in the bottom of the tub, and cover with old manure and straw. When plants appear, surround the plants with more soil and straw, or add soft weeds and non-invasive grass clippings. Repeat as the plant grows up inside the tub. In a cylinder, do the same, making sure plants get no more light than in a tub. In other containers, fill up as soon as plants appear, because they will reach for the light faster. If your soil gets waterlogged in winter, grow potatoes on higher ground or use the above methods. If you expect true wet seasons, harvest all before the onset. Never plant in low-lying pockets.
Convert lawn to a food plot by laying small potatoes on one 3-foot square of lawn and cover with manure and thick straw mulch. As plants appear, add more mulch. The grass becomes potato food, and, after harvest, you can plant other vegetables. May not work with some grasses.
Sow in spring. Dates back to 7000 BCE in Mexico. Also see Squash. The variety of pumpkins is stunning. In our shops, you mainly buy pie pumpkins and yellow butternut (not a true pumpkin) because these have long keeping qualities. But, generally, blue and green ones are the keepers, while yellow and orange ones are for eating soon. If you see an unusual pumpkin, buy it, dry the seeds indoors for a month, then refrigerate overnight. Rub off the silvery membranes before storing in an airtight container. If you have mice, don’t leave pumpkin seeds uncovered; they’ll bring the clan to devour them. Growers’ markets, small seed companies, and the Seed Savers Exchange are sources for varieties of pumpkin seed suitable for all climates. There are also mini pumpkins for singles and giant pumpkins weighing in at hundreds of pounds for the whole clan.
Start seed early under glass to allow for a long warm season. Dig holes one spade deep and fill with manure, soft weeds, grass clippings, and compost, adding lime for acidic soils. When this sinks down, add more compost and mulch and plant seedlings in a depression when all danger of frost is over. Although pumpkins survive dry days, to get results, a daily watering at the roots is needed.
After a year’s gardening, you may find pumpkin plants coming up in the compost. These are strong and viable. Leave them in place, or transplant them with a clod of earth attached. One of our keeper pumpkins had begun to rot, and I didn’t want to insult the chickens with it. Thrown on the compost heap in autumn, it dissolved in winter rains, but in spring, there were scores of dark green seedlings ready to transplant.
Mini pumpkins and butternuts are for small gardens, but most pumpkins need to sprawl. If you hope to limit your food garden to one or two squares, plant them on the edge to sprawl over, or make a pumpkin station somewhere else. Dig a bag of manure into a backyard corner (as long as the hose can reach it), raise a compost mound on top, and plant seedlings in a circle, protected by bottomless yogurt tubs. When they grow over the edges, remove protectors.
Pumpkin aficionados will pinch out the tips of pumpkin vines to encourage production of less but bigger fruit. When pumpkins are half grown, pinch every vine and carry the tips, complete with two or three furry leaves, flowers, and embryo fruit, to the kitchen. Steam lightly, toss in coconut cream, and serve hot. From mid-summer on, discourage the formation of more fruit by picking flowers. As a side dish, quick-fry these in batter, with or without vine tips, and sprinkle with parmesan.
Pumpkins carry male and female flowers on the same plant and are pollinated by bees. Observation tells gardeners that, according to weather and temperature, pumpkins will, in some seasons, produce all male flowers for a long time, whereas ideally female flowers bloom simultaneously. Yet when male and female flowers are in attendance but the weather is dark and cloudy, bees don’t leave the hive. Then, the gardener should consider hand-pollinating. Every morning, pick freshly opened male flowers (slender stem) and rub their pollen onto the stamen of the female flowers (swollen stem base), until the sun and bees return. Also do this when bees become scarce.
Pumpkins benefit from pruning in late summer to help maturing fruit. Cut vines to the nearest maturing pumpkin. Do this carefully, as half-grown pumpkins hide under leaves and you’ll really regret cutting off a one-pound junior. Now all the nutrients that course through the vines benefit pumpkins that will make the end of the season. If in doubt whether a small pumpkin has time to ripen, consider that even an unripe pumpkin makes good soup if you spice it up with onions, garlic, coriander, and cumin.
Maddeningly, when cool weather arrives, the vines go into production again! With autumn on the doorstep, new tips with tiny pumpkins appear everywhere! Have another meal of steamed tips in coconut cream, or toss tips into an end-of-season stir-fry with the last beans, broccoli shoots, or whatever is about to be pulled up, and some Thai curry paste. Serve with rice—so healthy!
By autumn, the vines take up a lot of space, yet they need to dry off before you should cut away the fruit with a short stem. Sometimes, when short of space, I carefully separate vines to clear space between them without disturbing the pumpkins. After filling the space with new compost, I may grow a quick crop of lettuce or radishes, even cauliflowers that stay after the pumpkins are harvested. Or, I’ll pick up the end of a vine and coil it like a rope around its root, being careful to lift each attached pumpkin by hand. There they can sit—on a paver or plank—until they’re done.
When the vines are dry, or if rains threaten to rot pumpkin tops, cut fruit with 2 inches of stem and place in a dry place, preferably in full sun, to harden off. In North India and Nepal, you see pumpkins drying on roofs, holding down the thatch. If your harvest season is damp, harden them off in a covered area. Hardy varieties will keep from several months to one year, so that you could be eating the last one when the new crop is getting ready. Occasionally, a rat or possum will attack a pumpkin with a soft top, but well-hardened pumpkins are usually left alone. Not all varieties harden off like Queensland blues and butternut, so store others in a cool room. The mini pumpkin “golden nugget” keeps well, too.
A friend saw one pumpkin vine climb her apple tree in autumn and flower. “Silly old thing,” she thought and left it to its endeavours. Mid-winter, while weeding, she found a perfect pumpkin on a dried-up vine, gently sinking down in the grass.
If you have grown a colorful variety of pumpkins, squashes, and zucchinis, pile them artistically on a garden table, take a photo, and send copies to friends. If they are astonished at your productivity, send them seed! Make yourself a batch of pumpkin pakora. Mix besan (chickpea flour) with your favorite spices and popped mustard seed into a thin batter. Leave standing while cutting pumpkin into thin wedges. Dip into batter and deep-fry until golden. The gardener’s reward.
Sow in spring and autumn. Companions: beets, carrots, and onions, which all provide root shade in summer. From Asia Minor. Also see Lettuce. Italian growers achieve amazing red to purple coloration of the leaves by leaving them out in the cold, then digging them up, balancing them above water, and covering plants with black plastic. On cold nights, all that may happen spontaneously, except for the long curling shoots. Heirloom chicories from Italy are radicchio for the salad bowl. What Italian cooks do not do with radicchio is not worth mentioning. The leaves can be shells for Waldorf salads with olives, or covered with steaming bean soup, served with antipasto, or grilled with olive oil.
Sow in all seasons. Companion: nasturtium (one seed will do!). Probably from the Mediterranean, but had dispersed to Egypt by 2000 BCE, thence to China and Japan. Choose from small round red, long red, red and white, European black, giant daikon or Japanese white, or the bulbous Chinese red radish (I wondered what people did with those). Sow small ones in spring and most of the year, big ones in autumn. Salad radishes grow so easily that kids can do it. Big ones need deep soil, or a deep box, tub, or cylinder.
There may be as many types of radishes as there are chilies, and with luck, or carelessness, you may create a new variety. Years ago, I grew my first daikons alongside round, red table radishes. Plants of both went to seed and the bees must have cross-fertilized the daikons. The next year, using saved daikon seed, I harvested monstrous round red radishes. They were good to eat, some hot, some mild, but there were buckets of them. I saved their seed, calling it “Lolo radish.”
During a stay in Singapore, we lunched at a hawker’s stall with our hostess. “Try carrot cake,” she advised, “it’s my favorite.” We thought of European-style carrot cake, and decided we’d rather have spicy noodles. Days later, when looking for tea and cake, we saw a sign announcing carrot cake. This time, I was in the mood for it. We ordered, sat down, and waited. After a while, the hawker brought tea and a large plate of steaming something. “I ordered carrot cake,” I pointed out politely. The cook looked annoyed. “This is carrot cake,” he said decisively, pointed at the dish and walked away. We took a spoonful each. It was yummy and we began to analyze it. Scrambled egg and green onions were easy to identify, but it took a sly walk past the hawker’s stall to see that the unidentified ingredient was grated daikon, the large white radish. Perhaps it was translated as “white carrot.”
So, I started to make Chinese carrot cake at home with my monstrous round reds. It is a great feed. Asian cookbooks have more recipes, but try rolling grated daikon into patties with besan (chickpea flour), and spices, then deep-frying. Grated daikon gives new flavor to old stir-fry combinations. Try it in soups, and use it to thicken sauces. But dig your soil very deep, or the daikon will push up and turn green up top. Cut off any green parts before using.
Daikon prefers cool weather, winter being best. Like all root vegetables, it should not grow in manured soil. Deep good earth with compost, topped with straw, is just fine. Tie a red ribbon or yarn on the best one and let it flower. The giant plant produces hundreds of white or pinkish mauve flowers visited by beneficial insects. Flowers turn into fat green pods. You don’t need all of these for seed. Pick smaller pods while fresh and green, parboil a few minutes, drain, pack in small jars, and cover with vinegar and a spoonful of oil. Large pods take time to fill out before seed is dry. Prune the bush down to what you want to save. To sow seed next year, break open the pods to release the seeds—this may have to be done in a mortar and pestle. Grow daikon sprouts by sowing seeds thickly in a pot. Harvest white stems with two green cotyledons at 2 or 3 inches for soups and salads. Or sprout seed like mung beans.
Finally, try grated apple and white daikon salad with a dressing of sweet- and-sour or spicy plum sauce. Daikon is useful in many dishes, produces bountiful seed, and attracts good insects. Do grow a few.
Plant rhizomes in autumn in well-manured soil topped with compost. Water well when stalks form in spring and summer. From Manchuria and Siberia; traded along the Silk Road in early times. The deep red or pale green rhubarb leaves are toxic, but if you have a bug problem in the garden, spread rhubarb leaves around affected plants. Only the stems are edible. Red rhubarb has the looks, but the green ones also taste fine.
For a yummy dessert, cook rhubarb, sweeten, and beat in cream cheese. Top with mint leaves and a strawberry. Or bake a rhubarb bread pudding.
Frost tolerant, sow spring to autumn. Companion: elderberry (spread branches around rutabagas to discourage borers). Keep mulch away from roots. There are Chinese, Japanese, English, and American rutabagas. These firm bulbous roots are sweet and juicy when eaten raw and young, or grated in salads. They can taste a bit earthy when cooked, but are great in soups, absorbing other flavors. Like radishes, they grow easily and rapidly, and are well worth cultivating. Fork soil lightly, but don’t fertilize if they follow a previous crop of gross feeders. Do not plant after brassicas. Some LS for the seedlings should be enough.
Salads start with lettuces, but the young leaves of many other plants can add interest, flavor, and more nutrition to the bowl. Some are found in mesclun mixes, but not often in the shop selection. Farmers’ market mesclun may be more on the wild side, as they are in France, where these salads originated.
Pick young leaves to 4 inches of amaranth, beet, bok choy, borage, fava beans, buckwheat, chervil, chicory, Chinese cabbage, collards, cilantro, cress, dandelion, endive, kale, mibuna, mizuna, mustard, nasturtium, peas, arugula, salad burnet, salsify, chard, sorrel, spinach, rutabaga, tatsoi, and turnip. Check edible flowers under Flowers. For salad dressings, see here.
Sow direct in spring 4 inches apart. Also known as oyster plant (not the ornamental variety). From the Mediterranean. The tapered white salsify root has a delicate taste when boiled or baked and served with butter sauce. Leaves are edible and good in salads. As salsify grows deeper than carrots, cultivate soil two spades deep. Apply CMC between plants, which can grow to over 3 feet tall. See also Scorzonera.
Plant in spring. Strong climber, but appears not to like hot, dry climates, although it originated in Mexico’s mountains. Mine succeeded at an elevation of 1,600 feet with cool nights. Stringy green pods up to 12 inches contain pink-spotted black beans. String, then thinly slice beans prior to cooking. It has gorgeous scarlet flowers and is prolific under the right conditions.
Sow direct in spring 4 inches apart. Also known as black salsify. From Southern Europe. The tapered root, of delicate taste, is similar to salsify, though dark brown. Cultivate like salsify. If the top of the root is cut off and replanted, it grows a second harvest of smaller spears.
Any season. A perennial from the European mountains from Italy to Germany. A wild plant usually bought as a potted herb, but prolific enough to be classed a vegetable. Seed is available. Sorrel is related to dock, a giant cousin producing thousands of seeds per single stem, sinking roots to the center of the earth. Sorrel doesn’t do that.
Depending on the soil, sorrel forms a migrating, self-seeding clump or is content with one fifth of a square, which is all you need. Water like lettuce. Not fussy and needs no fertilizer. Come winter, the plant goes mostly dormant. I grow mine in a box.
Pick sorrel for a fresh sour flavor in salads. Sorrel soup is a delicacy. Sauté sorrel leaves and blend with stock. Serve with black pepper and a teaspoon of cream. Add to kale, cabbage, and spinach. The French also put sorrel into leek- and-potato soup for la difference.
Plant in part shade to make it last. Sow in autumn with B&B and compost. English spinach. Originally from Iran. It thrives only during the cool months. A perennial spinach related to chard (Beta vulgaris) grows virtually all year round in a clump and tastes truly spinachy. Pick the large, light green leaves. When it goes to seed, let the best stalk have its head. Keep picking. Cut the clump down after harvesting seed, spread CMC around it, and water well to encourage new growth. Spinach likes nitrogen, so add B&B occasionally. Next season, cultivate new clumps from seedlings.
See also Amaranth. Chinese spinach (Amaranthus gangeticus) can grow several feet high. Other plants going by the common name of spinach in their places of origin are Ceylonese spinach (Basella rubra) on long creepers, and Indian spinach named saag, which is popular in Indian cooking. Pick these vegetables from the bottom up, as needed.
English spinach is a delicious accompaniment for young potatoes and baby carrots in butter, spicy tofu with noodles, or in a real spinach quiche. For the baking of spinach loaves, triangles, pies, and similar weekend food, grow perennial spinach and gourmet chard. They take little space and shrink less than English spinach.
Sow in spring. Companion: nasturtiums. Also see Pumpkins. Squashes come in colors, stripes, and shapes from buttons to giants. For the square-yard principle that inspired this book, look at baby squash, also called button squash or “patty pan.” You see them in baskets at gourmet green-grocers—toy flying saucers with scalloped edges in bright yellow, white, green, or striped. Expensive to buy, yet they grow readily.
Start two or three seedlings in toilet paper tubes under glass. Plant on one quarter when danger of frost is over, definitely before the first day of summer. They may need support. They benefit by having their roots in a shallow trench or earth saucer to hold the daily watering. Smaller squashes climb on wire netting. Female flowers need to be fertilized through bees or human hand to set fruit. They crop quickly and produce into autumn. At the height of the season, you’ll pick several each day.
Pick patty pan when 4 inches across or smaller, then cover with water, simmer until a fork goes in, drain, and slice in wedges. Serve with mustard, lime pickle, or homemade apple and rosemary chutney to retain the delicate texture and taste. Dice leftovers in a garden salad. Particularly good is sliced button squash grilled or baked and served with garlic, ginger, and herb butter.
To pickle patty pan, pick fruit small—about 2 to 3 inches. Parboil until a fork just goes in with resistance. Drain and keep covered in a tea towel. Boil half water, half vinegar with a rosemary twig and bay leaf, remove herbs, and when liquid has cooled, pack buttons in jars, pour liquid to ½ inch under the lid, and close tightly. Leave for a month. Eat all once jar is opened.
For large appetites, the Hubbard squash (Cucurbita maxima), which is really a pumpkin, comes highly recommended. It keeps several months if stored in a dry, airy place. This ungainly fruit, resembling a retired football, has fine orange flesh and large white seeds that can be roasted, after saving some for replanting. And if you have too many, do what the Shakers did. They peeled, thinly sliced, and dried pumpkin flesh, then ground it into flour for pumpkin bread.
Companions: beans, potatoes, pumpkins, squashes (see the Aztec Plot). From South America. Many varieties, including popping corn, are available from small seed companies and the Seed Savers Exchange. Grow only one variety per season if you save your own seed. Maize is more starchy than the juicy corn on the cob and is grown for the processed food industry and as stock feed.
This ancient plant loves warmth and sun. Frost kills it. Plant late spring and be prepared to sow again if a cold spell hits. Sweet corn needs five months to mature. Plant as late as June if your summers are long. Several weeks before planting, dig in manure and an organic nitrogen and phosphorus-rich fertilizer. Add lime or wood ash to acidic soil. See the Starchy Staples Plot. Sweet corn can grow with less water than dark green leafy plants, but the cobs are bigger and better if watered well. Deep mulch around the plants reduces water needs.
Plant sweet corn in a square and hammer in strong, tall stakes at the corners. Place corn seeds in pairs inside a protector (PVC pipe ring or bottomless yogurt tub) to prevent night prowlers digging them up. Push in a piece of screening for good measure and don’t remove either until the seedling pushes against the wire. By then, the seed is no longer attractive to prowlers. Apply LS. As stalks grow, wind a rope around the stakes to keep plants upright in the wind. Plant a short variety if you live in a stormy place. Don’t plant sweet corn in a long row; they need close proximity for cross-pollination. Once stalks are up and away, apply chicken manure, OF or B&B, mulch with straw, and water well.
When the silken tassels on the tops turn brown, the cobs are ripening. Strip down one cob leaf to see whether kernels have filled out and ooze milky sap when pinched. Don’t let them stand too long; they get tough and starchy. Each kernel is attached to one silken thread in the tassel, so that a thin tassel means part of the cob has not filled out.
To foil rats, make collars under the cobs from large waxed paper plates, cut to the center to fit around the stems like umbrellas. Staple the cut, then wrap the stem with a cloth strip to hold the plate up.
Freeze ripe cobs. No need to blanch. Peel and pack into the freezer. Eat corn on the cob with butter, after boiling in plenty of water. Barbecue, or roast cobs at picnics.
The usefulness of the sweet corn plant does not end there. Tassels are used in basket weaving or decorative loom weaving, and dried leaves make bread and fruit baskets. Leaves and stalks are used as fodder for domestic livestock, and cobs can also be dried for kindling.
Plant late spring after frost. Probably from Mexico and now a staple food in the Pacific Islands, Africa, and Asia. Sweet potatoes are generally larger than ordinary spuds and not related. The white, yellow, orange, or purple tubers are a staple food in Papua, New Guinea’s highlands, where the soil is volcanic and every afternoon at 4:00 p.m. the rain pelts down for an hour.
Sprout a sweet potato on top of the fridge. Cut off pieces and grow in pots indoors until warm weather allows planting outside. Mulch thickly and keep moist. As they need five months to develop, you may have to bring them in again later.
Having sprouted a sweet potato, take side stems of no more than 8 inches with a heel (the bit that attached them to the main stem) and root them in a glass of water. This way you make more plants to grow outside when summer arrives.
In Papua New Guinea, we boiled sweet potatoes in coconut milk, made by squeezing grated coconut in warm water, or baked it with bananas in an earthen oven. Following local custom, we ate the heart-shaped leaves on tender vines as a tasty spinach, also steamed in coconut milk. Sweet potatoes are delicious boiled, baked, roasted, or fried. In Hong Kong, they are prepared with sugar, nuts, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and served as a sweet.
Sow late summer or autumn. Companion: bush beans. Favorite Asian greens. A flat, dark green rosette with an endearing flavor. Loves cool weather. Pick outer leaves while it grows on. Lends a distinct flavor to salads and stir-fries. Plant a quarter, because it shrinks like spinach.
Solanum genus. Sow in spring. Companions: same as for tomatoes (asparagus, garlic chives, young mustard, parsley, stinging nettle). It is the cousin of Cape gooseberry. From Mexico. Drought tolerant. Grown like tomatoes, they produce small yellow or purple fruit in papery lanterns. Used for salsa with garlic and onions, and in sauces and salads.
Sow in spring. Plant out after frosts cease. Companions: asparagus, garlic chives, young mustard, parsley, stinging nettle. From Mexico. Tomato plants protect gooseberry shrubs from insect attacks. Organic gardening author Peter Bennett grows a green crop of barley before planting tomatoes to provide phosphorus. When I planted four cherry tomatoes, the one with self-seeded onion, nettle, and young cabbage as neighbors grew to more than double the size of the others. The onion also looked better than its mates.
Choose bush or climbing, big beefy fruit or cherry size, in colors from red, orange, pink, and yellow to black Russian. Look to seed companies or the Seed Savers Exchange for heirloom gourmet varieties. Prepare soil with organic matter low in nitrogen, no chicken manure, and a little lime for acidic soil. When the staked plants stand tall, drooping with bright orange globes, the heart swells. There are as many tomato experts as there are tomato growers. The tomato is the food gardener’s pride.
Unless you want to make tomato sauce, you need just one good cropper on a stake, or two cherry tomatoes or bush tomatoes, or one of each. Start seed in toilet paper tubes under glass in early spring. Plant out when all risk of frost has gone. Douse with LS. A pot of garlic chives nearby prevents wilt.
Save your own seed from a ripe tomato, wash off the pulp in a sieve, then place seeds on paper towels ½ inch apart each way. Let this tomato towel dry thoroughly indoors before storing in a paper bag. Next spring, cut off as many seeds on paper as you want plants, lay each one on soil in a toilet paper tube, sprinkle with ½ inch of fine soil, water daily, and raise behind glass. The paper disintegrates.
Freeze cherry tomatoes for use in sauce, juice, or stir-fries. Let them ripen to a good red, wash, and drop the daily handful in a freezer container. For pasta sauce, sauté garlic and onions, oregano, basil, or parsley in plenty of olive oil before adding defrosted or fresh diced tomatoes. Add pepper and salt, but little or no sugar. Use wine vinegar to the degree of acidity you want. Bottle hot. Once a bottle has been opened, keep it in the fridge. Alternatively, make a Balti sauce—see Fenugreek.
Frost tolerant. Plant spring to autumn. If soil is acidic, fork in a little lime three weeks prior to sowing. Companion: elderberry (spread branches around plot to discourage borers). Described in Alexander the Great’s time, and probably from the Middle East and Iran. Cultivate like rutabagas. They deserve better.
Plant after a well-manured crop, but not brassicas. Apply LS regularly. Choose white, yellow, green, or purple top. Roots and edible tops are best when grown quickly and eaten young. Make several sowings during spring and summer, and see whether they will grow all year in your microclimate, for turnips are actually biennial. They provide a pithy taste to soups and stews and bulk up other dishes when sliced, cubed, or grated raw. Stir-fry the leaves, serve with mustard and soy sauce. Tenzin Palmo, the Buddhist nun who lived fourteen years in a Himalayan cave, grew turnips all summer as the roots kept well into winter. Middle Eastern pickled turnip makes a good condiment. Use one part vinegar to two parts water, a quarter part salt, and add sliced beets or garlic cloves.
Plant in spring. Companion: a compost heap! Originally from Africa, watermelons have spread themselves around the globe for about 3,000 years. Mini watermelon seed is available. A farmer I know, who began growing watermelons as a boy, saved the seed from the biggest melon every year to plant the next. His watermelons became bigger and bigger, and by the time he was a young man, his biggest watermelon was 36 × 18 inches! That is what farmers have always done in imitation of natural selection. This farmer raises money for charities every year with his champion watermelons.
Our friend Maureen has always been besotted with watermelons. Whenever we went camping—when we were young and restless—she would keep her eyes peeled for watermelon signs in roadside villages, uttering a bloodcurdling cry when spotting one. She always bought a whole melon the size of a giant’s football. Seeing Maureen eat watermelon was beholding pure happiness. When she married fellow camper John, who bought many a watermelon to woo her, they set up house and garden, and Maureen continued to eat watermelons. Great was her joy when told that the little plants with scalloped leaves springing up in her compost heap were watermelon seedlings from the pips she’d spat out! Soon, she harvested her own watermelons. That is lasting happiness! In China, they roast the seeds, full of protein and unsaturated oil, to nibble. We are wasteful when it comes to pumpkin and melon pips.
Watermelon seeds germinate readily. They like rich soil and some lime. Horse manure preserves the moisture that melons need. They must grow plump in full sun, needing a long, warm growing season. Start them off in toilet paper tubes, indoors or under glass, then harden seedlings off outside during the daytime. Plant out when weather is warm. Cultivate like pumpkins.
There are a number of edible plants that grow in pots sunk into a pond, or in a big water pot—like lotus and water chestnut. Consult catalogs of small seed companies or specialty nurseries.
Companions: young nasturtiums, but zucchini will be retarded if growing near chard, which could be a good thing. From Central America. Called courgettes when picked young. Zucchinis belong to the family of gourds, squashes, and pumpkins in the genus Cucurbita. They are green, white, or black, smooth or ribbed. They like rich soil with some lime. Plant in a depression to hold water. It is said that growing zucchinis is easy: all you have to do is turn your back. This, for once, is true. One summer, it rained a few days. When I looked again, there was a zucchini 18 inches long of commensurate width. I juiced it for a week at one glass per day. If you make juice, you will cope with more than one plant. Delicious with apples, carrots, and ginger.
Most families need just one or two plants. A container of seedlings better be shared around. Or, plant two seeds in toilet paper tubes. Pick zucchinis young and regularly.
Zucchinis, like pumpkins, produce male and female flowers on thin and swollen stems to be pollinated by bees. If your garden has no bees, plant bee-attracting herbs and pollinate by hand the first year by picking a just-opened male flower and pushing it into an open female flower, rubbing carefully. You feel you’re invading their privacy. Place the used male flower in a tiny vase in the kitchen.
When zucchini plants have produced their first spectacular burst of fruits, they start looking like giant green centipedes lying with their feet in the air. Suddenly, there are but few flowers and hardly any fruit. Rejuvenate them by pruning. Cut off all leaves from the beginning of the main stem up to where the fruit is forming, leaving enough leaves to shade new fruit. This enables plants to put all nutrients into a second production run, not as boisterous as the first, but satisfyingly regular. In late summer and early autumn, let fruit grow to full capacity. The skin hardens, and it becomes a gourd to keep for a while and save seed from.
There are more recipes for zucchini than anything else. If all you have ever tried is fried zucchini, battered male zucchini flowers (only in the zucchini and pumpkin world is it the males who get battered), and zucchini soup, become adventurous. Try sliced male zucchini flowers in an omelet, bake zucchini cake and bread with marigold petals, or grate zucchini into lettuce with herbs, oil, lemon, and soy sauce. You can grill zucchini with tomatoes, garlic, cheese, and basil, serve zucchini sandwiches with chutney or grilled cheese and mustard, and make velvet zucchini soup with arugula, coriander, cumin, and lemongrass. Or stir-fry zucchini with green beans and broccoli or tomato chutney, and make up your own zucchini relish, jams, and pickles. My favorite salad is grated zucchini and carrots with chopped celery or grated apple and a dressing of Dijon mustard, curry powder, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. Pure health.
THE SOLANUM FAMILY of plants is now ubiquitous, but the ones we eat most originally came from Central and South America only five centuries ago after Columbus sailed the wrong way. Europeans first eyed them with suspicion, and they weren’t half wrong! Solanum plants are recognizable by their five-petaled flowers—white, mauve, or other—and pronounced yellow pistil. The family includes potatoes, tomatoes, red peppers, eggplants, chilies, and a number of other edible plants. Those five are the mainstay of fast-food outlets; the potatoes so filling, the others so colorful and tasty. There are solanums indigenous to other continents, such as goji berries from Asia and kangaroo apple from Australia (see An A–Z of Vegetable Families).
When buying seeds and plants, check labels for solanum or Solanaceae, as these plants contain solanines that, in small amounts, do not bother most people, but can aggravate certain forms of arthritis. One has to make dietary choices sometimes, but if you are not able to eat these summer favorites, you are free to indulge in other exotic vegetables: “Darling, I’d be stricken if I ate your beautiful solanum salsa, but I brought my own avocado and mango pickle, is that all right?”
Solanums and many other vegetables can have extended usage when grown at home (see Preserving and Using Home Produce).
Grows in winter. Save seed to re-sow in autumn. Perennial or wild arugula (Diplotaxis tenuifolia) grows through summer, dies down and reappears in the same spot in spring. Both make delicious pesto. In the blender, reduce a bowl of leaves to a pulp while drizzling in a little olive oil and a tablespoon of lemon juice, gradually adding a cup of pine nuts (or walnuts or cashews), and blend. Add two cloves of garlic, 2 tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese, and blend. Drizzle in more olive oil, if needed. Pack in small containers and freeze for instant, delicious pasta and dips.
Dry on the bush, remove seeds from pod, and store.
Eat whole young pods, up to 4 inches, picked around the bottom of the plant. Do not cut off ends, but lightly cook whole pod. Pick large pods as they form from bottom up, and shell. Enjoy fresh beans and freeze surplus by immediately packing portions in the freezer, without blanching. Keep picking and freezing as the pods mature. Can be dried.
The chopped young leaves are delicious sautéed in olive oil with garlic, lime leaf, and sprigs of sage, thyme, and rosemary. From six plants, pick two leaves each occasionally. Broccoli seed heads, flowers, and stems are eaten while tender, raw in salads, or tossed in olive oil.
Can be stored stuck upright in a box of sand. Grows all year as well. Cook surplus carrots to a mash, spice with salt, cumin, and green herb of choice, like tarragon, roll into rissoles, and freeze in portions.
Eat leaves as from broccoli. The taste is quite different but good.
Treat as eggplants and red peppers. Dry on a string in a shady veranda. Or, cut plants at soil level when most chilies have turned red and hang upside down in an airy, shady place. This allows nutrients to flow into the fruit from the stems.
If your microclimate is not too cold, cut plants to 8 inches after harvest and cover with bottomless plastic bottles for overwintering. They may shoot again in spring, becoming perennial. Or, overwinter in pots in the sunroom. Can be sliced and dried or pickled.
Also known as finocchio. This beautiful plant has many uses. Grow for the edible bulbs, but serve them raw to retain vitamins and minerals. Keep at least one plant to grow up and flower. It survives a long time during which you use the ferny leaves in cooking, added to soups, omelets, the greens pot, mixed stir-fries, rice pilaf, risotto, cooked and served warm, or sparingly in salads. The aniseed taste is strong, so experiment with quantities. Let seed heads develop, and harvest green seeds for curries. Dried seeds keep a long time. Ground to powder, a pinch of fennel lifts just about any dish, fry, or soup. Indispensable in Indian cooking.
The Chinese, and others on the vast Asian continent where melons grow, save seeds of melons, dry and toast them, and sell them in little bags. You split them open between your teeth to find a delicious little flat kernel inside. This habit may never catch on in fast-moving societies, although it does alleviate stress! When we have melon, I sometimes save a saucer of rinsed seed and put it by the computer. Makes me write better.
A refreshing instant pickle from Japan is made with a bunch of young mustard leaves, parboiled for seconds to a bright green. Chop finely, sprinkle with a little sea salt and lemon juice. Serve cold as a side dish. Young flower heads of mustard plants can be added to salads, steamed with soy sauce, and drizzled with sesame oil. Mustard plants clean up the soil for other crops.
Although onions are traditionally planted at Easter, you can plant whole onions from the shop any time to grow them for their fresh green straps. They start sprouting within weeks of finding themselves having a second life in real soil and reward you for many months. Buy a large bag of unsorted barbecue onions for a ridiculously low price—an opportunity for the grower to sell all of his crop, not just supermarket standard sizes. Plant these beautiful bulbs in borders of beds with kale and spinach. Once the green straps grow lustily, pick them for soups, salads, stir-fries, omelets, homemade pizza, and the pot that sautés your daily green leaves. When the bulbs are exhausted, they divide into small onions. How generous is that?
Can be dried on the bushes, shelled, and stored.
Potatoes are cheap to grow and crop heavily. Source seed potatoes from cooler climates to avoid viruses. Or, select healthy spuds from a good shop and cut into pieces with “eyes.” If you want large potatoes, remove all but one stem from the plant. Multi-stemmed plants produce more but smaller potatoes. Potatoes are full of vitamins and minerals. I was born into a potato culture. My favorite potato food, apart from real French fries, was spicy potato rissoles with herbs. Make them from mashed potato with corn or potato flour, parsley, nutmeg, five-spice, salt, pepper, and breadcrumbs. Fry in olive oil on both sides and eat hot. Great in a salad or with a bread salad. Potatoes keep for some time laid out on newspaper, not touching, in a cool, dark place.
Eat the pumpkins, and most of the male flowers when enough fruit has set. Shred flowers on salads or dip in a thin batter and deep-fry. When vines get longer and fruit is growing, harvest tips and side shoots of young leaves to steam in coconut cream. When harvested—always with 2 inches of stem—harden off pumpkins on a table in the sun. When cooking, save the nutritious seeds. Set aside enough seed for replanting, dry and store. Dry the rest, rub off the silvery outer skins, and roast slowly in a low oven. Watch them, as they can burn quite suddenly. Roasted pumpkin seeds can be chewed if you don’t mind a little roughage, or spitting. Or grind them in a spice grinder and put through a sieve to obtain a nutty flour to add to cake and biscuit dough. Mix cooked, mashed pumpkin into dough; add sugar or five- spice, or both, to make pumpkin scones and loaves. Pumpkin soup freezes well.
One red pepper plant grown with plenty of manure and great care once produced as many as 100 fruits! Overwinter as for eggplants. Can be dried, or roasted, then pickled—or frozen raw.
Most people think Swiss chard when spinach is mentioned. But real spinach is more delicate and tender with a taste all its own. It gave old Popeye his legendary strength to defeat adversaries, and, in my youth, all children were told they would never grow if they didn’t eat their spinach. This wonderful vegetable grew profusely in the damp grey atmosphere of pre–global warming Holland and England. When Mama came back from the greengrocer with a large, lightweight bundle wrapped in newspaper, I knew we’d be sorting spinach. The bright green bunches were soaked in a tub of water to let bits of soil and manure sink to the bottom, since all vegetables were organic. Then, we’d lift each bunch and check it for seeds. Spinach seeds are not unlike three-cornered jacks, and you don’t want to find them on your tongue, not even cooked! After reducing spinach briefly on high heat in water that clung to the leaves, Mama drained it before serving mixed with butter and breadcrumbs.
English or European spinach is a delicious accompaniment for young potatoes and baby carrots in butter, or spicy tofu with noodles, or in a real spinach quiche. Spinach shrinks dramatically during even the briefest of cooking, so you need a field to get your fill. But perennial spinach can be picked frequently and will soon regrow, throughout hot weather and cold. Keep picking large leaves and, when it goes to seed, let the best stalk have its head, while gradually stripping the rest for meals. When the clump has been pruned down and dried seed harvested, spread composted manure and compost around the plant and water well for new growth and seedlings. Spinach likes nitrogen; feed it B&B. After a year, cultivate new clumps from spontaneous seedlings. Small seed companies carry spinach seeds from many countries: New Zealand, Egypt, Sri Lanka, and more. A fleshy type is French Viroflay spinach, while Indian saag is my comfort food.
One summer, I grew four different heritage tomatoes, three climbers and one bush. You learn a few things by comparing.
The Amish brandywine tomato is a phenomenal climber, rising 10 feet, therefore flowering late. When it does, it is advisable to prune off all branches not carrying flowers. The puckered fruit is enormous. One fruit fills the palm of my hand; one whopper filled both hands. The fruit tends to split along the creases. Not one fruit ripened on the vine, probably because of our altitude with cool nights and misty mornings, our late springs, and our early onsets of autumn. Also, a fat 2-inch-long whitish green worm eats big holes into brandywine. I brought the fruit in as soon as it started coloring, to ripen indoors to a smooth pinkish orange. Even totally green fruit ripened indoors. The taste is exceedingly good. A childhood memory taste. Given full sun most of the day, brandywine produces great tomato volume for sauces, chutneys, salads, salsas, and frozen tomato soup.
The Russian black climbed on an 8-foot wire tower, its tomato the size of a large ping-pong ball. It intertwined with the Russian black cherry tomato, the size of big cherries. These two were the first to flower and set fruit and cropped over two months. The black cherry tomatoes are the most prolific, akin to similar cherry tomatoes in the regular red-orange range. Both black Russians taste like childhood on a stick, absolutely delicious. One of my visiting sons tasted one from a handful placed with crackers, biscuits, and nuts set out at coffee time, and soon was popping them into his mouth like peanuts.
The fourth tomato I grew was yellow pear, because my daughter fancied taking cocktail platters to parties. She planned to mix red, yellow and black tomatoes, arranging them on kebab sticks. The yellow pear does not climb, it sprawls. This is another small tomato to pop whole in the mouth, ideal for kids’ lunchboxes and party plates. With two bushes I simply didn’t know what to do with the volumes of yellow pears produced. I preserved some in malt vinegar and olive oil. As there is still frozen
brandywine and black Russian paste in the freezer, this year I’m growing only one variety. Black Russian cherry is my little champion!
Eat them young before making curried zucchini rice soup, zucchini/coconut/green pea soup, zucchini rissoles with onions, garlic, oregano, and cheese, grated drained zucchini pancakes (add flour, eggs, seasoning, and crumbly cheese), zucchini relish with tomato, zucchini slice, zucchini bake, zucchini loaf, zucchini bread, zucchini salsa. Next year, plant only one zucchini seed.
HERBS INCLUDED have culinary values and/or properties to ward off pests or promote plant health. Many are listed as companions to vegetables in List of Common Vegetables. Some suggestions for using herbs in the kitchen are included.
Plants carrying officinalis as their second botanical name have medicinal properties. To discuss these properties is beyond the scope of this book—see References and Further Reading for further information.
Wherever it is recommended to grow an herb in a pot, either because its roots are invasive or to act as a mobile pest controller, make sure to water regularly, as pots dry out. Place potted herbs with invasive roots on a tile to prevent roots anchoring the pot. Herbs that like full sun, gritty soil, and being well drained are mullein, sage, and thyme. Mints, lemon balm, and other soft-leaved herbs prefer part shade and moisture-holding soils, compost, LS, or B&B. Woody herbs tolerate poorer, stony soil. Try grouping plants accordingly.
Those herbs indicated as suitable for making herbal tea can be picked fresh for pot or cup, dried and mixed, or dried separately.
Many regional plants are suited for culinary use. Check with local nurseries or a guide book what will grow where you are, as they may be location-sensitive.
All aromatic herbs will repel one pest or another. For good health in and around the food garden, start collecting basil, chamomile, feverfew, various mints, pennyroyal, rue, rosemary, sage, southernwood, tansy, and thyme. Plant these in large pots to be moved among vegetables. Plant some as edgings and hedges.
See Arugula.
Sweet basil. Sow spring to summer when cold weather has fled. Companions: tomatoes and beans (although the marriage may benefit basil more than the beans). From India, this tropical herb is an annual in non-tropical areas. When basil grows lush in summer, you can afford to make pesto for pasta. Pinch out tips to encourage leaf growth. Try sacred basil for Thai cooking, bush basil, purple basil, and flavored basils. Although I’d rather combine basil with lemon juice then use lemon-flavored basil, I could be wrong. Freeze basil in airtight bags at summer’s end before cold nights kill off the plant, or bring it indoors in a big pot.
Basil mint has a good enough basil flavor, combined with the hardiness of mint, although you can lose it in a hard winter.
A slow-growing small tree. In Roman times, emperors, senators, and victorious generals wore bay-laurel wreaths on their curly heads. Fresh leaves flavor soups and sauces, but must be removed before serving, as they are not edible. Use in a bouquet garni with thyme and parsley. Leaves can be dried and stored for years. A little bay goes a long way, so, if you’re pressed for space, just buy a packet. But for elegance in a big pot, she’s your babe.
Prefers cool weather, sow late summer or late winter. Companion: strawberries. A soil improver. Originally from Italy. This proud herb with medium-size, light green, hairy leaves, faintly tasting of cucumber, bears masses of tiny, star-shaped, bright blue flowers. Young leaves and petals are nutritional additions to salads or steamed vegetables. Mix finely cut leaves with cream cheese or yogurt. Sprinkle salads with borage flowers, minus the black seeds, or freeze flowers and tiny leaves in ice cubes for summer drinks.
Borage adds delicate beauty to the food garden and becomes a sight for weary eyes when mixed with marigold or nasturtiums. Grow borage to attract bees to pollinate pumpkin, squash, and zucchini flowers. Geese love borage, and what they eat is good for you, too. Let old plants decay—they return more to the soil than they took out. A must-have companion plant.
Sow in autumn. Probably from Asia. White to pinkish flowers. The seeds are used in bread and cakes. Added to boiled or fried cabbage, they prevent bloat. Use leaves in salads and soups. Caraway attracts beneficial insects. Save an umbel of seed for next year, or let plants self-seed. Grind seeds with coriander for a nuts-and-spices pilaf. A versatile spice.
From England’s hedgerows. Choose between the large, sprawling, white-flowering catmint and the elegant gray rosettes with mauve flowers, known as Persian catmint, which makes a delicious tea. They seed themselves and grow rootlings. Good insects visit the flowers, and their scent keeps troubles away. Water during dry spells.
Sow in autumn. From Europe, but known in Asia as Chinese celery. Prefers cool seasons, setting seed in summer. Collect seed and prune stalks to the ground for new growth. May only last a few seasons, therefore sow again next autumn, or if you have mild summers, in spring. It is a versatile clumping plant providing aromatic leaves for soups, stews, stir-fries, omelets, and sandwiches. The stalks are not tender enough to eat, but the leaves add celery flavor in cooking. Root divisions grow readily and make a nice present in a generous pot. If growing real celery seems too much trouble, grow celery herb.
Sow in spring and autumn. The wild plant has been widely known in Europe, North Africa, and temperate Asia, and many varieties are bound to exist. Keeps surrounding plants healthy, attracts good insects, and repels white cabbage moths. Make chamomile tea with the flowers. Recent research confirms that chamomile boosts the immune system and relaxes muscles.
Sow late summer or early spring. Needs shade in summer. From Asia Minor and the Caucasus. Chervil takes up little space, but needs to be re-sown in most climates. A much underrated small herb for fine food and egg dishes. Make chervil butter for artichokes, carrots, pastas, and cheese dishes.
Sow thickly in autumn in one quarter. Probably from the Mediterranean. Best grown during winter. Fallen seeds germinate any time of the year, so a cool location makes it an all-rounder. Prepare soil with B&B and CM. This unmistakable herb with its peculiarly pungent taste is easy to grow. Put a dishwashing rack over the plot until plants are 2 inches, to prevent wild things raiding the seeds. Start picking leaves when stems are 12 inches. Flowers and roots are edible.
Let several plants produce seed from the exquisite white-grayish-pink flowers beloved by dragonflies and lacewings. Or, let all the crop set seed, harvest seeds when dried on the stalk, then strip, and store. The seeds are coriander, a fragrant spice, and lack the pungency of fresh cilantro that some writers have called fetid but that most people find an absolute nostril-pleaser.
Also known as garden cress. See also Arugula. Cress seed is sown thickly in shallow trays for mustard-and-cress sandwiches. As cress takes longer to germinate, sow mustard three days later in another tray and hope they synchronize. Although both prefer cooler seasons, by sowing them in trays in a sheltered spot or in the kitchen, you can grow them all year round. Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) needs clean running water, something difficult to come by in many locations, and land cress (Barbarea verna) also needs lots of water to become edible.
Sow in autumn. From Egypt and the Mediterranean. White to pink tiny flowers. Seeds are more pungent than caraway. Used in Indonesian, Mexican, and Indian food, curries, pickles, and sauerkraut. Self-seeds and attracts good insects.
Sow for autumn or spring, or in dappled shade in summer. From Western Asia and Southern Europe. Let some go to seed, for the yellow umbrellas are beloved by beneficial insects. Use foliage in cooking and baking; use seeds for pickling dill cucumbers, dill vinegar, dill butter, and dill bread.
Plant for autumn or spring. A deep green succulent needing little care, it makes a dense patch with purple flower spikes resembling Italian lavender. This is another pest-repellent plant to shift to trouble spots, not for eating. Some say it stinks, others love the pungent odor of crushed dogbane leaf. Dogs apparently avoid it. I lost mine in a garden move and have yet to find another plant in a nursery, as seed appears unavailable. Old-fashioned gardens may be a source.
Sow late winter. There is also a bronze fennel. For Florence fennel see here. From the Mediterranean.
Grow your own in a garden or orchard, but control the spreading of seed. Whether you grow common fennel or the elegant bronze variety—a mystical sight on a misty morn—you have to collect all seed heads as they ripen, or cut the plant down. If fennel seeds spread on the wind, the neighborhood may be less than pleased with you. Fennel is not easy to dig out after growing to teenage size undetected, but the taste of fresh fennel greens and the seed make it a wonderful herb, and the golden flowers attract thousands of beneficial insects. Do not plant fennel among vegetables, as it inhibits other plants. If you have an herb garden, plant fennel with invincible vegetation like mints or crab apple.
Fennel is an ingredient in fine liqueurs. Grind seeds for a new gourmet flavor in plain soups and stews. Fennel bread and hot fennel buns are easy achievements, the seed used whole. Toasted fennel seeds stave off hunger. In India, from luxury hotels to humble roadside eating shacks, toasted fennel seeds are served after meals to clear the palate and prevent flatulence. Sometimes, they are mixed with sugar—delicious, but bad for dental health. One plant provides a year’s supply.
Fresh foliage, green or bronze, makes a fragrant bed for arrangements of cheeses, olives, tomatoes, and slices of red onion and orange.
Red valerian and bronze fennel in a border adjoining the vegetable plot.
From Western Asia and the Mediterranean. Easy to grow, it stands clay and dry conditions and will germinate in any season, so experiment. Begin by sowing a teaspoon of seed in autumn. Seeds are sprouted for a spicy addition to soups and salads. Store-bought seed may grow plants but not sprout well, whereas home-grown fenugreek does so readily. Sickle-shaped pods contain the ochre seeds, an ingredient in curry powder.
In the 1980s, the National Farmer newspaper, inspired by British research, touted fenugreek as a promising new crop because of its birth-control potential, but also advocated it as a high-quality stock feed—presumably not on stud farms. It promised to become a forage crop like Lucerne—a high-nitrogen, legumous cover crop, oil producer, sprouting vegetable, and more. The seeds contain oil, high protein, gum, and resin, and the plant contains high levels of carotenes. Seeds can also be roasted for use as a coffee substitute.
Fenugreek leaves are indispensable in a popular one-pot meal called the Balti—from Baltistan. The Balti originated in Himalayan fields and contains what shepherds have on hand or carry in their bags, supplemented with wild garlic, herbs, and vegetables from the fields. You can design your own Balti at home.
Gather up literally any food at hand: vegetables, mushrooms, legumes, or any other protein food. Fry onions, garlic, ginger, and chili in oil or ghee until golden brown. In a separate pan, gently heat spice seeds—coriander, cumin, fennel, mustard, and a few peppercorns—for less than a minute (enough to release aromas) before grinding them up and mixing in some powdered turmeric, cinnamon, cumin, or paprika. Stir all into the onion mixture and fry for half a minute. Now, add the diced vegetables and mushrooms, the legumes, and anything else that harmonizes. Diced tomatoes or tomato puree is added with a little water, and the pot is set to simmer. Meanwhile, cut up fresh fenugreek or cilantro leaves to stir into the Balti when the food becomes tender. Sesame seeds can be used ground or whole to add a nutty flavor. Serve with chapatis made with atta (whole wheat) flour, or rice.
Balti sauce—now available in some supermarkets—is easily made at home. Just fry in oil the onion and spice mixtures as above, adding a whole bay leaf and a cardamom pod. Add tomatoes or tomato puree with some water and simmer half an hour. Remove the bay leaf and cardamom pod. When cool, puree in a blender and bottle. This sauce keeps in the fridge for a week, or can be frozen. For quick meals, use Balti sauce on chunky salads, on parboiled, roasted, or barbecued vegetables, or with rice or bread in any form. Add fresh fenugreek leaves.
Grind fenugreek seeds for your own curry or spice blend for chutneys. Use leaves through winter and harvest pods in late spring. Spend an hour podding them in a deep bowl before drying the seeds for storage. They will jump open when bashed in a pillowcase or pounded, but I like podding them and seeing the ochre, squarish seeds lying inside. Having started with 2 teaspoons of supermarket seed, I now grow enough fenugreek for our needs. Restore a harvested vegetable plot by sowing fenugreek in autumn for a fragrant spring harvest.
This medium-size plant with pungent serrated leaves is a garden insecticide. It carries heads of small white daisies with yellow hearts. Growing one in every vegetable plot removes the need for other insecticides, or grow it in a mobile pot. Feverfew self-seeds moderately and is easily transplanted to where it is needed. Root division is recommended, as plants may die after a few years.
So many flowers are edible that it is impossible to list them all. Violets, borage, nasturtium, and calendula are used as garnish in restaurants. Elderberry, hibiscus, hollyhock, pumpkin, squash, and zucchini flowers are fried in batter. The shungiku yellow daisy is added to Chinese dishes. The yellow flowers of broccoli and Asian greens can be eaten with the vegetables. Many herb flowers can be added to salads or made into teas. Mauve garlic-chive flowers are garlic flavored. Lavender flowers enhance jams and biscuits, as do scented geranium leaves and flowers.
To protect people with allergies, always remove style and stamen from flowers before using. There are books on cooking with flowers. Avoid flowers of plants with toxic properties unless you know they have been tried and proven safe to eat.
Plant cuttings anytime. Scented geraniums repel pests. Plant a low-but-tough hedge on the sunny side of the food garden, mixing peppermint, rose, nutmeg, coconut, lemon, and whatever other scented geraniums you find in friends’ gardens and in markets. Apply mulch and water for great results. The flowers are unappreciated miniature beauties. Flowers and young leaves grace gourmet salads. Geraniums will put up with brackish water.
Companion to none, horseradish tends to push out any other plant. An invasive plant that annually conquers neighboring territory, it is not advisable to grow horseradish in a vegetable garden unless you pound sheet iron 2 feet into the ground surrounding it.
An ancient root, probably from Western Asia and Southern Europe. The roots are dug up when the poisonous leaves dry off. All harvesting and cutting of tops has to be done on the plot itself, because any piece of the horseradish plant lost somewhere else will start the formation of a new squadron. The roots should be ground up in a meat mincer. Face mask and goggles are recommended when doing this as the fumes attack nostrils and eyes.
How do I know all this? Because we did grow our own, and after having pickled some in vinegar for a month, it made a divine condiment. After we moved, we chose to buy little jars from the supermarket, not half as good. Horseradish is the Genghis Khan of the vegetable world. We learned to keep our distance.
Sow or plant early autumn. From Southern Europe. This was once a favorite culinary herb for plain cooking. It has a strong aroma, deep purple flowers, and is fairly hardy but can disappear in a heat wave. Worth reinstating.
Sow in spring, plant cuttings any time. From Southern Europe. There are English, French, Italian, and Canary Island lavenders, and shades of mauve, purple, pink, and white. The old-fashioned lavenders from France and Italy have strong perfume. Lavender is a powerful insect repellent.
Plant a lavender and rosemary hedge on the north side of the vegetable garden, as they stand cold winds well. Lavender puts up with brackish water, but likes alkaline soil. Apply lime or place concrete rubble around plants. In a garden where two rows of lavender showed a marked difference in growth and health, although planted at the same time, the vigorous row edged a concrete path. Use leaves sparingly in salads, sauces, and jellies. Try apple-and-lavender jam, or lavender tea with honey and lemon.
Sow in spring, or plant root any time. Also known as bee balm. From the eastern Mediterranean. Fresh lemon balm leaves make an invigorating tea. Used sparingly in cooking for a hint of lemon. Beneficial in the food garden, as it attracts bees, but place it in a large pot, as it can be invasive.
Grow from seed in spring and summer, buy a root, or try sticking a bunch from the market in good soil, cutting down the tops to 12 inches.
Indispensable for Southeast Asian dishes. A tropical plant tough enough to survive a chilly winter if protected by a bag or plastic on three sticks, or a mini hothouse of water-filled plastic bottles.
The base of the stem is used in cooking. The spiky leaves are cut and dried for lemongrass tea. A lemongrass marinade with olive oil, garlic, tamari or soy sauce, and lime or lemon juice will flavor many dishes.
Sow any time. Companion plant for all vegetables. The ruffled French marigold is said to be as good a companion plant as calendula due to its strong smell. Calendula does not have a strong smell but works in subtler ways.
Presumably native to Europe, but naturalized in India, where it is used to make garlands and votive offerings. Also called English marigold, calendula, or pot marigold. Orange or yellow, flat, daisy-like flowers. Also available are Himalayan marigold (Tagetes lunulata), if it likes your climate, and Mexican marigold (Tagetes minuta) growing to 6 feet with bronze-colored tufts. Both control nematodes (eelworms).
The Mexican’s leaves look embarrassingly like marijuana, and whenever a helicopter or small plane hovered low over my second garden where they grew tall, I expected the drug squad to drop in for a chat. I looked forward to having them smell a leaf, as the plant is called “Stinking Roger” in Queensland where it was let loose. They never came.
Calendulas adorn every organic garden, as they attract good insects, need no maintenance, self-seed, and are easily pulled up when in the way. They are also a welcome addition to the compost. Calendula flowers (but not the others!) are edible and endowed with magic health qualities. Pick an uneven number, as magic never works with even numbers. Sprinkle petals on salads and gourmet platters and dry for baking cakes.
Sow any time. Also known as sweet marjoram. Native to Portugal. More delicate than oregano. Plant in a large pot and move around to help vegetables. There are several varieties, some sweeter, some more aromatic.
Plant any time. Native to Europe and North Africa, but now a global citizen. I picked mint in the Himalayan Spiti Valley. Grow in pots placed on tiles or planks to prevent roots invading the garden. I saw a food garden periodically left alone almost entirely overrun with mint. Although the roots go wide rather than deep, it is a big job to clean up the soil, as every tiny bit left behind grows again.
Move pots between vegetables, especially the cabbage family. Mints prefer temperate climates. In hot weather, I place mint pots in trays, or in a wheelbarrow with an inch or two of water, in the shade. There are many varieties. Peppermint repels mice and makes a favorite tea, spearmint spells chewing gum, bunches of eau-de-cologne mint act as room fresheners. Bowle’s mint is good in cooking, and ordinary garden mint can probably do all of those. Basil mint grows so fast, you can make basil mint pesto. Mint goes with peas, fruit salad, and yogurt.
Plant any season. Companion: tomatoes, protecting them from diseases they are prone to. See also Giant Red Mustard, and Cress. White mustard was a native of Europe, but mustards are widely cultivated everywhere for seed and oil. Start with a packet of mustard seed from a grocery spice rack. Sow a few mustard seeds between tomatoes, but when they grow taller, cut and leave the stalks lying around.
To recondition a bed of run-down soil where nothing grows well, sow mustard thickly and dig in when flowering. Grow mustard each year in a different plot to keep the garden healthy and free of nematodes.
Use green leaves for salads and stir-fries. Ambitions to make your own mustard? Thickly sow a square and let plants set seed. Cut dry pods into a pillowcase without holes. Let them dry a few weeks more, then slap the pillowcase from left to right on a table to separate the seed and chaff. To separate seed, read about winnowing in the chapter Saving Seed. As I haven’t made mustard yet, you’ll have to chase down a recipe.
Sow in autumn. Companion plant to just about anything, as it attracts good insects. Also known as Nasturtium majus or Indian cress. From Peru. Nasturtiums keep aphids away. Restrain nasturtiums by folding old plants under straw. Pick fat seeds just after petals have fallen, and pickle in vinegar for a peppery pseudo-caper. Use leaves and flowers in bean salads.
Sow or plant any time. Found in Asia, Europe, and North Africa. This is the wilder, more pungent sibling of marjoram. An essential herb in pizzas, pastas, and bouquet garnis. Grow in mobile pots as a companion plant.
Biennial. Sow in spring in part shade. Curly-leaved. Native to Europe. Italian parsley is flat-leaved and more frost resistant. Plant parsley in the flower border to aid roses. As parsley is not perennial, collect seed in the first year and dry in a paper bag. Cut stalks right down and mulch for a second year’s growth, while sowing seed in autumn for next year when the old root dies.
Parsley aids digestion, which may have given rise to the restaurant custom of decorating meals with a sprig. Unfortunately, most people push it aside. Parsley has also been pushed aside as a garnish by dill, cress, fennel, arugula, nasturtiums, and other fashionable herbs. Yet parsley remains an important food that is said to lower cholesterol. Grow plenty of parsley for tabouli, the Middle Eastern dish of chopped parsley, onions, and soaked bulgur wheat with lemon juice, olive oil, and pepper. If you can’t eat wheat, use crushed buckwheat or coarse polenta. Tabouli makes a great meal with hot beans, just as a bean dish improves with parsley. In Europe, flat-leaved parsley roots are eaten as a vegetable.
Parsley, tansy, thyme, and rosemary keep struggling young fruit trees healthy.
Sow spring or plant cuttings any time. From the Mediterranean. These aromatic evergreen shrubs should grace every garden. They are water-wise, low maintenance, and provide the greatest amount of herb for the least effort. Bees love the blue flowers. Add rosemary to a bouquet garni for gourmet chard. Pasta improves with finely chopped rosemary. Homemade drinks of lemon or other fruits benefit by a rosemary infusion. Apple-and-rosemary chutney goes with summer squash, rice, and beans. Rosemary tea helps the memory—mix the rosemary with purple sage. A rosemary rinse makes your hair shine. The list of rosemary’s benefits goes on, and you simply should find space for Rosmarinus officinalis and then take cuttings. Cultivars have brighter flowers, but you want strongly fragrant foliage. Plant a rosemary hedge along the boundary of the food plot that faces the prevailing wind.
Sow spring or autumn. From the Mediterranean. Repels cabbage moths and carrot flies. Although there are many sages with flowers, ranging from white and pink to night blue, Salvia officinalis is the culinary herb. Use sparingly in cheese and breads. Sage crispy fried in olive oil is good on pasta. Medicinally, sage makes a throat gargle and a tea to reduce fever. Pineapple sage (Salvia rutilans) is a great tea herb. Purple sage tea is said to aid the memory in old age.
Sow in autumn. From Europe. Also known as lesser burnet. A pretty, upright rosette of fine stems, with serrated tender leaves tasting of cucumber. Adds beauty to the herb plot. Sprinkle leaves on salads, or in raita, the Indian cucumber and yogurt dish.
Sow in autumn. From East Asia. The leaves and flat yellow flowers are used sparingly in Asian cooking to add a distinct aroma and taste. Collect seed heads to sow annually.
Sow spring to autumn, or plant cuttings any time. Also known as “lad’s love.” Native to Europe. Repels cabbage moths. Southernwood and Roman wormwood (A. pontica) are my favorite artemisia plants for their stimulating fragrance. Southernwood was once used to accompany marriage proposals, perhaps because of its sweet apple scent. It grows ferny upright branches up to 3 feet. Plant in a mobile pot and in hedges pruned annually with big shears. Not invasive. Use in wardrobes and drawers against moths.
Sow spring to autumn. Companion plant for many crops to improve soil, compost, and you. Found in Asia, Europe, South Africa, North and South America, and Australia. Stinging nettle in the garden is a blessing.
Eat young nettles as spinach—they taste good, and the sting disappears when cooked. Make velvety nettle tea from fresh tops or dried leaves. Cook nettles like sorrel soup, blended and with a dollop of yogurt. Before supermarkets and greengrocers, Europeans ate stinging nettle in many dishes, as it is a nourishing, wildly profuse vegetable.
Let only one nettle set seed. Although plants are easily pulled up where not wanted, neighbors may complain if seeds blow across. To contain the seed, tie a paper bag over the top. In compost and liquid manure, nettle is a prime ingredient.
A native of Peru. Not so much an herb as a food plant for its seed and oil. Sunflowers make a great addition to food gardens as background and as windbreaks. Use them as live stakes for climbing beans. Handsome varieties come in golden yellow, brown, and caramel. Harvest seed heads, dry indoors, then lay them out one by one for birds during the hungry season on a squirrel-proof board hung from a tree branch.
Sow spring to summer, plant rootlings anytime. Companion for fruit trees as an under-planting against various diseases. From Europe. Not recommended for cooking or baking nowadays, as the plant is somewhat toxic (19th-century English cooks flavored biscuits and cakes with tansy). Both flat-leaved and curly-leaved tansy carry clusters of golden buttons. The roots are invasive, but easily pulled up.
Sow in spring. From the Mediterranean. French tarragon is lauded as the only one to use for cooking. There is also German tarragon. Mexican tarragon is a strong grower with a fresh aniseed taste—to be used by the branch rather than the single leaf. The Russian variety is called “false tarragon,” even though it is an artemisia and has that artemian whiff about it. They’re all good, just different.
Sow spring or autumn. Companion to many vegetables. Repels cabbage moths. Known as “mother of thyme,” as all varieties sprung from this common thyme of Southern Europe and then conquered the globe. It clings to Himalayan mountainsides in a blaze of mauve flowers. Essential when cooking with tomatoes, and in a bouquet garni. Use lemon thyme in pasta and caraway thyme in Indian cooking. Serve garlic and thyme butter with zucchini. Search markets and nurseries for flavored thymes or settle for one in a mobile pot, guarding a vegetable plot.
Sow spring or autumn, plant cuttings when pruning after flowering. Native to the Northern Hemisphere. The sacred bitter herb of China used to ward off evil. A Southeast Asian artemisia is important medicinally against malaria. Artemisia annua is the wormwood that ekes out a living along farm fences, washed only by rain, with never a decent haircut. Wormwood makes a powerful pest-repellent hedge for an organic garden, but plant it several yards away from vegetables, as it tends to retard other plants. After flowering, cut it back by half for vigorous growth. The silver leaves are gorgeous in bouquets. Wormwood keeps chickens lice-free when planted near the coop.
Sow spring to autumn, plant rootlings anytime. From Europe. White and cyclamen-pink yarrows are hardy. Cultivars come in pastels. Yarrow roots are invasive: a 3-foot square patch may result from one plant. This is a very good herb in the orchard, working as a pest repellent and growth promoter for other plants, especially apple trees. It is also an excellent compost starter. Yarrow tea, made with flowers and leaves, soothes the spirit when you are stressed or fatigued, or just had a hard day in the garden.
READ THE chapter Easy-Care Fruit Trees before making your selection from the list here. Trees marked with an asterisk (*) are super easy to grow.
Fruit trees need care in their first three years while making deep roots. After that, they continue to need manure and/or fertilizer with mulch in spring, and lime and deep mulch in autumn. If you grow dense herbs under a fruit tree, little mulch is needed, but it does need food to produce well. Many trees can survive without watering after the first summer, or just three deep waterings per summer, depending on your climate.
When planting new trees, consider heritage varieties, as many are more disease resistant and have better nutritional properties—see Useful Addresses and organic gardening magazines. By spraying fruit trees with liquid seaweed early in spring and the root area in autumn, you may prevent diseases. Grow companion herbs under fruit trees (see List of Common Herbs) to prevent infestations and attract predators. Mix borage, comfrey, fenugreek, and feverfew with recommended companion plants for each fruit tree. Nettle is very beneficial. With chickens in the orchard, only deep-rooted herbs like yarrow, lemon balm, and tansy survive and must be protected while establishing themselves. If you live in an area frequently affected by fruit fly, do inform yourself on how to prevent it, as it is a serious pest that destroys susceptible crops in a wide area. Organic gardening magazines carry advertisements for fruit fly prevention products.
Ask your nursery. Another space saver is a “fruit salad tree” with a number of stone fruit, or citrus, or apple varieties grafted onto the same trunk.
Always keep soil around young trunks weed free. Chicken tractors are small A-frame cages, half timber, half wire netting, housing a few chickens to dig up grass and weeds. Move around the tree as needed. Chickens are perfectionists. Without chickens, consider a fence-to-fence herbal carpet after eradicating competing weeds and lawn grasses by other means. Alternatively, spread large flattened cardboard boxes in autumn—ask the electrical goods store. Or spread weedmat through three summer months.
Save space, increase production, and keep fruit within reach by espaliering fruit trees. Apart from the common fruit trees, I have espaliered mulberry, fig, and quince. Citrus varieties probably produce more as freestanding trees. See Espalier.
With permission, cut buds from a neighbor’s different fruit tree and graft onto yours, pome to pome and stone fruit to stone fruit, in mid-autumn. If this interests you, borrow a library book on budding and grafting, as it is easy to learn.
Plant the fruit you love best in the first year, your second love in the second year, and so on. It is better to prepare an excellent hole for one tree, look after it, see it flourish, and be proud, than to bang in six to see them flounder for lack of attention and feel sorry. Most trees take a few years to fruit, but berries produce in their first summer, black mulberry and loquat in the second.
Fruit trees are best planted in very late winter when dormant, unless otherwise indicated by the supplier. Citrus trees should be planted when soil is still warm.
Dig a hole much larger than the root ball. Fill hole with water two days before planting. If the water drains away, it’s a good spot. Put a spadeful of rubble, gravel, or broken tiles and clay pots in the bottom to prevent wet roots. Spade in compost mixed with old manure. Cover well with more compost for the root ball to sit on. Place the tree so that the graft (the knobbly bit above the root ball) is well above ground level. Fill in with good soil. Mulch and top dress with B&B after planting, and water well to settle roots. Do a foot-stomping dance around the trunk to compact the earth. If the level sinks and forms a saucer, level this out with mulch, keeping the graft above it.
To prune espaliered trees, see Easy-Care Fruit Trees. For freestanding trees, keep pruning simple:
1. Prune when trees are dormant. Shaping is your choice.
2. Prune away dead wood and crossing branches.
3. Prune trees to keep fruit within reach.
4. Prune away excess growth in summer.
Seedlings of apple, quince, plum, and nectarine may bear good fruit, sometimes better suited to cooking or juicing. Such trees show strong growth and disease resistance. Worth trying with any seed, if you have space. I’ve had excellent fruit from seedling nectarines, plums, and apples.
Companions: yarrow, chives, apple mint, self-heal (Prunella vulgaris), and nasturtium. All apples originate from Malus sieversii in the Tien Shan, the Heavenly Mountains range in Central Asia, where they survive in the wild. They love cool nights.
Apple trees are amazing. They can grow without being watered or otherwise tended, even in often drought-stricken regions. Yet young nursery-raised trees may die in a bad year. We inherited three apple trees in acidic, non-wetting soil, which blossomed and annually produced good fruit. We have newly inherited a cathedral of an old apple tree that has survived on rain. Its fruit is only fit for pies, yet its presence and shade are immense. I have had good fruit from a sucker, grown from an excellent old tree that produced good eating fruit. I’ve also nurtured self-seeded trees whose apples were good enough for chutney, apple stew, and sauces for the freezer. Apple trees love growing in hedgerows, where their roots are protected by herbs and shrubs.
Fruit fly and codling moth are the apple tree’s enemies. See An A–Z of Pests and Problems.
Apples from a sucker off an old-fashioned nameless apple tree. They were good to eat and to cook.
Companions: feverfew and garlic—keep cutting garlic tops for best results. Also chives, comfrey, tansy, and yarrow. From China, cultivated worldwide, and a main crop in Pakistan’s Hunza Valley. The earliest stone fruit to set fruit. Hardy and moderately drought tolerant. Apricot trees can be espaliered. Taste ripe home-grown apricots straight from the tree! Apricots can be dried, preserved, stewed, frozen, or devoured instantly. Team with cream cheese, cinnamon, or polenta, one at a time.
From Central America. Some varieties will stand a few degrees of frost. A nutritious food of proven benefit to arthritis sufferers. Before buying a tree, taste test varieties. There are distinct differences in flavor and texture. Take your favorite avocado from a shop to your local nursery and discuss its growing needs.
Since the avocado does not ripen on the tree, but after it has been plucked, it may be worth trying to grow one no matter your climate. I saw my first avocado tree in fruit outside our hotel window in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Later, I beheld the same sight through the window of my Adelaide dentist as I lay open-mouthed in the chair. The dentist said the fruit wasn’t ripe yet. Although I tried to convince him to pick it all the same, he wouldn’t. He moved to another building, and that avocado may still be hanging there.
Plant an avocado where it gets shade from other trees, yet receives warmth. Prepare soil with lots of organic matter for moisture and essential drainage. If drainage could be a problem, dig deeper and put a layer of rocks in the hole before planting. Mulch heavily. A shade cloth may be necessary, or a shady courtyard. It will be several years before you see fruit. Sprouting seeds make lovely house plants.
The brambles: raspberries (Rubus idaeus), blackberries (R. ulmifolius), boysenberries (Rubus spp.), loganberries (R. loganobaccus), and youngberries (Rubus spp.). Other brambles are tay berries and lawton berries. See the following for blueberries, gooseberries, and currants. Companions: try borage mixed with non-invasive herbs without overpowering aromas, like chamomile, dill, and nasturtiums.
Northern Hemisphere natives. Take cuttings in autumn or spring. Should these fail, take cuttings in the optimum growing season in your area. Soak cuttings in water with honey for one hour, then plant immediately, providing water and shade until rooted. Cuttings must never dry out. Thornless blackberry and youngberry are available
Having grown all of the above, the youngberry proved to produce not only large, delicious, and firm fruit, but was the only one to survive a searingly hot summer with temperatures in the sun around 110 degrees on many days. The canes sprouted back to see another summer. All berries do best in cooler climates. Imitate their natural environments with a mulch of old leaves, or twiggy compost with straw. Check the pH of the soil—they don’t do well under 6 or over 7, and 6.5 is just right.
Brambles are best grown on a wire trellis, preventing the formation of wild, rambling thickets and allowing access from two sides to pick fruit. An espalier wire arrangement between droppers or posts will do. Position the trellis north-south to make the most of the sun. Plant cuttings or canes under the wire and, when they lengthen, gather them up (with gloves), and twist and wind them around droppers, posts, and wires to tie up. Louis Glowinski writes that tying them in a fan shape gives the best crop. If you only plant three to five canes, place them around a wire tower (see Hardware in the Food Garden). Glowinski also describes other hybrid varieties.
Improve soil with CMC to retain the moisture essential for all berries. In the wild, they thrive in dark, muddy glens. After harvesting, prune out the canes that bore fruit, as next season’s fruit appears on new canes. Add young leaves of raspberry and blackberry to any tea for fragrance and health.
From North America. A thornless bush. They like it cool and can stand half shade, although full sun increases production. Wind protection is important. Grow blueberries if you have acid soil and can make it drain well by digging in loads of organic matter. Lime in the soil will inhibit blueberries. They must never dry out, so mulch thickly with pine needles, sawdust, leaves, or shredded branches. Ask your nursery to provide two different plants for better pollination. Be prepared to fuss over blueberry bushes like a brown bear would. Be prepared to wait for first fruit.
Companions: mine happily rambled among fifty vegetables and herbs, productive and self-seeding. From northeastern and Central America. This medium-size plant is easily grown from seed. The sweetly tart yellow berries are sheathed in a paper Chinese lantern. No kidding. Arthritis sufferers reconsider; this fruit belongs to the Solanum genus.
Companions: lavender, sage, self-heal (Prunella vulgaris), tansy, and yarrow. Citrus includes kumquat, grapefruit, lemon, lime, mandarin, and orange. All need excellent drainage, a warm spot, and the protection of other trees from cold winds. They like neither frost nor high humidity. Plant in the ground, if you live in the right part of the country, otherwise in tubs.
There are more stories about the success or failure of individual citrus trees than any other fruit tree. I’ve grown citrus on a stony hill where they fruited, and in a hotter place where they ailed. In desperation, I applied commercial citrus food, and still they died. But a Tahitian lime planted next to a banana palm—in a great heap of compost, manure, and straw, situated between three water tanks reflecting heat and tempering cold night air—was just beginning to set fine fruit when we moved. Everyone agrees drainage is vital, compost and animal manures important, and peeing around them is possibly the secret of success!
My best citrus was an ugli (I kid you not—see the 1997 edition of The New Oxford Book of Food Plants), which was the rootstock of a failed kumquat. It bore plenty of sweetly tart fruit, lovely in salads. The backyard lemon tree is similarly unpredictable. If your neighbors have a great lemon tree, your soil may support one, too, or arrange a fruit swap.
With citrus, the message is location, location, location, translating as drainage, drainage, drainage. Dig an enormous hole and partly fill with gravel and rubble before adding compost and planting the tree. After the first winter, give it morning urine once a week, diluted 1:10 with water. Many other fruit trees also benefit from our sterile, mineral-laden by-product.
Oranges are ever popular—there are sweet and sour varieties, and all are beautiful trees with fragrant flowers. The fruit can take up to a year to ripen, but is not bothered by birds.
Mandarins crop heavily in the right spot. Consult your local nursery.
Grapefruit trees appear to need even more water than other citrus until established. I fill up a slowly leaking watering can every day and put it by one of my four citrus trees, then give the grapefruit a hose watering as well.
Kumquats are lovely eaten raw from the tree, although people insist on preserving them in brandy, which as good as spoils the taste.
Lemons can be preserved by rubbing the fresh fruit with petroleum jelly and placing them, not touching, on newspaper in a dark, cool place. To preserve in salt, cut in quarters, rub with salt, and pack into glass jars. Or, squeeze the juice and pour into ice cube trays in the freezer; one cube equals the juice of half a lemon. Grate the zest off the skins and store in a plastic container in the freezer to scoop out with a fork, as much or little as needed, for lemon cake or lemon sago. Or, dry the peel on trays in a hot place (but not in the sun). When thoroughly dry, store in airtight jars. To use, chop finely or grind.
Companions: try tomato plants and the same herbaceous mix as for berries, although they can go it alone. Northern Hemisphere natives. Red (Ribes rubrum) and white (R. sativum) currants are small shrubs; the black currant (R. nigrum) grows taller.
The red currant produces fruit on old wood, just to be different. Even in my Uncle Wim’s garden in overcast Holland, the currant bushes grew in the shade of a massive walnut tree, where light was dappled. They like it cool and need a winter and regular waterings. Uncle Wim applied plenty of old poultry manure.
Black currants grew wild on the sandy heights of the heather in full sun between his village and ours. They grow fruit on last year’s wood, so take care in pruning. They can be espaliered. As children, we filled small buckets while stuffing ourselves with this curiously winey-tasting fruit. Mostly, black currants were made into jam, liqueur, and genever. Add the young leaves from currant bushes to herbal or black tea for fragrance and health.
Sow in spring, or plant cuttings in autumn or anytime. A tall shrub of the honeysuckle family from England, but there are blue elderberry (S. caerulea), American black elderberry (S. canadensis), and an elderberry panax (Tieghemopanax sambucifolius) with blue edible fruit. I have only grown what I assume to be the self-pollinating English one.
The fruit should not be eaten raw. Leaves, bark, roots, and seeds are toxic, yet the English elderberry provides food and drink, as well as pesticide. The tall shrub grows fast if treated with CMC and watered when stressed. Plant 18 inches apart for a dense windbreak. Leave some gaps to prevent turbulence.
Elderberry exudes a pest-repellent substance due to its glycoside content. Cut branches for vegetable seedlings under attack. In autumn, prune shrubs back to 6 feet. In spring, the shrub will be laden with umbels of creamy flowers which precede the black elderberries that can be used to make the famed elderberry wine, jam, or pies (remove the seeds).
Before berries form, pick trays of elderflowers to dry and store. Fragrant elderflower tea acts as a decongestant. Finely chopped flowers can bulk up scones, cakes, and biscuits. Make cordial by boiling flowers in water with sugar. Keep in the fridge and dilute for a refreshing drink. Adding ¼ cup citric acid per ½ gallon of water and a few sliced lemons makes it keep longer. The English make an elderflower and gooseberry preserve, as well as elderflower fritters in a batter of flour and egg. Any berries I leave are eaten by birds who didn’t read these notes. Despite the toxicity of the plant and some of its parts, elderberries have been used for centuries, cooked or processed. Elderberry varieties may play important pest-control functions in future food gardens.
Elderberry flowers make a distinctive cordial. Elder branches and leaves can be spread where there is a pest problem. A young loquat, producing first fruit of spring, stands in the background.
The edible fig we know is one of the oldest cultivated fruits from Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. It starts as a multiple-branched shrub that grows into a medium-size tree that can be espaliered. Fresh figs are purple ecstasy. Even fig haters eat fig jam or fig tart. Give the tree a good start with manure and mulch, water when the fruit is forming, but, apart from that, do not fuss. I picked five figs from a tiny fig tree, then espaliered and manured it, and the next year picked almost 100 figs.
From Central America. There are several varieties, and it is best to ask your nursery what does well where you are. This medium shrub is easy to grow and the fruit is a vitamin C bomb. Strawberry guava is said to have the best flavor. I’ve tasted wonderful guava from the cool Dandenongs in Victoria, while Louis Glowinski claims his Melbourne guava taste like blotting paper. The guava is reputed to be a pharmacy for a raft of serious but common diseases and able to grow in most soils. They don’t like heavy frost—although my little guava survived it unscathed—but make a good hedge on the warm side of the garden. All parts of the tree are used.
Companions: tomato plants, chives. These low-growing, thorny shrubs originate in Europe. An infusion of chives is supposed to stop gooseberry mildew, so try growing chives as companions. Oak-leaf mulch also helps. My Uncle Wim grew them on the sunny side of his walnut tree, and we only ever picked them fully ripe with a red blush, sweet and succulent. Fork in poultry manure and mulch heavily. If you want a row of gooseberry bushes, layer low branches. Scoop out soil, bend a branch into the trench, cover with soil, and pin down with a bent wire. When it has grown roots, cut it from the mother plant and plant it independently. Make sure you have access on both sides. Gooseberry does not like brackish water.
Companions: floribunda bush roses. I have found grapes to be about the easiest fruit to grow, but that may be due to my garden’s climactic conditions. An open position where the wind blows through, even a western wall, has produced grapes for me on mere cuttings from friends’ grapevines, and without mildew attacks. But in my third garden, half a dozen bare-rooted vines from a nursery all died in acidic soil with brackish dam water.
Grape cuttings are inexpensive, and, if they take, they bear in the second year. Cuttings should be 15 inches and have two buds. Dry dark grapes for raisins, light grapes for sultanas, and, if you can get it, the small seedless black grape is suitable for drying as currants. Stop watering after the plants set flower.
Established vines can go it alone on rain, if mulched. To grow a vine on a pergola (protecting the fruit from birds), let the main stem grow up and spread branches across the structure. Prune bush vines back to two buds after harvest. In spring, make dolmades—young grape leaves stuffed with rice.
Drought tolerant. Bantam chickens love roosting between the broad leaves, fertilizing the soil underneath. From the Himalayas, but will grow in subtropical and Mediterranean-type climates, tolerating moderate neglect. Often starts bearing in the second year. Prune after harvest to keep fruit at reaching height. Each year, the crop will increase, ripening gradually over two months.
If space is a problem, prune loquats to stay small. Unpruned, they become grand, shady trees. As urban gardens become smaller, loquat trees disappear. Yet, we should not lose such a long-bearing tree. Plant it, prune it, and rave about fresh loquats, the first fruit of spring, and the ideal fruit for an al fresco dessert. Pick a branch of fruit and lay it on the garden table. Eat loquats skin and all or peel. Serve with sour cream or yogurt dip with a drizzle of honey. Then, pop a few big seeds in pots to grow loquat trees for friends. Loquats are seldom available in shops, as they bruise readily. They contain beta-carotene.
The black mulberry. From Iran (Persia) or Africa. Given its head, the mulberry tree forms a beautiful spreading canopy loved by children. But with increasing urbanization, this big tree is also heading for extinction in our cities. Only the black mulberry is worth growing for fruit. It bears in its second year. The white mulberry produces insignificant fruit, while another variety is grown for its leaves to feed silkworms doomed to die for the luxury rag trade.
Although I have espaliered mulberry, I’d much prefer to grow the untamed tree. My first mulberry tree still sits on its stony hillside twenty years after planting, and although it has not received any attention and is not very big, the new owners say it bears fruit reliably.
Companions: chives, garlic, and tansy (keep garlic cut to release its odor). The name is derived from nectar, the food for the gods that the Romans didn’t have. Nectarines are an exhilarating fruit. They are related to peaches, but are smooth-skinned and have a more decisive flavor. Small tree, easy to grow, and can be espaliered. A seedling grown from a nectarine stone can bear fruit true to type. Bury a few stones in compost in an area where you won’t need to transplant them. When birds start pecking the still-unripe fruit, it is excellent for jam making. Protect with netting to ripen fruit. The bane of nectarine growers is curly-leaf affliction in early spring. If neglected, it can reduce the crop considerably because the tree feels sick, unable to function through its leaves.
Companions: mixed herbs to imitate meadows. Olives grow on stony hillsides in Mediterranean countries. Drought tolerant. Another tree that has survived, despite neglect, for some 10,000 years. Their leathery leaves don’t wither in the blazing sun. The fruit is tough and bitter and needs pickling, or processing into olive oil.
My olive tree literally fell from the back of a truck. It lay on the road in its black tube, the top broken. When planted, it grew. We moved house and it moved with us and grew. Then a lost cow broke it in half, and it regrew!
Italian urban gardeners are known to prune their single olive tree to within an inch of its life each winter, for bumper crops to pickle. My recipe: soak black olives in strong brine for one week. Rinse and steep another week in fresh strong brine. Rinse and make a weak brine (2 tablespoons of salt per ½ gallon of boiled water). Put olives in wide-mouthed jars interspersed with bruised garlic cloves, chopped celery, and oregano. Leave to mature one month. If you have no space for an olive tree, ask your Mediterranean greengrocer to get you a case of black olives in autumn.
This vine from Brazil is not long-lived. Many legends of success and failure exist about this plant. I grew my first passionfruit in a square foot of soil surrounded by concrete near an east-facing back door. It stormed up the wall, spread several yards along the gutter in a glory of bright green leaves, produced a bucket of sweet purple fruit, and died. Rather like a Brazilian carnival. Next, I planted passionfruit facing north with organic material, nitrogen, and a trellis. Three times. None survived.
If you love passionfruit, ask your local nursery for the hardiest variety and growing advice. Once established, the plant needs a couple of handfuls of B&B in spring and likes sulphate of potash, something I was ignorant of when I lost my passion for growing passionfruit.
Sow late spring and protect into winter. Presumably from Mexico. Although a tropical fruit, I include this to encourage experimentation. If you live in one of the country’s sub-tropical regions (roughly the space between southern California and Florida) and have a southerly-facing skylight or greenhouse, you can try growing tropical fruit. I grew a banana plant in a tank yard, heat bouncing off iron tanks and shed, keeping out winds and ameliorating night temperatures.
Pawpaw is the easiest tropical fruit to germinate. The New Oxford Book of Food Plants calls it a “tree-like herb,” which shakes up our perceptions about what an herb is. The seeds are chewed by travelers with dysentery, and the pulp prevents fresh wounds from becoming infected. This “herb” shapes up to be a tree of 6 to 30 feet, depending on circumstances. In Papua New Guinea’s highlands, where nights can be cold, pawpaw trees grow simply from discarded pips. There are male and female trees, but also self-pollinating ones. Hoping for the latter, I bought a pawpaw at the market, scooped out the seed, and within weeks had fifty seedlings. I potted some to give away as pot plants with attractive foliage, but kept some in the greenhouse at a 1,600-foot elevation. One produced a reasonable-size fruit.
The mountain pawpaw (Carica candamarcensis) comes from the Andes. When sowing seed in the 1980s, I found it was not prolific in germination, and I ended up with just one viable tree: a non-fruiting male. But it was a beauty—surviving at 1,600-foot elevation and backed by native forest bathing in sun all day. The fruit-bearing life of the tree is evidently not long, and the fruit has to be cooked. Small seed companies may still carry this seed.
Companions: chives, garlic, and tansy (cut garlic tops during fruiting to release odor). See An A–Z of Pests and Problems for treatments of curly leaf. Originally from western Tibet, where we bought some small but sweet fruit from a valley farmer, and the Tien Shan mountains of Central Asia. Peaches reached Europe via Iran (Persia).
Peaches can be dried, preserved, stewed, frozen, or eaten daily as they ripen. Trees are small and can be espaliered. A sun-warmed peach straight off the tree is a treat. If they like your place, they crop impressively. If not, they’re still a thrill. White or yellow flesh, find your preference at the greengrocer.
Companions: catmint, rosemary, sage, and yarrow. From the Tien Shan mountains. Hardy and prolific. They like a cold winter, but seem to take heat better than apples. A full-grown pear tree spreads a shady canopy. If space is limited, prune your pear each winter to manageable size, or espalier. They start bearing within a few years, if there is another pear tree in the neighborhood for pollination. If not, buy the self-pollinating Williams pear for its big, juicy fruit and prolific crop. For pear slug on the leaves, see An A–Z of Pests and Problems here.
Companions: chives and tansy. From Europe and Japan. Many varieties, hybrids, and colors. Carefree trees, hardy, prolific, fast growing. Apply dolomite. One early and one late plum may overwhelm a family, so get one special plum instead. Greengage is special but bears only every other year and needs another plum for pollination. Do you want a firm or juicy plum, to eat, dry, or preserve? For drying, choose Prune D’Agen.
From Iran. Tolerates dry climates and some neglect once established. Not choosy about soil. A tree-size shrub with deep orange flowers and red fruit, although dwarf varieties do exist. Seeds are surrounded by juice, which has been rediscovered as a health drink. Children love pomegranates. Serve whole for dessert at a garden lunch.
Companion: yarrow. From the Caucasus, this shrubby tree grows wild near some abandoned settlements. The shell-pink petals of quince flowers in velvet leafy rosettes herald spring. One of the earliest fruit trees to blossom, but the last fruit to ripen. Autumn’s fragrant harvest suggests quince paste and jelly, preserves, salads, desserts, and perfumed juice. They need cooking, but even the cooking water is divine!
Espaliered quince laden with ripe fruit in its fourth year.
The hard pomes will keep in a cool place for several months while you eat your way through stewed quinces and quince crumbles. To peel a quince, lop off top and bottom, stand fruit upright on a board, and with a sharp knife, shave the skin off all around. Then chop pieces off the fruit until reaching the core. Much easier than trying to quarter them, as the core is stubborn.
Sow from seed in spring or plant runners in late autumn. Companions: borage, bush beans, lettuce, and spinach. The cabbage family is not a favorite of strawberries and the Solanaceae family (potatoes, tomatoes, etc.) should be kept at a distance. Wild ancestors such as alpine strawberries do best in cool to cold areas, and wild strawberries are native to all Northern Hemisphere woodlands. I was once smitten by the sight of North American alpine strawberries flowering in May along Mount Washington’s icy mountain streams.
The appearance of cultivated strawberries is a story of wild reluctance, chance encounters, and a persistent English horticulturalist. Despite growing as far north as Finland, strawberries do well in southern climates (think of the woody giants in every grocery store!), fruiting from spring to autumn. Buy certified virus-free roots and prepare your plot generously with CMC and B&B. Slightly raise rows or small hills for essential drainage, and mulch with clean straw mixed with pine, spruce, or fir needles. Adjust soil to a pH of 6—if acidic, add lime. Apply LS regularly for disease resistance.
In autumn, the plants throw out runners to take root in nearby soil. Prepare a new plot. Cut and transplant runners from autumn to spring, manuring and mulching as above. Clean up the old bed by removing any dead leaves. To prevent disease build-up, don’t keep any bed longer than three years. Protect with netting or a cage and pick off slugs and snails. Water at the roots to avoid fungal problems. Strewth! Yet they are easy to grow.
Strawberries are loved by all wildlife. In my forest garden, the occasional snake came for dessert, as did bandicoots. We never had better-tasting strawberries than those reared near the forest’s edge, mulched with rotting fallen apple pulp. Visitors would rave at tasting a long-lost memory. With strawberries, it’s the plant food that determines the taste.
White strawberries are also available. They taste good and reputedly don’t attract birds, but millipedes are color blind.
“SETTING BY” it used to be called. “I’m setting by some pickles,” the prudent mother would say, wiping her hands on her flower-print apron in a kitchen redolent with green aromas and the sharpness of mustard, wine, and vinegar. Before refrigeration, “setting by” was part of providing for the family. It was regulated by the seasons. Harvest at summer’s end was the busiest time for preserving home produce. Traditional methods of keeping fruit and vegetables for future use are drying and pickling, which need care to succeed, and preserving in vinegar, brine, or sugar to kill bacteria that normally make food go off. Refrigeration has added freezing as a marvelous method.
Apples and pears are cored and cut in slices. Dunk apples in water with vinegar to prevent them going brown, then string up in a dry place, out of the sun and dust, in your attic or shed.
Broad beans, borlotti beans, other fat beans, and peas can be dried on the plant. When thoroughly dry but not blackened, pick, pod, and dry for another week indoors before storing in glass containers. All dried pulses need to be reconstituted by soaking overnight before cooking.
Chilies look decorative strung up to dry under the eaves.
Coriander can be let go to seed before picking stalks and hanging to dry further indoors. Strip off seeds and store in glass in a dark place. Do the same with other seeds you can grow, such as caraway, cumin, and mustard. Cut off coriander roots and freeze in a container between baking paper so that you can peel off one root at a time to flavor your cooking.
Eggplant and bell peppers can be dried slowly in a low oven.
Fenugreek, my favorite herb for Indian cooking, can be left on the plant till the sickle-shaped pods are dry. Bring inside to dry off, pod them, and let the seeds dry for another week before storing in glass in a dark place.
Garlic is hung in bunches in a dry, dark place, keeping for up to six months.
Herbs dry quickly, hung in small bunches in a dry place. For tea, dry lemon balm, mint, nettles, sage, tarragon, and yarrow, and mix for a taste sensation. Vamoose fatigue! For cooking, dry mint, oregano, rosemary, sage, and tarragon. When thoroughly dry, rub leaves off stalks, rub till fine, store in glass jars, and place in a dark cupboard. For herb vinegars, stuff bottles with herbs like fennel, lemon balm, lemongrass, mint, oregano, sage, tarragon, or thyme, pour on white vinegar, and let stand for a month before using.
Onions, should they all ripen at once, can be divided in two lots. Spread half in a dark, dry place on newspapers for gradual use, hoping they won’t sprout. Any that sprout can be planted back in the garden to produce green straps for several months, plus a clutch of small onions. (Make sure to crop rotate onions every year and not leave them in the ground for more than their growing season.) Peel and slice the other onions thinly, spread on oven trays and dry at a low temperature. This can take days and may perfume the house, but having dried onions on hand is handy in winter. Or, do it on trays outside during a heat wave.
Prunes (from the tree named Prune d’Agen) or plums, cut in halves and pits removed. Dry at low temperature in the oven for a long time, maybe more than one day. Dry indoors for a week before storing in jars.
Sweet corn loses sugar when dried, becoming starchy. Don’t bother.
I would be loathe to keep a separate large freezer, unless I lived on a remote station or was cooking for crowds. The freezing compartment of standard family fridges can hold a large amount of well-stacked meal-size packages and is often under-used except for ice and ice cream.
Solid vegetables freeze well: beans, broad beans, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, corn-on-the-cob (for a short period), and peas. Freshly picked, not blanched, into the freezer within 15 minutes from harvesting. Quarter tomatoes and red peppers so they can be frozen tightly packed for cooking purposes. Pick in the morning—on a weekend, if you work full-time. Eggplant and red peppers can be fried in oil in julienned strips with red onions and garlic, then frozen in containers to pull out for an impromptu lunch—great with Italian bread and avocado. Or purée eggplant, adding salt and pepper, and freeze for later use.
Freeze beans with ends still on, slice carrots, break cauli and broccoli into florets and thinly peel the delicious stem, remove leaves from cobs, pod peas, and beans. Don’t wash vegetables, wipe if necessary. Pack in plastic containers of meal-size portions. I heard from an Italian cook that you can blanch radicchio and freeze it, but haven’t tried. She said to dip the vegetable into water just off the boil, shake and pat dry, and then freeze.
Freezing also enables you to process vegetables you could not otherwise keep for long. Process arugula (Italian in spring and wild in autumn) to make pesto (see More Value from Popular Vegetables). Frozen soups are a great standby. Make surprise soups by putting leftovers from the daily pot into a container and freeze. It may be a few spoonfuls of vegetables, a few beans, some lovely cooking juice, or a handful of pasta. Defrost and blend with a dash of sauce, spice, and fresh herbs for an easy meal of soup with grilled cheese and red onion on bread.
Process a tomato glut into thick tomato, parsley, and onion soup, and freeze. Anything else you can turn into a favorite soup when plentiful in the garden, such as zucchini and potato and leek spiced up with curry, or Siberian kale, is great to have on hand in the lean season. Remember: using big containers means using up all the contents after defrosting, because refreezing is a no-no due to proliferating bacteria. Collect meal-size containers.
Clever use of the freezing compartment above your refrigerator allows a host of ways to make from-scratch menus. If you think of a menu the day before, you can take one or more items out of the freezer to defrost overnight—in the fridge. Frozen foods have most of their nutrients to benefit you, but make sure you eat from the freezer on a regular basis, so that there is turnover and things don’t become too ancient.
That said, we just had dessert of two-year-old persimmons with store-bought custard and it was divine! My freezer has just been defrosted, very quickly so that none of the contents had time to thaw, and looks almost empty due to space previously taken up by built-up ice. The half-empty freezer compartment presently contains the following two-person meals:
◆ 9 packets of podded broad beans
◆ 3 containers of cooked eggplant with garlic
◆ 2 large containers of tomato, onion, and garlic pasta sauce
◆ 2 containers of plain tomato paste
◆ 2 containers of arugula pesto
◆ 1 container of hummus
◆ 2 containers cooked beet salad
◆ 2 containers of stewed quince
◆ 2 containers of fried tofu
◆ 3 large containers of lentil soup
◆ 2 containers of pumpkin soup
◆ half a bar of homemade cake
◆ 1 bag of frozen peas from the shop
All these delicacies, except the last one, were frozen at different times, when I was cooking and made too much, or purposely made more to freeze for later. Defrosting by placing a container in a bowl of hot water to dislodge the contents, then transferring it to the cooking pot, is a much-used method in this household when friends arrive who don’t mind a scratch lunch. The soup is dressed with freshly chopped parsley, the pesto needs a pasta, broad beans and peas go with anything, hummus on pita bread or crackers, heat the beet salad and serve warm, and quinces for dessert with a dash of maple syrup. Defrosted cake with coffee concludes the scratch meal from the freezer.
There is, of course, one joker in this pack of possibilities, the electricity utility that keeps the fridge running. Living in the bush, we were early converts to solar power, and when we saw the lights go out in a distant town, we read our books by solar-generated electricity. Now, we are semi-urban in a semi-rural environment where the electricity generated by our roof panels goes into the grid, and when there is a blackout, we are also in the dark. When the first company we sold electricity to only gave us paper credits for overproduction, we changed to a company that sends a check. To buy candles.
Quince tree two years after being espaliered.
Pickling in vinegar is something anyone can do. Pickle small gherkins with dill and peppercorns, cucumber chunks with dill or fennel. Both need draining. Sprinkle with salt and stand overnight. Dry with a clean dish towel before pickling. Radish seedpods and nasturtium pods are pickled straight into plain vinegar. Vinegar may be diluted with boiled water 3:1. But the less vinegar, the more chance of mold developing. Check jars periodically.
Eggplant and red peppers can be pickled as slices in more olive oil than balsamic vinegar, with garlic. Yum. Making tomato sauce is a form of pickling, although with less vinegar, as the fruit contains acid—and some sugar, salt, and onion. There are many home recipes for tomato sauce. Every one is the best!
I love piccalilli, traditionally a summer mixture of cauliflower, carrots, peas, broad beans, green beans, gherkins, cucumbers, and shallots in a spiced mustard sauce with vinegar. Read this recipe to collect what you need before starting. It is fun to make piccalilli with children. Let them wash a number of glass jars with lids in warm water with baking soda to remove any contaminating substances. Let jars dry upside down on a clean rack. Next, the children can clean and cut a couple pounds of vegetables. Make florets from a small cauliflower, slice carrots, cube cucumbers and drain, slice gherkins and shallots, and pod peas and beans. While they are busy doing this and placing vegetables in a big pot, you can mix into a smooth paste 2½ ounces dry mustard, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons each of ground cumin and ginger with a little vinegar from a liter bottle (you’ll need the rest of the liter later). Taste and add a dash of anything you feel it needs, maybe a teaspoon of honey? Bring the rest of the one liter vinegar to a boil in a separate pot, add the spice paste, and cook about five minutes. Meanwhile, dunk the vegetables in boiling water for five minutes, strain and pat in a dry dish towel, then cook the vegetables in the mustard sauce for another five minutes. The children set the jars in a clean tray of hottish water so they won’t crack when receiving the hot piccalilli. When ready to fill, set jars on a towel or bread board, pour in the well-stirred piccalilli, and seal with lids. Pick up jars with oven gloves and turn upside down to remove vacuum, then screw the lid tight once more. While jars cool, the kids write labels with the correctly spelled name and date of this refreshing pickle! Attach when cold.
Pickling in brine: Olives are pickled in strong brine for a week. Drain, repeat for one week, drain. Then, place olives in a weak brine of 1 tablespoon of salt per two quarts of boiled water. While filling jars, add crushed garlic, bay leaf, and sprigs of celery, rosemary, sage and marjoram between layers—or any herb you like. Tarragon is good; so is oregano and fennel. Be creative. Stand for one month.
Enjoy your meals!
