Yay! My favourite salad flower started producing today. It’s peach-leaved bellflower (Campanula persicifolia), but since that’s a bit of a mouthful we usually call it salad bluebell. (Campanulas are called bluebells in Scotland. The plant that they call bluebell in England is pretty poisonous. This is why Latin names are so good!) It has a mild taste and the flowers are large and produced in abundance between now and the first frost. This means that it can be used as a bulk salad ingredient, so from this time of year our salads generally turn blue.
The whole Campanula genus is edible and further south I’m told that C versicolor tastes nicest, but persicifolia is thoroughly hardy and thrives in Aberdeen, which is what I look for in a plant.
Photo from Wikipedia Commons, with thanks to Pixeltoo.
Hello there I have just discovered your blog and am very pleased. I too have made a forest garden, in fact two, one in Sheffield which I hardly ever get chance to visit and one on the edge of Milton keynes, it is small, 11×9 metres, but very beautiful and my absolute pride and joy. The most unusual things planted so far are Bladder Nut, Blue Bean and prostrate Raspberries. It was a plot on the local allotment site which no one wanted as it is very heavy clay, water logged, shady and covered with couch grass, field bind weed and Ash seedlings. Ive not been good at letting the wider community know it is there, this is my first, public “coming out “about it. I was really pleased to find your info on Shitake as mine has just been sitting there, I couldnt understand why you should beat them and now, thanks to you I get it! I will go and retrieve my log today and give it a good pasting. followed by a bath. Mandy