Tag Archives: plants

Daubenton’s kale – growing and cooking

Daubenton’s kale (Brassica oleracea var ramosa) is a perennial vegetable that seems to have everything going for it: tasty, hardy, productive and easy to grow.

I also grow nine-star perennial broccoli (Brassica oleracea botrytis aparagoides – actually a sprouting cauliflower) which is often touted as a perennial, but really it’s just a biennial that manages to hang on for a few more years if you zealously remove all the flowers. Daubenton’s, on the other hand, is the real deal, a perennial kale that usually lives for 5 or 6 years.

It seems that a lot more kales used to be perennial, but Victorian seed companies selected for biennialism in order to be able to sell the same variety year on year. A few old varieties have hung on by being passed from gardener to gardener, leading to a plethora of names such as Ragged Jack, tree collards, Woburn kale, Taunton Deane and many others which may or may not be the same as each other. Worse, some biennial varieties share a name with perennial ones having been bred from them. My all-time-favourite biennial kale is Pentland Brig; there’s a rumour of a perennial version out there which I dearly hope is true. In Germany there’s an ehwiger kohl (‘everlasting kale’ or, as Google Translate charmingly puts it, ‘eternal carbon’).

The bargain that Daubenton’s makes for its long life is that it is lived in complete celibacy. It is hardly ever known to flower [but see The Joy of Promiscuity], which means that it doesn’t exhaust itself, but adds a problem for the gardener: no flowers means no seeds, perhaps giving one reason why it is so rare. Fortunately, it is extremely easy to propagate from stem cuttings, particularly if you break off branches near the base. You’ll find some knobbles which are incipient roots. At most times of year you can plant cuttings or put them in water and the roots will start to grow. In autumn, Daubenton’s undergoes a brief hiatus when it slows its growth and sheds a lot (but by no means all) of its leaves. I’ve noticed that at this point its capacity to grow from cuttings is much reduced, so if you have failed to get them to root at this time of year, don’t give up. Another method is to layer branches by bending them down and burying a section. Over time the buried section will develop roots and make a new plant.

I got my first Daubentons in 2009 from Pépinière Eric Deloulay in France. He’ll deliver to the UK but there doesn’t seem to be an English version of the website, so you’ll have to scrape your secondary-school French back together or Google Translate it and run the risk of buying some eternal carbon by mistake. I got two versions, one green one with a red tinge to the leaves and another, variegated, one with larger leaves. The Agroforestry Research Trust now sell the non-variegated variety and Pennard Plants have both kinds. Cotswold Garden Flowers sell the variegated form (plants simply disappear from their list if they are sold out, so if it’s not there, that’s what happened). I’m often asked about suppliers in the US and Australia. I haven’t managed to track any down, but if you’re a supplier, or know of one, anywhere outside Europe, let me know and I would be happy to put up a link. If you are in the States, you might like to look at the ‘Kosmic Kale’ supplied by the Territorial Seed Company. This claims to be a new variety but it certainly walks and quacks like variegated Daubenton’s.

My original plants have now all died out but they have given rise to several generations of successors. A mature plant typically makes a dome about one metre high and wide and lasts for about 5 years. Winter hardiness seems to reduce with age and I usually lose some older plants over winter, but taking cuttings or allowing plants to self-layer seems to reset the clock. The worst cold my plants have had to face was -15°C one year, which they did with aplomb.

I have planted cuttings in various positions in sun and part shade (under an apple tree) and they have thrived in all of them. This ability to tolerate shade makes them ideal for my forest garden set up. They are also said to be very tolerant of soil conditions.

I use Daubenton’s pretty much wherever I would use an annual kale, in soups, stews and stir-fries. In summer I mostly use it as a pot-herb, usually in a 50-50 mixture with sea beet. The kale takes longer to become tender than the beet, so you have to make sure it is cooked enough. In winter the leaves become sweeter and tenderer, enough that I start to use them in salads too. They are also ideal for kale chips (i.e. crisps).

Incidentally, Daubenton’s kale was named after the great French naturalist Jean-Louis-Marie Daubenton, a man who has had to suffer the posthumous indignity of English speakers constantly sticking an apostrophe into his name in order to make it look more French, so you’ll often find the plant referred to as D’Aubenton’s kale or even chou D’Aubenton. It’s also sometimes seen as ‘Dorbenton’, which seems to be an English phonetic spelling.

Rhubarb and elderflower jam, and a surprise

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Rhubarb is the one perennial vegetable that needs no introduction. Everyone must have a patch in the corner of their garden, even if it was planted by their granny and hasn’t been used since. It is long-lived and practically bomb-proof and it just goes on and on.

Most years my rhubarb patch doesn’t see a lot of use. One year I actually managed to set up a barter system with my local shop, swapping rhubarb and courgettes for bread, but then the ownership of the shop changed. More recently our community centre cafe has been using some of it, but I must confess to a bit of a history of neglect.

Fortunately, neglect is exactly what rhubarb thrives on and it points up a general advantage of perennial veg: if you don’t use them then they can store up the resources and become stronger plants. The yield is not totally lost as it is with annual veg.

This year, since so many of the fruits have done badly in the cold spring, I’m taking a little more interest in my rhubarb, so I called my mother, who is, in her own words, a ‘heavy user’ of the stuff. I remember most of her recipes from childhood: rhubarb crumble, rhubarb pies, rhubarb jams, rhubarb chutney and, best of all, a big stick of fresh rhubarb dipped in a bowl of sugar and eaten straight. There was even a surprisingly nice rhubarb wine.

To this day I don’t like crumble, but the rhubarb pies were wonderful, especially when left for a couple of days and served cold, with the rhubarb juices soaked a way into the pastry. However, it was the jam I wanted to try, particularly one of my mum’s specialities, rhubarb and elderflower. Here’s the recipe (adapted a little to cater for my preference for less-sweet jams).

Ingredients
3 kg rhubarb
1.5 kg sugar
10 elder flowers
Juice of 2 lemons
Makes 10 jars

Wash the rhubarb stems and cut off the leaves and the stem bases. Cut them into chunks about 2 cm long (use a sharp knife or you’ll find you don’t get all the way through the skin). Put the chunks into a bowl in layers, adding a little sugar over each layer and putting in the elder flowers head-down before doing the last layer. Pour the rest of the sugar over the top and leave overnight.

The next day you will find that the sugar has drawn the juice out of the rhubarb and the chunks are floating in syrup. Try not to let your children steal too many of these. Take the flowers out and steep them in water to make an instant cordial. Then boil up the jam in the usual way. Between the rhubarb and the lemon, this jam will set well so there is no need to overdo the cooking.

As this is a low-sugar jam, it is best kept in the fridge once opened, but it will store quite happily for years unopened. For better storage once opened, use equal amounts of rhubarb and sugar.

Elder is a tree with so many uses that I’ll have to give it a post of its own some day. It is so abundant that I prefer to forage it rather than have it take up space in my forest garden. I went down to our local park and selected ten choice blossoms; elder flowers have a rather nasty taste if you don’t get them at the right point, so each bloom got a sniff test to make sure it had that heady scent of summer. It’s the ones that look like they are almost over that are usually the best, not the pristine white new ones.

I also found a pleasant bonus while I was investigating the elders: they were full of jelly ear fungi (Auricularia auricula-judae, also known as Jews’ ears in a bit of traditional European prejudice). Jelly ears never found much favour in European cookery (one online description says that eating them is ‘like chewing on a piece of inner tube’) but Chinese cuisine has got a use for them: they are sliced thinly into stir fries to provide a mild flavour and a bit of a crunch. They can even be dried and rehydrated for the purpose.

Rhubarb in the forest garden

The scientific naming of rhubarb is a bit of a mess: you can choose between Rheum rhabarbarum, Rheum x hybridum or Rheum x cultorum. Rheum rhaponticum may refer to cultivated rhubarb or to another, closely related species. There are at least 2 other species of Rheum worth trying: Himalayan rhubarb (R. australe) is said to taste like apple and Chinese rhubarb or da huang (R. palmatum), like gooseberry. I’ve got both on order so I can let you know whether I agree.

Technically, it isn’t the stem of rhubarb that we eat but the petiole, the leaf-stem. The true stem only comes later, when the rhubarb flowers. A persistent myth about rhubarb is that it is poisonous after flowering: perhaps this came about from people trying to eat the flowering stem rather than the petioles. The part that definitely is poisonous is the leaf and there is another myth which says that you shouldn’t put them on the compost heap as they will poison it. In fact the poisonous compound is an acid which quickly breaks down in compost and is then completely harmless. A little-known fact is that you can also eat the flowers of rhubarb.

Rhubarb grows well in a forest garden. It doesn’t like full shade and shouldn’t be grown under another plant, but it is quite happy to be surrounded by taller plants which shade it for parts of the day.

Edible flowers

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One of the most striking things about growing food with forest gardening is how many flowers end up on your plate. When you think about it though, the stranger thing is perhaps why this part of the plant has been neglected in our cookery for so long (apart from immature flowers like cauliflowers and artichokes). After all, plants are pretty keen on producing them and there is a massive industry dedicated to breeding and growing them for non-edible purposes.

Recently, the balance seems to have shifted and there is a bit of a fashion for eating flowers. There’s a good, comprehensive article on the subject here. However, a lot of this is driven by the search for novelty in fancy restaurants or is based on picking a few flowers off basically ornamental species to decorate a dish. There is a much shorter list of flowers that can really be considered as crops in themselves, either because they are so productive that they are worth growing as the main yield or because they are a by-product of a plant that is cropped for some other part. My short list is: day lilies, bellflowers, salsify, pot marigold, king’s spear, alliums, mallow, courgette, peas, runner bean, nasturtium, dandelion and (maybe) tiger lily and golden currant.

Pot marigold (Calendula officinalis)

Day lilies, salsify and bellflowers are the three most productive: best fried, steamed and in salads respectively. All three illustrate an important point about eating flowers: the more you pick, the more you have of them. For a plant, a flower is just a means to an end: getting pollinated and producing seeds. Once that has been achieved it rapidly switches its resources to the growing fruit or seed head and stops flowering, but if you frustrate its ambitions it will often keep on trying, sometimes for the rest of the year.

Pot marigolds (Calendula officinalis) are not bulk producers like the last three, but a small patch will produce a lot of flowers over the course of a summer. It is the petals that are used: they add a subtle but interesting flavour and an entirely unsubtle, cheerful colour to practically any dish. Perhaps they are best regarded as a herb. They are equally good raw in a salad or cooked in almost anything and unlike most flowers they keep their colour no matter how much you cook them. On top of this they are famously good for the health of the garden, producing chemicals that kill or repel little parasitic worms called nematodes. This combination of qualities, plus their relative ease of growing, wins them a place in my garden.

Golden garlic (Allium moly)

The alliums or onions are a group with too many edible species to even list. They are often grown for their leaves or bulbs but the flowers are usually edible too and they are often available when the rest of the plant has either died down or become woody. Chives (A. schoenoprasum) are one that I use a lot. Like all alliums, its flowers are borne on little stems radiating from a central point. The trick to using it is to get your thumbnail into this central point and nip it out, causing an explosion of little pink florets. Chive flowers are mild enough for salads. Wild garlic (A. ursinum) can also be used but has a much stronger, more garlicky flavour. Golden garlic (A. moly) hardly looks like an allium at all, with relatively few flowers per head and those bright yellow. The flowers add a sweet oniony flavour to a salad and the leaves and bulbs can be used too. Round-headed leek (A. sphaerocephalon) has huge, showy balls of edible flowers.

Common mallow (Malva sylvestris)

Common mallow has the advantage that it will grow in the shade. It’s an all-round useful plant that I’ve already written about here.

Across in the annual garden, courgettes (or zucchini if you prefer) are already moderately well known, especially frittered. Sometimes the baby courgette is harvested along with the flower but if you’re careful you can break the flower off the end of the fruit before it wilts, allowing you to both have your courgette and eat it(s flower).

Courgette (Curcurbita pepo ovifera)

Other annual crops that have unexpectedly edible flowers are mangtout peas, sugar snap peas and runner beans. The runners in particular are delicious and mine always produce far more flowers than they are capable of ripening into pods, so a little thinning does no harm at all. Don’t be deceived by appearances though: sweet peas (Lathyrus odorata) are not edible.

Pea flowers (Pisum sativum)

Another annual famed for its edible flowers is the nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus – a bit confusingly, Nasturtium as a Latin name refers to water cress, not nasturtiums.) Every part of the nasturtium is edible, with a hot, cress/pepper flavour. In fact they are too strong for me – the only way I like to use them is to pickle the seeds and use them like capers – but if you like a cress flavour then this is the plant for you.

I don’t plant dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) in the forest garden but, as you’d expect, I have them anyway. In fact they’re a fairly low level weed in the forest garden, so in contrast to my zero-tolerance approach in the annual beds I’m fairly lax about pulling them out, happy to make occasional use of the spring leaves and flowers in the meantime. Dandelion flowers should be cooked, preferably in ways that either exploit their bitterness or minimise it with a starchy component. Fritters and bhajis are good, or you could try the spicy fried dandelion recipe I found on a rather good blog by Ciaran Burke in Ireland.

Finally, a couple I haven’t tried yet but have high hopes for. Golden currant (Ribes aureum) has very pretty flowers which are said to be edible. It is closely related to buffalo currant (Ribes odoratum), which grows well here, so I’ve ordered some and expect them to thrive. Then there is tiger lily (Lilium linifolium). I am already growing this for its edible bulbs but I found out recently that the flower is edible too, with some very enthusiastic reports online. On the other hand, Plants for a Future list the pollen as poisonous, which could make eating the flowers a delicate business. More research, as they say, is needed.

Raspberries

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I’m passionately fond of raspberries (Rubus idaeus), so it’s a good thing that they are a perfect forest garden crop. Their native habitat is the forest edge and even commercially bred forms do well there. They are also worth mentioning just to show that, alongside the weird and wonderful species I have been writing about, some perfectly respectable, traditional crops grow in forest gardens.

The season is about a month late this year, but my raspberry year usually begins in June with the smaller, wild-type rasps. It’s the most colourful time in the raspberry bowl as I have red ones, yellow ones and even a beautiful apricot-coloured strain that I collected in the wild and have named ‘Sunset’ for the colour change that it goes through. These are the nicest fruits of the year and they mostly go on porridge or straight in the mouth.

A few weeks later the maincrop varieties start producing: I have Glen Ample, which gives superb yields of big juicy fruits with not much loss of flavour compared to wild rasps. These are the ones that go for jam and into the freezer (a great way to eat raspberries is simply to take them out of the freezer, pour some cream over them and let it semi-freeze, then eat). Come September, the autumn-fruiting varieties are ready: I have Autumn Bliss and Allgold. They will last until the first frosts, which last year meant that I had raspberries from June to December.

The secret to raspberries is to keep them well picked. If they are left for long on the cane then the older ones rot and infect the new ones and the canes soon stop producing. When picking, I pick off any berries that are past it: nipping them off and letting them drop to the ground seems to be sufficient. I find raspberry-picking a very pleasant experience compared to the tedium of picking currants. It is almost entirely done by touch: a raspberry is ready when it feels soft and just slips off the receptacle (the fleshy bit in the middle) with a gentle pull. If you have to tug, you leave it; if it squidges, you drop it.

Rasbperry ‘Sunset’

Martin Crawford suggests leaving raspberry canes unstaked and letting them wander where they will. I do some like this but I also find it useful to grow some in the traditional way. This involves growing them in lines with a wire frame that I tie the new canes into and cutting out the old season’s canes once they’ve finished fruiting. It takes a little work but it helps to keep diseases down and makes the fruits very accessible, which I think saves work overall. It also prevents the laden canes from bending to the ground and spoiling the fruit. The autumn varieties are treated differently: they are very vigorous varieties that are cut down completely at the end of the year and then fruit on the first-season canes.

Raspberries are the middle layer in the forest garden so they can have other crops both above and below them. Cultivated varieties don’t like much shade but they do benefit from growing surrounded by trees, presumably because of the shelter. By contrast, my wild type plants have wandered under the plum and still produce a good yield. All my rasps seem completely unbothered by having other crops growing at their base: in various parts of the garden they have their feet amongst wild strawberries, wild garlic, salsify, mallow, wood violet, Solomon’s seal, hedge garlic, cowslips and pignuts.

Shady characters

Turkish rocket

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With an exotic name like Turkish rocket, you would expect Bunias orientalis to be a bit more than a perennial version of broccoli, but that is what it is.

According to Ken Fern of Plants for a Future, ‘the cooked leaves make an excellent vegetable’. I’m afraid I can’t agree. To me, the leaves have an odd bitterness which is capable of spoiling an entire dish. I find a number of plants that Ken Fern recommends too bitter for my taste; I don’t know whether I’m just a fussy eater or whether there is some side effect of growing plants a few hundred miles further north.

The parts of Turkish rocket that I use are the immature flowering stems, like sprouting broccoli (I call them ‘rockoli’). They have an unusual, slightly shellfish-like flavour that at first I found frankly disturbing in a plant, but I have come to like it and now look forward to the rockoli season keenly. They stir fry well, or are very tasty steamed with a dressing of soy sauce, apple juice, lemon juice, vegetable oil and a few drops of sesame oil. Another way I have cooked them is in a white sauce with a little cheese and mustard.

Turkish rocket illustrates well why you shouldn’t be too quick to give up on a plant. I almost wrote it off after trying the leaves, then discovered the rockolis but found it a rather unproductive plant. More recently I have discovered that it is much more productive if you pick a good long stem along with the flower head. Not only is the stem soft and tasty, this method also seems to have the advantage that it prompts the plant to produce another – and another – crop of large flower stems. If you just pick the tip of the stem then the result will be a great mass of thin side shoots which rapidly become too spindly and fiddly to deal with.

TR is the yellow-flowered one under the raspberries

Eventually however, Turkish rocket will get away from you and start to flower. This then attracts clouds of hoverflies which are good for keeping down pests like greenfly.

If you allow Turkish rocket to seed, you will probably find that it self-seeds quite happily. I usually chop it down after flowering to avoid that, but if you find yourself with more plants than you really intended, you might want to try a final harvest: the grated roots have a horseradish-like flavour; not quite so strong as horseradish but pleasantly spicy.

Turkish rocket is a very easy plant. It’s easy to raise and easy to grow. Its deep tap roots which scavenge water and nutrients from deep in the soil and its strong spring growth mean that it never needs weeded or watered. It’s untroubled by diseases in my garden: my plants are over ten years old and look like they plan to go on for ever. It seems unfussy about soil. In my garden it thrives in the dappled shade under an apple tree but would grow well in full sun too.

IMGP1152

Salsify

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Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a member of the daisy family traditionally grown as a root vegetable, but I find its uses in the forest garden are much more varied than that. Its natural habitat is by the sea and it won’t grow in deep shade, but it seems very happy to seed itself around the more open parts of the garden. It’s a biennial and dies after its seeding year, but it self seeds so effectively that once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. The seedlings are very tolerant of being transplanted, which is handy if you want to do a bit of rearranging it from where it has offered to grow. On top of their edible uses their deep tap roots mean that they probably act as dynamic accumulators, bringing nutrients up from deeper in the soil.

The leaves of salsify make a handy early salad and a component of forest garden spinach, but my favourite part is definitely the flower buds. I pick them just as they are about to open (or even a little after), put them in boiling water and cook for a couple of minutes. I then drain them and add a little oil, lemon juice and salt. They taste a bit like artichoke hearts and make a nice side dish, especially with a mezze-type meal.

One slightly alarming feature of salsify is the gush of milky latex from its stem when you break it. If this is allowed to get on anything else it turns brown and clarts it irremovably. Fortunately it washes off very easily while still wet and doesn’t produce any more after the first rush, so I simply gather a handful at a time then wash the ends under the allotment tap before I put it into anything.

So long as you keep it picked, salsify has a long productive season, but if you stop picking it will successfully set seed and stop flowering. It makes a large, dandelion-like seed head with substantial seeds. These can be harvested for sprouting or for seeding into new parts of the garden.

VERB – to spinach

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Spinach used to be a noun, a particular plant, Spinacia oleracea: a pleasure to eat but a pain to grow, requiring lots of feeding and watering and running to seed the minute you look at it. Now, in the forest garden, it has become a verb, a way of cooking, something you do with a great variety of leaves.

Here’s my spinach recipe. Gather a mixture of wild garlic (Allium ursinum), leaf beet (Beta vulgaris), perennial kale (Brassica oleracea ramosa), red mustard (Brassica juncea), hedge garlic (Alliaria petiolata), Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus), salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), pea (Pisum sativum), Hosta and mallow (Malva sylvestris) leaves. Give them a quick wash and chop roughly.

Now fry an onion and some garlic (or any of the other alliums from the forest garden, but I won’t go there just now) in a large pan. Then throw the leaves on top, sprinkle on a little salt, cover and cook slowly. The jucier leaves will cook in their own juice if there is still some water clinging to the leaves, but with the others you will need to add a tiny bit of water.

To my taste, the result is simple but delicious. I also love the texture. Frozen spinach from the shops goes to a horrible mush, but the large leaf size in this recipe gives it a firmness and integrity.

If the taste isn’t enough, spinach is, as your mum no doubt told you, very good for you. Apparently spinach got its near supernatural reputation for iron content and strengthening properties (think Popeye) when an early table of the nutrient content of different foods accidentally slipped a decimal place, giving spinach ten times the iron content that it really has. None the less, all green, leafy vegetables do contain plenty of iron and also high levels of protein. On top of that, they encourage the growth of Lactobacillus in the gut, the beneficial bacteria that some people spend a fortune ingesting in ‘probiotic’ yoghurts and such.

I quite enjoy a dollop of ‘green’ as a side dish in any meal, but there are lots of other ways to use it, such as spanakopita, lasagna or spinach, feta and dill filo triangles. It seems to have a bit of an affinity with chickpeas, as in many Mediterranean recipes.

Many of the above species are natural shade plants, but even those which aren’t can benefit from some shade. Leaf beet naturally grows in the open, but shade leads it to produce larger, more tender leaves, so I layer it under the apple tree. It isn’t a perennial but self seeds so reliably that it doesn’t really matter.

Eating hostas

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One of my favourite seasonal treats from the forest garden is the hostas. No, no spelling mistake: hostas are really edible. In fact, they are a near perfect forest garden crop. Woodland is the natural habitat of many hosta species, so they like moist soil with plenty of organic matter and tolerate a considerable amount of shade. A friend tells me that they have a positive allelopathic relationship (i.e. they secrete chemicals that help each other) with apples, and since the research on it is published in Russian I’ll have to take her word for it. Hostas are no novelty nibble: they have the potential to be a major productive vegetable.

The best part of the hosta is the ‘hoston’, the rolled up leaf as it emerges in the spring, although many varieties are still pretty good even once they have unfurled. The best way of cooking them depends on the size of the hostons. Small ones are delicious if you fry them for a few minutes, then add a little light soy sauce and sesame oil. The slight bitterness of the hostons complements the saltiness of the soy sauce very well. Similarly, they go very well in stir fries. The chunkier hostons are better boiled briefly and used as a vegetable. In the picture below, the hostons on the right are bound for frying, those on the left are for boiling.

Hostons are best cropped by gripping them firmly near the base and snapping ones off the edge of the clump. If you can snap them off right at the base they will hold together as a whole instead of falling apart into individual leaves. The short leaf scales around the base are bitterer than the larger leaves so they are worth removing. It is much easier to harvest the hostons if the crown of the plant is a little above ground level when it is planted. It is possible to harvest the whole first flush of leaves of an established plant without killing it: ornamental hosta growers will sometimes ‘mow’ their plants to get a second flush of fresh, attractive leaves.

Later on, the open leaves can be used as a general pot herb or substituted for spinach in recipes like ‘hostakopita’. The flowers and flower buds are also edible: the Montreal Botanical Garden lists all species as edible and Hosta fortunei as the tastiest.

It seems to be an open question whether every single species of hosta is edible and therefore whether it is a good idea to try any unidentified hosta that you may happen across. The species I have eaten regularly myself are H. sieboldiana, montana and longipes. Martin Crawford lists H. crispula, longipes, montana, plantaginea, sieboldii, sieboldiana, undulata and ventricosa. Plants for a Future add H. clausa, clavata, longissima, nigrescens, rectifolia and tardiva and list no known hazards for the genus as a whole. This covers all the common ornamental species except H minor, which probably isn’t worth it anyway, and H fortunei, which must be edible since the most popular variety of it, ‘Sagae’ originally arose in hostas being grown for food in Sagae City in Japan. On the basis of that I’m happy to try any hosta myself, but if you’re going to do that, remember to try only a small piece first and test for a skin reaction by rubbing a piece on your skin before putting anything in your mouth.

Picture by ‘dcarch’ on the Seed Savers’ Forum

For more on eating hostas, there is a discussion and some astonishingly beautiful pictures of hosta dishes on the Seed Savers’ Forum. There was also a very useful article in Permaculture Magazine No. 58. It isn’t online unfortunately, but you can buy the back issue if you are really keen. A fellow wordpress blogger has also been writing about eating hostas here.

In Japan, hostas are prized as sansai or ‘mountain vegetables’, a class of plants that are usually gathered wild from the mountain and are considered to be particularly strong in vitality. There’s a great blog post about sansai at http://shizuokagourmet.com/sansai/.

Feeding the forest garden – part 1

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Not all the plants in the forest garden are there to feed me. Some are there to feed the garden itself.

The main two types of plant I have planted for this purpose are the nitrogen fixers and the dynamic accumulators. There’s a third kind too, but if it’s there it wasn’t put there by me.

Nitrogen fixers are the simplest. They are plants that, unlike most, can pull nitrogen, the main component of fertiliser, directly out of the air rather than needing it supplied as soluble nitrates by other organisms, such as gardeners. To be completely accurate, they don’t do it themselves either, but co-operate with bacteria in their roots which do the job for them. Most of these plants are legumes, in the pea and bean family. Worldwide, legumes come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny herbs to mighty trees. Native British legumes are a bit deficient at the mighty-tree end of the scale, but we have a wealth of smaller ones.

The largest legume you’ll usually see in Scotland is Laburnum, better known as a bright yellow street tree than as a nitrogen-fixing powerhouse. I haven’t got one in my own forest garden but Graham Bell has several in his rather larger one, feeding the rest of the system through a steady stream of cuttings. The only leguminous tree I have myself is a Siberian pea tree (Caragana arborescens), which is a relatively new addition that is yet to seed. When it does, I am fascinated by the idea of seed described as being very similar to lentils growing on a tree.

Down at shrub level, legumes are an essential component of the Scottish landscape: the furze and whins that turn whole hillsides a mad yellow and fill the air with intoxicating coconut-vanilla scent. In the forest garden, I draw the line at gorse (Ulex europaea) due to its extreme spikiness, but make a place for broom (Cytisus scoparius).

In the herbaceous range, the familiar peas and beans give a yield at the same time as fixing nitrogen. This year, I’m also trying a variety of white lupin (Lupinus albus). The drawback is that none of them are shade tolerant so they cannot be stacked in with other species. This niche is taken by various other, mostly smaller members of the family. I have an assortment, including an everlasting sweet pea (Lathyrus latifolius) growing in about my raspberries. It provides occasional pea shoots for a stir fry as well as fixing nitrogen. In the ground layer under the fruit trees I have wood vetch (Vicia sylvatica), which is there purely as a nitrogen fixer.

Dynamic accumulators don’t have any supernatural nutrient-fixing powers, but move nutrients around in ways extremely useful to the gardener. The king of them all is undoubtedly Russian comfrey (Symphytum x uplandicum), which is also widely used by organic gardeners to provide organic feeds. The beauty of comfrey is that it is extremely deep-rooting. Not only does this mean that it can safely be planted under fruit trees without competing too much with their roots, but it allows comfrey to scavenge nutrients, especially potassium, from deep in the soil where they would otherwise slowly be leached out and lost to the system. This really illustrates the beauty of forest gardening for me: the way the system really fills the available space.

The third kind of organism that feeds the forest garden is not a plant at all but a class of fungi called mycorrhizae. Mycorrhizae have a symbiosis with tree roots, exchanging nutrients like nitrogen for sugars made by the tree. In a typical forest, one tree will have several species of mycorrhizae and each fungus will have several client trees, meaning that the entire ecosystem is interlinked in a global trading network. Fungi are the dark matter of ecosystems – they influence everything but it is very difficult to detect them – so it is unknown whether or how quickly a mycorrhizal net gets established in a forest garden, but is a real possibility that a mature forest garden has this invisible trading web moving nutrients around to where they are needed most.

A Food Forest in your Garden

forest gardening in Scotland and beyond