Tag Archives: plants

Tomorrow the world!

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By now, the number of forest garden species I have has seriously outgrown my allotment and space is becoming a real issue, particularly in the canopy layer.

Luckily this threat is also an opportunity and I am finding lots of places to plant what I think of as an ‘extended forest garden’. Closest to home, I am fortunate enough to live on a housing estate where there is lots of green open space. We have a lot of mature trees, the legacy of the houses having been built in the grounds of what was once a country estate on the edge of Aberdeen. Over the last two years a series of storms have taken down a whole lot of these trees, creating a need to plant the next generation. I have been out there with my spade, making sure that the new trees are productive ones.

I have been trying to plant trees on this estate for some time, but finding that the combination of vandals and Council grass-cutters is a difficult one. The solution that now seems to be working is to put a serious stake and a wire tree guard on the trees, then a tree shelter inside that. Council workers work round them like any other, official, tree and vandals seem content to put a few dents in the shelters, which I can always straighten out. The tree shelter protects the tree from Council sprayers.

So far I’ve put in 25 trees, including small-leaved lime (for salad leaves), hazel, cherry, domestic plum, Japanese plum, cherry plum, apple, juneberry (Amelanchier), handkerchief tree (Cornus kousa) and Pinus cembra, the tree that pine kernels come from.

Most of them I have grown from seed, including the cherries, which came from seed gathered from prolifically fruiting cherries on the Black Isle by a member of Reforesting Scotland. Similarly, the cherry plums come from particularly nice selections from the many trees growing around this area.

I’ve also managed to spread trees by donating them. The local Botanic Gardens were delighted to take a Japanese plum (Prunus salicina) and a rare intergeneric cross x Sorbocrataegus ‘Ivan’s Belle’, and the local park took half a dozen of my seed-grown trees.

For the shrub layer, I have pioneered the fruiting hedge on my housing estate. I find that a row or currants (red, white, black and buffalo), gooseberries and wild raspberries can be cut as an urban hedge and still fruit quite prolifically. The raspberries have to be wild raspberries as cultivated ones grow too tall and don’t respond well to being cut back. It’s not the traditional way of pruning these fruit and I’m sure yields aren’t as high as they might be, but it gets them into the city landscape. I’ve also managed to sneak a few into shrub beds where they can express themselves more fully. Several other people have taken up the idea and fruiting hedges are slowly spreading around the whole estate.

The ground layer is the hardest to guerilla garden as you have to find somewhere out of the way of Council sprayers and strimmers. Fortunately the local park is going a little wild in places, so I’ve managed to plant out wild garlic, wild strawberries wood violets and a selection of others in the shady parts.

Six legs good

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plum blossom

The Japanese plum is in extravagant, exuberant blossom at the moment, so it seemed a good time to take an inventory of the pollinators in the garden. Some were surprising: a wasp with its snout deep in a flower; a shiny, blue-black fly. Others were more expected: a perfect little hoverfly; a bumblebee of some sort.

plum blossom - waspplum blossom - flyplum blossom - hoverflyplum blossom - bumble bee

Perhaps the most surprising thing, however, was the complete lack of honeybees, given that there is an entire hive of the critters sitting just a few metres away. There’s been a lot in the media recently about the importance of honey bees for fruit pollination and some people take hives into their orchards specially for the purpose, but the little slackers don’t seem to be doing me any good. They are bringing home bucketloads of nectar and pollen from somewhere though, so perhaps the reason for their neglect is that they have simply found something better somewhere else. Never mind. Here’s a beautiful bee picture anyway.

honeybee
Pictures thanks to Andy Coventry.

Germination and determination

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Spring is an anxious time in the seed frame, interspersed with small moments of triumph.

One area where forest gardening is definitely trickier than annual agriculture is in raising plants from seed. Annual crops have been bred not to hang about when it comes to germinating; mostly they just need a little warmth and a little moisture and off they go. The seeds of perennials are often more cautious creatures; they want to be sure that the time is just right before they will consider coming out to play and they may have very exacting requirements that must be met before they do.

Most simply, many seeds need a period of cold (known as ‘stratification’) before they will then respond to heat by germinating. You can see their logic: they want to be sure that they are germinating in spring and not in autumn. Some take it further and need a period of warmth, then cold, then warmth again. Some are even more complicated, virtually guaranteeing that the gardener will panic and leave them in the one place where they will definitely never germinate: in the packet.

I can’t say I’ve ever really, properly got the hang of growing perennial seeds. Mostly I sow them in pots or seed trays in a greenhouse in time for them to experience a winter’s cold, with mixed results. Last year was a bit of a disaster. I spent lots of money on seeds from the Agroforestry Research Trust and put them in poly bags with damp sand in the fridge, as many books will tell you to, for the amount of time specified for each species. In April I took them out and spread the sand on top of compost in seed trays in the greenhouse. Very little grew.

I think the problem may have been the seeds rotting in the sand and possibly drying out in the compost. This year I have taken a different approach, putting them right from the start in a container where they could grow happily, which will seal up and retain moisture and which converts instantly to a seed tray with built in water tray. This miracle of technology is called a margarine tub.

First I drill some holes in the bottom of the tub, to allow water to drain out. I almost fill it with a good peat-free compost (using rubbishy, cheap compost has cost me a lot of seeds in the past I think, as it dries out so easily), sow the seeds and then cover them with vermiculite and/or sand depending on how big they are. Then the lid goes on and they go in the fridge. Ones which need some heat first have the lid put underneath as a water tray and go in a heated propagator or on the window sill. I’m also giving up on the greenhouse in favour of a more gentle spring heat on the windowsills.

So far the results have been promising. Only a few have actually germinated so far, but you would expect that and all the seeds look healthy and vital.

In the past I have found out that record keeping is as big an issue with seeds as the kit that you use. I’m not one of nature’s record-keepers and I’ve already managed to lose track of which of my seed potatoes are earlies and which are maincrop as I mysteriously forgot to note which varieties were which when I set them up for chitting. The useful thing about the margarine tubs is the ease with which you can write on them. I write each a label but also write the name on the tub. When they go in the fridge, each tub gets its release date written on the front in large digits.

Where the stratification requirements of a seed would leave it germinating half way through the summer I am leaving it in the packet for the time being. These are generally the ones which would naturally drop their seeds around August and then experience late summer warmth, winter cold and spring warmth. If they don’t get the autumn warmth they go into quite deep dormancy and this is the state that you get a lot of tree seeds in from seed companies. The simplest thing seems to be just to wait for their natural seed fall time to come round again and put them in their tubs at that point.

Seeds that have sprouted so far with me this year include Japanese and cherry plums, Crataegus succulenta (an edible hawthorn, with a very promising Latin name I think!), Allium sphaerocephalon (round-headed leek), Chaerophyllum bulbosum (turnip-rooted chervil) and Asclepias incarnata (swamp milkweed).

Hamburg parsley seeds

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After about a fortnight of Aberdeenshire being the warmest place in the UK, I finally got out and got some seeds into the ground in the annual garden: leeks, parsnips, turnips, broad beans and peas. I resisted the temptation to put some potatoes in as I’m sure things will return to normal soon. The forest garden doesn’t require much sowing of course, but there are a few annual veg that will take a bit of shade and find a useful place in the forest garden. One of these is Hamburg parsley (Petroselenium crispum tuberosum) which, as its name completely fails to suggest, is a root vegetable.

The overall look of Hamburg parsley, and indeed the taste, is very close to parsnip, but the Hamburg parsley will grow happily in the shade of an apple tree and is generally ready to use before parsnip is.

(That said, I’m interested in growing parsnip itself as a self-seeder in the forest garden. I once took over an abandoned veg patch which had become overgrown with willowherb, which isn’t a tree but still makes quite a forest. The parsnip had self sown all over the place and I got a good harvest of large, well-shaped roots. So I’m letting a few of my parsnips run to seed this year to see what happens.)

Last year, I grew on a few Hamburgs for seed and was rewarded with a sack full of the stuff. I took some to the seed swap at the Permaculture Scotland meeting yesterday but still have oodles, so if you live in the UK and would like to give it a try, just leave a comment or drop me an email and I’ll mail you some.

It’s Spring!

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Ground frozen all one week, T-shirt weather the next. What’s a poor plant supposed to think? Well, a lot of forest garden regulars are hardy creatures and have decided to think that it’s spring already. The Japanese plum has started to blossom – fully five weeks before it did last year.

plum blossom

However, spring always comes early to the forest gardener and quite a number of early species are now into production. The first leaves of wild garlic (Allium ursinum) have spiked up through the soil and unfurled. The alliums are obviously a competitive family, because the chives, welsh onions and tree onions (A schoenoprasum, fistulosum and cepa proliferum) are all not far behind.

A perennial relative of spinach, with the splendidly silly name of Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus), has been sending up tentative leaves for a couple of weeks now, as has Turkish rocket (Bunias orientalis), which has unpleasantly strong-flavoured leaves later in the year but is sweet and mild when young. Sea beet (Beta vulgaris maritima) seems to come in both perennial and biennial strains – both are starting into new growth. It’s probably my favourite ‘spinach’ after spinach itself and is almost embarrassingly easy to grow.

While all these leaves are probably best cooked, salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a salad leaf. As a root vegetable, it is known as ‘vegetable oyster’ but to me this is the least interesting part of the plant. In summer, I’ll steam the flower buds which taste quite like globe artichoke and once the flowers open they’ll go into salads, but at this time of year it is the young leaves I’m interested in. While later on they will become tough and bitter they are now juicy and sweet and already being produced in enough quantity to make them the basis of a salad.

Finally there are two plants that I don’t encourage in the forest garden but which make very fine greens if you know how to cook them. Nettles grow anywhere but the ones from shade are the best for eating; ground elder mystified me for years as to why anyone would eat it, till I discovered that it is a gourmet dish if you pick the youngest, hardly-even-unfurled leaves and fry them in olive oil. Which makes sense for a plant introduced to Britain by Italians.

Winter harvests

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I have to admit that winter isn’t the busiest time in the forest garden. It’s based on perennial plants and most of these have evolved ways of keeping their heads down during the cold season. Herbaceous perennials sacrifice their above-ground parts completely and die back to roots, tubers, corms and bulbs. Trees and shrubs lose their leaves and overwinter as stark, bare wood. The few species that keep their foliage over the winter months have leaves that are tough, prickly, chemically defended and decidedly not edible.

That means that all the action is in the ground layer, with the few plants – annual, biennial and perennial – that have adopted the strategy of toughing out the snow and ice in return for the reward of snatching some winter sunshine while the canopy layer isn’t using it.

The stars of the winter plants are the cabbage family, with many familiar annually-grown veg, from Christmas’s Brussels sprouts to spring’s sprouting broccoli. The perennial members of the family are less well known: nine-star perennial broccoli (Brassica oleracea botrytis aparagoides) just barely makes it into the perennial category, rarely lasting more than three years, but it’s worth growing, as much for its winter production of leaves sweet enough for salads as for its cauliflower-like sprouts in spring; Daubenton’s kale (Brassica oleracea ramosa) is a more genuine perennial kale, which can be used in all the same ways as annual kale. Daubenton’s kale has an extremely attractive variegated-fringed version which could take a place in the flowerbed on merit.

A more distantly related member of the same family, land cress (Barbarea verna) is a low-growing weedy-looking cress that seems to relish the winter months. It is like an easy-to grow version of watercress with most of the same uses. I find it a bit too much in salads, but I know people who love it. My favourite use is to make a potato soup and then blend in some land cress at the last minute for land cress soup. Land cress puts up with a fair degree of shade and if you let it self seed you will never be short of it. A pretty, large-leaved, variegated version seems to have established itself in my garden. Rocket (Eruca vesicaria sativa) can be treated in the same way and is productive with me in all but the worst winters. It grows like a weed and I’m always amazed at how much supermarkets get away with charging for it.

Most alliums die down over the winter, but everlasting onion (Allium cepa Perutile) just soldiers on, providing onion tops in all but the worst weather. Alternatively you can dig up and divide a clump, using them just like spring onions.
Some species that are unpalateable in the summer grow more succulent in the winter, when they don’t need hairy leaves to protect against slugs and insects. Serbian bellflower (Campanula poscharskyana) is one that is finding its way into our salad bowl at this time of year. So too are the various primroses: cowslip, oxlip and primrose (Primula spp). They are mostly in the garden for colour and wildlife value, but they are also a fairly abundant source of succulent little leaves at this time of year.

Finally, a few things to jazz up a salad. The French sorrel (Rumex acetosa) has died down, but smaller-leaved, hardier, local varieties of the same species are still producing a crop of lemony-sour leaves. Traditional winter herbs such as curled parsley are hanging on in there too. Sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata) is venturing the occasional aniseed-flavoured leaf. And for those who like it fiery, the wasabi-flavoured native plant dittander (Lepidium latifolium) is still in production.

Applemania

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I picked the last of the apples from my trees today. I’ve got two varieties: one traditional one called James Grieve and a more recent kind called Red Devil – a variety of Discovery that not only has red skin but also gorgeous red flesh almost through to the core. The result is that the flat is now carpeted with apples as the ones from my own trees have been added to ones that we have been given and ones from the Apple Day at the National Trust’s Pitmedden Gardens, where you could buy bags of apples rejoicing in names like Peasegood Nonesuch.

Neither of my own varieties are particularly good keepers, something that I would definitely change if I was starting again. When I first planted them, it wasn’t easy to get good varieties for the north of Scotland, but fortunately nurseries like Appletreeman, Walcott Nursery and Keepers Nursery now offer a much wider variety. Beware of buying from national garden centres like B&Q or Dobbies as I have seen both offering varieties totally unsuited to the area.

There’s a great cookbook called What Am I Going To Do With All These Courgettes? I wish there was one for apples too. The best ones are safely boxed up and stored, but there are loads of ‘seconds’ that really won’t keep for long. I don’t really have enough to justify getting an apple press to juice them – I don’t think any individual, non-commercial grower is ever likely to – and I’ve been put off juicing in the past by the horrible, slow, noisy and impossible-to-clean-quickly-or-well machine that I had to do it with. That has totally changed with the acquisition of a hand-cranked juicer from UK Juicers. It’s beautifully thought out and engineered, completely silent and only takes seconds to take down and wash at the end – oh, and in contrast to a lot of juicers it only set me back £29. It’s not big or strong enough for bulk processing, but it makes doing a bottle or two of juice at a time from windfalls and cracked apples entirely feasible.

Juicing aside, I’ve also tried preserving apples by making apple jam (a sort of thicker, sweeter apple puree that seems to keep indefinitely in sealed jars) and apple mush (frozen or bottled), but the one I like best is making apple rings. Drying is a perfect zero-energy way to preserve all sorts of foods and apple is an ideal candidate as it dries easily and gets much sweeter as it does so. I’ve dried some almost unbearably sharp apples this autumn and the results are delicious: I even think that I prefer apple rings from sharp apples now as the contrast between the sweetness and the little bit of bite makes them more interesting. Home-made apple rings are just different creatures from the overpriced, bland, sulphur-soaked things you get in health food shops. It’s difficult to say how long they keep as they rarely get to last for long enough to tell in our house, but last year I put some in a paper bag and hid them and they were still in perfect condition when I squirreled them out and tried some just now.

Unfortunately, there’s a reason why sun-dried tomatoes etc come from Spain and California rather than Scotland – we don’t have ideal drying weather. We borrowed a dessicator from a friend last year but were horrified at the amount of energy it took to dry tiny numbers of apples. The solution I have come up with is to make a ‘drying shelf’ across our living room window, together with hooks at either side to take bamboo canes, along which I string the apples rings. A corer and a sharp knife are the only other equipment I need and the rings usually dry within a few days. I don’t bother to use lemon juice on them and although I may give it a try this year, they seem fine without it. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has worked out low-energy drying techniques that would work in a flat without an airing cupboard.

Forest garden visiting

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I’ve been off travelling again, and this time managed to fit in a visit to Graham Bell and Nancy Woodhead and their forest garden in Coldstream. Graham and Nancy are lovely people and fed us generously, even going so far as to kill the fatted artichoke for us. Apples in the curry is definitely something I’ll try myself and the salad doubled up as an identification quiz. Just as I thought I couldn’t fit in anything else, a cheesecake covered in wild strawberries turned up and I discovered that I could.

Afterwards, we had a walk round their garden, planted 20 years ago on quarter of an acre (0.1 ha) of ground. I was immediately struck by how much the scale of a forest garden affects its form. I manage my ground layer pretty intensively to get a sufficient, continual supply of salads and vegetables. The tree and shrub layer is left very open to allow enough light down to the ground layer to do this. If quarter of an acre of ground was managed like that, you would have vegetables coming out of your ears, so Graham and Nancy’s garden puts much more emphasis on a closed, high forest layer. Graham is a bit of an apple expert, so there is a plethora of species adapted to the Scottish Borders. I was surprised by how much shade some of the apples tolerated. There were a number of trees in the walnut family, including butternut and heartnut. They were too small to be producing much yet (forest gardening can be a long-term project!), but flourishing well enough to encourage me to try planting some out round here as an experiment.

Some of Graham’s planting is for compost rather than directly for food and I was interested in the use of woody species like the nitrogen-fixing legume laburnum as compost providers. The compost heaps mostly seemed to be used to grow fat, happy members of the squash family: courgettes, marrows, pumpkins and squashes. Since my squashes have mostly sulked and rotted in the cold, damp summer this year, I will try that level of pampering myself next year.

One thing I sadly won’t be able to try myself, being in an allotment, is the use of a flock of tiny, white and extremely beautiful ducks to patrol the garden and turn slugs into manure. Between the compost and the ducks, the garden is entirely self-fertilising.

One of the great joys of gardening is of course the swapping of plants and we left with a couple of plants that had particularly impressed us during the meal. One was a white wild strawberry – white so that the birds don’t realise when they are ripe. The other was buckler-leaved sorrel. We use the large-leaved French sorrel almost daily to add a lemony bite to salads: the buckler-leaved one tastes similar but produces masses of smaller, beautifully-shaped leaves that seem ideal for throwing straight into a salad.

Shallon

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shallon

Shallon berries and alpine strawberries

Gaultheria shallon is a great, if little known, wee species for the forest garden. It’s one of those ornamental plants that many people grow never suspecting that it is a good edible fruit, giving the opportunity for some urban foraging once you get to recognise it.

It is a relative of blueberry and has similar uses. Soft, sweet and slightly seedy, it is great on porridge or cereal along with the raspberries, strawberries and plums that are still coming out of the forest garden. Its flavour is quite mild, making it perhaps a bit boring to eat in bulk on its own, but it seems to work very well for mixing with and bulking out other fruit.

At this gluttish time of year, my thoughts turn to preserving, and a great advantage of shallon berries is that they air-dry on the windowsill, becoming sweeter and tastier in the process. Who needs raisins? Shallon also spreads its fruiting period out over an unusually long period, meaning that gluts are less of an issue. The dryness of shallon berries compared to most fruits gives them some special uses. It is a very handy fruit for making fruit leathers with: added to juicy fruits such as plums it dries out the mix and reduces the drying time considerably. They also go very well in bread. I add a handful to almost every loaf I make when I have them.

What makes shallon so perfect for the forest garden is that it is a natural woodland species, adapted to growing in deep shade. Like many shade-bearers though, it fruits better when grown in only light shade. Like most of the blueberry family, it prefers growing in an acid soil.

Marvellous Malvas

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musk mallow

musk mallow – Malva moschata

If you like both your food and your vegetable garden to look beautiful, then the Malvas are the plants for you. I grow two: musk mallow (Malva moschata) and common mallow (Malva sylvestris). Musk mallow is the prettiest – even its names are evocative. Its best feature is its flowers, which come either in fairy white or candy pink, are produced throughout the growing season and have a melt-in-the-mouth texture when used in salads. Their one drawback is that they don’t keep for very long once picked and will go rather yucky left in a salad bowl overnight. Their leaves are also useful and – yet again – very attractive, with deeply-cut palmate lobes. They taste fine and look great in a salad but unfortunately I’m not very keen on the texture and prefer them cooked as a pot herb. They are a useful plant for this as they carry on producing leaves throughout the winter.

Musk mallow is usually described as an annual but I have plants that have been going on for several years. It will usually self-seed quite happily and is a strong grower, enough so that it can hold its own naturalised in long grass. It likes a sunny spot.

Common mallow - Malva sylvestris

Common mallow – Malva sylvestris

Common mallow isn’t quite such a beauty as musk mallow, but it is perhaps even more useful. The flowers are smaller but still edible, the leaves are edible all year and its seed heads, known as ‘cheeses’, are edible too. It is a forest plant, meaning that it takes a bit of shade, making it an ideal forest garden inhabitant. All the mallows are members of the Malvaceae, a family that includes hollyhock, abutilon, marsh mallow, Hibiscus, okra (bhindi or lady’s fingers), Lavatera (tree mallows) and Sidalcea (prairie mallows). Pretty much all of them have flowers that are edible to some degree and some have edible leaves or fruits too. One obvious family trait is a certain mucilaginous (okay, slimy) quality, most famous in the okra-based dish gumbo. Both flowers and leaves of mallow have this quality, but not to an unpleasant degree. The people who appreciate mallow most seem to be the Morroccans and all the best mallow recipes come from there. It’s used to thicken a soup called harira which is used to break the fast during Ramadan.

There’s a rather fine recipe for Wild Celery and Common Mallow Harira at eatweeds.co.uk. Professional forager Miles Irving recommends wilted mallow leaf and scrambled egg for breakfast and shares a fascinating recipe for mallow soup with smoked oil. Personally, I’m happy to put mallow leaves in almost anything, including salads, soups, stews, stir fries and pasta sauces, and also use them cooked on their own as a sort of spinach.

mallow flower

One problem with pretty much the whole mallow family is a susceptibility to Puccinia rust, which causes orange flecks to appear on the leaves as if they have indeed gone rusty. One or two varieties of mallow, such as ‘Zebrina’ have been bred for a degree of resistance, but I haven’t found one which is also tolerant of the cold in these parts. I’m hoping to cross Zebrina with a locally-collected strain to produce a cold-tolerant, rust-tolerant mallow.