Category: Forest Garden
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Carrot top pesto recipes
Once you know how to make carrot top pesto, you’ll never want to waste your carrot ‘greens’ ever again. My recipe appeared online and then in my book The Permaculture Kitchen. Since then, I’ve seen carrot top pesto used by loads of people in all sorts of creative and scrumptious ways. I thought it’d be…
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Summer sunflowers
Sunflowers induce a smile on my face. Outwardly simple, they shout “Summer!” even if the rain is pouring. And this year, they’re having a ball in our gloriously hot summer. We plant lots and save seed too. On the right is part of my friend Carla’s garden near Roma, Italy. The tall sunflowers are from…
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Mustard greens, fermented and more
I wish I’d got to know mustard greens (and reds and goldens) much earlier in my growing adventure. They are such a tasty, versatile and good-hearted vegetable. And some of the varieties are great green manures, ground cover and biofumigants. Here at Legge Towers we sow them in mid to late summer so that we…
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Hanging baskets from recycled poultry feeders
Sometimes the most obvious solutions are at my feet. Which is ironic, as I was after a high-level solution. We’ve grown tomatoes in the Big Polytunnel for a few years now. They take up quite a lot of bed space and we felt we could use the bed space more productively. But we like tomatoes…
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Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs – Emma Cooper Interview
I had a lot of fun yesterday when I interviewed Emma Cooper about her new e-book, Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs as part of Emma’s virtual book tour. Update 21st April 2015: I’m delighted Emma now has a print version of Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs that you can buy from Amazon. Emma’s book is…
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How to grow beer
All you need is a few hop plants (humulus lupulus), some malt and sugar, water and the help of Andy Hamilton. At the end of the summer, we had loads of the female flowers which are the hops on our plants. So we stripped them and dried them on a rack on top of the…
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Wild garlic slaw recipe
Spring is a joy not least because of the re-emergence of the wild garlic. There’s lots of publicity in the UK at the moment about eating more vegetables. I’ve been having fun concocting meals where I replace the normal carbohydrate element (potatoes, pasta, rice etc) with tasty veg. In this recipe, I added a big…
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Currant ‘champagne’ recipe – quick fizz
If you want a fizz that tastes spectacular, this recipe is for you. In under a month you get the full bright fruity taste of currants with a mildly mouth puckering tart-tannin background. The aroma is the wonderful woodland smell of crushed currant leaves. All this surrounded with lively & youthful fizz. I’m delighted with…
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Three-cornered leek recipes
This box arrived courtesy of a very generous Lindsay on Twitter. Lindsay has a wonderful surfeit of these in Devon and needed an ID for it. She also wanted to be rid of some and so one thing led to another. It’s allium triquetrum or three-cornered leek (aka three-cornered garlic). It’s so called because of…