The flowering veg plot

I love nothing more than giving plants the room to do their thing with a little bit of natural abandon.

I think its a bit along the lines of permaculture - but I still dig ground over now and again before I plant my garlic bulbs or sew some seeds in a bed and I only grow a few perennial edibles so I don't quite think I'm one of the perma crowd set yet.

What I like to do is allow my veg to self seed.  My first motivation for this was to save my own seed as I became more and more of a Heritage Seed Library addict.  So I like to encourage my plants to flower and seed and it makes the veg plot look beautiful!  My favourites have to be the umbellifereae flowers of the parsnips, carrots and parsley.  Brassica flowers can look very bold with their bright yellows.

Right now in mid June, the veg in full flower is kale, kai lan, parsnip, parsley, chives, broad beans

and soon I will have radish (followed by their tasty radish pods), salsify, amaranthus, pea flowers, bean flowers, garlic scapes, egyptian walking onion flowers and if I'm lucky the globe artichokes.

Since I've been letting my kales flower at abandon I've been spotting ragged jack kale sprouting up all over the place.  Performing its very own crop rotation.  Eventually when its self seeded enough around the plot I will dig over the bed where I've been growing the kale and grow something completely different.  By then I'm sure I'll have kale growing where it wishes in different spots around the plot.

I have this idea that when a plant germinates naturally it will germinate earlier and at more optimum conditions with a longer growing season than when I deem it safe and warm enough to plant the seed direct.  I first starting thinking about this when I found things germinating from seed that got into my wormery compost.  When I found it particularly hard to germinate seeds I started to chuck those difficult ones in the wormery so that when I used the compost on the patch I would get seedlings springing up randomly.

I really enjoy this type of veg patch - its relatively low effort a little like helping nature along and guiding it with your choice of what you want to grow rather than you physically cultivating it.  Its not completely easy gardening - you do need to manage the weeds you don't want growing in your plot.

There are some seeds I will always plant myself such as peas and garlic but wouldn't it be wonderful if the carrot and parsnip flowers self seed across the plot and I get some surprise roots growing in a new place.  The weeding will be such an adventure of discovering new seedling gifts from my flowering veg plot.

Some ornamental winter salad

Here's a combination of mustard (purple) and lamb's lettuce. I grew them together in my plastic greenhouse over the winter as they are both supposed to be hardy enough to grow under protection in winter.  I had no idea what a pretty combination they would make!

Now inspired to mix lollo rosso lettuce with a really vibrant green one.  

Have you come across any beautiful salads?

A visit to Hampton Court Flower Show

I went to the Hampton Court Flower Show yesterday and was sauntering through the show gardens and it struck me... I find gardens with no edibles boring, like there's something serious missing!  Surely gardens should have something to offer all 5 senses and not deny the sense of taste?  Ornamentals are fine providing they have a few edibles for company.

And the great thing about this year's show is that there are so many edibles in the displays.  I particularly enjoyed the 5 A Day garden and the Dig for Victory garden but there were many more with edible fruit, vegetables and flowers in their displays.  On reflection, I think the Dig for Victory garden is my favourite as it had a slightly more natural and evolved look about it.  The 5 A Day garden just looked a little too new, but was great to show examples of beautiful food growing in a garden with limited space.  Also, at the stand they had free food growing planners showing what you could sow in which month and when it would crop.  I love these types of charts!

I find edibles really exciting.  They are full of possibility.  Ornamentals with no culinary or medicinal uses have only one purpose, but edibles have beautiful vegetables, fruit or herbs growing on them with endless possibilities.  The flowers on edibles have promise of more to come.  Although I have to admit that ornamentals are probably so much more if you are a honey bee.

It got even more exciting when I got to the huge edible area and talked enthusiastically with the exhibitors in the edible tent.  Found my favourite stand - Pennard Plants with their wonderful heirloom variety seeds, bought loads of Franchi seeds and my next year's garlic bulbs from The Garlic Farm.  I also bought a bunch of seeds from Jekka's Herb Farm stand.  Interestingly though I did buy a few packets of poppy seeds as I do think they are beautiful and I also like to grow cosmos as ornamentals too.  I also bought copious amounts of different varieties of nasturtiums as I love to add the leaves to my salads.

The visit got me thinking... why do I have this huge enthusiasm for all things edible?

I grew up on a 4 acre small holding in north Wales where my parents were attempting to be self sufficient.  All the food I ate had been created from the vegetables and fruit grown on the farm.  Also we had a goat which I milked every day with my mother, hens for providing us with eggs and the animals reared would eventually make their way to our plates.

As a child, walking into the garden always started with grabbing a generous handful of chives to munch on and then going on my way.  In spring and summer this included a detour via the pea patch, strawberry patch, raspberry patch... And then my next stop would be to go and find my father.  He was always doing something exciting in the vegetable garden like sowing new seeds.

So from very early on, the garden means grazing.  I have now graduated to cooking and making teas, with lemon verbena being my absolute favourite garden tea.  I guess it is only natural that these passions for taste would follow through to adulthood.