King Basil
If someone held a gun to my head and said “You can only use one herb ever again, choose now punk or I’ll blow your brains out” (admittedly, an unlikely scenario), my …
If someone held a gun to my head and said “You can only use one herb ever again, choose now punk or I’ll blow your brains out” (admittedly, an unlikely scenario), my …
The most underused and unappreciated of all the winter vegetables is surely swede. The big purple root was once ubiquitous in the UK, a routine staple with the school dinner and …
The fruits on my two blackcurrant bushes are so abundant their sheer weight sags the shrub’s woody branches almost to the ground. I’ve been picking daily for a week and …
Of the many herbs I grow, the early spring vanguard are now sprouting enough greenery to be regularly harvested: chives, mint, parsley, sage and, that most underrated and underused of …
In 2012 I moved a small fig tree (Ficus carica) I’d kept for years in a restricting tub and planted it out in open ground in my back garden, figuring …
One of the bitterest pills to swallow for those who care about contemporary Wales is the state of the nation’s health. First there is the odious background noise of the …
It was my lucky day: I picked up a butternut squash at the Food Bank. Squashes, and indeed the whole Cucurbita genus (pumpkins, marrows, gourds, courgettes, cucumbers), are actually fruits not vegetables, being seed-bearing. …
I had only one non-negotiable condition when my partner and I were house-hunting in Cardiff years ago: the back garden had to be facing either south or west or south-west to …
The first non-imported fruit of the year is now available: forced rhubarb, grown in pitch-dark sheds in the ‘rhubarb triangle’ of Yorkshire. Of course rhubarb is technically not a fruit …
I’ve been foraging for Autumn’s free harvest again; this time for hazel nuts from Corylus avellana, a native shrubby tree abundant in wild places on Cardiff’s northerly range of hills. …