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Daffodil time
Perhaps because of the mild winter, the yellow explosion of daffodils (Narcissus) seems to have come slightly earlier than usual this year, adding garish colour to public parks, roadside verges, …
Coriander candour
Coriander (Coriandrum sativum) is an interesting plant. A member of the huge Apium genus of umbellifers, closely related to other important culinary plants such as caraway, carrot, celery, chervil, cumin, …
Gardeners’ Question Time
Franklin Englishman: A very warm welcome to Gardeners’ Question Time. Today the programme comes from a fly-tip off Seawall Road in southern Cardiff where the panel and I are the …
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 …
Rooting around rwden
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 …
Currant affairs
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 …
Lovage story
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 …
Go figure
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 …
Doctor Dic’s Welsh herbal
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 …
Squashed
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. …