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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. …
Bamboozled
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 …
Rhubarb, rhubarb
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 …
Food for free
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. …
Gone pear-shaped
Native to cool, temperate regions, the pear has been cultivated in Europe since the beginnings of agriculture. In southern Wales every farm and smallholding once had a pear orchard and the freely available, easy …
