Want the best of both worlds? Here are the Best Edible Ground Cover Plants that you can grow to add stunning appeal to your landscape with a fresh supply in your kitchen!
21.08.2023 - 12:00 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
On Friday evening we headed to London (an unusual event in itself) to the Natural History Museum for one of their special After Hours events. The museum stays open late into the evening for guests who have booked tickets to visit the special exhibitions while it’s quieter (although the main bulk of the museum closes as normal). We weren’t booked in for an exhibition – we ended up in the restaurant for a special tasting session of edible insects.
As I discussed when we booked the tickets, there has been some buzz in the media of late over whether or not eating more insects could solve some of the food shortage problems around the world, and provide a low-carbon source of protein. One of the speakers at the Edible Insects evening was Meredith Alexander from ActionAid, and it was her opinion that most food shortages are caused by food distribution issues rather than a lack of food per se, and one of the big problems with modern agriculture is that we look for global solutions, when we should be looking at local landscapes and tailoring our agricultural methods (and crops) to what the land is most suited to produce.
The main speaker was Stuart Hine, who is an entomologist at the NHM and who advises on insect contamination in food and identifies insects and things like that. Surprisingly, perhaps, he’s a big fan of insects and thinks we should all be eating more of them!
Ostensibly the evening was a serious discussion of these issues, but really it was just a chance for people to try eating insects – something we normally tend to avoid doing. An interesting crowd turned up, although it has to be said that some of them left at the intermission, and many didn’t seem to eat any of the insects at all. It’s not as though they didn’t
Want the best of both worlds? Here are the Best Edible Ground Cover Plants that you can grow to add stunning appeal to your landscape with a fresh supply in your kitchen!
From well-known favorites like grapevines to unique varieties like chayote, there’s a vine out there for every taste bud. Check out our guide to discover the Best Edible Vines you can grow in your own backyard.
My parents are coming to visit today, to ‘see the garden’ (which is probably just a convenient excuse for them to visit). I am a little apprehensive – not least because it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop raining all day. We were going to have a barbecue; we’ve thought better of it.
Over the weekend I got involved in a project that Sustainable Didcot (one of the local Community Action Groups) is putting together under the banner ‘Incredible Edible Didcot‘. The aim of the Incredible Edible movement is to encourage edible planting in public/communal areas, so that local people have access to food they can pick, but also so that people can come together with a sense of community. Sustainable Didcot have a community allotment, with a polytunnel, on the site where I used to have my allotment (our tenures didn’t coincide!), but this will be their first public planting.
I love growing unusual edible plants – not only are they potentially useful and easy to grow (because the pests and diseases they suffer from are not widespread), but they can be beautiful too.
As gardeners, we’re all familiar with finding caterpillars in the cabbages, but we’re also adept at removing them before we cook up our feasts (or, in my case, feeding the whole lot to the chickens). But what if we didn’t? There are plenty of cultures around the world in which insects provide a valuable source of protein, and even in the Western world our food processing systems don’t guarantee us insect-free food, so we’re all eating them unwittingly anyway. (Although, apparently, the idea that we eat spiders in our sleep is an urban legend.)
I’ve mentioned the TomTato and the Egg & Chips plants before – they’re exclusive to T&M, grafted vegetables that grow two crops – potatoes combined either with tomatoes or aubergines. Now opinion is divided as to whether they’re genius space savers or a novelty that won’t give you your money’s worth on either crop. But if you’d like the opportunity to decide for yourself then they’re on offer today – you can buy a pair of plants (one of each variety) for just £4.99.
Hurricane Barney battered the garden a bit last week, but it seems to have withstood the weather
Two things came together to prompt this post on edible spring flowers. The first was that we invited Ryan’s parents round for dinner on Mothering Sunday, and I pondered buying some spring flowers for a table decoration that I could later plant out in the garden as additions to my edible flower collection.
We’ve been making a lot of progress in the garden this year, including processing many of the plants in pots that travelled from the old garden, and were waiting to find a permanent home. Some have moved on yet again, to a friend’s garden. Some pots were filled with nothing but weeds, and have been emptied into the green waste bin. As the clutter subsides, it’s easier to keep track of what I’ve got, and where it is. One of the pots that has resurfaced from the chaos holds ‘Minogue’s Onion’, a slightly mysterious species that was given to me by the late Patrick Whitefield. He described it in Permaculture Magazine a few years ago, but never uncovered its scientific name. It’s a perennial allium with the flattened leaves of a garlic, and forms a clump of strongly-flavoured (he said) salad onions in the winter. In the summer it forms small, round bulbs, which you harvest by digging up the clump and replanting a few to allow it to continue. They don’t need peeling, apparently, which sounds appealing. The plant is supposed to die back in summer; mine hasn’t yet. I have never seen it flower; I don’t think it does.
It’s hard to believe that it’s three months since Sustainable Didcot’s Incredible Edible volunteers took on their first big challenge and planted up a herb garden in the centre of Didcot.
Last year I ordered myself a packet of the Organic Gardening Catalogue’s wild edible plant mix. It says it contains: