Edible perennial alliums, part 1

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.

Perennials are the stalwarts of our garden borders – they provide colourful flowers in the garden, year after year.

When I clear the next bed it will be time to plant the overwintering onions. I choose to plant my onions in the autumn for two reasons; the first is that I like having the beds filled overwinter. It’s nicer than having a bare garden to look at. The second is that they are harvestable about a month earlier in the summer, which means their bed is available for replanting a month earlier, and that works for me.

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.

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.

A week ago, I received the most wonderful gift. Alison from The Backyard Larder sent me a collection of edible perennial plants to restart my garden – a transplant from her garden to mine

When we last saw my mini polytunnel from First Tunnels, it was just an open frame, sitting out of the way on top of a raised bed until Ryan had time to finish it. Since then, Ryan has been working on putting a door onto the frame, with magnetic latches:

In my article about growing your own peashoots I explain how to get more than one harvest from your pea seedlings – you simply snip off the top of the plants and allow them to continue growing.

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.