Check out the list of 12 Edibles You Can Grow in Water with ease! You don’t need a garden to grow these–A small windowsill, balcony, or tabletop is sufficient to have a fresh supply right at your fingertips!
21.08.2023 - 11:54 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
At the beginning of the month I was helping to survey some planters in the centre of Didcot that Incredible Edible Didcot (a group within Sustainable Didcot) had been given permission to plant with edible herbs as their first Incredible Edible community planting project.
Yesterday was the big day, when Sustainable Didcot and volunteers from the community came together to donate plants, plant up the space with edibles and make signs to let people know what was happening.
The council had cleared the old planting out of the first tier of planters for us. The old planting wasn’t bad – there were plenty of flowering plants for bees and beneficial insects, including rosemary and lavender, but it was neglected. We knew the soil was rock solid, so we brought peat-free compost to improve it, and plenty of bark chips to mulch the plants and give them some litter protection!
Most of the plants were donated by the public, but Sainsbury’s Didcot sent up some herbs to get us started. The coriander and basil are off to a new home in Sustainable Didcot’s community allotment – they didn’t quite fit the bill for the planters – but we planted up the chives, mint and parsley alongside the other plants.
The volunteers really got stuck in to the hard work of digging over the soil.
Tibor (red cap) is from Hungary, and works as a professional gardener here in the UK. He did all of the work for the middle planter himself! After digging, adding compost, planting and watering, and applying the bark chips, this is the result. He chose lavender for the back row, various thymes for the front, and little bay trees for the middle. There’s a pair of strawberries (‘Snow White’, leftover plants from my garden!) at either end, too. You can see that one of the
Check out the list of 12 Edibles You Can Grow in Water with ease! You don’t need a garden to grow these–A small windowsill, balcony, or tabletop is sufficient to have a fresh supply right at your fingertips!
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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.
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.