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Sowing using your cookbook

Our Chief Horticulturist turns his decision-making process on its head when it comes to choosing what to grow

Do you ever see interesting vegetables in seed catalogues, grown them and then not use them?  I am afraid that I do, so am starting from the other direction this year. Let’s see what alluring recipes I can find and grow to suit them with a clear end use in mind....

My ex-colleague, Caroline Craig, quit the RHS Press Office last year to write her new book, Provence, using family recipes from her native Provence. Most unusually Caroline has been relentlessly seasonal in her book. Many recipes drive me wild requiring fresh cherry tomatoes in winter and celeriac in summer. There is no sense in that if you grow much of your own veg.

Chard is beautiful and tasty
Globe artichokes make a stately addition to the veg patch

Although tomatoes and other tender crops are only in season briefly in most British gardens, others are available for longer; chard, endives, both frilly and plain-leaved, cardoons for example. I know this because I have numerous Italian allotment neighbours who favour these crops. Even better, they are generous with plants and seeds, although on the downside their culinary instructions are often sketchy.

It is the method of utilising crops that is important. The Italian plotholders cook escarole – outlandish though to may seem to us (it's a plain-leaved endive and it is delicious cooked) and so it seems they do in Provence as well.

Some I already grow; globe artichokes, one of my favourite vegetables but only palatable in my humble opinion when golf ball size. Then there is Florence fennel, which is a demon for bolting in a dry year – I think of it as a challenge.  French beans, a crop highly suited southeast England is a speciality for me. In Provence, it seems that they are often eaten as immature seeds squeezed from nearly ripe pods, and common practice too amongst the Italian growers who freeze them for winter.

Eastern promise

Japanese radishes (mooli) grow well in Britain
Provence may be impossibly exotic compared to Surrey, but also features carrots, garlic, onions, potatoes and many other every day veg and fruit. Exotic tropical crops, used in Indian or Thai cookery, seem to me to be too much trouble for home growing.

More adventurously, I have taken a shine to Korean food. Korean cuisine seems to have potential with its tasty soups and pickled or fermented vegetables, often using vegetable that I grow already; carrots, courgettes, leeks, ridge cucumbers, salad onions, spinach.

However, bracken shoots, bellflower roots and other exotic delicacies will have to wait. If they were worthwhile they would already be widely grown. On the other hand, according to my new Korean cookery book, Our Korean Kitchen by Jordan Burke and Rejina Pyo (Christmas present), there are some easier options. Radishes for example, not the Japanese mooli radish but shorter greener ones used for fermenting, and white ones that seem like the well-known ‘Icicle’.

Chinese cabbage is another Korean staple, easy to grow, not so easy to keep pest free, which is why I have not grown it for years. Like radishes it is a martyr to cabbage root fly, but since my turnips and swedes have to grow under insect-proof mesh it is easy enough to cover radishes and Chinese cabbage too. Then there is shiso (perilla), a herb which I have grown only as an ornamental, with its basil like flavours.

I really need a Korean allotment neighbour, but it is a start.

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