Innholdsfortegnelse for A Year in the Edible Garden 2025 i Gardens Illustrated Magazine

In the garden April is a terrible month for impatient gardeners. I know, I am one. With windowsills bristling with potted-up seedlings, the temptation to plant them out can be overpowering (and disastrous). It's very easy to let a few days of warm weather go to your head but planting out your tender courgettes, peppers, pumpkins and tomatoes before the last frost is a recipe for tears before breakfast. If you really want to get your hands dirty, why not plant radishes? The clever kitchen gardener will already have a row in the ground but for the rest of us now is the time to sow. With their flash of green, red and white, radishes are the beauty queens of the vegetable kingdom. Not only that but they are they…

In the garden It is with a hollow laugh that I greet the advice offered in some vegetable growing manuals to ‘sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labours’. For me, a vegetable garden in July is like a river in full spate, the growth of weeds and crops both equally relentless. Courgettes and cucumbers never seem to stop coming, the dahlias, sunflowers and cosmos need picking or deadheading and pumpkins need feeding. Every corner of the plot seems to scream for attention, and that's even before you begin the process of turning produce into plenty. Your ability to stay afloat depends on how much work you have put in during the previous months. In summers past I have wasted many hot hours hacking down overgrown paths and watering…

In the garden Shunning the practical for a moment, I want to pause for thought. In the month when sultry days slow the pace of life, it's time to make the case for the vegetable garden as a place in which to revel in beauty. There is a newly minted quality to freshly picked fruit and vegetables that makes them objects worthy of admiration quite apart from their culinary qualities; it's no accident that the still life has been a subject popular with artists since the 17th century, many of whom chose fruit and flowers as their subjects. From Chardin's strawberries to Fantin-Latour's nasturtiums, painters have delighted in the exquisite shapes and subtle colours revealed in nature; so should you. Set aside time for contemplation and stroll round your plot…

Every season has its joys in the garden, but if I had to pick a favourite month it would be October. The light has a special quality at this time of year, somehow making colours appear richer as the borders reach their climax. This last display before the first frosts set in can feel like the garden shaking a fist at the approaching winter. Every drop of sunshine feels like the precious last sip from the bottle and best of all, this is the peak of the apple season. Our orchard dates back to the 1890s when the charismatic garden writer William Robinson first moved to Gravetye. The romance of carefully shaped trees rising out of wildflower meadows was an essential element to his wild garden. He chose his site…

In the garden Winter is a good time to think about what you have learned throughout the past year in your own and other people's gardens. My allotment has a very specific aesthetic: a bit ramshackle, sometimes a little overgrown. It is productive enough but I always strive to make it better and to that end I sketch ambitious plans in my notebook, sitting by a fire rather than out in the mud and cold. Psychologically, I prefer winter to autumn, when I suffer my own allotment version of SAD (seasonal affective disorder). Each September I am plunged into gloom, the good intentions of last spring behind me; bindweed has taken hold, weaving a string of lantern-like seedheads through the branches of our ‘Spartan’ apple tree, while couch grass is…

In the garden Some time ago a friend brought me several packets of vegetable seeds back from India. There were pusa navbahar (cluster beans), two types of brinjal (aubergine), dudhi (bottle gourds), palak (spinach), pusa sawani (okra), chilli and white radish – enough for an entire allotment's worth of Indian vegetables. The seeds were beautifully packaged; the plant names spelled out in black, in old-fashioned typefaces, and illustrated with drawings of vegetables. Too beautiful to use, they sit in the letter rack on my desk, now long out of date. Though no seeds germinated, the idea of an Indian allotment stayed with me. Now I plan to do it. First came the thought of a windowsill packed with bright-red, orange, yellow and purple chilli peppers. Then came the accidental discovery…

In the garden Children understand the satisfaction of arranging things. Whether it's plastic animals or the inside of a doll's house, making orderly groups is something we learn to enjoy early and it is a pleasure that stays with us. My kitchen windowsill holds various succulents and pelargoniums with lemon-scented leaves along with two tiny lead figures: a lady in a flowing blue dress and a mechanic carrying a can of petrol. While washing up, I like to imagine these two playing out scenes beneath the various leaves. Rearranging my window-scape is good occupational therapy and perhaps that is why I find June gardening so pleasing. Nothing makes me happier than setting out for my plot with a shallow basket packed with well-grown courgettes, beans, tomatoes and squash plants ready…

In the garden The standard supermarket onion is a harsh, rank-tasting object when compared with the subtly flavoured kinds we can grow for ourselves. Just like that other staple, the potato, the choice of onions available in seed catalogues makes what's on offer in the shops look rather pathetic. Coloured golden, red, purple, white or green, there are onions to store, onions to eat fresh, salad onions, pickling onions and that oddity, the Egyptian or tree onion (Allium cepa var. viviparum), with its long, wand-like stem topped with a cluster of bulbils or sets where a normal onion would have flowers. Onions can be grown from seed or sets (immature bulbs about the size of a cherry tomato). For a year-round supply of onions from seed, sow twice, once at…

In the garden I like gardening on the edge of winter. The jobs that need doing are neither too vigorous nor too numerous; instead they are of the pleasing, putting-to-rights kind. Things are slowing down, weeds no longer grow like Topsy and the time-consuming job of watering large sections of the plot by hand no longer needs to be done. Instead there are tools to be cleaned and rubbed with an oily cloth, leaves to be raked and the odd bit of soft fruit pruning to do. I would like to be the kind of person who keeps their shed in perfect order, but it is often the case that after I have weeded, watered and picked in too short a time there is only a moment in which to…

In the garden Most gardeners maintain two gardens, one real and susceptible to slugs, and one imaginary in which every plant succeeds. The size of your plot is of little consequence; whatever its dimensions, you are prone to the same paralysing malaise of the ideal. Whether you have a substantial acreage, a slither of town garden, a postagestamp-sized yard or a few feet of balcony on which to put pots, beware too much fantasy gardening. A bit of dreaming is fine – after all, a gardener's imagination is what sustains them through the winter – but at some point ambition must be turned into practical application. Every year I work hard to make my allotment more productive, most recently concentrating on two large central beds, manuring them well and closely…

In the garden May is the month in which I long for a gardening third eye. In this heightened state, I would become a paragon of focused efficiency. I would remember to earth up my potatoes and stay on top of weeds by running a hoe down the rows regularly, and I wouldn't forget to thin newly germinated salad – and I'd also take time to sow spinach, beetroot, carrot, radishes and turnips successionally at regular two-week intervals. As the polemicist William Cobbett observed 200 years ago: ‘Almost every gardener could grow more by sowing less and doing this more often.’ While coolly measuring out my short rows, I would then take the time to prune my damson and greengage trees while it's warm (this helps to prevent silver leaf…

IN BRIEF Name Kasteel Hex. What 18th-century house with extensive formal gardens and a walled kitchen garden. Where Heers-Heks, Belgium. Size 148 acres, including a four-acre walled kitchen garden. Soil Heavy soil. Climate Mild winters and moderate summer temperatures. Walled garden produces a warmer microclimate. Hardiness zone USDA 8b. There is a buzz in the air when we arrive at Hex. Estate workers meet and greet gardeners from across northern Europe as they park their cars in the cherry orchard, and there is a palpable sense of excitement. The reason is the twice-yearly plant fair, the only time the garden is open to the public. As you head up the drive, you catch your first sight of Kasteel Hex. The 18th-century house looks out on to the parterre garden that…

When I arrive at the home of Real Seeds in Newport, Pembrokeshire, boxes of vegetables and bits of drying plant matter are stacked everywhere. I am hardly through the door before Ben Gabel arrives with an armful of shaggy parasol mushrooms, intended for dinner, while his partner Kate McEvoy launches into a discussion of chenopods – the virtues of obscure grains such as quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), Aztec broccoli (C. berlandieri), and the amaranths. It is clear early on that this place is about more than seeds. Ben and Kate have strong views on food production, the scourge of hybrid seeds, energy production and how to run a company – their own is a balanced partnership between the owners, the staff and the customers. Their mission has been distilled to finding…

In the garden The third garden in my life (aside from my allotment and the one attached to our house) is the one I am most proud of: the garden in the playground of our local primary school in Hackney, east London. It is worked by me and another mother, the children in our after-school gardening club and, most significantly, by our school gardener who comes in one day a week to maintain the garden (beautifully) and teach the children about all things ecological. The beauty and fruitfulness of the garden is down to him (we mostly mess it up), but the teaching part is key. In these times of swingeing cuts, school gardens will only survive if they offer educational value for money. As well as 11 raised beds,…

In the garden January is a month that is best spent reading seed catalogues by the fire. It's a time for taking stock and planning next year's crops, with flavour in mind. I may be biased but I think cooks who grow their own fruit and vegetables are a cut above the average kitchen incumbent. Not only do they work with ingredients of enviable taste and freshness, but the need to make time for both horticultural and culinary tasks requires a delicate balancing act. The kitchen gardener has to think ahead, to feed the earth in autumn in order to produce slim, green, finger-length courgettes the following June, and to turn the surplus fruits of late summer into wine-dark jellies or rich and savoury chutneys that will sustain you until…