Combining a slow living mindset with a love for growing, foraging, and cooking seasonal food Inspiring and encouraging people to develop a greater connection to nature as a way to connect to our families, our communities, and to ourselves Celebrating each of the seasons and the patterns of our natural environment as a way to […]
Today is the last day of my Instagram virtual holiday with a French theme, and is there anything more quintessentially French than the madeleine? These tiny, shell-shaped cakes with their plump little bellies are the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee or tea. The inspiration for this recipe was the combination of blackberry and […]
You know you’re well into the spring season when the lilacs start to bloom. Shrubs put on huge shows of beautiful flower clusters with an intoxicating floral scent that infuses the air. Like most spring blooms, their show is short-lived and only lasts a couple of weeks, and if you bring the cut flowers into […]
Lilacs are a real highlight of late spring, bursting with fragrance and colour all over the place. They come in a range of purple hues as well as some pink and white varieties too, and all are edible and delicious. Care should always be taken not to confuse them with superficially similar horse chestnut flowers […]
I’ll get one important thing out of the way: “Ground Ivy” is a very different plant to English Ivy which is poisonous and definitely shouldn’t be eaten. Ground ivy is actually related to mint and is has also been known as creeping charlie, alehoof, gill-over-the-ground, and many more names. In a similar way to mint, […]
You might have noticed a hiatus in my blog posting over the last few months. Without going into too much detail at this point, my body wasn’t taking no for an answer and the enforced rest was pretty much mandatory for a while! The good news is that I’m in full health, there is nothing […]
Radishes are one of the quickest foods you can grow, from seed to plate in just 4-5 weeks, and they are a great spring food with their crisp, crunchy texture and hot, peppery yet fresh flavour. I’ve gone from hardly liking them at all to considering them a bit of a wonder-veg. Now is the […]
I’ve loved magnolia trees ever since I was a child visiting my grandmother’s cottage in spring and seeing the beautiful Magnolia soulangeana in bloom in her garden. There seem to be a lot of magnolia trees where we live – I feel very lucky to be able to walk down nearby streets and see them […]
Wild garlic shoots have been spotted in the south and it never takes Instagram long at all to catch on to the start of wild garlic season. As soon as the young shoots emerge across the south of England there’s a frenzy of photographs and recipes and the excitement for a new year of foraging […]
Rhubarb is one of my absolute favourite things to grow and eat. It is such a hardy plant that is ready before a lot of fruit and veg in the spring and it just keeps on giving. Its unique flavour is perfect to brighten up a dull day, or any day for that matter. Full […]
As the weather turns cooler and the frosts start to creep in at night, for most people the main foraging “season” is coming to a close. Of course, the notion of a defined foraging season would have been nonsense to our ancestors who were relying on gathering their food from the wild in order to […]
The courgette glut is a well-known phenomenon. Every year I know it’s coming, and every year I continue to be surprised by how many of these incredible vegetables can be produced by a single plant in a very short space of time. We have about 5 courgette plants on our allotment and I would say […]
Flowering currants are a beautiful pop of pink in gardens, parks and the occasional hedgerow in spring. They are particularly abundant in March and April, but can still be flowering in early May in more northerly parts of the UK. I love their fruity aroma and gorgeous bright colour and they are just perfect as […]
The cabbage. An unloved, perhaps uninspiring vegetable to some, a saviour in winter for the allotment keeper! Cabbages are generally cool-weather veg with winter varieties that can grow slowly but surely through the frosts. There are the deep green crinkly varieties that fill you with the sense that you’re being good to yourself by eating […]
