January salads: fennel, sorrel, onion leaves, daylily leaves and a snippet of parsley root

When I took up the challenge set by Michelle at Veg Plotting to find salads to eat from my garden every week of this year, it took a little while for the penny to drop that she was starting the challenge at the beginning of the year. Logical, you might think, until it occurs to you that it is January.

This most difficult of months in the veg garden means my salad pickings have been – let’s face it – a bit thin. If you’re efficient you’ve got greenhouses and coldframes packed to the gunwhales with winter salad mixes you sowed in September last year, growing, perhaps more slowly, but enough for you to pick a goodly meal.

In an emergency, of course, you can always try sprouting seeds: microgreens, grown on a windowsill, make deliciously different salad ingredients (I tried this last year: radish sprouts and pea shoots were my firm favourites).

But for now, caught on the hop, I have to fall back on what I can find in my garden that’s already there.

Feathery, airy bronze fennel leaves are exquisite to eat right through the year

Normally salads are the ultimate in grow-your-own fast food: sown every couple of weeks, up within days, pickable (just) within a fortnight.  They last all of a month or two, then they’re gone – eaten, bolted or just a bit too mature for enjoying raw.

Wouldn’t it be great, I started thinking, if you had plants which produced salads for a bit longer. Even better: over winter. And certainly into next year.

And the more I looked, the more I discovered that there are more perennial salad ingredients out there than you’d think. In fact, I’ve amazed myself: with literally no effort, I’ve been able to pick something for salads every week of this month.

If you widen the net to include things like corn salad (so plentiful and prolific you’re never without it even though it’s strictly speaking an annual) and young leaves picked from winter veg, you can add kale, beetroot tops and the very tiniest chard leaves, too. Colourful, as well as delicious!

Ten of the best Perennial Salads:

Sorrel: to be used in moderation, as they have a really powerful flavour. French sorrel is big, beefy and green; red-veined sorrel is altogether more refined, with burgundy veins. Both carry young leaves right through winter and taste sharply lemony and tangy.

Fennel: this deliciously aniseedy herb carries a frothy tuft of young growth right through winter: bronze fennel in particular looks gorgeous sprinkled sparingly in with larger leaves

Garlic: instead of pulling all your garlic in August, leave a few in at the end of the row to overwinter. Then at this time of year you can be snipping the slenderest shoots like chives to sprinkle on salads. This works well with overwintering onion shoots, too.

Salad burnet: evergreen Sanguisorba minor is generously productive and so low-growing you can tuck it in around other things; pick the smallest, youngest leaves as older ones are too tough. The flavour is fresh and subtle, a little like a nutty cucumber.

Garlic cress: hard to get hold of but worth tracking down, Peltaria alliacea is another evergreen herb with a spicy, garlicky, almost mustardy taste.

Mint: as we all know, mint grows like billy-o through most of the season and it’s all you can do to keep it in check. At this time of year, though, it dies down to a little basal foliage of tiny, tender leaves: sprinkled on salads, these are just delicious.

Wild rocket: stronger (even stronger?) than the related and more familiar salad rocket, this is a robust little herb that comes back year after year. It dies down in winter, but you’ll keep it going later (and start it growing earlier) by covering with a cloche.

Horseradish: another salad ingredient to use sparingly, and only the very youngest of leaves as they get poisonous as they mature.  A peppery flavour, with quite a kick.

Scorzonera: This useful perennial vegetable produces long black roots that taste of artichokes, but you can also pick the leaves when young: a little bland in flavour, but pleasant with other spicier ingredients to pep them up (the flowers later in the year are edible, too).

Daylily leaves: every veg garden should have a daylily (Hemerocallis) or two: the flower buds are crunchy and sweet, like a cross between peas and lettuce. Most varieties keep some leaves through winter: pick them young and fresh but don’t overdo it, as they’re laxative.

(Potato and Root Parsley soup-stew)

Deciding what you do with your root parsley once you’ve grown it is easy: you just plump for one of its multiple identities and use it just like you would parsnips, or carrots (or parsley, if you’re using the tops). We had ours roasted alongside the Sunday joint, and very delicious it was too.

But to pay true homage to this most Slavic of vegetables, you need to cook it Eastern European style. It’s jolly cold east of, say, Austria, so it’s no surprise that the local cooking involves a lot of hearty stews and warming soups: inner insulation, you might say.

This one is about as hearty and warming as it gets: it also makes the most of the many virtues of parsley root, using both its underground roots and its topknot of fresh green parsley. I can’t make up my mind whether it’s a soup or a stew (you can make it with the emphasis on either) but whatever, it’s a filling, nourishing and delicious lunch that’ll set you trudging out onto the snow-lashed plains with a glow in your cheeks.

2 parsley roots (or if you happen not to be growing parsley root this year, just use smallish parsnips - and you’ll also need to get yourself a bunch of fresh parsley)
1 onion
1 carrot
1kg (about 2 1/2 lbs) potatoes
1.2 l (2 pts) chicken stock
225g (8oz) bacon
salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Start by preparing all your veg.

Trim the parsley roots, removing the tops, then peeling and dicing them. Top and tail the carrot and dice that too (peel if it’s old-ish, otherwise leave the skin on) and scrub your potatoes before dicing them skin and all. Finally peel and chop the onion.

Put the whole lot into a big pan along with the chicken stock, then bring to the boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer, and cook gently for about 20 minutes until the veg are tender.

While they’re cooking, chop the root parsley tops (or fresh parsley if you’re using parsnips) finely. Also cut the bacon into small pieces (if you can find lardons in your local shop, these save you a bit of work) and dry-fry them in a frying pan for about 10 minutes until they’re lightly browned. Remove from the heat and set aside.

At this point, you can decide whether you want it to be a soup or a stew. If you want a soup, put the cooked vegetables through a blender and whizz for a minute or so till they’re nicely creamy. Then return to the pan. If you want a stew – just leave them as they are.

Add the bacon to the vegetables, then sprinkle in the parsley and season to taste with salt and pepper. Give the whole thing a good stir, and simmer again for another five minutes or so before ladling into a big generous bowl.

Above ground it's parsley...

If there was ever a vegetable which couldn’t make up its mind, this is it.

It might be a parsley: and then again, maybe it’s a parsnip. On a good day, it could be a carrot.

The identity crisis even affects its common name: take your pick from root parsley, rock selinen, Hamburg parsley, Dutch parsley (good grief, it can’t even decide which country it comes from. Actually, it turns out to be Czechoslovakia) parsley root or just ‘that bloody thing that doesn’t know what it is’.

But all this general confusion plays beautifully into the hands of us veg gardeners. Because a veg that’s trying its hand at being several different things can be everything at once – and you get the best of all worlds.

Root parsley is definitely parsley (it’s Petroselinum crispum, but with a var tuberosum on the end betraying those swollen parsnip-like roots). But it’s a parsley that – like a parsnip – stays in the ground through most of the winter.

The luxury of having plenty of parsley to go and snip from the garden even in December and January can’t be overstated. I always have a bit of trouble keeping conventional parsley happy indoors: I think it’s too warm for it, so it grows more leggy than leafy, and besides I have a habit of forgetting to water it.

But this winter I’ve been able to pop into the veg garden and snip myself a few sprigs from each plant whenever I feel like it (don’t fleece them or they won’t have enough left to keep themselves going).

It’s a little coarser than your Italian flat-leaved summer parsley, with a slightly stronger flavour, but as long as you use a little less than you would normally it makes a very respectable substitute.

Then when you feel like it, you simply dig up the roots and use them just like you would parsnips, or carrots, or turnips for that matter.

...and below ground, it's a parsnip (and I'm about as successful in growing it straight)

They are much more delicate, whiter and smaller than parsnips – about 15cm long, and nowhere near as fat – but to my mind that’s a distinct advantage. I find a lot of my parsnips are hard, inedible core which needs removing before you can enjoy the root at its best: no such problem with root parsley.

The flavour is where this vegetable stops being like a parsnip and starts being more like a carrot. It’s sweet, tender, without any of the earthiness of a parsnip - rather like a carrot that’s been cooked with parsley for flavouring. It’s intriguingly, deliciously different.

I sowed mine in modules in spring, then potted them on a bit before planting them outside. I would imagine it wouldn’t be too troublesome to sow direct outdoors if you prefer. It doesn’t seem to have inherited the problems with germination for which parsley (and parsnips) are notorious, either.

After that it grows like a parsnip: in other words, it needs a good long spell in the ground to form those lovely little white roots.

Unlike parsnips (though like parsley) it’s happy to grow in the shade and are almost ridiculously trouble-free: mine spent most of their summer overshadowed by the rampant seeding radishes next door which I hadn’t realised would grow so big (I like their peppery, crunchy green seedpods). The root parsley didn’t mind a bit - they were just as good when I uncovered them as if they’d had the place to themselves.

If you’re strapped for space, and wondering whether you have room for parsley and parsnips and carrots this year, this may just be the answer. And even if you have all the room in the world, it’s worth growing for that intriguingly unusual flavour and easy-going nature. All in all, for a schizophrenic vegetable, it’s pretty nice to have around.

My future berry patch: it may not look very promising at the moment, but you wait.

No kitchen garden is complete, I’d argue, without a very large quantity of fruit as well as vegetables.

I’m not sure what puts people off growing fruit - it’s ridiculously easy, especially if you compare it to, say, preventing spinach from bolting - yet it’s usually an afterthought, with the possible exception of strawberries. But just growing veg is like living life in black and white: you’re missing a whole other dimension to your gardening life.

Berries dripping with blood-red juice, apples still warm from the sun, pears so juicy you have to eat them over the sink: fruit in the garden is the definition of luxury. You can be as poor as a church mouse and still live like a king if you grow fruit. It brings out your romantic, indulgent side, making you generous to yourself and those closest to you with sumptuous treats and illicit excesses of crumbles and pies and tarts and icecream.

I’m gradually repopulating my garden with fruit, and so far things are going well: we have the annual treat of three trees’ worth of apples, and my previously ailing ‘Conference’ pear produced a bumper crop last year. I’ve begun work (slowly) on planting what I’m optimistically calling the orchard on top of the hill: so far, so pathetic, with just one medlar and one quince, but I’m adding more each year.

But the most exciting bit is starting this year. I have a little spit of land, about 5m by 7.5m (that’s 16 x 25ft to you oldies) between my greenhouse and the wall of the garage which doubles up as my garden shed. And it’s just the right size for a berry patch.

It’s roughly rectangular, so I fancied something a bit more formal this time. I knew I didn’t want the usual fruit cage; there’s nothing wrong with them, it’s just that I suffer from delusions of grandeur and I’m after a fruit cage that doesn’t look like a fruit cage. I’m thinking tall slender posts with copper pipes between them, and swags of rope from a central point to hold the netting up.

Inside, I had in mind a geometric design, rather like a potager. These are very easy to draw up, given a little graph paper and a pencil: I did mine on the kitchen table.

Yes, of course I could have just done the traditional thing and made beds either side of a central path. I’d probably have given myself a lot less hassle that way.

But though it may seem odd to be ‘designing’ a kitchen garden layout, actually it makes the whole space so much more inviting, interesting and just downright beautiful. And that means you want to be in it: which means your garden is loved and cherished in a way a practical but visually dull space is not.

There’s absolutely no reason why a kitchen garden can’t be just as well laid out as an ornamental one, and once you’ve taken that on board, the possibilities for growing fruit and veg become downright exciting.

There is just one rule for designing a garden, and that stays more or less the same whatever you’re doing: keep it simple, stupid. I began by drawing some complicated fiddly thing with a diamond in the middle but that left me with lots of funny triangular corner beds. Then I tried a rather grand design with a sweeping semi-circle at the back: nope, not enough width, and besides, it would have been a nightmare to build and obscured the garage window, which is kind of attractive.

Given that the entrance is over towards one corner, I had to have diagonal paths: I also wanted growing space all round the edges, as I’m planning espaliered cherry trees (perfect for growing under netting: the birds get the lot otherwise).

I also needed a central space for a raised bed, or maybe a pot, so I can grow blueberries: my soil is unrelentingly alkaline, and my favourite fruit is stubbornly acid-loving. So my only option is to put some in containers of ericaceous compost. Luckily they adapt well to container life.

My central higher posts (the ones the swags of ropes will hang from) also had to go in the middle: so that more or less set me off on the design.

Here (with apologies for the lousy quality of the drawing) is what I came up with.

(click on the image for a larger version)

Designing your garden – working through the practicalities of what must go where, how you’re going to get from A to B (and back again), how you will reach your plants and – most importantly of all – where you can fit in your favourites – is the first step to creating a successful outdoor space. Even if all you want are rows of rectangular beds, a drawing will help you work out how wide your paths will be, where the shed will go and what you’re going to put in the shady spot where nothing much will grow.

It’s so much better to think through all these things well before you start chopping your ground up and laying paths all over the place: mistakes, or just the realisation you’re going about it all the wrong way, are so much more easier to put right on paper. Take the time now, write it all down, and you’ve got a blueprint from which everything else follows – and you can watch your dream turn into reality.

Next month: time to get to work. I’ll be stripping back what’s there now and starting to put in the bones of the garden.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting itchy. It’s one of those turning points in the gardening year: like in March when you start sowing seeds in earnest, or September when you clear your beds and the new season really begins. Now, the end of the old year and the unveiling of the new, is when I start getting twitchy, with all that untapped promise ahead and, no doubt, unforeseen trials.

It’s a time to think, hard, about how last season went, and see if you can’t do things better this time around. I try to avoid New Year’s Resolutions if at all possible, since I almost always forget what they are by the 10th anyway and even if I write them down I generally realise by March that I will never keep the garden free of the kids’ toys or get round to hoeing the veg beds every week without fail or resist sowing too much seed yet again this year.

However that’s not quite the same as resolving to learn a little from the discoveries, experiments and outright mistakes of 2011. So I’ve taken a little look back at what went right last year, so I can have a little inner smug-fest and also try to remember to do it again like that this year; and though it’s not quite as likely to give me a warm tingly feeling, I also take stock of all the things that went wrong. Apart from anything else it helps if I think there’s a point to all my little catastrophes, if only to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.

An awful lot of my post-2011 conclusions seem to be about tomatoes, which probably means everything else got along more or less OK. Though that might be just because I’ve forgotten; that’s the worst thing about mistakes. You only remember you meant not to do that again when you’re actually doing it again. And it’s going horribly wrong. Just like it did last year.

Things I have learned this year:

French shallots are the only ones worth growing. I have now tried ’Echalote Grise’ and ‘Hative de Niort’ and they were both a revelation. Big, fat, deliciously-flavoured, and one of those veg you kind of want to show off to your friends (but don’t dare for fear of losing them all – the friends, that is, not the veg). I’ve also tried Pikant, Red Sun and Golden Gourmet: perfectly respectable and perfectly reliable (Red Sun is the best of the three); but not a patch on the wow-factor of their Gallic cousins.

Cherry tomatoes need protection from birds if you grow them outdoors. My heirloom variety ‘Sweet Pea Currant’ was stripped of every single bright red bead this year. Lovely plants though.

Sprouts really do need staking. My plants were giants this year - the best ones I’ve ever produced – but ended up at a 45° angle because I didn’t realise they got quite that tall, never having grown very good ones before, and failed to stake them properly. Lesson learned.

Things I won’t be doing again:

Growing anything in grow bags. The whole thing was hugely unsatisfactory. For anyone interested in the result of my grow bag trials earlier this year: the best support was string wrapped round the roots (though they did have an irritating habit of snapping later in the year, so I think nylon string rather than jute). The single growbags cut in half and containing two plants were the only ones which produced passable results: even doubled-up growbags still didn’t do the biz, though with ring culture pots they were better. And if you really have to grow in these benighted systems – and you have my deepest sympathy – then water, water, water, or it just isn’t worth even starting.

Overcrowding the greenhouse. I always get overenthusiastic and plant far too many tomato plants in my greenhouse. This is Not a Good Idea. It’s fine while they’re little, but when they grow up they crowd each other out, it’s hellish trying to get into the back row to water and you can never get enough food into them to keep them happy. So from now on, it’s no more than 7-8 plants to a 6x8ft greenhouse. I still have no idea how I’m going to force myself to stick to this one.

Growing runner beans. I’m sorry; I know they’re an allotment staple and a Great British Vegetable. But I have tried dozens of varieties now, and picked them at all stages of development, and I still haven’t found one that doesn’t knot itself between your teeth when you’re trying to eat it. And when you’ve got something as string-free and delicious as a climbing French bean instead, you’ve got to ask yourself why?

Things I want to do for the first time this year:

Try some new tomatoes: actually I’m thinking about doing tomato trials a bit like my annual potato experiments (now a bit of a family institution, though rather hit-and-miss in 2011. Better varieties planned for 2012). There are so many wonderful tomatoes out there, and I’ve tried only a handful: and here, as with potatoes. taste is all. So watch this space: I will report back.

Get to grips with achocha: Mine was a bit of a disaster this year, mainly because I totally forgot to plant them out in time and they got too rootbound to do well after that. However they started like rockets and were lovely healthy little plants so I’m sure they’re worth another try.

Produce some salad for every day of the year: there is a challenge being hatched by my good friend over at Veg Plotting in which several of us fanatical growers will be trying to produce year-round salad. I don’t do too badly most years and have something to pick from March to around late October; but I want to navigate the doldrums which inexplicably hit in mid-August each year, and get my timings right for winter too (usually I sow too late – so nothing gets going till spring – or too early, so everything’s over by November). I’m hoping that with a little help from my friends, this will be the year I finally crack this particular nut.

So here’s to 2012: may all your carrots grow straight, may frost kiss the shoulders of your parsnips and may sun shine on your gardening from dawn to dusk (but not so much that you need to do extra watering ). Happy New Year!

A POINSETTIA! Are you mad?

Right. Just for the record: I use only Felco no. 9 ‘clippers’ (secateurs to you, mate), and I’ve already got three trowels and two forks, if you don’t count the one I lost the other week (I have a feeling it may turn up next time I flip the compost heap). All are beautifully worn to fit my hands and my hands only. I have absolutely no need of poinsettias.

You see the problem?

OK then, let’s try something more specific. What about a plant for that fruit garden you know (because I’ve been banging on about it for so long) I’m planning to build this winter?

Another minefield. If you turn up on my doorstep with a nice healthy blackcurrant ‘Ben Sarek’, for example, while outwardly I shall be delighted and very, very polite, inwardly I shall be wailing in distress, as now I shall have to find garden room for a dwarf-ish little blackcurrant suitable for small gardens when I want big, beefy ‘Ben Gairn’ or perhaps ’Ben Lomond’. And I haven’t even broken ground yet so what am I going to do with the damn thing while I get around to the heavy-labour digging I was hoping to put off till February?

And don’t even try to buy me the cooking apple trees I’ve wanted to plant in the top orchard without being prepared to run through the conclusions from my weeks and weeks of research weighing up heritage varieties against yield, the fairly exposed position and peculiar soil conditions I have, and comparing the relative merits of different pollinating groups.

You see, we gardeners are a very, very pernickety bunch.

However: there are some presents which are safe: gifts to gladden any veg gardener in the land, however eccentric, over-researched or just downright eclectic their requirements for that particular growing year may be. So if, with a week to go, you’re still dithering over the perfect Christmas present for the gardener in your life, try one of these.

Proper terracotta rhubarb forcers

You don’t even need to force rhubarb on a regular basis to want one of these gracing your garden. We all covet them: very few of us have them.

Proper glass cloches

Ditto.

Heritage seeds

Don’t whatever you do choose them yourself: you’ll pick the wrong ones for sure. No: simply sign them up to the Heritage Seed Library, part of the charity Garden Organic, and you’ll be giving them access to possibly the most exclusive seed catalogue there is, full of varieties you can’t buy anywhere else. You can even adopt a veg on their behalf, too, helping preserve varieties that might otherwise be lost.

A garden planner

No, no, no: not one of those diary thingies that are full of sections devoted to stuff you don’t do and don’t leave nearly enough room when it’s something you really need to make a note of. I mean an online garden planner. I’ve used GrowVeg.com for years: for a modest subscription you can draw up a plan of your veg garden, fill it in with whatever veg you fancy and it’ll even help you sort out your crop rotation the next year too.

Warm feet

There’s nothing more dispiriting than trudging around the veg garden in the depths of winter feeling your toes slowly lose feeling and wondering if you’ll be able to bear the pain of them defrosting without screaming. You have three options:

• welly warmers (faux fur - you have a choice between leopardskin and chinchilla – for ultimate snuggle value)
• wheat bags – heat in the microwave before setting out and they release their heat gradually for ages
• and if funds stretch to it… a posh pair of very good-quality lined wellie boots.

Something to listen to

I don’t know about you but when I’m doing a long sesh in the garden I like to do it with a radio on in the background somewhere. Nothing that’s going to disturb the peace: just the soothing strains of Desert Island Discs or a little ’80s New Romantic (that’s probably more than I want to give away about my musical tastes, so we’ll move on). Top of my list for this year is a solar-powered radio to follow me around the garden and keep me company as I weed.

Something to read:

There are so many books out there and many of them tell you what you already know: but on my wish-list for this year has to be ‘Our Plot’, designer Cleve West’s homage to his West London allotment, ‘A Taste of the Unexpected’ by Mark Diacono – guaranteeing a few new arrivals on the veg plot next year; and a timely tome from salad grower extraordinaire Charles Dowding, ‘How to Grow Winter Vegetables’. Or for something completely different: the hugely enjoyable and fascinating ‘A New Orchard and Garden’ and ’The Country Housewife’s Garden’,  from 17th-century gardener and author William Lawson.

Some après-gardening

Oh my… when you’ve overdone it in the garden again, you really know about it. Time to put things right. A mug of fresh coffee;  a long soak in a deep, hot bath (candles optional); hands repaired with rich, nourishing cream and feet made toasty warm in lavender-scented socks.  Now that would make my best Christmas ever.

This may come as a shock, but you don’t have to boil sprouts.

I know it’s traditional: I know it’s the way we all do it. But sprouts are so much more versatile than that. You can have them raw, shredded into salads with salami or hazelnuts; roast them with onions and a splash of olive oil in the oven (40 minutes and they’re done);  or mash ‘em with potatoes for a classy bubble & squeak.

But my very, very favourite way to enjoy Brussels sprouts is sizzled in the frying pan. This rich, ecstatically luxurious light lunch takes minutes to cook, but is a truly comforting indulgence enjoyed in front of a crackling fire while the winter wind howls outside.

Serves 2:

400g Brussels sprouts

200g shallots

200g streaky bacon

20 juniper berries

olive oil

freshly ground black pepper

Pick your sprouts small, as the firmest little buttons keep their shape more reliably and taste the best too. Clean them up by trimming off the stalk and taking off any blemished outer leaves.

Then trim your shallots, top-and-tailing them and removing the brown skin. Cut them in half if they’re small enough, or into thirds or quarters if you have to: the pieces should be around the same size as half a sprout.

Finally, cut up the bacon: again, you’re looking to have all the pieces roughly the same size, so not too finely.

Boil a pan of water, and drop in the sprouts for just 3-4 minutes – enough to parboil them but not cook them soft – and then once they’re done, drain off the water and leave them to cool a little.

While that’s happening, heat up the oil in a frying pan and add the shallots. Cover and cook on a medium-low heat for around 5 minutes, till they’re starting to soften. Then add the bacon bits and fry for another 5 minutes (uncovered this time).

As the bacon is cooking, take the half-cooked sprouts and cut them in half. Then crush the juniper berries with the flat of a knife – they don’t need to be chopped, just roughened up a little.

Once the bacon has cooked, add the sprouts and juniper berries, and grind over some pepper. Then cook the whole lot for a further 5 minutes or so, stirring occasionally.

Tip out onto a plate in a generous heap, find your nearest crackling fire, and sit back to enjoy.

Well, come on. It’s December. Sparkly tinsel and twinkly lights a go-go and turkey and deck the halls before breakfast. Of course my pick of the month is going to be the most Christmassy of Christmas vegetables.

Unfortunately, timing your sprout crop to be in tip-top form for Christmas Day is one of the biggest lotteries of a veg-grower’s life. 

To pick sprouts on Christmas Day, you’ll need to grow at least two varieties (some swear by three…. or even four, just to be on the safe side).

An early variety like ‘Evesham Special’ is supposed to crop from around October till mid-December - until you have the sort of warm autumn we’ve just been through, when they’re over before November is out.

So just in case that happens, you sow a late variety too – something like ‘Trafalgar’, which in a normal year (whatever that is these days) doesn’t start cropping till January.

Trouble is if the weather closes in after your early sprouts are over, your late ones are properly late – leaving a big black hole where your Christmas sprouts are supposed to be.

You see the problem? So really dedicated growers sow not-quite-so-early and not-quite-so-late sprouts as well, but to be honest, there are only so many sprouts a girl can take (and I like sprouts).

My insurance crop this year was ‘Falstaff’, said to crop from November to February – now that’s what I call hedging your bets.

And it’s worked: we’re picking them now as tight little buttons, but they have a bit of growing to do and I reckon they’ll still be coming in a couple of weeks’ time when the calendar flips to 25.

Except – I won’t be serving them.

I have neglected to mention that they are purple. On the plus side, that means the first properly attractive Brussels sprout plant I’ve ever seen.

Sprouts are usually the gaunt, gawky teenagers of the veg plot – all awkward angles and gangly limbs. But ‘Falstaff’ is the good-looking kid who always knows the right thing to say, never trips over his own feet and probably sings in the sort of band which has floppy fringes and gets spotted by EMI talent agents.

Its huge billowy heads of burgundy glow in the autumn sunshine and are particularly striking after rain, the foliage glistening and poised like a swan’s back. They are wonderfully elegant, stately plants: you can imagine them setting off the frizzy vibrant greens of curly kale, or maybe providing a brooding background for steely-blue leeks.

The sprouts are tight little buttons held close to the stem: there are loads of them. The fact that they’re purple seems like quite a nice idea as you’re picking them: they look like little baby red cabbages.

Then you cook them, and they turn black.

You know that ugly purplish-black your pans go after you’ve been braising red cabbage? Well – that. Nubbins of bruised, bilious black are not a sight to get the festive tastebuds tingling.

And that’s a shame – because if you can get over having to eat food that looks like it’s been ten rounds with Mike Tyson, they have quite the most exquisite flavour of any sprout I’ve tasted. Delicate and fine, without a hint of the bitterness of the big green things you buy in the shops, and just enough nuttiness to give it character. Mmm-hmm: this is what you thought sprouts were supposed to taste like.

But even though it’s quite possible, if we hold back a bit, that at least some of them will make it through to Christmas, I can’t possibly serve up black sprouts with the turkey. Typical. I finally hit the jackpot and score home-grown sprouts for Christmas, they even taste good – and they’re the wrong colour.

All chopped up and ready to go...

I’m not usually in the business of disclaimers but I’d better just mention before I begin: I’m not about to tell you how to make a pesticide. Oooooh no. That would be illegal; only approved pesticides are licensed for use in the UK.

No: I’m in the business of sending the little wrigglers packing before they even take their first bite. This is what you might call a pest repellent: and when I tell you it’s made of garlic you’ll understand why.

Garlic spray is one of many traditional remedies for the garden. Before they had such a thing as chemical pesticides gardeners would hand down well-thumbed recipes for burying rhubarb by brassicas to repel clubroot (doesn’t work, apparently), cider vinegar against apple scab, the ends of the soap dish for an insecticidal soap (but not washing up liquid – too many chemicals)  and neat urine as a fungicidal winter wash for soft and top fruit.

I haven’t tried any of the above – particularly that last one, I can assure you – and can’t vouch for how well any of them work.

Anyone for garlic mush?

It’s said to be effective in keeping slugs and snails off – you spray it on to, say, young cabbages and it makes it taste so strongly of garlic they stay away (though make sure you leave a fair gap before you eat them yourself – or you’ll get garlic-flavoured cabbage too). And it has a similar effect on aphids (which includes cabbage mealybugs and blackfly on broad beans).

It’s also a great way of using up all those mingy garlic bulbs that grew a bit too small to be good enough for the kitchen, and dead easy to make. Here’s how:

1. Take two large garlic bulbs - or three to four smaller ones – and chop them very roughly, skins, roots and all.

2. Put them in a blender with 1/2 pint hot water, and whizz for around two minutes until they’re thoroughly minced.

3. Put the resulting mush into a plastic bottle (I used a washed-up milk carton) and top up with another 1 1/2 pts of hot water.

Et voila: garlic water steeping nicely. Once strained, this is ready to go.

4. Put the lid on and leave this for 2-3 days to steep. This releases all those garlicky essential oils: if you take the lid off and have a sniff it’ll blow your head off (and stink the kitchen out).

5. Find a piece of fine netting or muslin – you can use old stockings, or I get gauze from the local pharmacy which doubles up for holding the spices when I’m making chutney, too. Hold it over the neck of the bottle and strain the liquid through into a jug. When you’ve got as much as you can out this way, shake the garlic mush out of the bottle into the muslin and squeeze it dry to get the last drops of liquid out.

6. Dilute the resulting garlic water 1:10 with fresh water and use in a spray gun. You can also add oil to make a suspension which will be more rainproof and will stick better to the leaves: add 20ml vegetable oil and about two teaspoons of liquid soap to the mix and shake well.

The resulting yellowish liquid doesn’t keep forever: in fact three weeks at room temperature and it’ll start to go off. However it does freeze, so you can always decant it into other containers and pop it in the freezer.

Oh, and if you are using milk cartons, do label it very clearly: that’s a nasty surprise you don’t want in your tea first thing in the morning.

Thymus serpyllum 'Coccineus Group'

This is my year for growing herbs. Great mounds of billowing rosemary, stately lovage marching through vivid green parsley, hummocks of purple and green and multicoloured sage pierced here and there with drumsticks of puffball-topped chives or soaring firework-bursts of angelica. I shall grow herbs for making tea; herbs for sprinkling in your cooking or mashing into skincream or perfuming the bath.

I’m exploring herbs I’ve never grown before: sweet cicely, caraway and salad burnet. And others which are tried-and-tested favourites: chives and parsley, rosemary and marjoram. And the reason for my new obsession with all things culinary, medicinal and just plain quirky? Well: I have finally come to the end of clearing the raised area where my herb bed will go: it’s a lovely, big blank slate and it’s a whopping 20ft x 8ft to fill. Time to go shopping.

Already in there, tucked in nooks and crannies where I need a low-growing, mat-forming, weed-suppressing hummock, is my growing collection of thyme. There are hundreds to choose from: and every one of them small, well-behaved and perfectly beautiful.

Thyme comes from the stony hillsides of the Mediterranean: thin, stony, dry soil in full sun makes it feel right at home. The common thyme (Thymus vulgaris) can be easily raised from seed and I’m planning to sow a tray next year to fill a funny little gap of scrappy, dusty soil along the drive where nothing else will grow. The prostrate Thymus herba-barona - with a scent like caraway and traditionally used to flavour beef – will grow in nothing more than a crack in a wall.

Thymus pulegioides 'Archers Gold'

In ancient Greece thyme was a symbol of courage, style and elegance; the word thyme comes from the Greek ‘thumos’, meaning bravery. Roman soldiers bathed in thyme water before battle, and a few hundred years later, ladies embroidered a bee with a sprig of thyme on the scarves of knights leaving on Crusades.

More practically, it’s also a powerful antibacterial agent, with the extract thymol used in toothpaste and mouthwash. An infusion can be used as a gargle, an antiseptic wipe for wounds, or to help heal insect bites. It’s also a pick-me-up: infuse a sprig of thyme for five minutes in just-boiled water and the resulting tea taken no more than three times a day is good for tackling exhaustion and anaemia, colds and flu.

The upright forms have the best flavour: the tiny leaves can be snipped stalk and all as sprigs and dropped into cooking or you can strip them from the stems and chop them. Spreading thymes – usually varieties of Thymus serpyllum - make up for their lack of flavour by creeping out sideways to cover the ground with a dense mat of petite little leaves. They make wonderful scented no-mow lawns in a sunny spot. They actually like to be trodden on – it presses the stems into the ground where they root and spread some more – and the experience of picnicking on a thyme lawn in high summer, breathing in that heady perfume while sipping chilled champagne, is one you’ll never forget.

There are wonderfully strokeable woolly ones and ones which smell of lemon; ones which have pink, white or red flowers or leaves of every shade and combination of variegation. One is never enough: so start with these five and watch your collection grow.

Five thymes to grow in your garden:

Thymus pulegioides: the one to choose for cooking, with large, generous leaves

Thymus serpyllum: no. 1 for lawns, though not for the kitchen: creeps across the ground to form a scented carpet

Thymus pseudolanuginosus: cuddly, woolly grey leaves in a soft cushion you’ll want to stroke every time you pass

Thymus ‘Coccineus Group’: a creeping habit and deepest, deepest burgundy flowers: the best colour of them all

Thymus x citriodorus ‘Silver Queen’: dapply silver foliage, generous-sized leaves and a sharp lemony tang that’s delicious in cooking