Grow Your Own

Left to steep all afternoon, and served with more cream than our doctor would recommend, it made for a melt-in-the-mouth, life-affirming plate of kind-of healthy(ish) deliciousness.

No, the hot weather isn’t getting to me, it’s just the name of THE must-have plant for your GYO garden and I’ve been ever so slightly obsessed with it for twenty something years now since I watched ‘All Muck and Magic’ on Channel 4.

Let’s be honest, we have so much of the wet stuff in reserve, we don’t even have to do it now the temperatures are scorchio and everyone is fighting for the last ice cream.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I quickly found out, it was fraught with problems.

After all, GYO is about more than the utilitarian need to put food on our table. It’s about reconnecting with the luxurious abundance of the natural world and delighting in the gifts of nature; it’s about nourishing body, soul and community every time we sit down and share the best food money can’t buy with people we care about; it’s about wresting control of the food system back from agri-industry and learning how to fend for ourselves a little better.

If I’m honest though, my ‘savings’ on Grow Your Own greenhouse fruits and veggies don’t come close to covering the cost of the thing itself.

Why be stuck inside or waste time staying connected on your iGadgets when you could be relaxing and topping up your Vitamin D?

From my earliest forays into the world of Growing My Own, I was taught to loathe weeds. To engage in a War on the Axis of Gardening Evil that is my abundant supply of docks, nettles, creeping buttercup and couch grass. To blitz them – first with chemicals and then, after a Damascene conversion to organics, with a lifetime of hand weeding.

Flicking through the pages, I came across his flowerdew salad – a stunning mix of colourful flowers and fresh herbs. It looked amazing – to me at least, though my work colleagues weren’t even slightly tempted by the idea of eating pansies with their cucumber, tomatoes and lettuce.

Hardly a day goes by without some new superfood being lauded in the press but few receive more accolades than the berry family. From your common or garden strawberry to its more exotic cousins the acai and goji - berries get top billing every time.