Start your own foraging garden

Weekend gardener

Grow popular wild plants For those of us who aren’t too sure about what’s good to gather from the wild and where to go to do it, there’s a simple alternative – grow your own!

A foraging garden in your own backyard is an enjoyable way to include those unusual and reputedly more healthy foods in your diet. And it’s simple to do. Many of the wild foods that excite the foraging fraternity are easy to grow, self-sufficient and casual about the quality of the soil they grow in – in fact you probably have some already in your garden.

A small plot to the side of your regular vegetable or flower plot will serve perfectly as a foraging garden, in it you can grow a half dozen of the popular wild plants.

Wild plants look after their own needs when they’re outside the garden fence, and they’ll do the same thing in your garden. Of course, you can fuss over them if you choose, watering on dry days and feeding with compost or a liquid mix if you want to, but they’ll do just fine with what they can get from the ground.

Try miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), nasturtiums, wild onions or onion weed (Allium triquetrum), chickweed (Stellaria media), plantain (both broad and narrow-leafed plantain Plantago major and Plantago lanceolata), fat hen, red clover, and native spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides).

Collect and dry nettles now, before they go to flower

Stinging nettle is a nutritious and tasty vegetable that requires only a little extra care to harvest. Gloves are not essential for the experienced nettle harvester, but it’s still a good idea to have some on hand. A pair of scissors, longhandled is best, and a sense of caution will be enough to get you to the stage where you have leaves to dry or cook if you’ve chosen to make soup from them instead of the usual nettle tea. Nettle soup is a delicacy and has a beautiful colour.

If you are growing the annual nettle (Urtica urens), you need not fear the sting as it’s light and passing. Our perennial European nettle (Urtica dioica) requires a little more care in the harvesting, as it’s stronger, although aside from a minute or two of discomfort is really nothing to worry about.

The native ongaonga (Urtica ferox), on the other hand, is not recommended for the home grower nor the soup fancier, and I’ve never met anyone who says they’ve drunk the ferocious stinger as a soup or a tea.

Don’t pick them all! Nettles are the preferred host plants for red and yellow admiral butterfly caterpillars.

Sow some back-up brassicas

These unexpectedly warm bouts of weather cause kale and cabbages to bolt, and an overblown brassica is not much good, coming too early and being too straggly to satisfy. If the heat causes your crop to peak too soon, have replacements at the ready and get them in as soon as you’ve cleared away the bolters.

This applies particularly when your crops are under glass or plastic, in a tunnelhouse or conservatory. There’s little you can do about the extra warmth except ventilate and that’s often difficult where there’s no movement from the wind. It’s advisable, when conditions get too hot, to coat the glass or plastic in some sort of waterbased screen, such as paint or even a coat

of clay and water, which will dry and shield the plants from the sun.

Cabbage white butterflies are searching for brassicas to lay their eggs. If you don’t want cabbages chewed or caterpillars lurking in your broccoli then cover with horticultural mesh. Inspect plants daily and flick off the eggs and squash the caterpillars. A paint brush is handy to winkle eggs and caterpillars out of kale leaves.

Pack more crops into your garden beds

■ Space in the garden can be at a premium during peak growing season so think beyond straight rows of just one type of crop to fit more in.

■ Radishes are quick to mature and ready to harvest four weeks after sowing. Intermix among slower growing vegetables, and they can be grown and eaten before the space is needed.

■ Spring onions are tall and skinny and can be popped in anywhere there is a spare square centimetre. Varying their microclimate will vary their maturity time, spreading out your harvest.

■ Consider growing your groundsprawlers upwards. Pumpkins and cucumbers can be directed up a fence or trellis to save room.

■ Courgettes and determinate (bush) tomatoes need fresh air to prevent fungal diseases. Let them hang over the edge of raised gardens, so they don’t take up too much space but still get the required amount of airflow.

■ As with all intensive gardening, you’ll need to increase feeding of root zones to ensure your plants are healthy and productive.

Feed and water both tomatoes and strawberries

Once tomatoes and strawberries start flowering, switch from using a general-purpose fertiliser (and pat yourself on the back for treating your plants so well) to one that is potassium-rich.

General-purpose fertilisers tend to be high in nitrogen, which is great for getting fruiting plants off to a good start and for salad greens, but can result in lots of leafy growth at the expense of fruit, so use either a liquid or granular fertiliser for fruit and flowers, or feed all your fruiting crops – strawberries, beans, chillies, cucumbers, pumpkins, and so on – with a tomatospecific fertiliser. You can make your own potassiumrich fertiliser

by soaking comfrey leaves or banana skins in water before applying.

Consistent watering is key with tomatoes. Aim to water them deeply a couple of times a week and every day or two if they’re in pots.

Water strawberries every couple of days, while the fruit is developing, when you see the first hint of red, pull back on watering to encourage firm, sweet fruit.