Friday 30 November 2012

Downton Abbey at the Secret Garden Club

The Secret Garden Club has been visited by a celebrity! Do you remember Cousin Patrick, the mysterious Canadian bandaged possibly fake long lost heir who poor Edith (of course) started to fall for? Yes, he who is also indelicately known in Viv Groskop's Downton columns as 'melty face', came to the Secret Garden Club for dinner!!
He even wrapped some napkins around his head so we could recognise him better.
Anyway even actor Trevor White, for that's his real name, thought the storyline was rather abruptly finished. I thought we were in for a long 'Return of Martin Guerre' type story. Spoiler alert: Trevor has not been asked back. So it seems we won't see the imposter Patrick Cousin Meltyface again.
We ate an autumnal feast of roast pumpkins, roast chestnuts, puffball mushrooms, truffle tagliatelli, pears poached in red wine and drank lots. We didn't do any canning at all. I was too tired and the guests were too drunk.
Puff ball mushrooms fried in butter and garlic
Spaghetti squash being forked at the table, tons of butter in it.
Riverford Organic pumpkin box and our own Secret Garden Club pumpkins. Plus one 'chestnut' flavoured pumpkin from Israel, where I met the guy who 'designed' it. 
Pumpkins roasted with achiote paste, red peppers, smoked paprika. 
Truffle tagliatelli and pink peppercorns.
Never mind, we do have a canning demonstration/workshop and jar meal set for next year. On March 3rd, we have the hugely talented and probably only British expert on pressure canning, Gloria Nicol of The Laundry, coming down to London to teach. We will go through pressure canning, water bath canning and preserving. Jars will be provided by Le Parfait (love their jars). Gloria and I will then make a stunning supper, using our home-canned goodies, all in jars.
March 3rd 2013: Sunday, starts at 2pm. Book here: £60 for workshop and supper. Bring your own alcohol.

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Grow Your Own Curry

MsMarmiteLover's aubergine curry
MsMarmiteLover's aubergine curry
Think of curries, whether an Indian dhansak or jalfrezi, or a hot and sour Thai jungle curry, or a Malaysian laksa rich with aromatic flavours, and we think of exotic ingredients. A curry made with all-purpose curry powder will never taste as good as a bespoke curry in an authentic Indian restaurant. Ready-made pastes for specific dishes – like a Mussaman, or a Tikka Masala – are convenient but to me at any rate they all taste rather too alike to be seriously credible.

Before I grew my own curry ingredients, I knew that on the occasions when I’d planned ahead and bought fresh ingredients to make my own curry powders and pastes that the resulting dishes were streets ahead. But there are ingredients that are very difficult to get hold of, even here in London where we’re lucky enough to have food shops of the world on our doorsteps. So you leave out the curry leaves, or the kaffir lime leaves, or the holy basil and the curry still tastes great, but is missing something.

Ingredients like lemon grass, ginger, turmeric, cumin, etc, are invariably imported and so by the time they reach even a high turnover oriental supermarket they will have lost a significant amount of freshness. But what many people don’t know is that it’s perfectly possible to grow many of these supposedly exotic ingredients here in the UK, here on your patio.

Make a curry from ingredients you have grown yourself, that can come straight out of the ground into your pestle and mortar and the flavours will sing out loud. No longer will the curry be simply hot with a vaguely warm spicy taste, it will be aromatic and you’ll taste all the sweet-sour, hot, salty, mustardy, clovey, aniseedy flavours as they should be.

There’s a convenience factor as well. I have cobbled together a Thai green curry paste from scratch, added coconut cream from the store cupboard, some rice plus whatever was lurking at the bottom of the fridge and made a fantastic fresh curry in less than half an hour, no shopping needed. It takes a bit longer than using a packaged paste, but it’s much nicer and much more satisfying.

Let’s start though with some core ingredients of any spice paste. Onions and garlic form the basis of many curry and curry pastes and these are two ingredients that grow very happily here in the garden.

Onions

Onion sets can be planted out either in autumn or spring. The advantage of planting onions in autumn is that they will get a head start in spring next year as soon as the weather warms up and you should be lifting your onions to eat in May. There should be just enough time to plant overwintering onions now, but don't leave it any later. We planted Senshyu onions in the Secret Garden, a type specifically bred for autumn planting, spacing the onions evenly and planting them just deep enough to leave the tips slightly exposed above the soil - not too much top showing or else they will be dug up again by birds who appear to enjoy tossing freshly planted onions around the garden.

In the summer we ran a workshop on companion planting – the beneficial effects of positioning certain plants close to each other. Onions and garlic are well-known companion plants – the onion smell and garlic smell are said to deter some insect pests. Onions are good for repelling carrot fly - the onion odour masks the smell of carrots - while garlic is good to plant under roses as the smell deters greenfly.

Garlic

Now is the optimum time to plant garlic. We would always recommend a UK-bred variety such as Solent Wight for best results here. Check the weather forecast and aim to plant just before a cold snap: garlic cloves like to be chilled after planting to stimulate growth. Separate the garlic bulb into individual cloves and push each one into the ground, closing the soil over the tip so they are covered.


Fennel

Another spice ingredient suitable for growing outdoors is fennel. Fennel seeds are an integral part of a number of spice mixes and this herb fennel (this isn’t the type that grows a swollen bulb at the base) produces edible leaves, edible flowerheads and then of course, after flowering, the seeds. These seeds are mature right now - try biting into a fresh fennel seed and see how pungent the flavour is. 

There’s one other thing I like about growing hot chillies, ginger, turmeric and so on. There’s something a bit subversive about it. You’re not supposed to be able to grow these plants here in Britain, which makes it all the more fun to try and all the more fun when you get a half-decent crop.

Chillies

Chillies are a great example of a plant that is ridiculously easy to grow. I’ve been raising chilli plants for 10 years now, and I can’t remember the last time I bought a chilli pepper in the shops. There’s something incredibly satisfying – almost addictive - about growing chillies.

Not only are they easy to grow, but they mature into extremely attractive plants laden with fruit. In the Secret Garden we've grown Jalapenos, which are piquant and which are also traditionally smoked to make the Mexican chipotle sauce, and also the miniature Basket Of Fire variety, which we picked and used in the curries served at the Grow Your Own Curry afternoon. Basket of Fire is a very hot, birds-eye style chilli – ideal for Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese dishes.
      

Ginger

Ginger is a tropical plant, but it’s perfectly possible to grow ginger in a pot, indoors, in a conservatory or on a sunny windowsill. First you will need to find a piece of ginger root with small yellow nodules (see picture) protruding from it - these will develop into shoots. You may have to hunt around in your local mini-market and greengrocers to find suitable roots for planting.

home grown ginger, The Secret Garden ClubPlant up in rich moist compost and keep the soil moist, but not wet. Keep temperature as constant as possible: bright windowsill against a double-glazed window is good, heated conservatory is good. They prefer not to be in direct sunlight. Anything above 20 degrees is workable, above 25 degrees better. The root will take up to a month to sprout but will then grow quickly throughout the summer before dying back at the beginning of autumn - anytime from October is a good time to harvest. Do not expect to become self-sufficient in ginger unless you have a lot of pots.

There's a step-by-step guide to how we grew our ginger plants here.


Turmeric

home grown turmeric, The Secret Garden Club
Growing turmeric in the UK is very similar to ginger: you need to plant a piece of rhizome with a nodule on it that looks as though it might sprout. However, turmeric will withstand slightly lower temperatures than ginger – down to around 18 degrees Celsius is OK, and also its leaves are edible and can be used for flavouring.

However, don’t imagine that you can just snap off a leaf and start chewing on it. The leaves tend to be used either in the same way as banana leaves, for wrapping food in, or ground up into a paste, or pickled. Or the leaves are picked and soaked to get some of the sourness out of them – then the soaking water is used in the recipe and the leaves thrown away.


The picture here shows part of the fresh root which can be cut from the plant and used fresh, or dried and then ground into powder.

Curry Leaves


home grown curry leaves, The Secret Garden Club


Pictured above is a Murraya koenigii, or curry leaf tree and it’s one of those times when Latin or botanical names comes in handy because this is a very different plant to the curry plant which you find on sale in garden centres all over the country.

Murraya koenigii is the plant whose leaves are used throughout Indian and Malaysian cooking, usually quickly fried in oil and then added to a curry as a finish or garnish.

I find fresh curry leaves practically impossible to find over here, and dried ones seem to me to have lost much of their flavour. They do freeze well, but again, I don’t have much luck finding even the frozen versions.

So instead I have my little curry tree. And it is very little –this is a young plant and in its natural habitat it will grow into a full-sized tree, over 10ft tall. 

I bought this plant from Plants4Presents and they’re also sold in the UK by Poyntzfield Nursery up in Scotland. The two things to remember about keeping a curry leaf tree happy is that 1) they’re not frost hardy so you will need to grow them in a pot, outdoors in summer, indoors in winter; 2) in their natural habitat they grow on the forest floor, so don’t put them out in the sun. Put them under a tree.

Lemon grass

home grown lemon grass, The Secret Garden Club

Lemon grass is well worth growing in the UK – even outside. Once established, the plants will grow vigorously, giving you fragrant leaves for flavouring, for making herbal teas, or scenting your bath. It will also grow offshoots, which the close-up photo here shows clearly at the base of the plant, which you can use as the classic lemon grass stalk in Thai curry pastes.

There are three ways you can get a lemon grass plant going. You can buy seeds fairly readily from garden centres and nurseries. Sow these in a seed tray in February and keep warm – cover with clear plastic lid or polythene bag until the seeds have germinated. When the seedlings are big enough they can go into a big pot, a number of smaller pots, or, once the danger of frost is over, outside in a sunny sheltered spot in lots of good rich compost.

The second way is to find some very fresh-looking stalks either in the supermarket or more likely an Asian supermarket. Trim the stalks lightly then sit them in water – stuffed into the neck of a cleaned-out Coke bottle or a plastic water bottle that supports the stalks is a good idea. Change the water daily and you should see white roots begin to appear. The time taken for the stalks to develop roots varies enormously: it can be a few days, or it can be several weeks. 

Thirdly, you can divide your own established plants once they’ve developed side-shoots. Instead of using all the side-shoots for cooking, select some for removing from the mother-plant and planting up separately.

By September you will need to harvest your lemon grass – any that isn’t used at the time can be sliced and put in the freezer, where they will keep very well.

Otherwise, bring your pots of lemon grass in over winter. They will not survive temperatures of less than 5 degrees. Give them a haircut, trimming them down to about six inches, then continue to water them sparingly, just enough to prevent them from drying out, and they should come back to life in the spring.

One other point to be aware of, if you have cats, is that the cats love lemon grass. Mine regularly likes to sit on the kitchen table and chew away at the leaves. Not great if you’re planning to harvest them later.

Kaffir Lime

The kaffir lime is a member of the citrus family which produces highly fragrant leaves used in Thai cooking, and also knobbly-shaped limes with, again, highly fragrant zest. I’ve had a Kaffir lime bush for five or six years now and while it isn't very prolific in terms of producing fruit, it earns its keep by giving me a hassle-free supply of Kaffir lime leaves 365 days of the year. I find fresh leaves practically impossible to find in the shops, and the dried versions have lost much of their flavour.

Citrus trees have quite a precise set of requirements to keep them healthy. If you’re able, either by luck or design, to provide a suitable environment for a citrus tree then it will appear to need very little maintenance. If your conditions aren’t ideal then they’ll prove troublesome.

In summer, in the UK, they’ll like to be outdoors, somewhere sunny and sheltered. A south-facing patio is ideal.  They don’t however like frost or wet winters so you will need to bring your tree indoors in winter. They do, however, like to be kept cool in winter, somewhere between 7 and 13 degrees. I move mine to an unheated loft bathroom under the skylight – it’s not too cold because of all the heat coming up from the floors below and it’s nice and bright with the big skylight window. If you have a light, bright conservatory that’s ideal so long as you don’t turn the heating up in winter.

In summer, keep the soil moist; in winter keep it dry and water very sparingly. However, it may well be worth standing the citrus pot in a tray of gravel which you keep wet, to raise the overall humidity around the plant – they do tend to find the air in our centrally heated houses very dry. (Another reason why the unheated bathroom works well.)

We’re doing a citrus workshop next month with lemons, limes, oranges, and kumquats when we’ll go into specific detail. However, I usually say that if your citrus looks happy: plant looking perky, leaves nice and glossy, then it is happy. A characteristic of any citrus plant that is struggling, whether too wet, too dry, too hot or too cold, is that all its leaves will fall off. A bald plant is one that is in trouble.


Coriander

Coriander can be grown both for its leaves - and roots and stems, which are often used in Thai dishes - and also for its seeds, which are commonly used in spice mixes and powders. 

When growing for its leaves, I find I get the best results by sowing the seeds thickly in a seed tray, keeping the tray warm and harvesting as microleaves - snipping off the leaves when the seedlinsg are just a couple of inches high. 


Growing for seed is almost easier as coriander is a notorious 'bolter' - the plants often to seed. Simply collect the seeds as soon as they turn brown on the plant and let them finish drying on a plate in the kitchen before storing in an airtight jar. 

You may often see what looks like coriander referred to as cilantro. I used to think it was simply that cilantro was the American word, but since I’ve started growing it as well as eating it I keep coming across cilantro in a British context. I have seen it suggested that coriander is grown for seed and cilantro for leaf but also that coriander refers to the whole plant: roots, stem (which are also edible and much used in Thai cooking) and all, while cilantro is the leaf only.

Thai basil

Until about six weeks ago I would have been recommending these wholeheartedly as the kind of herb which is not only easy to grow but also impossible to buy in the shops. Then my local Waitrose started stocking it in the fresh cut herbs sections. Thai basil is the variety that gives Thai curries that sweet licorice scent, and ordinary basil leaves just don’t work the same way. It’s incredibly easy to grow Thai basil in a pot on a sunny windowsill and one medium-sized pot will keep you in basil all summer long.

I grow lots of different types of basil, all in the same way. Get a medium pot with drainage holes and fill it full of good compost – multipurpose will do but it needs to be fine rather than rough-cut. Water it well. Sprinkle the seed over the surface – be generous, but keep the seed in a single layer. Cover very lightly with a layer of fine compost, so that the seed are just covered. If you’re sowing before April, cover the pot either with a fitted cloche, or a clear polythene bag stretched over the lip of the pot. April or after, you can leave the pot uncovered.

Put the pot in your sunniest windowsill: basil likes lots of light. The seeds should germinate by the end of a week – just three or four days at the height of summer – and once they’re through you can remove the polythene covering.

Keep them growing on the windowsill and start cutting when the leaves are big enough. Try to snip leaves from all over the pot: if you completely denude one seedling down to a bare stalk it won’t grow any more leaves. But if you pinch out the leaves at the very tip of the plant it will regrow quite happily. Water regularly to keep the compost moist and your pot should last all summer. Thai basil will start producing purple flower buds which can be snipped out and used as well as a garnish and flavouring.

After much experimentation I have come to the conclusion that here in the Uk, basil is an indoor plant. Outdoors, they fall prey too easily to aphids (greenfly), they get watered too irregularly and blown about in the wind. A warm sunny windowsill with still air and not so much temperature fluctuation will give you much more succulent leaves.

Holy basil

Often confused with Thai basil, this has smaller, more rounded leaves which are a matt green (or flushed with red, if it’s holy red basil) and slightly hairy. It looks frankly a more nondescript plant than the striking Thai basil. The flavour of the leaves is spicier, hotter, less sweet. Holy basil is also associated with Thai cooking, in stir fries, stews and rice dishes.

You can grow holy basil in exactly the same way as any other basil, but I’ve found it less prolific than the other basils and slower to grow.

Fenugreek


Like coriander you can grow fenugreek, or methi, for the leaves or seeds, both of which will give your dishes a distinctive mustard flavour and aroma. You can grow fenugreek from the seeds you buy in the supermarket. You can grow as separate plants or, a better solution at this time of year, is to grow as microleaves (pictured, left). Soak the seeds for about eight hours or overnight in clean cold water, then spread them evenly over a seed tray filled with compost. Cover the seeds very lightly with compost, and place a clear lid or polythene bag over the seed tray. Place somewhere light, bright and warm and the seeds should germinate in just two to three days.

There are two distinct types of fenugreek. The more common large-seeded variety has white flowers, and can only be cut once so once you've harvested, you'll need to sow some more. The smaller seeded variety has slightly smaller leaves, yellow flowers and will regrow after cutting.

If you're growing to raise single plants to maturity, soak the seeds first as above, then sow directly in a well-drained sunny spot. Sow the seeds thinly and just cover with soil, any time between April and August. Fenugreek will survive a light frost so is worth sowing sowing successionally throughout the growing season.


Cumin

There’s no reason why you can’t grow your own cumin plant in a sunny sheltered spot in the garden or in a patio container, or on a windowsill if you have the space. It’s an umbellifer, so related to caraway, fennel, and also carrots and parsnips. However, most of the world’s cumin is grown in the Middle East – it prefers daytime temperature consistently in the mid-20s Celsius.

If you’re going to try them outside, sow the seed indoors and keep warm until the seeds germinate. Once the seedlings are large enough to handle, transplant to pots, about three to four seedlings per pot. These can be then be kept indoors to grow on, moved outdoors once all danger of frost is past (say, late April), or the plants can be transferred to an outside border. Then pray for a long hot summer.

Simpler is to sow the cumin seeds directly in the large pot you plan to raise them in. Sow indoors as above, thin the seedlings once they have all germinated and decide whether to keep it indoors or move it outside depending on how the weather pans out. Last summer, for example, they would have stayed in.

It’s an attractive plant with feathery leaves, but you will be growing it for the seeds – another reason for needing a long season. The flowers are white (sometimes pink), after flowering you should see the seeds form. Pick them off the plant when they turn yellowy in colour and let them dry somewhere sunny – on a plate in the kitchen, say – until they go brown. Then they’re ready to be stored in a clean airtight jar and used as you would use the shop-bought version. Cumin seeds mature at different rates – there won’t be one single day when you can go and harvest all the seeds – so you will need to keep an eye on the plants and pick off the seeds as and when and add them to the kitchen plate.

I think it would be going some to grow enough cumin to become self-sufficient, but you should get enough for a few special occasion meals.


Fancy a challenge?

The plants listed above are all relatively easy to grow, whether indoors or outdoors, and should give you a decent harvest in favourable conditions. The spices and aromatics listed below present far more of a challenge - often because even if you managed to raise a tropical plant in the UK climate, you would have to wait many years for the plant to mature and produce its edible seed. It's not too surprising, therefore, that spices have been so highly prized and priced throughout history.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is grown mainly for its bark, though its leaves are used in curries as well. It has been a much-prized spice for hundreds of years - there is a fascinating history of the trade in cinnamon here 
You won't be able to grow cinnamon for its bark in the UK, but you could grow it in a pot in a conservatory and use leaves in teas and curries.
To use as a garnish, try growing cinnamon basil – a basil variety whose leaves have a definite cinnamon aroma. This can be grown exactly as Thai or ordinary basil.

Cardamom

Cardamom is a tropical rainforest plant. Best place would be a steamy bathroom, or an indoor heated swimming pool, should you have one. Kew Gardens has some advice on growing cardamom plants here, and Plants4Presents currently has plants for sale.

Don’t sow the culinary seeds that you buy in the shops, as they’re harvested unripe and then dried for kitchen use. 

Saffron

Saffron is extracted from the stamens of the saffron crocus. It's a painstaking process which must be done by hand, which is why saffron has traditionally been one of the most expensive spices in the world. I have tried growing crocuses for saffron, with dismal results, but there is a good online guide at Nurseries Online here. You plant in the summer and harvest saffron from the stamens of the flowers in autumn. You’ll need a pair of tweezers and it’s very fiddly.

Star anise

In theory, growing star anise, which is native to China, would be perfectly possible as a pot plant, indoors in winter, outdoors in summer. If only I could find one - and if anyone knows of a star anise plant supplier in the UK, please tell me! 

The star anise likes acid soil – it’s distantly related to magnolia – and lots of water. Once you get the plant established, it could be up to 10 years or more before it bears flowers and fruit – the star anise itself is the dried egg-shaped fruit in the star-shaped casing. The star anise ‘flowers’ that you buy here have been picked when immature and unripe and then dried, so you can’t reconstitute the seeds and grow the plant from there, unfortunately: the seeds are undeveloped and empty.

Peppercorns

The peppercorn vine is native to India and grows happily in Vietnam, but temperatures here, even in a greenhouse, are just too low. Peppercorns are the fruit of the vine, which are dried and can then be further treated. Black pepper, for example is cooked and dried peppercorns; green pepper is dried unripe fruit and white pepper is made up of dried ripe seeds. Pink peppercorns, however, are from a different plant: the Peruvian pepper tree, Schinus molle, or its relative the Brazilian pepper tree, Schinus terebinthifolius.

Although conventional pepper can’t be grown here, you can always try Szechuan pepper, which is comparatively easy - see Mark Diacono's guide in his book A Taste of the Unexpected.

Szechuan pepper is botanically related to citrus plants rather than pepper vines, but it will still give you a hot peppery hit along with some more complex citrus notes as well. It’s hardy in the cold and so long as you plant two of them (a male plant and a female plant), they will supply with you fruits – the Szechuan peppers – for a good few years.

Cloves

Originally from the Indonesian spice islands, cloves like it hot and humid. In its natural habitat a clove seed will develop it a full-grown tree up to 12 metres tall and spreading eight metres; it's next to impossible to recreate the conditions it likes in the UK outside a very large heated glasshouse. Bear in mind also that what is sold in the shops is a dried flower bud, not a seed, so cannot be planted, and that it takes 20 years for the trees to start producing flower buds.

Nutmeg

See cloves, above, for the optimal growing conditions, although they are speedy developers in comparison since the first nutmegs, the seeds of the tree, will be produced about 7-9 years after planting.

General tips for growing spice plants

  • These will tend to be tropical plants; by default in the UK they will have to come indoors in winter;        
  • Many also tend to grow in rainforest conditions; they don’t necessarily need lots of hot sun, but moist warm shade;
  • Plants which grow on the forest floor are used to lots of organic matter but not necessarily very fertile soil;
  • Don’t assume that a plant with edible seeds will have other edible parts, eg, cumin. (Although it might have, eg, turmeric);
  • Choose whether to try to grow your plant from seed – may be cheaper and more obtainable, or whether to buy a plant to nurture – may be the only viable way to acquire;
  • When searching the Internet for cultivation advice, check whether the site is referring to the UK, US, Australia or indeed anywhere else. You’ll find sites telling you how easy it is to grow cinnamon or talking about the benefits of growing lemon grass as hedging, and then find they are talking about Louisiana and Brisbane respectively.
zia mays, The Secret Garden Club
The Secret Garden Club's ginger harvest 


Guests were able to take away a selection of  seeds, a handful of overwintering onions and chillies picked fresh from the plant, to try raising their own spice plants.

Sunday 4 November 2012

Mixed nuts

The Secret Garden's new hazelnut tree
When you're thinking of edibles to grow in the garden or allotment, it's easy to forget about nuts. But nut trees are easy to grow once established and hugely rewarding at harvest time in the autumn. Fresh nuts from the tree are a very different prospect to the older, drier nuts you buy in the shops.

Nuts are a tricky prospect for the urban garden, however. You will need space, ideally for more than one tree, since nut trees are not, on the whole, self-fertile. You will also need an anti-squirrel plan, but beyond that, nut trees need little in the way of maintenance and looking after.

The four main species grown in the UK - and mostly in the south of the UK - are hazelnuts (cobnuts), walnuts, sweet chestnuts and almonds.

Hazelnuts/cobnuts

Hazelnut trees grow well in southern England – traditionally they were grown on a commercial scale in Kent among the hops. This is why the hazels mostly grown in the UK are a variety of Kentish cob, where they will thrive in any type of soil, except that which is waterlogged.

They may not be at their best in a small urban garden, but you can decide if it's worth giving hazelnuts a go.


To pollinate successfully, ie, to get a good crop of nuts, you need at least two different types of hazel tree. Hazels are self-sterile: they may have both male and female flowers on each tree, but flowers from the same tree won't pollinate each other. They need a tree nearby of a different variety of hazelnut. Before you decide to buy 2-3 trees, check your neighbourhood. If there are hazel trees in the next garden, or the next after that, the chances are that it will wind-pollinate your tree quite satisfactorily.

To plant a nut tree, choose a site either in the sun, or brightly-lit part-shade, where the soil will drain well. Dig a hole that will fit your roots and base comfortably, water well, drop your sapling in and replace the soil, firming the surface. These days, experts often recommend that you don't add any manure or fertiliser to the planting hole or the soil: you want the tree to send down strong roots in search of nourishment, not loll around in the luxury of its original planting hollow.


A stake is always a good idea even if it’s only temporary until the tree sends down strong roots and establishes itself. Use a soft tie to tether your tree to the stake, so that wire or twine doesn’t cut into the bark of the tree as it grows – an ideal soft tie is a leg cut away from an old pair of tights!


Clear the area underneath the tree – the drip canopy – of any grass, or weeds and mulch it thoroughly with organic matter and/or composted bark. This helps to suppress weeds which might compete with the tree for nutrients, and will also help to retain moisture. 


Hazelnuts are picked when they are still fresh and green, from August through to October. They are usually eaten straightaway, when the nut is still relatively green and juicy. If you leave the nut until the shell goes brown, the nut will be drier in texture, but fuller in flavour. Hazelnuts store well up to Christmas if you keep them somewhere cool and dry.



The squirrel problem
Squirrels are probably most closely identified with hazelnuts but they are a problem for all nut growers, since they will eat or make away with as many nuts as possible. In a setting with plenty of space, you can minimise the problem by planting your nut tree away from woodland, leaving about 100m between the nuts and other trees. That's not possible in the Secret Garden and unlikely to be a viable solution in most urban gardens. 

What is possible is to take a sheet of pliable aluminium 1m in width and tack it around the tree at about eye level here just as the nuts are forming. This should stop squirrels from climbing the tree although you will need to make sure they can’t jump from another tree to your hazel. Remove the aluminium after you’ve harvested.


Nut weevils can also be a problem. You’ll know if you have nut weevils because you’ll have nuts with a tiny, perfect circular hole bored into each one – and the nut will have been eaten.

Nut weevils can be controlled or eliminated if you cultivate the ground underneath the tree. Digging, raking, weeding, will disturb the weevils. Alternatively if you have chickens you can let them loose under the tree and their scratching will have the same effect – Bunny Guinness recommends this as an anti-weevil measure.

Even if the squirrels do bag most of your harvest a hazel tree is still worth growing. They are quick-growing and pretty with the catkins emerging in early spring. Their straight branches are traditionally used as canes and plant support – cut them down in winter and store somewhere cool and dry. They can also be trained into arches and other decorative forms and are often used as hedging.

But if you think your garden isn’t suitable for a hazelnut tree – too small, too many trees, too many squirrels – you can still enjoy fresh-picked cobnuts in season as they are one of the easiest foods to find when foraging. Get out into your local commons, hedgerows and woodlands, and look for hazelnut trees.

Sweet chestnuts
For me, these are the best nuts for foraging. We lived near sweet chestnut woods when I was a child and I can well remember the excitement of the sweet chestnut season, picking over the windfalls. 

If you don't live near wild sweet chestnuts, a bought sweet chestnut sapling should produce nuts for you in 2-3 years. There’s nothing to say you can’t grow a nut tree from seed, so long as you bear in mind that: 1) you can’t guarantee that it will grow true, 2) you can’t guarantee it will be a healthy specimen, and 3) it will take years (10 for a walnut, up to 20 for a sweet chestnut) before it bears nuts. Make sure you still want to be living in the same house by then or else you will only bequeath a nut tree to the next owners.

Take care when buying a sweet chestnut tree in the UK. Recently a fungal disease affecting sweet chestnuts has ravaged trees in France and isolated cases have been reported in the UK. Make sure you buy your tree from a reputable supplier and that the tree is guaranteed fungus free. Some suppliers, eg Mammoth, have actually suspended supplies of sweet chestnuts until they can guarantee that their stock is free of the fungus.

Having found your reputable supplier, choose a self-fertile variety, unless you live in a stately home with its own parklands and have the space to plant more than one tree. Varieties such as Regal and Marigoule are both self-fertile, not too huge (Regal will grow to 15 feet in 10 years) and will give you nuts in 2-4 years.

Once you’ve overcome these hurdles, chosen your variety and the right location in your garden, the sweet chestnut will give you few problems. Squirrels like them – of course – and the same prevention methods with hazelnuts will work with chestnuts.

Walnuts
There is something very aspirational about a walnut tree. I once tried to persuade my husband we should move out of London to a house in Hampshire – solely because it had a mature walnut tree in the garden. I actually don’t remember anything about the house.

The mature trees are beautiful in a stately, elegant way – a lovely, spreading shape with intensely green, oval leaves. They are slow to grow and establish - and in the wild, slow to fruit (about 10-15 years) - so there is something of permanence and history about them.

And then of course they produce walnuts. And the difference between the walnuts you buy the shops, whether dried up and brown-shelled or ready-shelled, and the nuts that fall off your tree, is a revelation. Wet walnuts, with the shell still soft and undeveloped, can be pickled, but once the green husks fall from the tree and split to reveal the shell, the nut inside is moist and rich and creamy.

So, you want to plant a walnut tree? You’ll need two of them, at least. Walnuts tend not to be very self-fertile and will crop much better if there is another walnut tree of a different variety nearby (and of course, you’ll get more walnuts).

Chose a named cultivar, and plant as for other nut trees. Keep well watered as the tree establishes itself and gradually reduce this as it grows – walnut tree roots can rot. When the tree crops, wear gloves – the outer husks will stain your hands indelibly. I speak from experience having spent a week in Spain with black hands after I filled my pockets with wet walnuts – I think I thought I was going to pickle them back at the villa.

Walnut trees have another interesting characteristic: their roots exude a chemical which deters other plants from growing near it – so, easy weeding. I also wonder if this has anything to do with the traditional saying that you don’t get flies under a walnut tree. If the chemical deters more than plants as it were. Certainly walnut trees are not much affected by pests. There is such a thing as walnut blight, a bacterial disease which makes black spots develop on the leaves and can also affect the crop. Apart from that, it’s the old enemy, squirrels, which you need to guard against.

Almonds
Almonds like warm dry summers and frost-free winters to do their best, so they are a tree that does best in the south-east – like walnuts, in fact. In London the clay soil and consequent poor drainage is likely to be your biggest problem.

Almonds come from the same plant family as peaches and nectarines – think of the kernel of a peach/nectarine with that distinctive bitter almond taste. So the growing conditions are very similar.

If you want to grow an almond tree, you’ll need deep, free draining soil. Dig in lots of organic matter prior to planting and if you have a slope in your garden or allotment, plant near the top, not at the bottom. You also want somewhere in full sun or as close to it as possible. Buy a sapling, either as a bare root plant or in a pot, rather than trying to grow from seed, and you should have nuts in the second or third year.

The best way to harvest almonds is to lay a big sheet underneath the tree and then shake the branches hard to make the fruit fall out and on to the sheet. Let them dry for a few days before you start to eat them.

As they are related to peaches , they attract the same pests: in this case, leaf curl is the most likely problem you’ll get. Keeping the plants dry in late winter and early spring is one way to help prevent this fungal disease; using a copper fungicide in January/February is also effective.