Indoor gardening guide: growing fruit, vegetables and herbs at home
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Version 0 of 1. You can grow food on your windowsill, particularly if it’s a sunny one. The best return is from micro leaves – nutritious baby leaves of salads and other vegetables. They often pack a punch with flavour and make for a pretty garnish. You can harvest the leaves when they are about 5cm and no more. Thus, each sowing is a single harvest. Takeaway trays, using the lid as a saucer, are ideal. Sow the seeds thickly, but not so they sit on top of each other. Basil, watercress, mustard, brassicas, red amaranth, coriander and peas all make excellent microgreens. Skysprouts.co.uk and hodmedods.co.uk stock fair-priced seeds. Or grow mushrooms – in a book. The Grow Your Own Oyster Mushrooms Book Kit will get you started. Simply place the mushroom spawn inside a paperback, moisten, and wait for a mass of fungus to burst forth from between the pages. Alys Fowler Chef Ollie Dabbous on unusual herbs you can grow at home Lovage – tastes like the smell of a freshly mown lawn. Indigenous and sadly underutilised, this herb makes a nice change from parsley. Perilla – a member of the mint family, popular in Asian cookery but less known in Europe. It is most recognisable as the token leaf used to garnish sashimi in Japanese restaurants. The flavour, however, merits attention of its own: clean, grassy and verdant. It is a great alternative to coriander and works well in cocktails. Marigold – fresh, coriander-seed, citrus flavour. This works well in both sweet and savoury dishes. At Dabbous, we serve it with ripe peaches, fresh almonds and a light olive oil. At Oskar’s Bar downstairs, it is used to infuse aged white rum before being served with fresh juices such as a summer punch. Chrysanthemum – popular in Asian cookery, these slightly bitter leaves add an invigorating freshness; they cut through the fat of a dish and provide a counterpoint, which prevents a plate of food from being bland. Flower petals can also be added. Lesser calamint – has a feral, dry taste, in between oregano, thyme and regular mint; fantastic with lamb, runner beans and artichokes. Popular in Italian cookery, this hardy plant also grows well here and deserves more appreciation than it gets. Use your discarded fruit pips Lemons, oranges, avocados, mangoes, lychees, pomegranates and even medjool dates can all be sprouted from the discarded seed. Lemon and oranges germinate at around 15-20C. Mangoes germinate at 21-25C, which is very moist soil. Avocados germinate at a similar temperature, but are best germinated suspended over a glass of water using toothpicks to balance on the sides – the bottom half needs to sit in water. Lychees need to be fresh and are slow to germinate; they do so at around 18C. For pomegranates, plant several seeds in a pot of compost on a warm, sunny window sill (18-21C); they tend to germinate fast if ripe. Select the strongest to pot on. Medjool dates need to be soaked for a week, changing the water daily. Then placed between damp kitchen towels (replace if they go mouldy) and put in a freezer bag. Keep it somewhere warm, above the fridge perhaps, and wait. They take several weeks to germinate. Once sprouting, pot into moist compost and continue to keep warm. Alys Fowler Become an indoor farmer You long to call yourself a farmer, but you live on the sixth floor. Find a plastic container. Poke holes in it, fill with compost and sow your grains - oats, buckwheat or flax. Add compost and water. So there you have your lovely verdant field. Alys Fowler Grow your own cocktail ingredients Herbs are the unsung heroes of the cocktail. Mint is wonderful, but why stop there? A sprig of the herb agastache will add a hint of sweet, liquorice flavour to your gin and tonics, and will grow happily in a pot on the balcony. Cucamelons resemble miniature watermelons, perfect for Barbie and Ken, but taste like a zesty cucumber. Borage is another cucumber-scented herb, with delicate blue star-like flowers, which goes very well with Pimms. Get started with a Cocktail Garden Kit from grow-your-own pioneer Plant Theatre, £13.50. Becky Barnicoat |