Orto di Casa Cecconi

My first allotment, and then one thing leading to another…

L’orto di Casa Cecconi Plants Recipes Me & Kew One Year at Wisley

  • Seedy penpals

    I must have written before that I have a collector streak in me, and it comes out with seeds.

    Every winter I get all the packets out from the recesses of my shed and take stock: I usually end up with some 150-300 species on my database (they have grown over the years both with perennials – which I also catalouge – and new seeds). Then I sort them by month of sowing, put them in coffee tins and padded envelopes with some silica gel to keep them dry, and they go back to the shed, to be picked out at the right month…

     … which sounds quite orderly, but it isn’t really, as I tend to run late after April every year (for some curious reason) so previous months’ tins lie about for a while, and then of course seeds can be sown over a range of months and I buy new ones on top (as I need them or it catches my fancy)… basically, by this time of the year I have lost track of what I have used and what I still have! That is why the winter stock taking is so necessary for me.

    As my garden and allotments are getting to capacity, after four and five years of working on them respectively, last winter for the first time I realised I had simply too many seeds to use, so I started looking for someone interested to share, and I found it surprisingly difficult! It was only in spring that someone showed interest. I then mailed my seeds, which they might or might not have received. Never heard from them again. That I found sad, as I care for my seeds.

    Then Carl came up with the idea of “seedy penpals“, like the penpals of yore, sending letters to each other, swapping surplus seeds, and keeping in touch on gardening progress. It is a great idea as you get to try new seeds, share your surplus and know what happens to it, and get to know someone at the same time: I enrolled straight away.

    Seedy Penpals Big Badge
    The first seeds swap ever under the scheme was scheduled for early August, and it has now gone through, so I have now virtually met Rebecca and Lucy, and we swapped seeds.

    Rebecca is my receiver pal. We had a lovely exchange of emails and, based on her preferences, I selected some seeds to send her. Always a difficult task for a seed hoarder like me 😀 , but I enjoyed trying to match species to Rebecca’s asks and writing to her about them. I thought some seedlings would also fill up for the fact that we are at the end of the season and you cannot sow so many things now as you would in spring. I hope she enjoys my little parcel.

    Today I also received my own parcel from Lucy. Collector’s paradise here, it will increase my collection rather than keep it in check! Lucy warned me she was quite busy at the moment, but despite that she managed to send me a rather wonderful parcel with a selection of flowers (for my new wildflower/cottage front garden, which I told her about) and veggies. The most interesting thing for me is she seems to have collected some of the seeds either from her own garden or other places, which I admire: I do not trust myself at saving seeds and have only occasionally attempted it- it’s something I’ve always wanted to take up, though, so here’s someone that I can learn from!

    I’d better stop sitting in front of this screen, writing, and get going: a lot of sowing to be done!

    Then, this winter, when I take stock of seeds again, I will have my seedy penpals in mind and the next swap in March to look forward too. 😀

  • Have you ever cooked artichokes?

    After 4 years of toiling on the artichoke patch, this first week of summer yielded the first three edible ones: pride and joy!

    I love artichokes, and it is quite difficult to find them here in the UK… a few years ago, when staying at Bangors Organic in Cornwall, Gill served them for dinner: whole, just steamed (or boiled?) with a butter serving – de-li-cio-us! So, before leaving, I was eager to ask for some to take away, I mean, we were ready to buy some! When we went back more recently, Neil recognised us as the people who asked for the artichokes – he said he was surprised by the request at the time! I like to think that that episode might have contributed to spark off the idea to open an organic farmers’ market at their place, The Big Green Shed, which they have inaugurated this month.

    Fast forward to now, here are my artichokes, just back from the plot: don’t they look appetizing?

    If that was a new veg for me, I’d feel intimidated how to approach it… how do you pick, clean and eat? Any safety concerns?

    I was like that with gooseberries when I first saw them… now I love them, thorns and all! I was not yet entirely comfortable with artichoke in the field, either: when are they ready to pick? Now I know: the leaves need to be starting to come apart.

    For those that have never cooked with artichokes, I have asked Gianfranco to take some pictures of me cleaning them: nobody should be put off such a lovely veg! They are fairly quick to deal with when you know how: it took me 48 mins from basket to plate, with taking pictures and all. Pictures from all steps are on Flickr, I copy here the essential ones to keep it shorter.

    First thing to know, is that artichokes oxidise and go unappealingly brown as soon as cut, unless kept in acidic conditions, which in my family we do by washing and keeping in water in which lemon has been squeezed.

    Second thing to know if you do not want to be put off from ever eating artichokes again is: the tasty bit is the heart, all the rest is basically a way for the plant to discourage pests eating it (humans as well) you have to be absolutely ruthless with what you take away – everything that feels like cutting into cardboard, anything spiny and the choke need to go.

    I start by pulling out the external leaves. The smallish ones are composted, while the bigger ones can be used later – take care to keep them whole at the base. As soon as they are off, put in lemon & water. Everything that is green at the base is off, you have to be left with yellow and red.

    If the stalk is not too woody, you can keep it on for cooked recipes, but have to peel it (up to the first leaves’ remains). It’s not too good in raw recipes, so you can keep it for later together with the leaves.


    Take the top of the leaves off. I have left too many tougher leaves (see the greenness there?): always tempted to keep as much as possible – this is the time to take them off, really. Also, you have to decide how high up to cut depending on how tough those internal leaves are.



    Half the heart and then quarter it.


    Remove the choke. There is a line where the blade goes in easily at the bottom of the fluffy choke. Do not cut into the flesh, that’s what you eat! Take away all the internal spiny leaves too: they look deceptively innocuous. Get them in the water & lemon asap to avoid discolouration.

    Ready for eating!

    I love them raw, sliced with salt, extravergin olive oil and lemon. Also delicious sliced and deep fried in a batter of egg, dusting of flour, lightly salted: OH granny’s Easter speciality.


    This time, I braised them in lemon juice after lightly frying with garlic & chilli. Stirred in a few fresh basil leaves, chopped. Et voila!


    I kept the tough leaves in acidic water until next day & boiled until tender: the fleshy bit goes green and you can see veins. Holding the leaf at the top, you can dip them in butter and scoop out the flesh with your teeth (guilty pleasure, that’s how I ate them at Gill’s back then).

    My aunty, more refinedly, scoops them out with a spoon to make puree.

    How will you cook them?

  • What can you do with lemon balm? And other plants

    There are plants that I introduced once on the plot and now grow largely unasked. Their weedy behaviour means they multiply and tend happily to survive slug attack. They are usually loved by pollinators.

    It’s a pity to weed them out, given their success, so I have decided to find a use for them. I refer in particular to three plants: opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), borage (Borago officinalis) and lemon balm (Melissa officinalis). Let’s forget the poppy for a moment, but when a plant has ‘officinalis’ in its name it means it has been used in herbalism as a medicine – it’s not just a pretty flower.

    Opium poppy, I discovered a couple of autumns ago, is the very useful source of poppy seed.

    I love poppy seeds in my bread, so I have been collecting them for the last couple of years, trying them both as is and dry toasted. Number one plant sorted.

    By the way, not all poppies have edible seeds, but the opium poppy (whose seedpod milky sap incidentally will make opium, the reason why the plant was introduced in England, then becoming naturalised) is THE ONE. Warning: apparently, if you eat too many you might test positive for opium.

    Oh, and the seedheads make lovely winter display in a bunch at home.



    Then, earlier this month, I tried borage leaves.

    Borage leaves are used in Genoese cuisine to make pasta filling, and I liked them cooked, tasting very much like nettles. They can be also eaten raw in salads, taste apparently cucumber-like, but need chopping finely, they are so hairy.

    It turned out, however, that they contain an alkaloid poisonous to the liver, so eating too many is not a good idea. Number two plant not really sorted.

    But they can be used as green manure as the taproot accesses nutrients deep in the ground – that’s sort of how I had used them in the past. And of course bees adore the flowers, which can be safely eaten, and are usually added to ice cubes as drink decoration.
    Interesting fact: with seeds they make starflower oil, a GLA supplement.

    Finally, I decided to tackle the tons of lemon balm on the plot. Lovely smell, but they grow in every nooks and crannies!

    First search yielded tea recipes to be made with fresh or dried leaves. That would not however sort the quantity issue for me. Then, my friend Carl suggested I have a look at the Plant for the Future database: a note at the bottom of the page indicated you could make pesto. Eureka! Search online for lemon balm pesto and you will find an abundance of recipes. I went for lemon balm, walnuts, garlic and parmigiano cheese, then soak in extravirgin olive oil. On pasta, it did pass the husband test, and it is fairly quick to prepare. Here’s how it looked at the various stages:

    Chopping



    Ready and soaked in oil



    Lemon balm pesto linguine

  • Totally undeserved yet humbly accepted Liebster Blog Award

    My lovely friend Carl Legge, truly generous as he is, did think about my ailing blog when making nominations for the Liebster Blog Award, in an attempt to encourage me to write more.

    Thank you Carl, I am honoured by the nomination and humbled – would love to blog more, even though at the moment I seem to be lacking inspiration – and, most of all, time. 

    All my free time I spend keeping the plot tidy (endless pursuit as it is), studying horticulture (in order to be able to do more effective plot-tidying…) and translating into English an Italian recipe book of the organic, “real food” persuasion (you have to use up all that produce in the end!). 

    But I will, Carl, I’ll come back and write about what I’ve learnt: you are an inspiration with your thorough understanding and openness to sharing.

    In the meantime, I keep the picture albums and the interesting links up to date, as that is less time consuming. And I sometimes tweet about my allotment.

    The Liebster Blog Award comes with some rules:

    • Thank the person that gave you the award in a post on your own site
    • Nominate up to five blogs with less than 200 followers
    • Let the nominees know they’ve won by leaving a comment on one of their posts
    • Add the Liebster image so all your readers know that you are a recipient.
    Bad enough at thanking people, I’m even worse at reading blogs – talk about going out of my comfort zone! Really, I do not read blogs regularly. I follow links on Twitter and search on Google, that’s about what I can manage in between all the rest, and how I find interesting content, and people.
    Besides, any blogs I have occasionally followed have far more than 200 followers: Carl’s Llynlines with his allround sustainable life pursuit, Saidos da Concha with Constanca’s home made life,  Il pasto nudo with Sonia’s “rebirth” in real food…


    Promise I will look out for a couple of blogs with fewer followers, nominate them and let you all know… and you could suggest some for me to have a look at?

  • Caring for the soil – part 1: crop rotation, companion planting and intercropping

    As you know, I have tried do grow organically over these four years or so. I have always believed that working with nature makes more sense than working against it: fire-fighting against pests with chemicals, for example, instead of working in a balanced ecosystem with pests and predators even themselves out – that at least is the thinking.

    In my efforts to do and know more, I have been a member of several organisations in the organic sector, among which the Soil Association, but somehow I never bothered why they were called like that. Then, I had a eureka moment earlier this year, when I read something: you should not be fretting so much about your plants but first and foremost care for the soil they grow in, because if the soil is healthy the plants (more or less) then take care of themselves. The soil sustains all life.

    So I started thinking: how to take better care of my soil?

    CROP ROTATION

    I have practised 4-year rotation quite strictly according to Garden Organic suggestions.

    Crop rotation is an ancient system, it dates back at the very least to the Romans who apparently called it “food, feed and fallow”. It helps with management of both soils and pests, namely:

    • pests and diseases are family-specific, and some of them may persist in the soil, so if you keep growing the same plants over and over again in the same spot you are more likely to be hit; 
    • families of plants use up more or less the same type of nutrients, so if you grow the same plants over and over again in the same spot, they will use up all the same nutrients and there will be little or none left in the soil, leading to all sorts of problems (depletion, erosion etc).
    It is exactly the opposite of monoculture, which is the prevailing system in industrial agriculture. 

    Rotation works like this. Botanically, plants belong to families. Families with similar characteristics and requirements can be grouped and planted together. Plants from one group should not be planted on the same spot year on year to avoid the problems above. So you divide your plot  in areas (more easily done with beds), and rotate your crop groups. The minimum advised rotation is 4 years, which means you will only plant a group of families in one area once in 4 years. 

    Garden Organic suggests to divide plant families in 4 groups (I provide links to Wikipedia but do not bother too much with family names as they change all the time as botanists becomes clearer which plants belong to which family, and whether a family is still a family or some sort of sub or super-grouping of something else).

    The groups are labelled A,B,C and D, which I find quite convenient to mark my beds on the plot:

    A:  solanaceae (the nightshade family, including tomato peppers and potato), cucurbitaceae (your pumpkins and courgettes);
    B:  alliaceae (garlic and onions);  papillonaceae (peas and beans, vetches and clovers);
    C:  brassicaceae (the cabbage family, also including spicy salads i.e. rocket and cress); poaceae (the grasses, including cereals and corn); asteraceae (the daisy-shaped flower family, including most salads that are not spicy);
    D:  apiaceae (the plant that have flowers umbrella-shaped i.e. parsley, carrots, parsnips), chenopodiaceae (mostly weeds but also spinach and beets) – both families together can be roughly identified as the root crops.

    There are other families with less common plants, those are outside the rotation and can make up an extra year in the rotation or could be associated – consistently – with another group.

    Crop rotation goes with other methods of soil care, which I am planning to discuss later on.

    COMPANION PLANTING

    Of course, even within the sustainable agriculture persuasion (basically anything but monoculture), there are other schools of thought. For example, one that advocates something that is not so neatly organised: “companion planting“.  This is also about pairing plants/grouping, on the basis that:

    • some pests locate the crops by sights (mixed planting confusing them); 
    • some plants emit smells that can deter pests from other plants;
    • some plants may provide nutrients for other plants.

    There’s no excess of scientific evidence of this working – possibly because of lack of interest from science, which nowadays seem to be mostly focussed on technological innovation, genetic engineering to create new and “better” species at the forefront. But it makes sense to me and a notable example of this system was traced back to the Americas where the “three sisters”: corn, beans and pumpkins were planted together – corn providing a climbing support for the beans, which fix the nitrogen for hungry pumpkins and pumpkins shading the roots keeping weeds at bay etc.

    Yet I have not found a way to make the two systems work together, except in cases where the “extra” plants are out of rotation or within the same rotation group. Not that I have spent too much time exploring this, I barely have time to follow one philosophy, what with gardening around a full time job with travelling, and keeping the house and feeding myself and husband etc. Gardening definitely requires a lot of hands on experience and observation.

    Which reminds me it’s time to go to the plot, as it’s a gorgeous day and there’s so much to do.

    INTERCROPPING AND CATCH CROPS

    But I will conclude on a another practice that deserves a mention in this context: intercropping. To make more profitable use of the often scarce resource of space, one could grow quick maturing crops (i.e. salads) while waiting for slower crops to develop. Similarly, catch crops are used in between planting of other crops (i.e. while waiting for the seedlings to be ready in the greenhouse). 

    I know next to nothing about this, and I sense there might be a tension between wanting to produce more and the need to keep the soil in good shape – but you may know more.

    Please leave your comments if you have experience on any of these practices and how they might work together in a sustainable way.

  • Long live the chilli plants

    I am not sure what has been wrong with my technique of growing chillies in the last two years. I suspect they might have taken objection to my reluctance feeding them.


    Anyway, come September they were, and are  – this year even worse – just about to flower for the first time if at all. Won’t bear much of a crop.

    Except last year I discovered chillies are tender perennials.

    So I took 3 pots in over winter and kept them on the kitchen windowsill. They kept flowering and produced the odd tiny chilli. The only problem was greenfly, which affected them all winter. At some stage I also petted a ladybird, that I found on the window, to try and  get rid of them. But then it was summer and I put them outside again.

    Here is one. It looks like I will get my crop from them rather than the new plants this year. So if you have not been very lucky with your chilli plants, don’t give up. They might do better next year, given a bit of TLC over winter.

    I myself am planning to make room in the loft this winter for my new and not so new chilli plants. And for my latest discovery: perennial basil…

  • Another year of elderberries

    I have not written for a while: gardening is repetitive, so I sort of ran out of topics, and I am trying to figure out how to make my pages interesting in the little time I have. Also, I am not happy with pictures from my new camera, so my old blog format does not work any longer.

    That does not mean that I have not carried on in my garden and in the kitchen finding the best ways to use my produce.

    Elderberry had a special place this year too. I made Holunderlikoer, which I love, and jam (but it set too hard so it rolls rather than spreading). Then my friend wrote to me saying she had found out elderberries had medicinal properties, could I sent her something. I researched it a bit on the web and found it is good for winter colds and coughs, and what I was after was a “rob” – which, I found out today, stands for thickened juice).

    Could not find a definitive recipe, but storage over time seemed an issue with some of them. So I made up my own recipe with info from here and there.

    My own elderberry rob

    • 500 gr ripe elder berries
    • 200 gr sugar 
    • 4 clovers
    • ground ginger and cinnamon to taste
    With a fork, pull the berries from the stalks, removing as many of the remaining stalks as possible. Wash.

    Simmer the berries until soft and squash them with a food mill to get the juice (without seeds, as they are mildly toxic). 

    Mix with the sugar and bring to the boil, adding the spices. Thicken it to a runny honey texture. Bottle as jam.

    Let’s see if it works.

About Me

M.Paola M.Paola, that’s me

I got my first allotment in the UK in 2007 and started growing my own food. Learning as I went along was not enough, so I studied horticulture. Faced with the horticultural warfare, I became a conscientious objector: I use no chemicals and support organic principles and regulations.

Brexit gave me a new life in the Netherlands, three new plots by a nature reserve and an MSc in sustainable food systems.

I write in my personal capacity and, as a language perfectionist and a non native speaker, I keep reviewing my entries’ text for clarity.

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