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

Tag: l’orto

Orto is the Italian for a vegetable plot. Find here all the pages that talk about my own plot(s).

  • Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

    Taraxacum officinale are beautiful wild flowers, laden in pollen (I remember a spring in the mountains when everything was covered in yellow “dust” as dandelions all came into flower) and last year, after reading about someone having the largest botanic collection of them, I started noticing the different leaf shapes… I even considered devoting them…

  • It’s raspberry time!

    I have not written for a while about the allotment, as Kew is taking up most of my time, energies and generally most of my thoughts… However, although it is the case that I am not doing as much as I would like to (isn’t that the case every year?!?), I am growing, picking and…

  • Another year draws to an end

    This has been a busy year. In the plot, I have grown a few new crops: oca, achocha, shark fin melon, salsify, scorzonera. And the year I tried seaweed meal as a soil conditioner and cardboard mulch in autumn. The year I planted more fruit bushes because I think perennials are much less effort and…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

About Me

M.Paola M.Paola, that’s me

I got my first allotment in the UK in 2007 and started gI 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.

Links

Blog Archive

Some Rights Reserved

Creative Commons License
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.