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: plants

Plants are my great love, they are like children to me. I sometimes indulge in sharing a bit more details about this plant or the other.

  • Learning, weeding and improvising

    The Herb Garden at Wisley is a lovely little area that opened back in 2003 and where my colleague experiments with planting of old and novel herbs, some of which are used in the restaurants on site (they share some of the recipes online that might be interesting). The area is divided by use of…

  • 10 apples or so a day: keeps the doctor away?

    After all the picking, and the rehearsal in London earlier in the month, the last six days have been full-on on apples at the Wisley Taste of Autumn Festival and one can get enough of apples, I tell you! Produce display for Wisley Taste of Autumn After a day of set up that involved me checking stored crates of…

  • Nothoscordum borbonicum

    Nothoscordum borbonicum Only one weed is considered obnoxious at RHS Garden Wisley, and that is honeybells or onion weed (Nothoscordum borbonicum). It is spreading in the fan borders and the fruit garden, so I have had the opportunity to weed it out a few times in the last couple of weeks, so I’ve become familiar with it.…

  • Crop of the week: grapes

    As part of our coursework our teams ask us trainees to study specific crops in more details, so that we learn: some general information about the plant and how it is grown; available and recommended cultivars, including any with an Award of Garden Merit (AGM); common pest and diseases and how to deal with them. As the…

  • Chervil (Anthriscus cerefolium)

    One of the plugs we planted I have never tasted chervil, not consciously (although I read it is the main ingredient of French fines herbes and bouquet garni). Nor have I ever tried to grow it, so it would be fair to say I had no knowledge of the plant at all when I was…

  • Grape stars

    When my team leader gave us trainees an introduction to the Fruit Department, he showed us some dessert grapes grown in a small greenhouse by the orchard, remarking that they were high maintenance, requiring: an intensive regime of pruning and trimming, fruit thinning and stripping of the bark from the stems to expose pests before…

  • Cardoons

    Cardoons (Cynara cardunculus) is not a very common vegetable, either here in the UK or indeed in Italy, where, however, they make the occasional appearance in the shops. One of the odd and little known vegetables that are kept alive by elderly people eating them and that have seen better days, when they even had…

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.

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