2 weeks Ago By Sonja Brodie
In 2013 we left the city we spent most of our adulthood lives in up to that point, Edinburgh , swapping our third-floor tenement flat for a former farm labourer’s cottage with 1.5 acres of ground on the windy Rhins of Galloway in south-west Scotland , at the sunny end of the west coast. We were both 39-years-old and our previous gardening experience consisted of growing herbs on a windowsill, mowing the lawn in the communal garden and harvesting fruit and veg in other people’s gardens as children.
Immediately before our move to the Galloway countryside, we sailed out of Granton harbour and spent two years at sea, cruising the North Atlantic on a 29ft sailboat, which taught us a lot about creative problem-solving, flexibility, self-reliance and storage. What we lacked in gardening experience, we made up for in sense of adventure, willingness to experiment and enquiring minds. Inquisitiveness, research and experimentation were also something we brought with us from our professional lives as a biologist (Jim) and journalist (Sonja).
Our initial aim in the garden was to see how much of our own sustenance we could produce under Scottish growing conditions, what our meals would look like through the seasons, and to find out if we could produce carrots like our grandmothers used to grow, bursting with flavour. From the start, we tried to eat as much as possible from our own land and experimented with various preservation methods. Fruit was in very short supply to begin with, so we made marrow jam, nettle beer and parsnip wine.
Already in our first year, we were amazed how much grew, once we put up good wind breaks, even through the winter. Skip ahead ten years and we haven’t bought any vegetables for eight years and no fruit for six. That’s total year-round self-sufficiency in fruit and veg.
We also grow all of our own herbs and teas and most of our spices. We’ve never been dogmatic about eating home produce exclusively, hence our choice of handle on Instagram: ‘reasonablygoodlife’. We still buy dairy products, sugar, fat and oil, grains, coffee and sometimes meat or fish.
What is perhaps more unusual than growing all our own fruit and veg is that we don’t buy any inputs for the garden, i.e. no compost or soil amendments.
We don’t buy any seeds either, instead saving most of our own seed, supporting the Heritage Seed Library and swapping seeds with local gardeners and Instagram friends. We take what other people would throw away as garden waste and use it to build our soil. The results have been phenomenal.
So what does self-sufficiency in Scottish fruit and veg look like throughout the year? It doesn’t have to be a return to a 1950s diet of potatoes, turnips, root veg, leeks, runner beans, cabbage and kale, as many people assume. With a bit of imagination, experimentation and a plant hunter’s eye perpetually scanning the horizon, it can be a diverse and seasonally varied diet. However, it doesn’t resemble our previous shop-bought diet at all – it’s much better.
The key to becoming more self-sufficient is willingness to change what you eat. The traditional staples represent a large part of what is available over the winter, simply because they grow well in our climate, as do peas and broad beans. But there are also plenty of vegetables unknown to our ancestors that do well here: crops like oca, a lemony South American tuber; aromatic spinach substitutes such as Good King Henry and Caucasian spinach; globe artichokes and cardoons (both members of the thistle family).
In early spring, the separate paths of gardener and forager can merge, with young nutritious weeds becoming desirable fresh greens: nettle tops and ground elder are fantastic in soups, chickweed and hairy bitter-cress in salads and cleavers in tea. In summer months we grow more heat-loving crops under cover in greenhouse, polytunnel and cold frames: tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies, French beans and winter squashes. Courgettes, marrows and some types of squash and French bean can also be grown outdoors.
A good portion of all of these summer crops is stored or preserved for use through winter and into the traditionally dreaded ‘hungry gap’, when winter crops are running out and new season crops aren’t ready yet, usually April and May in Scotland. Two amazing stalwarts in our garden are rosehips, particularly the large Rosa rugosa variety, and wild watercress, which grows like a weed in damp ground around the veg garden. We’d never eaten rosehips before and now they’re a winter staple.
We use them in tea, of course, but mainly as a tomato substitute. Once the seeds have been scooped out, rosehips make a lovely, surprisingly tomato-like, sauce and the quartered rosehips are also great in risottos and stews. Watercress is a delicious peppery salad ingredient and, combined with a few potatoes and some seaweed stock, makes one of our favourite soups.
Our diet also includes some wild, foraged foods throughout the year, starting with wild garlic in early spring, progressing to brambles and mushrooms in autumn and finishing with seaweed in winter. Fruit-wise, we heavily rely on apples, blackcurrants and strawberries, eaten fresh and preserved in various ways to last all year round. Rhubarb, strangely a vegetable that is eaten as fruit, plays a crucial role in early spring.
The humble gooseberry is the Scottish answer to lemons. High in pectin, it can be used instead of lemons to improve the set of jams and jellies. Its acidity makes it ideal in treats like ‘lemon’ drizzle cake and its juice can be turned into a delicious fruity vinegar.
We have now brought together the mass of knowledge gained from growing food on an exposed site by the Irish Sea to produce a somewhat overdue Scottish gardening book with a focus on resilience in the face of a changing climate. Anyone who has ever found it strangely difficult to grow food according to methods in the standard texts will understand why, when they realise they were written for very different growing conditions. Top five veg-growing tips Use grass clippings to mulch around vegetables, especially potatoes.
This will help keep moisture in, suppress weeds and supply slow-release fertiliser. Grow some perennial vegetables for early spring crops. There are many perennial kales, spinach-like greens and types of onion/leek to choose from.
Save seeds from your vegetable plants to improve germination rates and develop improved local varieties. Easy crops to start with are peas, all types of bean, rocket, tomatoes and herbs. Plant to attract beneficial insects.
Add some umbelliferous flowers like bronze fennel, angelica and parsley to your veg garden to bring in hoverflies and ladybirds. For a bit of fun, plant some organic carrots in the soil so that the top is just sticking out. These will produce big, beautiful umbelliferous flowers.
Grow through the seasons. Once the tatties, broad beans and garlic are harvested, sow more vegetables in the same space through July and August. Suitable crops for a second sowing include turnips, lettuce, radishes, carrots and salad leaves such as rocket and mizuna.
The Circular Garden: a Manifesto for Sustainable Growing by Sonja and Jim Brodie is out now. The Circular Garden retails at £10 (plus £5p&p in the UK and £10p&p for EU countries). It is available as a printed book and as an ebook in pdf format.
To order a copy, visit www.ediblegardeners.co.
uk.
