Celia Hart's blog about what's going on in and around her studio.
Art, printmaking, inspirations, gardening, vegetables, hens, landscapes, wild flowers, East Anglia, adventure, travel.

Monday 19 March 2007

C is for Cardoon (and Chester the Cat)


I'm a great fan of The Great Big Vegetable Challenge - a blog following a vegetable-challenged boy's quest to eat his way through the alphabet of vegetables. So I looked around my vegetable garden today to find something beginning with C. These are Cardoons a fabulous dramatic vegetable. They need rich soil, sun and space to grow - each plant takes up about a square metre and the flower stalk grows over 2 metres tall with purple thistle-like flowers that the bees love. At this time of year they look triumphant in the mostly bare vegetable garden, with beautifully elegant blue-grey leaves. It's the stalk that is edible - the bit that looks like a stick of celery, but it doesn't taste of celery, it's a more delicate flavour a bit like swiss chard stalks and nice with a cheese sauce. But I think they're worth growing just to look at and the leaves are the perfect place for cats to hide under.

2 comments:

  1. Glad to hear that the quince brandy is brewing on your window sill! Hope you enjoy it! Thanks for the lovely posts on my blog.

    Hannah
    xxx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Purrrfect spot to hide and seek with beloved human of Chester;)
    Dun be naughty ya Chester, avoid swinging on those lovely vegetables...

    meaning of catfight both on feline and human see http://felinesophy.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete

I love reading all the comments (except for spam and advertising which I will delete) and I'll reply here in the comments under each blog post, it may take a few days if I'm busy.
You don't need to have a blog to leave a comment, you can select the name/URL option and fill in just your name instead of a blog link.