Sometimes the simplest words turn out to hide concepts of thorny complexity. Putting together my seasonal food cloud for April, I struggled with the question of whether to include Mediterranean oranges. Oranges are one of the joys of winter and early spring, especially the peculiarly sharp sweetness of Sicilian blood oranges. But should they really [...]
No crop dominates the British arable landscape quite like rapeseed (Brassica napus, also known as oilseed rape, the edible variety as canola). From the very beginning of April, previously mundane green fields of this member of the cabbage and turnip family suddenly erupt into luminous flower. Across lowland England, great swathes of countryside are painted [...]
March in England and the peach seems an impossibly distant and exotic fruit, its heady summer aroma almost unimaginable. Out of season peaches always disappoint and the sickly syrupy sweetness of the tinned fruit is altogether different. But late March in Suffolk and peach trees, most of them tight against a south-facing wall for warmth, [...]
Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, yesterday compared the big retailers to invasive species like the Nile Perch and Japanese knotweed. Honey fungus (Armillaria mellea and related species) also springs to mind, its superficially attractive fruiting bodies sprouting up prolifically while insidiously killing off surrounding plants. Over the last few decades, the [...]
The arrival of the cherry plum blossom in late February marks the turn of winter, the first promise of summer fruits
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