An urban harvest


An urban harvest


Every year, enough herbs, fruit, vegetables and salad leaves grow in James's garden for his family to eat something home-grown almost every day, summer, spring and autumn. Even in winter there is often something to pick and eat. This is no vast vegetable plot; it is only 6m by 6m (20ft by 20ft), and located in the heart of the city, but there are runner beans twining through jasmine and wisteria, spinach growing beneath roses and great foaming pots of lettuce.

James is not a professional gardener. He lives a normal, stressed urban existence, with too much to do and too little time to do it. But his garden is an urban eden - a species we define as a small town or city garden at ground or roof level, often surrounded by other gardens and houses, and sometimes as confined as a balcony.

Many town-dwellers assume that, even if space were not an issue, it would be inadvisable to eat anything grown in their garden because the air is too polluted, or the soil too contaminated. In fact, vegetables, herbs, salads and fruit grown in almost all city gardens are just as delicious and healthy as those grown in the country.

Urban eden gardening is both exciting and satisfying. When something delicious comes from the garden, it's a triumphant feeling. You are, in a powerful and primitive way, making food. And it always tastes better than shop-bought food. Salads still juicy from the garden taste deliciously delicate and wonderfully strong at the same time. Lamb cooked with dried rosemary is nowhere near as delicious as lamb cooked with leaves just picked from the bush.

It makes no sense for an urban eden gardener to divide plants into ornamental and edible categories. The division may have been useful once, but now it is just restrictive, as though some plants are deemed appropriate only for the vegetable patch or allotment. In reality some edible plants are ornamental and some ornamental plants are edible.

The runner bean is a good example. It's a magnificent climber, with superb flowers, elegant fruit and a striking leaf. If the beans weren't edible, more people might grow it in their back gardens - it was first introduced into Europe as an ornamental. The Jerusalem artichoke is a relative of the sunflower, with a tall stem and striking yellow flowers; you get the added bonus of its edible tubers. The majestic artichoke Cynara scolymus can illuminate an area of border all by itself with its striking powdery green leaves and stunning flowerheads. But because they are thought of as "edibles" they are all too rarely grown in the ordinary back garden.

Even in a small space, creating a garden reinforces the natural rhythms of life. With edibles growing and being used through the year, the impact of the seasons is felt more strongly. When the sweetcorn seedlings go out, and there are a couple of rainy days, and they start to swell and shoot ahead, the drizzle comes as a boon; every sunny day has extra resonance.

Seed catalogues offer an extraordinary number of different varieties of vegetables, hundreds more than those typically grown commercially. Other varieties offer different advantages, each providing some peculiar delight. You can choose carrots that are short or long, round or tapered, big-rooted, small-rooted, early-cropping, late-cropping, dark orange, light yellow, sweet-tasting, crisp, long-storing ... and so on. Tomatoes can be yellow, orange, white, striped and even black, and many different shapes and sizes.

When you have great-tasting food in the garden, cooking becomes easier. Fresh vegetables are often so delicious that they are best served plain, rather than being "improved" with sauces and complex recipes. A good crop can help suggest an entire meal. With a superb crop of tiny French beans, the cook thinks about what will be delicious with the beans, rather than treating them as an accompaniment to a main dish. Urban eden gardening can save you money too. A salad from the garden, followed by an omelette made with home-picked sorrel, ending with a couple of your own ripe figs, tastes sublime, and costs hardly anything.

Gardening like this has other profound effects. With a constant supply of ever-changing edible plants in the garden, it is tempting to go into the garden even more, if only to check on what is ready to pick and eat. Looking closely at plants, regularly, brings to the attention all the other creatures that live in and amongst the plants - birds and insects, slugs and snails. Becoming aware of insect life and eating your own produce means it makes sense to be careful about what is sprayed on the garden. An urban eden should hum with life.

Ornamental plants are vital in any urban eden. Their beauty is, in itself, a form of nourishment, vital for many of us whose environment during the day is predominantly one of paper, glass, plastic and concrete. Flowers also help attract numerous insects such as hoverflies, whose larvae eat aphids.

Designed in the right way, an urban eden can thrive well if you don't have much time for it, and do better if you have more time for regular care. And growing things can be a social activity. When there is a glut - even three runner bean plants, at the height of the season, can produce beans by the bagful - these can be shared with friends and neighbours. In return, you will probably receive something they have grown or cooked. Such exchange reinforces the sense of community that is such a vital part of urban life.

A luscious garden in full swing is a delight for children. They love the process of picking food, and having it appear later on the table.

But you don't even have to have a garden to grow something delicious in the middle of a city, as long as you have some access to the open air. Containers mean you can grow much more in a small space. Hanging baskets can be filled with tumbling tomatoes or strawberries and hung in the sun; a courgette can be put halfway up a wall in a hay basket; a peach tree can sit in a container on a patio or balcony.

When James lived in a flat with only a balcony, he grew a big pot of new potatoes, and one summer evening when entertaining some friends, tipped out the pot, scrubbed off the potatoes and ate them there and then with butter and fresh garlic. Paradise, in the middle of the city.

· These extracts, © Adam and James Caplin, are taken from their book Urban Eden, published by Kyle Cathie, priced £12.99.