I am following Kathy Slack’s advice:

The first thing you must do with the first ever radish you grow is just pluck it out of the soil dust it off and eat it. That's your first recipe, nothing else, because it's so remarkable that you've done it. Then you can go a step further and do a radish slammer, which I love, which is like a tequila slammer but much better for you. So fresh radish, pot of salt, pot of butter, really soft butter. You like swish the radish through the butter so it's got a big dollop of butter on it and then you dunk it in the salt. and then you bite it and you get this lovely salty, fatty and then a peppery kick at the end and it's just delicious.”

I absolutely love Kathy’s passion for vegetables and it shines through in this week’s episode. Anyone who can muse about broad beans being ‘happy vegetables’ snuggled up in their velvety jackets and ponder coming back as a broad bean though not a radish because, well ‘that’s too fleeting a life’ - really does think and talk ‘vegetable’! But as you will find if you listen to this week’s episode, Kathy talks about the power of growing vegetables, to pull her out of a very dark place. Flowers may be lovely but you can’t eat them, well ok you can eat some, but you can’t feed yourself in the same way as you can with a vegetable. And so as Kathy began to emerge from that dark place, she began a creative journey making recipes, thinking what she could do with the glut of courgettes or tomatoes whilst all the time wondering at the magic of all that had come from one tiny packet of seeds. Plants offer hope. And we’ve hear that before in the episode on Mint in which Lally Snow talked about the hope offered by gardens in the Ukraine.

Lally joined Kathy to talk vegetables. Lally has just published a book called My Family and Other Seedlings and it charts her first year on an allotment near her home. It has some laugh out loud moments and lessons for all growers who have small children in tow. Beware showing how to thin out carrots, the small person’s even smaller sister may not understand that action as the ‘thinning’ of carrots but merely the ‘pulling of all carrots’ out of the soil and suddenly you find that your entire crop has been ‘thinned’! I loved the way that Kathy and Lally talked about ‘just having a go’. We live in an age where there are so many sources of information telling us how to do something; books, youtube videos, instagram reels, blogs (!), tv and radio programmes. I think sometimes we can feel overwhelmed and tell ourselves we can’t start yet because we haven’t learned how to do it properly. Of course there are better, more efficient, more productive, ways to do anything but you’ll never get to that point if you don’t first just try, have a go. The chances are that the radish seeds know what to do, whether you put them in that well prepared vegetable bed at the ‘correct’ depth and distance or just plop them in a margarine tub. But as always there is a how to grow section to this podcast, Kathy got very excited when I asked about varieties of radish - who knew there were so many - and you can find all that information on the episode page here.

I really like that in this podcast journey I am coming across such creative people and I’d love you to support their work too. So if you are thinking birthday presents then here are two books that might work for the cooks, allotment owners, veg growers or gardeners in your life. Kathy Slack’s cookbook is called From the Veg Patch and it’s 10 veg, 10 ways. She also has a great substack account. Haven’t heard about Substack - don’t worry just dive in and follow the link and you will see more recipes and lovely musings from Kathy. You can get free content or become a subscriber for £4 a month…the cost of a packet of seeds! Lally’s new book My Family and other Seedlings is not just about her family but it also has woven into it, the history of allotments, which is of course fascinating and so tied into moments in our history. Lally joins me for an Offshoot episode in a couple of weeks time to share more about this allotment story.

If you can share the podcast with friends and family either by forwarding them this blog post or just telling them about it, that would also be great. And rating and reviewing it, if you listen to it on a podcast app - REALLY does make a difference. I’d love to push this podcast to a 1000 downloads a month. We are currently at 800. I can only do this with your help!

As you read this I will be on my way to the RHS Malvern show. Last year was my first visit to this show and I am hooked. The views over the Malvern hills and the excitement of growers showing their plants for the first time in the year, was wonderful. So I hope I shall see Vicky, who I see has won another Gold for her Hostas, and see Perennial who have a garden at the show and I also need to find a cacti grower. Then from Malvern I am going to visit and record in a garden suggested last year by a reader, in the comments on this blog. Remember I am always looking for Plant Stories so do feel free to contact me if you have one you would like to share.

Have a lovely weekend.

Sally xx