Surrey Homes | SH37 | November 2017 | Gift supplement inside

Garden
Grow your
own hedge
Jo Arnell explains how to ensure you
have pick of the crop at home...
The hedgerows are packed with deliciousness right now.
There are elderberries for sauces and wine, rosehips for
syrups and cordials, wild plums, apples, cobnuts and
sloes. A veritable forager’s feast awaits at the edges of fields and
roadways and it can be great fun heading out to harvest free
food, giving added purpose to autumn walks and satisfying
our inner hunter-gatherer. If you would like all the joys of a
hedgerow harvest without the muddy trek out into the fields, or
a hedge with added purpose, why not grow one of your own?
Vertical allotments
When is a hedge not a hedge? When it’s a vertical
allotment! If you haven’t got room for a fruit or vegetable
garden, growing upwards, rather than outwards could
be the solution. Choose the right plants – apples, pears,
plums and blackberries and you could even grow a linear
orchard. Most of these are trees, but they can be pruned to
become more of a hedge and will stay fairly neat and well
behaved – as long as you keep them regularly pruned.
Go nuts
Hazels and filberts (collectively known as cobnuts) can be
grown as part of a mixed hedge, or on their own as more
of a nuttery. An additional benefit to the nuts are the nice
straight stems that grow when hazel is coppiced. These provide
sturdy plant supports, wigwams or bean poles in the vegetable
garden. Hazel within a mixed native hedge will also help to
support local wildlife (unfortunately this does include hungry
squirrels), as nuts are packed full of nutritious fat and protein,
ripening in the autumn just before creatures such as dormice
go into hibernation. Cobnuts provide a valuable source of
high energy food to help them get through the winter.
Sloe, sloe, quick-quick sloe
If you want to establish a fast-growing hedge, then blackthorn
(sloes are the fruit), or hawthorn – commonly called
quickthorn – will rapidly establish and knit together into
a thorny barrier. Both hawberries and sloes are edible. It
is a bit of a process making the haws edible (they seem to
be stuffed with sawdust and need much straining through
muslin), but sloes slip easily into gin… (see recipe below).
Sloe gin
Pick enough sloes to half fill a clean Kilner jar, about
1lb. Prick all over or put in the freezer overnight. Put
in jar with 4oz granulated sugar. Fill jar with gin
and stir well, seal and leave for at least 6-8 weeks,
gently shaking jar from time to time. Strain through
muslin into clean bottles. It improves with keeping.
133 surrey-homes.co.uk