My Passion with Peter Banks: A taste for foraging can bear fruit... and chutneys, pies and cider

I STARTED growing vegetables around eight years ago when a friend suggested growing my own tomatoes in pots.

The ease with which they grew was a revelation. As was the fact that not only is growing your own fun and tasty, but it’s also a whole lot cheaper – guaranteed to please any self-respecting Yorkshire man. My eureka moment came when I saw an advertisement in the back of a Sunday supplement advertising plant pots made out of recycled newspaper.

I thought why buy them when I had a perfectly good source of materials for recycling closer to home. At Rudding Park our guests use up to two miles of loo roll a day – that leaves an awful lot of cardboard rolls to be disposed of.

So rather than binning them for landfill I now recycle and use them to grow individual seedlings. It works so much better for me than planting in plugs where I always manage to damage the roots and it’s perfect for the lazy gardener.

Just fill them with compost and leave them to germinate on the window sill before popping the whole thing in the ground. Eventually, the cardboard rots away and the roots are encouraged to grow deeper in the ground and can therefore benefit from the lower water table even in all this dry weather.

So far this year I have planted out 300 rolls and will be planting out my swedes grown in the same way this weekend. I’ve also successfully grown curly kale, beans, courgettes, a 35lb pumpkin, peas, and sweetcorn.

Unfortunately, my purple sprouting broccoli was eaten by pheasants – but that’s another story. I am a keen preserver and like nothing better than to get something for nothing. Foraging is very of the moment but for me it’s always been a real passion (because its free).

The ingredients for jams, chutneys and pickles and more are all to be found in our hedgerows. I make a point of identifying fruit trees growing wild when they are in blossom and nip back for the fruit later in the year.

I’ve collected wild plums and damsons – it’s a great way to gather the free ingredients for a hedgerow jelly which is delicious with the plentiful local game. Further afield, on my regular travels I’ve discovered that the A1 is an unlikely but rich source for foraging – a plentiful source of apples from the trees which have sprung up from cores discarded from passing cars. Last year I collected three bags of apples on one journey and set to making chutneys and pies, as well as cider made using the garden shredder and a car jack.

Of course, my experiments don’t always work – last year my elderflower cordial exploded all over the larder leaving a sticky residue that took ages to get rid of but I’m all set to try again this year. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.