Seasonal Produce

It has to be said that April and May are all about British Asparagus. Deep green tips and a flavour that you don’t get with imported spears, make this something to really get excited about. If the temperature drops below 7°C the Asparagus stops growing so we all hope for mild nights and no frost. We grow in kent, the season starts being grown undercover and then moves outdoors. The best accompaniments are the most simple - classic partners include melted butter or hollandaise with warm stems, and lemony vinaigrette with cold asparagus.

This slightly peppery herb is commonly used as a flavouring and garnish. Curly parsley is very coarse relative to flat leaf parsley and may be described as having a younger, sharper flavour than flat leafed parsley. Where it grows as a biennial, in the first year, it forms a rosette of tripinnate leaves 10–25 cm long with numerous 1–3 cm leaflets, and a taproot used as a food store over the winter. In the second year, it grows a flowering stem to 75 cm tall with sparser leaves and flat-topped 3–10 cm diameter umbels with numerous 2 mm diameter yellow to yellowish-green flowers. The seeds are ovoid, 2–3mm long, with prominent style remnants at the apex. One of the compounds of the essential oil is apiol. The plant normally dies after seed maturation.

A versatile green that's great for stir-fries. It has a generally sweet flavour with a hint of mustard. Dwarf bok choy are more leafy than the regular bok choy and it goes without saying that they are also a lot smaller.  This crop is actually grown all year round in our Essex glasshouse.

No kitchen should be without a good supply of this multi-purpose herb. It can be used as a garnish, flavouring and as a vegetable. There are two main varieties: curly leaf and flat leaf. Both can be used for the same purposes although flat leaf parsley has a stronger flavour and tends to be favoured in Mediterranean cooking.

Eaten raw the leaves are at their most pungent and fiery, but they come into their own when cooked. In fact they are almost endlessly versatile: quickly blanched or wilted in olive oil they make a delicately garlicky alternative to spinach.

A member of the allium family, the plant's elegant broad, pointed leaves have the same pleasing combination of sweetness and astringency that make leeks, onions, spring onions, chives and bulb garlic so useful in the kitchen.