Veg plot from scratch
A restaurateur’s voyage of veg discovery
Bangladesh-born restaurant owner and chef Shaish Alam doesn’t believe in taking things slowly. Just four years after picking up a trowel for the first time, he’s thrown himself into growing food with a wholehearted, infectious delight that won viewers’ hearts when Gardeners’ World visited him on his three-and-a-half-acre plot in west Wales. His only previous experience of gardening was scrumping apples, blackberries and wild raspberries from churchyards and railway sidings in east London as a child .“Oh my god! So tasty,” he remembers. It was those intense, just-picked flavours that he yearned to use in his restaurant Yasmin’s. “I couldn’t afford chandeliers, so I thought, how about I just grow things?” he says. “If I have the finest ingredients, then maybe I can turn people’s heads.” Shaish had no idea where to start, though, and kept putting it off. But then came the tragic loss of his daughter Kamilla at just ten months old. Shaish realised he talked about doing all sorts of things, but didn’t carry them through. “The day after the funeral, I started gardening,” he says. Most beginner gardeners would go cautiously at first. Not Shaish. Within weeks there was a 19m polytunnel outside the restaurant; then he added a second polytunnel, as well as chickens and bees, in a field behind his home. It worked. His restaurant has won a clutch of awards, and Shaish’s garden is lush and green with salads, chi l l ies, cauliflowers and broccoli. This is veg growing Bangla style, with seeds sourced from family and from Asian food shops. Among Shaish’s spinach is climbing, burgundy-stemmed Malabar spinach ( Basella rubra); he sprinkles its fleshy leaves liberally into salads and garnishes. Among his aubergines are long, slender Bangladeshi brinjal, and he grows ordinary radishes but picks their ‘oniony’ leaves for cooking. His pride and joy, though, are his ‘Bengal Naga’ chillies; hundreds of plants laden with
I grow ordinary radishes but pick their ‘oniony’ leaves for cooking
blisteringly hot, lipstick-red fruits. One day, Shaish wants to grow the world’s hottest chilli, but right now he just wants them to get through winter. “We tried soil-warming cables but they short-circuited,” he says. He’s started building a hot compost heap to heat water pumped around the plants’ feet. “I don’t need it to be tropical, I just want the roots to survive,” he says. The garden has become a cherished way of life for him, shared daily with his partner, three boisterous children – “they’re growing up to be like Tarzan” – and Pomeranian-Shitzu-cross Booboo, “the craziest dog in the world”. He adds: “I wake up, I go straight to the garden. My missus comes with the kids and off we go. I’ve got a caravan, a treehouse, an abundance of food, I have picnics galore – I have more picnics than anyone on earth!” He’s still learning on the job; but, he says, “mostly, everything grows”. And, he believes, it’s simpler than you might think. “The design of a cabbage is real ly complicated, but luckily you don’t have to understand a cabbage,” he says. “You just have to put it in the right place, and the cabbage understands what it has to do. And it grows into a beautiful vegetable.”