Edible Garden: Plant in the shade

If you've depleted your salad crops and tomatoes and gobbled all the beans, it's time to plant again. This time, plant in the shade.

Plant peas, a final crop of beans and leafy vegetables like spinach and rocket. Coriander's another one that grows better in the shade. It loves warm, damp soil. Coriander (also called cilantro) is a herb that is often regarded as exotic and hence hard to grow. The opposite is true. It is almost a weed. Well, it is a weed.

With the humidity of recent weeks, my garden is full of tiny self-sown coriander plants. It will grow anywhere, including in a pot in the kitchen.

The roots are shallow - it doesn't spread with underground networks of tendrils like convolvulus. The fresh leaves are delicious with just about anything, especially pasta, salads and tomatoes.

Fresh green coriander seed is easy to pulverise and makes delicious pesto, or is perfect rubbed on steak for the barbecue. And dried seeds can be roasted and stored to use at any time you inexplicably find you have no plants growing in the garden.

Coriander seeds are the most common ingredient in curries. They are in the Egyptian appetiser dukka and in garam masala. Taklia, a popular Arab spice mixture, is made from coriander and garlic, crushed and fried.