This summer I planted beans, peas, peppers, squashes, and a handful of other vegetables. Instead, this summer we’ve been harvesting shiso. We didn’t plant any shiso this year, but because of seeds from last year’s shiso plants, our garden is full of shiso. Only shiso.

I exaggerate. We have a little ginger growing that I planted in the spring (Or is it the turmeric? I don’t know as the leaves from both plants - and we have both growing - are the same. We have a little bit of basil that hasn’t died yet and a few leaves of Swiss chard. And weeds, wow, we’re pretty good at growing weeds.

My gardening style is quite laissez-faire. We compost a lot of our kitchen scraps, and that compost once mixed into the garden produces new crops. The problem is that things start growing and we say “Oh, look! A tomato plant! We didn’t plant any tomotoes, but we have a tomato plant growing.” and this continues with many of the plants we find in the garden.

Sometimes we think we are growing something good and tasty when after all that love, water, and attention turns out to be a nasty weed in disguise. I’ve used some of these weeds at times in salads and soups, but the bad tasting weeds outnumber the good tasting ones.

I also like to scatter seeds through my garden all through the year and see what comes up. Again, there are successes and failures but it’s fun to play.

Small potted plants are added to the garden every year, as is nutrition of some sort. The soil is dug up a few times during the year (when possible - if some surprise veges pop up, well then I can’t quite disturb them, now can I?) to make the soil nice for the plants.

When plants reach the end of their time and produce seeds, we scatter those into the garden (and compost) and this brings us to the present. I planted a lot of different things this year but those shiso plants came up everywhere in the garden and I think choked out everything else. I’ve pulled out armfuls of the shiso plants a few times during the summer, but they wouldn’t give up.

“Uncle” was reached a while back and so we started with shiso salads, then moved on to pestos, and recently found that Korean pickles was quite good.

Yesterday I made vinegar pickles with the shiso. Find your favourite dill pickle recipe and eliminate both the dill and cucumber and you’ll wind up with the pickles I made. The flavour is surprisingly fantastic. These pickles would be good in sandwiches (haven’t tried yet; still eating them plain, out of the jar) or hamburgers. The shiso flavour has not been erased; it’s still there as well as the flavour from the pickling spice, garlic and hot pepper.

If the shiso continues to flourish, I’ll be looking for new ideas. Feel free to let me know if you’ve any good recipes. Now, it’s back to the pickle jar.