Wrinkled Crinkled Crumpled cress: has anything ever sounded more pleasing to grow? It sounds like the stuff of story books, afternoon tea, and of course egg sandwiches. It is the same cress you used to grow in an egg shell or on a piece of damp kitchen paper, but a much better variety, with ruffled edges.
Lepidium sativum is a very old vegetable from the Middle East, in the brassica family. Sativum translates as “from seed”, meaning it was cultivated, and you can trace its history back to early Persian vegetable gardens in 400BC.
It is easy to see how it has survived the centuries: it is delicious, peppery and easy to grow. It will rescue your egg sandwich from boredom, it will spice up your salad, zing in salsas and stir-fries, garnish any number of soups, or just give you something to snack on as you gaze out of the window.
If ever there was a plant for window box-growing, this is the one. The whole thing grows 10cm high and doesn’t mind being crammed in next to its neighbours. It is pretty resistant to slugs and snails. And it is fast: you can get a crop in 20 to 30 days.
To do all this, it needs to remain moist and in a little shade. A baked, sunny window ledge won’t work for this herb – in hot conditions cress will bolt to flower. If this happens, don’t waste the flowers, which are delicious, as are the unripe seedheads – try them dipped in batter and fried. If, however, you can keep them from flowering immediately you do get to cut more leaves: cress is a happy cut-and-come-again crop.
Sowing in June will mean the plant goes straight to flowering in the heat; but if you sow now, when temperatures are still warm enough for quick germination, it will ensure more leaf than flower, particularly with autumn’s long, cooler nights around the corner.
If you have planted your cress outside, and want to keep it going over winter, you will need some sort of shelter, a cloche or fleece, as frost will take it down. At this point you could move the operation indoors.
I’ve fallen for the folded edges of Wrinkled Crinkled Crumpled from the Real Seed Catalogue – it’s a cross between curly cress and Persian cress. The latter you can get from Chiltern Seeds and is decidedly less peppery. If you want heat, go for Greek cress (seedaholic.com), which is less crumpled, perhaps slightly nuttier in flavour, and definitely packs a punch.
