• In season now: May

    New this month: Asparagus! The food of gods... and carrots are back.

    Still in season from last month: cauliflower, chard, green cabbage, salad leaves, main-crop potatoes (from store), salad leaves, sea kale, spring greens, rhubarb

    Goodbye till next year to: Purple sprouting broccoli (sniff, sniff), leeks, stored parsnips, forced rhubarb

  • What I’m doing here

    This all started when I picked the first strawberries from my new allotment.

    I'd never been so enraptured or so excited by food. It was a shock to find that anything could taste so good.

    So what - I'd never had strawberries before?

    No - all the strawberries I'd had were shop-bought, like as not flown in from intensive growers in Spain or Chile, and eaten in winter when strawberries should be a distant summer memory.

    It revolutionised my thinking about the fresh food we eat every day. I started to wonder if you got the same amazing taste from all types of food grown and eaten in season. And then I decided to do something about it.

    The Year of Eating Seasonally is my little experiment to find out what it's really like not to have it all. The only fruit and veg I and my family are going to eat in 2008 will be what's growing in the ground at the time (or, in winter, what I can get out of store).

    I want to find out if the hungry gap is really as hungry as everyone says it is: whether you're really eating nothing but cabbage all winter; and whether you miss strawberries in December.

    Along the way I hope I'll save a few tons of carbon being released into the atmosphere on my behalf, as I won't be requiring those French beans flown from Chile, thanks very much. And I hope I'll be rediscovering what food can really taste like.

    If you have any comments, please feel free to post them anywhere you like - or you can email me at sallywhite@hotmail.com.

Veggie abundance

Posted on April 9, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: 100% (the cookfest continues) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: none

On the menu: toast, jam & juice (breakfast); can of coke – oops (lunch); chard pasta and rhubarb crumble (supper)

Howzat for a home-grown supper. The chard I used for this easy-peasy pasta sauce came from the allotment – I’ve had a couple of pickings now and it’s still going strong – and so did the rhubarb I used in the crumble, my first stems pulled from a very robust and healthy crown which is currently threatening to burst out of the raised bed it’s planted in.

I’ve suddenly realised what the secret is to successful veg growing – abundance. By which I mean, whatever you grow, you need to grow buckets and buckets of it so you don’t feel like you’re even a little bit restricted as to how much you can pick. There’s something so satisfying about pulling armfuls of rhubarb, or stuffing a carrier bag to bursting with home-grown chard. Veg growing is about generosity, about plenty, about celebrating everything that’s best in life. Time to double the seed order.

Filed under: Cooking, Gardening, Grow your own, Recipes, Seasonal eating, healthy eating | Tagged: , , , ,

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3 Responses

  1. Neen, on April 10th, 2008 at 2:07 pm Said:

    You’ve touched on the thing that always gives me pause when I contemplate starting a garden… the abundance that follows from spring through autumn. On the one hand, it sounds amazingly gratifying and creative (“what else can I make with rhubarb, since I only get it during this one period per year??”), on the other, well, there are only two of us and we already struggle with “serves 4/serves 6-8″ recipes and getting bogged down under a mountain of leftovers. How do you deal with that?

  2. SallyGardener, on April 10th, 2008 at 2:14 pm Said:

    I so identify with the “what else can I make with rhubarb” thing – I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much of the stuff with this seasonal eating experiment! still, at least you get creative…

    I sympathise about the two-people thing. Obviously you have to tailor how much you grow to how many people you have! But I freeze loads – rhubarb freezes beautifully and then you can dip into it through the year as well. If it doesn’t freeze, I cook it up into soups and stews and freeze those instead. Or there’s jams… chutneys… the list is endless really. When your store cupboard and your freezer are full too, I think perhaps then you might have overdone the growing bit lol :D

  3. Neen, on April 11th, 2008 at 1:55 pm Said:

    …or you buy a new freezer!! :) Thanks for taking the time to respond!

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