It’s been a warm dry spring so far and we’ve made the most of the weather down on the plot, getting suitably hot and bothered.

I’ve posted an update on the earthwoman blog detailing the ongoing struggle I have with the blasted M1 Gardener Rotovator and another showing Lynn’s valiant efforts at constructing a pallet compost bin extension.

There have been a number of choice words on the plot this month but also some tasty food courtesy of the new 64C Parafin Cooker and the abundant purple sprouting broccoli.

I’ve spent a good proportion of the bank holiday reading about food and quite specifically how to eat food.

I started with the seriously irritating Allen Carr and his Easyweigh to Lose Weight. I’ve read this once before and threw it out in disgust but I have to cut Allen a lot of slack as I’m into my tenth year as a non smoker thanks to his EasyWay methods. Still, when it comes to food and nutrition he drives me nuts.

His main premise is that we should look to wild animals for advice on what to eat, after all they don’t get sick or obese. Somehow he manages to jump from wild animals to the instruction to eat a vegetarian diet with fruit and nothing but fruit for breakfast. I can cope with all of that and resist the temptation to argue the point of predation and age-related conditions but when he starts on slugs and snails I’m afraid the book has to go into the charity pile again.

I know about slugs and I’m not too enamored of them. Allen likes to use the example of the slothful slug and snail to illustrate his suggestion that exercise is overrated. You don’t really need to exercise as, after all, have you ever seen an obese snail? That sets me wondering. If I match sluggy slime trails to body length, I reckon our squidgy friends are really quite active critters, especially of a damp evening and if we are going to be critical, I’m not sure I’d consider them the slenderest of creatures either. Quite podgy I’d say.

Next on my list was Savor, a Buddhist guide to mindful eating. This book attempts to fuse nutritional advice with the buddhist concept of mindfulness through the discussion of the four noble truths and a series of exercises or meditations that encourage a focus on the present. Mindfulness is not restricted to eating and Thich Nhat Hanh takes us through mindfulness for eating, exercise and living.

The eating messages I’ve taken home are:

• Eat at the table
• Avoid multitasking – so no TV, work or magazines
• Appreciate your food by use of all the senses
• Chew and take it slowly
• Quality not quantity

There is a particularly useful exercise on appreciating the apple and I’d encourage anyone to spend 10 minutes with a Discovery apple, reacquainting yourself with its joys.

I’m a big fan of food and this time of year is particularly conducive to appreciating food. The plot is so productive that I can’t help but serve up meals that are at least 70% home grown and it is such a delight to look at the plate and remember the soil turning, seed sowing, weeding and watering that led to the harvest.

We’ve snuck a few yellow courgette plants into the flower border at home and I find their unexpected presence on the plate extremely satisfying.

Not content with the first two books on food, I’ve turned now to Michael Pollen for the down to earth advice succinctly wrapped up in the title of this post: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants. Homespun advice that would make your mum and grandmother nod their heads in appreciation.

In Defense of Food, contains Michael Pollens manifesto for eating and attempts to find the commonsense lost in the nutritional world that has become hijacked by commerce and the food industry.

In addition to the above advice you’ll find tips such as:

• Only eat food your great grandmother would recognise as food
• Avoid products with unpronounceable ingredients or more than 5 ingredients

I’ve been overdosing on common sense, so now it’s time to set the table and enjoy the products of our labour.

Originally published on my earthwoman blog.

The plot and the hedgerows are so productive at the moment. It seems about two months too early but the sloes are already plump and juicy. I’ve just had to polish of the last remaining drop of slow gin from last year so that I can re-use the bottles for this year’s vintage. Extraordinarily tasty and potent stuff!

This year we remembered to take carrier bags for a trip around Mitcham Common and have collected enough apples and blackberries for about 30 pies. The trees were almost breaking under the burden of fruit, it’s a shame more people don’t take advantage of the free crops.

Back on the plot we’ve found ourselves overrun with beetroot and I’m in the unusual position of trying to find creative ways to cook and store it.

The Preserves book from the River Cottage Series has a fabulous recipe for sweet beetroot relish. I made slight adjustments, replacing creamed horseradish for the requested home-grown pickled variety and I also cheated with the tomato puree which I couldn’t be bothered to make from scratch. Here is my cheats version:

Sweet Beetroot Relish

1kg Beetroot – roasted at 180′C
250g Sugar
150ml cider vinegar
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
large onion finely chopped
2 tbsp creamed horseradish
4 garlic cloves crushed
1 tbsp tomato puree

Put all the ingredients except for the beetroot into a preserving pan and boil for 5 mins.

Peel and coarsely grate the roasted beetroot. Add this to the mix and cook for another 10 mins.

The juice should be syrupy when ready to transfer to the sterilised jars.

It should last up to a year.

Originally published on my earthwoman blog.

It’s been an incredibly productive season. Today we bagged up 3 sacks of assorted spuds and loaded the car boot with beans galore.

It all feels vaguely sinful.

The freezer is bulging, I’ve cooked dishes to last a week, I have beetroot roasting for a delicious chutney and still we have buckets of beans left in the kitchen.

We’ve dropped produce off with a friend and will offload more with the neighbours but it would be nice to pass these beautiful crops to someone who struggles to afford fresh crops and who hasn’t already done their weekly shop.

Originally published on my earthwoman blog.

What’s happening with the weather gods? The rain has come too late for a bounteous crop of spuds but is perfectly timed to ruin my garlic bulbs that are desperately in need of a good sun basking.

I had a tricky decision to make this weekend. The ground was sodden and with no respite promised, the bulbs of garlic that had appeared to be drying a fortnight ago were now disintegrating into a white fluff. I decided to pull the lot up and deal with the drying task at home.

We’ve now got close to 100 bulbs of wet fresh garlic, lined up under every radiator in the house, acting as a dubious pomander. I’d put them in the airing cupboard but I don’t think the clothes would maintain their just washed, lenor freshness.

While I was despairing over the bulbs, Lynn was constructing the insect hi-rise. This has been a monster in the making – cutting hundreds of nettle and bracken stems to size has tried our patience but Lynn had the worst of it while trying to bring the whole she-bang together.

As ever with construction tasks, we start off appearing prepared, drill charged, screwdriver to hand, multiple assorted screws and so on but then the facade begins to crumble. Drill bits aplenty but they are all masonry bits, screwdriver does the job until the screw head flies out and disappears in the neighbour’s strawberry patch.

This is when the job really starts and the cursing and sweating begins.

I did my best to get in the sartorial spirit of the weekend but my enviromesh veil was hardly an Alexander McQueen.

I’m all for Royal Weddings, I get to weep with a good proportion of the nation and then as a bonus I get an extra day to play around on the plot.

After two long and sunny weekends we can sit back contentedly and consider ourselves back on track as far as planting and weeding is concerned. We even had time to start on the insect houses we’ve been plotting for at least a year.

There has been a slow and soggy start to the 2011 allotment year but the urge to plant is becoming more forceful.

The urge to get out there and dig over the plot isn’t that strong yet though.

Hopefully it will come soon as the potatoes are taking over the house….

Last weekend I became a forager, this weekend I quit.

It started at 11am this morning in the pouring rain, we’d just had to vacate our lovely weekend Yurt and the warm safety of the wood burning stove. All for the sake of a haw, or two.

Having shredded our hands on blackthorn and rosehip bushes we returned only slightly damp and deflated, with a bag of hedgerow berries. Now all we had to do was trim them of stalks and rustle up a bottle of ketchup.

It started well enough but 45 minutes in, the bowl was not getting any emptier, I’d reached the point where I couldn’t give a flying wotsit about hawthorn ketchup and Lynn was glaring at me and burping. Apparently the stress of it all had brought on her indigestion.

Having boiled the trimmed berries up in my lovely stock pot I got to while away another hour or so squishing fruity vinegar juice through a colander and then a sieve. I have purple pulp from one end of the kitchen to another and Lynn will get indigestion again when she spots it.

I now have two bottles of ketchup and a lovely book on hedgerow preserves that I will probably never use again – life is too short!

It is a marvelous book actually and here’s the recipe I used for the Hawthorn Ketchup, I had to double up on quantities as Ihad 1.2kg or berries:

500g trimmed Haws
300ml cider vinegar
300ml water
175g sugar
salt and pepper

Boil the haws up with the vinegar and water for about 30 mins, so that the berries go brown and soft.
Allow to cool for a while and then push the pulp through a colander or sieve to remove the stones and skin.

With the juice and pulp back in the pan, add the sugar and heat til it has dissolved. Cook for a further 5 mins, seasoning with salt and pepper. I also added finely chopped chillis at this point and then bottled up.

I just need to work on my labeling now.

I must feel settled here.

I spent the afternoon preparing a permanent bed, with manure, trenches and finely sieved soil, all for a crop that won’t be harvested for about 4 years.

It’s an incredibly high maintenance crop, at least at the outset, and it only produces edible shoots for a couple of weeks. Hardly seems worth it but Lidl lured me with it’s offering of heavily discounted asparagus crowns.

I managed to lay out this bed with £8 worth of spidery aliens – bargain.

I was ready to wipe off the idea of Christmas potatoes when we arrived. The spuds we planted back in summer had all collapsed with the blight and with only a couple months worth of growth I didn’t think we stood a chance of harvesting anything bigger than a smartie.

Lynn managed to uncover a remarkably impressive array of delicate skinned tubers from the two diseased rows and we headed home to run a taste test on the three varieties – Bambino, Vivaldi and Maris Peer.

Originally published on my earthwoman blog.

I reached into the veg basket this morning hoping to find a selection of ingredients for a wholesome veggie curry and pulled out this whopping sweet potato – a little past it’s best I’d say.

It seemed a shame to cook it, so although it is way too late in the season I decided it might be worth planting.

I had a sense that sweet potatoes are a right faff in the UK and although Bob Flowerdew grows them successfully I didn’t stand a cat in hells chance.

I’ve done a bit more research now and I’m beginning to hope that it rots in situ. Here’s a quote from one site on How To Grow Sweet Potatoes:

In fact, the question is not how to grow sweet potatoes, it’s rather how to stop sweet potato vines from taking over the whole garden! Sweet potato is a very invasive creeper…

Sounds like I might have inadvertently attempted to cultivate a persistent weed on the allotment. Great.

Sweet Potatoes are usually cultivated from slips which I think are the shoots that you can see on my sweet potato photo. They can be potted up and grown on before planting out in May but I imagine they will still grow ok if you chuck the whole tuber in. This one will never be harvested though, they need about 4 to 6 months of sunshine to mature and I don’t expect we’ll have a lot of that between November and February.

I’ll be sure to let you know if anything outstanding happens.

Originally published on my earthwoman blog.