Tuesday 27 July 2010

Sustainability Mondays: yeah, I know it's Tuesday

Thinnings from the onion patch, complete with volunteer potatoes, curing in the sun for a day

I took Monday off to enjoy a day in the garden! There were a number of jobs that I felt I needed to catch up on, and hadn't been getting around to while surrounded by people. I had a whole pile of time on my flexi-time at work, and decided to put it to good use. I even had a happy hour's weaving for the first time all year, when it was too hot to work outside in the middle of the day.

1. Plant Something -
  • Sowed spring onion seeds.
  • Repotted all of the tomato, chilli and okra plants that needed to go into bigger pots or growbags
  • Repotted several of the other potted plants
  • Turned in the barley chaff and manured that bed, in preparation for it to become a permanent artichoke bed.
2. Harvest something -
  • spinach
  • broad beans (4 kg)
  • onions (see picture above)
  • potatoes
  • lettuce and salad greens
  • baby carrots
  • lots and lots and lots of herbs
  • lots of courgettes
  • beetroot
  • chillies
  • turnips
  • eggs
  • the very last of the garlic
  • runner beans
  • French beans
  • cucumbers from a neighbour
  • orange cherry tomatoes
  • the first red sweet pepper
  • small yellow wild plums
  • the very first blackberries, as a mid-morning snack
3. Preserve something -
  • Cured onions and potatoes for storage
  • Froze several kilograms of broad beans
4. Waste Not (reducing wastage in all areas)
  • The usual things
5. Want Not (preparing for shortage situations)
  • Nothing this week
6. Build Community Food Systems
  • The usual
7. Eat the Food
  • Broad beans in a rich tomato sauce for a light supper and later for a mezze supper
  • Caramelised courgette salad: delicious!
  • Intensely courgettey pasta sauce (recipe to come)
  • Smashed and roasted new potatoes
  • Lots of salad with greens, baby carrots, radish and beetroot
  • Used the preserved mini olives from last year's crop on our tree (and I do mean mini in some cases, see below) to make an olive bread with chopped fresh garlic, chopped herbs and a wonderful oak-smoked, malted wholewheat flour. We ate it two evenings in a row: the first, with stuffed portobello mushrooms and several salads; the second night as part of a mezze supper. It got rave reviews.

8. What I bought:
Avocadoes, stone fruit and portobello mushrooms.

2 comments:

Leigh said...

You have an olive tree??? I'm officially envious. Did you sow your onion seed directly to the ground, or in flats? I really need to do this too. So hard to be motivated though, in our heat.

Geodyne said...

I do have an olive tree! I picked it up for less than £10 on sale a few years ago. It's not very large - a 1-metre standard - but it provides plentiful tiny olives every second year. I've had a lot of people tell me that olives trees aren't frost hardy and that you can't brong olives to ripeness in the UK, but no-one seems to have told my tree, which withstood frosts of -10C last winter and is currently covered in literally hundreds of baby olives.

I've only planted spring onion seeds so far; I'll wait for another month or so before sowing proper onions to overwinter. I sow directly into the ground as I seem to have more success that way than using flats. I'll make a shallow drill, sow seed into that, and cover that finely with a moist compost.