Sustainability Mondays: the summer squash edition!

Above, clockwise, from front centre: a giant white patty pan squash which hadn't been there a few days before, smaller patty pan squash with flower, spaghetti squash, "Zucchini" zucchini, "Striata" zucchini, half a "Trombocino" zucchini, a small golden zucchini, the back end of a trombocino (flower visible in the background), and (bottom) a "Black beauty" zucchini. All harvested on one day!

1. Plant Something -

• Planted out some very advanced tomato seedlings from pots and potted on some chillies.
  

2. Harvest something -

• spinach
• lettuce and salad greens
• herbs
• courgettes and other summer squash
• 3 spaghetti squash
  
• chillies
• French beans
  
• cherry tomatoes
• Moneymaker tomatoes

A selection of tomatoes and chillies with the odd pea pod and broad bean pod thrown in for good measure

3. Preserve something -

• Nothing this week
  

4. Waste Not (reducing wastage in all areas)

• The usual things

5. Want Not (preparing for shortage situations)

• Hardened some spaghetti squash for storage by putting them in the sun for a few days to cure. Although I'm not sure they're going to last long enough to need that.
• Bought a kilo of hard winter wheat berries to try out with the flour grinder, to use for baking soon. Probably this coming weekend.
  

6. Build Community Food Systems –

• The usual

7. Eat the Food –

• Baked a spaghetti squash, cut into two halves, seeds hollowed out and filled with a red kidney bean chilli. Delicious. Will do again very soon.
  
• lots of green bean and tofu dishes
• Made more of the intensely courgetty pasta sauce. I'd intended to freeze some, but it made it to our bellies before it made it to the freezer.
  
• Lots of salad with greens, baby carrots, radish and beetroot
• It may not count, but I had some of yarninmypocket's fabulous home-brewed beer. Hey, I enjoyed it, surely I can count it as "eating the food"!
  

The squash row. It was well prepared with horse manure before planting.

8. What I bought:
A pound of red kidney beans and a kilo of wheat beans.

This is why you don't let your onions set flower heads

I'm always careful to pinch out onion flower stems (not least because they're so yummy), but what I've never seen is what happens if you let them grow. Many of my onions this year are in a remote plot in a friend's back yard this year, and I tend to only go to visit them once a fortnight to control the weeds. The onions there were planted as sets last autumn, so come the spring some of them flowered quite early. It took enough time for me to find them that the onion stems were quite large and stiff. But I snapped them down and let them grow to see what would happen to them. I harvested and cut one open, this weekend, and the end result was what you see in the picture below.
This is the bottom of the onion. You can see the very thick base of the flower stem in the middle of the onion, with a wrinkled layer of 'normal' onion layers around it.


I chopped up the wrinkled bits at the outside of the onion and cooked them normally. They're absolutely fine to eat, even if they look a bit strange. Onions that have set flower stems need to be eaten quickly however, as they will not keep. I don't think this one would have lasted another month.

The onion flower stem itself is very hard and woody. If you click the picture above for the larger image you'll be able to see the cellulose cells which have formed to support the thickness of the stem and the size of the flower head. Not even I would eat this, I think it would be too woody to be pleasant. It was put out in the compost heap instead.

As it was so far along, I could have left this onion to flower and set seed, but if you think about it, that was the last thing I'd want to do. This was the first onion to set seed, and keeping and using its seed would propagate early-flowering onions. That's the last thing you want if you're planning to store them. Great if you're after pretty allium flowers of course, which is how the ornamentals came about. If you want to save seed, always let two or three of your best-producing plants go to seed. In this case, it would be the last to flower.

Sustainbility Monday: the not-much-done edition

For Leigh: my special little olive tree that lives todis prove the belief that you can't grow olives in the UK.

It's been the kind of week in which things other than the garden get done, although significant time was spent at the allotment removing all the deep-rooted weeds that had set in there while the ground was like concrete. We've had two good lots of rain lately so I wanted to get that job out of the way while the soil was still soft.

1. Plant Something -

• Nothing this week although I did catch up on all the weeding.
  

2. Harvest something -

• spinach
• onions
  
• potatoes
  
• lettuce and salad greens
• baby carrots
  
• herbs
• courgettes
  
• beetroot
• chillies
• egg (singular)
  
• runner beans
• French beans
  
• orange cherry tomatoes

3. Preserve something -

• Soaked several pounds of morello cherries in vodka, to turn into cherry liquer and later glace cherries
  

4. Waste Not (reducing wastage in all areas)

• The usual things
• Turned the compost
• Checked through the store cupboard to make sure nothing was nearing its use-by date and needed using. I'm pleased to report that nothing is.
  

5. Want Not (preparing for shortage situations)

• Did my tri-weekly baking as well as making ciabatta and pizza bases
• Bought a mini-BBQ to save pulling out the big one every time I'd like to char-grill a few veg.
  

6. Build Community Food Systems –

• The usual

7. Eat the Food –

• Peppers and courgettes grilled on the BBQ, as well as BBQ tofu as a pre-preparation for tonight's dinner.
  
• lots of green bean and tofu dishes: Mexican mole and Malaysian stir-fries
• Potato and green bean curry
  
• Lots of salad with greens, baby carrots, radish and beetroot
• New potato, caper and lemon-thyme pizza
  

The olive tree is covered in hundreds of tiny olives at the moment.

8. What I bought:
Antipasto-type stuff to put on pizzas.