Sustainable eating and the greand plan

This photo is just to make yarninmypocket jealous. Yes, that's a woodburner in the corner (actually, it's the only heating in the house!).

Despite the fact that I've been living in a small flat for the last couple of months, I've scored well on the sustainable living front. Of course, it's easy to do so when you move to an area that has a strong primary produce industry, thriving markets and people who make their living growing market gardens. Most of the food I've been eating has been bought from the market gardeners and grown locally: luscious summer berries, green veg and lately, local tomatoes. Even locally made goat's milk yoghurt, which is absolutely luscious. I'm proud that in six weeks I've only visited the large supermarket twice. I've also been baking my own bread after buying a mere two loaves from local artisan bakers. It's going to sound dangerously like boasting, but I didn't like their bread as much as my own!

As most people will know, Australia has had a devastating series of floods in the last couple of months. The areas that have been hardest hit have been the rich, fertile vegetable-growing areas which are, of course, built on the immensely fertile flood plains of large rivers. There is already a shortage of many fresh veg in the country, and prices will rise. Something that shocked me in the media coverage is how many households ran out of food withing just a day or three of being cut off from shops - despite being warned that the flood was coming, they are so disconnected from their food supply they failed to prepare adequately. This kind of thing makes it even more important to take control of one's own consumption. My household could live for at least a month (and possibly more based on how much I failed to run my UK pantry down) out of the normal contents of my pantry, although that's not the case at the moment.

Which brings me to the plan to set up our sustainable lifestyle anew here. Obviously there's going to be a certain initial investment required, but I intend doing it in steps. Our new rental house is a good start: it's on tank water with a septic sewage system and its only heating is from a woodburner (something that is sustainable if managed properly on a highly forested island, controversial as logging is). That's a good start for keeping our consumption on the property.

The next step will be to get veggie gardens set in. As I know this will be a short-term property, obviously we don't want to do too much, but we want some food in the ground. I've just missed the major summer planting time, but I'm just in time for one or two late-planted summer veg and the autumn planting. I'll post more about that over the next week or so.

The next step is to set up the food reserves. One of the reasons I do this is because it's cheaper to buy in bulk, and it can make it easier to buy staples from local producers who may only sell wholesale. But it also means there's a food reserve that can get you through the lean times. Things like rice and beans can be hard to buy from local sources - these are often imported - but I can at least work on growing my own beans. I've heard of a windmill in the nearby area which grinds grain, and I intend checking them out as soon as I have some free cash, with the intention of laying in flour for baking.

The important thing is to do this in little steps and pay attention to what's going on around me. I know effectively nothing about the property I'm moving to yet. I don't know where the light falls, what the soil is like, and how many local critters are likely to eat every seedling I put in the ground. I'm almost certainly going to have to protect seedlings. It's a matter of watching and learning before rushing in.

New starts

Otherwise known as "why I no longer call this blog backyard self sufficiency".


This blog started life as my attempt to track efforts in maintaining a self-sufficient lifestyle while stuck in the city. As a result of my move, that's no longer the case!

After two months in temporary accommodation, I'll be moving this week to a small rural property in the Huon Valley region of Tasmania. This is the view from the front verandah. There are even a couple of promising-looking wineries just down the road. The house is on a 1-acre block and we'll be living here for a year or so, which is enough space and time to relax and enjoy the wildlife and get to know the area while looking about for an acreage to buy.

I'll be camping in the empty house for the first 10 days, before the furniture arrives. But the veggie garden starts in two day's time. Watch this space!

Breakdown

This is what my backyard veggie garden looked like, a month or so ago: green beans still fiercely climbing up the bean frame, romanesco cauliflower and brussels sprouts happily growing away in the near bed, and lots of chinese greens, lettuce and spinach dotted around. Sunflowers and flowers in the pot.


This is what my veggie garden looked like when I got home from a week-long business trip yesterday.

Mr G had been kind enough to pull down the netting frame he'd done such a good job of building. He described it as one of the saddest jobs he's needed to do. But there's an excellent reason: we're moving out of our lovely little rented house.

I removed all the veggie plants yesterday and raked the compost out over the lawn to act as a top-dressing. It will do it a lot of good.

The reason we're moving is because I've just accepted a job in Australia and will be moving there at the end of the month. Then the search will begin for some land on which to build a new garden!

What do we really want from our food?

It was a wet, windy, drizzly day yesterday, and Mr G and I were feeling somewhat lazy. In a rare event, we had a nice long sleep-in, a prolonged brunch, and sometime in the mid-afternoon wandered down to our local pub for a friendly pint. It's such a wonderful luxury to have an excellent pub at the end of your street. We don't avail ourselves of it anywhere near as much as we fell we ought but we enjoy going and want to patronise it so it keeps going. This pub has an endlessly changing list of two guest ales. The one we chose was hoppy, crisp and refreshing.

While we were enjoying our pints, a man came around offering everyone a lovely, steaming hot roast potato - it was Sunday afternoon, after all! The potatoes were delicious - crispy and golden on the outside and fluffy on the inside - and went really well with the ale, but something troubled me about them. Then it hit me.

All of the potatoes were exactly the same size. They came from potatoes that had been mercilessly graded, then cut in half and prepared. This was how I knew that they'd come out of a packet, rather than straight out of someone's field. Nothing like my roasties, which are made with whatever potatoes are in the top of the sack and can involve sizes from giant to quite small. I cut them to an even size, which leaves them a variety of interesting shapes.

It's yet another example of how people have been educated to believe that what they want is consistency, when really we'd all be much happier if we chose our produce with the primary concern being taste.

As an addendum, I'd like to say that we did get some stuff done with the rest of our day! It was a bread baking day, and there was quite a bit of sorting, cleaning and cooking achieved with the rest of the afternoon.

Seasonal eating: zucchini and parmesan soup with garlic ciabatta

We've been on holiday lately and came home to 10 kilograms of zucchini in the allotment. I've managed to give a lot away, but wanted to use some fresh for some wholesome soup. Mr. G isn't really a soup fan, but I think I won him over with this. This is delicious, tasty, wholesome and satisfying, and if you choose your chilli right it's spicy too. I ought to make vegetable stock but I rarely think of it in time, so happily use a good quality vegetable stock cube.

No photos, because it all got gobbled up in short order, so you'll have to believe me it's pretty.

Zucchini and parmesan soup
Serves two. Easily expands to serve more, or have some for freezing.

1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic and one chilli, finely chopped together
15 leaves basil, torn
2 small-medium zucchini, or two large ones (about 200g), chopped into 1/2-inch dice
1 vegetable stock cube
2-3 cups water
1 tsp soya sauce
1/4 cup (about 30g) finely grated fresh parmesan, reserving a little for the garlic bread (if you have a parmesan rind use it in the soup too)
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 tbsp finely chopped parsley

Heat the oil in a saucepan and fry the onion for 2-3 minutes. Then add the basil, garlic, chilli and zucchini and fry for 10 minutes over medium heat, stirring to ensure they don't stick, until the zucchini start to brown. Add the water, stock cube, parmesan rind if using and soya sauce, bring to the boil and boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and remove parmesan rind. Blend either in the pot with a stick blender or use a normal blender. Return pot to the heat, add parmesan and cook for 5 minutes more, or until required consistency. Taste and adjust for seasoning. Serve in bowls with a grinding of black pepper and the parsley scattered over, with the garlic bread on the side.

Garlic ciabatta
Makes two. Make this while the soup is boiling.

1/2 small ciabatta, cut in half horizontally as though for a sandwich
2-3 cloves garlic
1 pinch coarse salt
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp parmesan (optional)

Pound the garlic and salt together in a mortar and pestle, or alternatively chop the garlic finely and crush the garlic and salt together on the chopping board with the flat of a knife. Add the olive oil and stir to blend. Let these sit for a few minutes so the flavours can permeate. Spread this garlic oil over the cut surface of the ciabatta: I use a pastry brush for this. Sprinkle the parmesan over if using. Bake in a 180C oven for 10 minutes or under a grill for 5 minutes, until the bread is toasty and the garlic and cheese are golden.

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.