Nitrates and great balls of…. courgettes!

As if you needed another reason for giving up shop produce, and giving growing your own a go, here is another one for you….

Researchers say they have found a link in regards to the increase of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes to nitrites and nitrates in food processing, preservation and agriculture therefore making these toxin exposure-related diseases. So there goes your bacon if you are eating it, have you ever noticed that it seems to glow in the dark, and have this yellow tinge to it?

http://www.lifespan.org/news/2009/07/06/researchers-find-possible-environmental-causes-for-alzheimer%E2%80%99s-diabetes/

We have become totally committed to growing all of our own food over the next few years, we think we will have got to about 30% this year, and know that unless we can get either another allotment, or a piece of land we are unlikely to increase this where we are currently living. But it is a commitment that we have made to ourselves, and daily from the food we are harvesting so far, we both know that it is totally the right decision.

Why are these people putting this stuff into our foods, just ask yourself who this really benefits, it is not for the good of our health, and to us it just seems that it benefits the pharmaceutical companies. They are the only ones who’s profits get larger from the population becoming iller.

Anyway we officially have a glut of courgettes, and our neighbour’s are starting to benefit from our allotment. We planted 2 types one of them being 8 ball courgettes, which as you can imagine should be just like a pool ball. Well we laughed when we returned to our allotment today after 2 days of solid rainfall, as we found courgette balls the size of footballs. We will be stuffing them and we have been living off them already for days, and we think we probably have a few weeks left of having too many courgettes!

Chamomile

Beautiful chamomile has taken over the farmers field, due to the crops not taking properly this year. We found huge swathes of it, mainly identifying it through the intense fragrance it was giving off, we have been picking and drying it out, wonderful.

Beautiful chamomile along the field

So I now have bunches of them drying out in the porch hung up, looking lovely. Lots of tea, and of course useful to have for in enemas when the liver needs supporting.

Watering, and more watering…and a well earned bath!

It’s not until you start to grow your own veggies do you start to realise how much water they need. Now I have been pretty much aware that for me a water based diet is vital, but I hadn’t ever thought about how much they would need to grow. They need a lot, and our 3 water butts in this weather don’t hold anywhere near enough we have realised particularly in weather as we have currently! They are almost dry, fortunately we are pretty near a tap, so we can run a hose to nearly all the areas of the allotment.

So whilst R is building more beds, as an aside, today we got some all year round carrots in, I am spending nearly the whole time watering, the kale needed so much, as it looked quite sorry for itself today! Once they are all watered, they look so lovely as they all pick up, and their leaves just seem to then start to face the sun. We had the obligatory courgette which if we hadn’t taken would of become a marrow, by tomorrow!! LOL

Bed number 10 ready for carrots!

How much kale???

I have been reading about the therapeutic uses for bathing, Not just a room with a bath, by Dr Keith Souter, is really interesting in regards to how to bath and heal at the same time! I currently have sciatica and he talks about using Sitz baths medicated with either basil, thyme, or nettle, which we have stacks of, or with aromatherapy oils using Eucalyptus, chamomile, or lavender. Sitz baths are where you sit in bathing temperature water which is only 5-6 inches in the bath, or just enough to cover your hips and pelvis. Then you either put your feet into another bath of similar height of water, which is cooler, or you can get out and into the other bath for a minute, and back into your warmer one. Doing this 3 times in all, I will be sitting in the warmer water for about 5-7 mins with 1 minute in the cooler water each time. You can either get a sitz bath or use a babies bath. As with all of these hydrotherapy techniques they say to do them until the condition has completely gone, and a bit of a way beyond, I have been doing a little bit of yoga which has helped as well, just stretching my back out and twisting it a little bit, maybe the 2 together will be just what the doxtor ordered!

Firstly though I did get a bit sunburnt today so I will be having a tepid bath with a few drops of lavender oil in it, which is meant to be very good for the skin!

How fast do courgettes grow!

As fast as I am cutting them off the plant, the courgettes are almost doubling in size! Well not quite that fast but it feels a bit like it, and although we don’t have too many plants, we are now eating courgette everyday!

So I thought I would share today’s recipe, have you ever thought of eating them raw, in a salad? If not, now is the time to try it, whilst courgettes are really lovely, fresh and hard.

Courgette and lemon salad….
Chop your courgettes up quite fine, put some shelled hemp seeds over them, chop some lemon balm up into it, juice a lemon onto it, and finally drizzle some walnut oil onto them.

Lovely. Or you can do what all the other allotment holders are doing, and make ratatouille with it!

The cobnuts are coming!

..and we can’t wait, although someone got there before us last year, and stripped the trees bare. But this year we are keeping a close eye on them, although in all fairness they still have a couple of months yet. Cobnuts are like hazlenuts, lovely when they are just picked! We haven’t been out foraging anywhere near as much as last year, when we have we have collected a few bits, but we have been focusing on our allotment. Which has given us our first courgettes, and we have 2 types, the long thin ones, and ball type ones. The taste and texture of them is worlds apart from those in the shops that are soft and when cooked for any length of time almost fall apart. These when cooked remained really crisp, kept their structure, and still had flavour, you will now never convince me that buying food from the supermarket is the right thing to be doing.

On that note, I have also been reading about the agricultural land prices in the UK, we noticed how they were on the rise, particularly as buying a house with some land has been stretching further and further away from us. They have risen significantly, and are not slowing down, not good news for food prices, which has given us yet another reason, as though we needed one, that growing our own was the right thing to be doing.

Yesterday scrunched all the herbs we have been drying into bags, we have so much sage and lemon balm we will have to share with others, first come first served! Although I find more and more that people really don’t want them, as they don’t know how to use them, or what they can do with them! Such a shame that people are moving so far away from these natural foods, that aid our health in so many ways, and give us the ownership of it back to us.

With so many kale plants on the go, and producing copious amounts of leaves, even the dog is eating it! We have been also been putting it into salads, and stir fries, and making our smoothies green, you can’t taste it honestly, no one ever believes me until they try it for themselves! It’s such an easy way of consuming greens, honestly it’s painless!

In all of this lovely weather consuming stacks of water is vital, I’ve been making almond milk, with bee pollen in it, litres of the stuff, just blend them up, and strain if you don’t want the bits! A great way to remain hydrated, and more often than not I find that people are not drinking anywhere near enough.

I’ve discovered magnesium oil, fantastic stuff, which I have been using in foot baths to relax to, and it works, well for me anyway, everynight I have one, it just sends me straight to sleep afterwards! I will tell you more in another post about magnesium oil as I think it’s well worth using particularly if you are stressed.

Drying lemon balm

The lemon balm has done amazing this year, so well that we have cut it back more than once, this just seems to encourage it all the more to grow! Not that we are complaining, with 2 huge bunches drying out on the porch we will definitely have it to last all winter. So lovely lemon balm tea will be for breakfast most mornings! The sun has meant that we could naturally dry the bunches, normally we end up using the dehydrator, but the weather has been truly lovely. On top of the dried bunches we have also potted up 2 more plants from cuttings that we have taken, these we plan to put onto our allotment.

We have been really not happy about some of the seeds that we purchased from a specialist organic heritage supplier, they were expensive and not worth the money. The returns are little if not disappointing, and sad to say it that we supported what we hoped would be a independent, but we have had more luck from B&Q! Even some of the half price, nearly on their last legs cabbages are going great guns, so we won’t be shopping anywhere else from now on!

Although I have looked high and low for purslaine, finally we found some in Brightons Infinity wholefoods shop, purslaine is a fantastic green which is full of nutrients that will knock your socks off! Although the cat has given them a run for their money, a big ginger tom who I am hoping my lurcher takes a shine to at some stage! But despite the cat onslaught, they are starting to take off, David Wolfe thinks its great, so I can’t wait to put it onto my menu.

Too much kale and those damn cats!

Is it possible to have too much kale? Yes we have found, 3 beds of it have exceeded our needs, and we are deciding whether to juice it all, then freeze the juice into ice cubes to add to smoothies during the winter. Mind you that will be a lot of juicing to do one of these days. But the success of the kale has taken us by surprise to be honest, and it is so lovely to eat, I have it raw in salads, really finely chopped up, R steams his, and we both juice it for green juices with a punch.

Mizano greens were pulled up today, they quickly went to seed, too quickly for our liking, so we won’t be bothering again with them, especially as we could only eat a couple of leaves at a time. The taste of them was too powerful for us to deal with.

We have been discovering wild lettuce whilst out walking, they have these little prongs on their leaves, which make them a bit uncomfortable to eat raw, so we have steamed them. They are so much stronger than shop bought green leaves in taste, that it really takes some getting used to, you don’t realise how much agriculture has taken the taste out of food until you go wild in the country!

The allotment is going well, although a lot of work, which R is mainly doing, as I am still not well since the kidney infection! Lots of naturopathic techniques are coming into play, including skin brushing to keep the lymph moving, and thin, castor oil packing my liver when its congested, lots of enemas to keep that route of elimination clear, and magnesium oil baths which I have to admit I have become addicted to. I can recommend magnesium oil for relaxing in a bath, I am sleeping really well after it, but make sure your routes of elimination are open, as it could well cause you more problems.

Finally we are getting fed up with next doors cat, which loves our newly dug, soft soil, to use as a toilet, and we keep losing seeds and new shoots to it. We have taken to leaving the dog in the garden on guard of our precious veg that it keeps digging up. I am taking a real dislike to cats I really am!

Lemon balm tea and wild greens

We have started foraging again for wild foods, and are building up our supplies of wild greens that we are drying out ready to get us through the winter. Previously I spent a fortune on green powders that I have to say gave me great health, but the kick we get out of our own wild foraged ones is far higher it really is. It is probably down to the fact that we have collected them, but energetically they just feel better for us. Yesterday we collected dandelion leaves, blackberry leaves, and goose grass, all to dry off, although I tend to eat a few in a salad as its too good an opportunity to miss.

The green powder we make has a real mix of all the wild greens we collect in various amounts, depending on what we want it to do to our body, so some figure much more in the mix than others. I like to have dandelions as they support my kidneys, but I have also taken to lemon balm just lately as well.

We do dry lemon balm out but we also have it fresh in tea, put some in a cafetiere, with hot water and let it steep for a while, I have this daily now. It is absolutely lovely, has been a doddle to grow, in fact it is so prolific that we continually are having to cut it back. We have taken cuttings from it so we can take it to grow on the allotment as well, which are also doing really well.

It has a lovely light lemony taste to it, and feels quite calming, has lovely medicinal properties including being antibacterial, so I have been having a little bit each day. In a salad of sprouted beans and seeds it adds a really nice summery taste, with flax dressing, doesn’t get any better than that really! All home grown, well except the flax oil!

Dandelion seeds, Swiss chard, and bed number 7!

We have been collecting those beautiful dandelion heads, and not as you might imagine making a wish whilst we blow them away, but instead carefully placing them into a bag to grow on our allotment. I know, probably everyone else is pulling them up considering them to be weeds, but the nutrient value of dandelions is fantastic, and we love using them in salads, and drying them for tea. So we have decided to grow them, and this is our first foray into collecting seeds to dry out for the coming year. We are complete seed collecting novices, but this is our years goal to collect the seeds from our plants that we are growing so that we keep the control we want over our foods. It’s what head gardeners have done for years, and so it can’t be that hard, can it? So we are also letting some of our Swiss Chard go to seed at the moment, to collect and also dry out.

Our allotment has 6 beds now on it, and we have sweetcorn ready to go into bed number 7, which we have planned for tomorrow. We have our eye on a poly tunnel, which is quite exciting, well as exciting as extending the growing year gets!!

Having greens just outside the back door available is absolutely fantastic, everyday we have green salad which we have picked fresh, and it doesn’t get much better than that. We are keeping our eyes out for a small plot of land to grow more food on and set up our small holding, the recession has led to a realisation that moving up the ladder isn’t likely to happen. But we could stretch to a small land only plot not too far from where we are living, and that would enable us to achieve more of our goal of becoming sustainable in regards to our own food.

Kale, a new neighbour, and raised beds!

Yes we’ve been busy catching up on our allotment since I have been ill, and breaking my foot. We have been building raised beds, and we now have 4 in, with Kale, Mizuno, potatoes, and we are planning the peas next. The woodland has provided us with the canes for the peas from the local hazel trees. It is a lot of work having such a large allotment that it is taking nearly all of our evenings up and I am no longer sure I need my gym membership during the summer months! But it is exciting considering that we may be able to grow at least 40-50% of the vegetables that we eat. I never thought that growing food would be so exciting but to be honest it really is, and we have a new allotment neighbour, who is giving us a run for our money.

Allotments are really growing (excuse the pun!) in popularity, and even tonight we saw in a newspaper them being reported as a viable option for affording organic food during the recession. But we have seen the allotment filling up, where there were empty plots they are now growing food, and every time we go there we run into people.