It’s interesting reading what the senate in the USA is doing as often our own government follows suit, there is a ‘food safety act’ being taken through the senate currently, which changes the face of how the American population will be supplied with food. Now not only are the UK government trying to implement a number of food related bills, Codex for one, fluoride another, it’s not that unlikely any more I would think that total control over food supplies would be on the agenda!

Incredible really that after all these years of having safe food supplies, that when big agribusinesses get involved suddenly no longer is food safe any more. They give the farmers terminator seeds, now they are controlled, pesticides that only work with their seeds, more control, growth hormones, now your health is controlled, and GM, now your DNA is affected, and long term, well who really knows? It’s not going to be whilst companies like Monsanto are involved, our government needs to allow us to grow our own foods, make our own choices about how we heal ourselves, and allow us to be adults. Nanny state? I think it was Kissenger who stated that ‘those who controlled the food controlled the population’, and he is still working behind the scenes in American government. When bills are trying to be passed in the US which are controlling what you even grow for your own consumption in your own back yard, you know things are not for your benefit anymore.

Watch for our own government following suit and trying to do this in the UK. I for one want to continue to dictate what I want to grow, and eat, and not have it covered in all sorts of chemicals because someones bonus depends on it.

When I wasn’t bothered about the garden and how it looked, cats were a nice thing to have around, they kept the dog occupied, often giving her fleas, and would be something else to stroke and talk to. But now things are different, and I am becoming a hardened cat hater, particularly of the ginger tom from number 92 who is using our beautiful raised beds, shingled path growing arena as a large kitty litter tray. The ginger tom dug up our whole bed of strawberries, and this annoyed us, and then the salad veg, this angered us, and then the carrots, we became passionate cat haters at that point. This cat knows that we don’t like it, we have taken to leaving our dog in the garden, she doesn’t mind she can sleep anywhere, but it seems to know when she is around, and it’s only when we go out does the cat strike. It is truly infuriating to put in so much work to grow food to have it dug up by an uncaring cat.
This has left us with little option but to put netting over all the beds to prevent the cat from getting into them. This makes the garden look like its got rigging from a boat all over it, but seems to finally be preventing the cat from doing any more damage. What with the cat on the garden and now we have a fox digging holes on our allotment, its becoming animal wars, when all we thought we would be dealing with were slugs and cabbage fly at this time of the year.
Talking of cabbage fly, we are about to start cutting off our rhubarb leaves to soak them, this we will then use as a pesticide on our veggies which on the allotment are doing very nicely. The thing though that we can’t wait for are the sweetcorn, they look so lovely and have done so well, in our first allotment year as well! Setting up the garden last year, building the greenhouse and shed, and now another shed, takes up a lot of time, far more than we ever anticipated to be honest. We have a poly tunnel which we are about to put up to extend the growing time we will have, and are learning about aquaponics as another possible to add to our sustainable life mix. What is amazing is already we are noticing how our food bill is about 1/3 less than it was just 6 months ago. This is significant for us, and can only get better as we have only managed to turn over 1/3 of the allotment plot so far, and therefore have a lot of space still left over to grow on. We are really excited about the possibilities that this leaves us with, but are realising how living like this takes up time, and a lot of effort to keep going.

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!

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.

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!

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!

..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.

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.

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!

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!