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.

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.

It feels good to be outside..

It really does, we arrived back on our allotment to really get stuck into clearing off all the brambles, and weeds. We managed to clear it enough to start to dig over part of it, and cleared about 12ft by 8ft. So we are pleased, and it was so nice to see families down there, with the kids all mucking in, going backwards and forwards to the compost bins with the wheel barrow.

We have to admit we have been incredibly lucky with the plot, it is huge and will sustain us for a number of months if we plan it right, and the soil is fantastic. Full of worms, lovely and pink, even I was pleased to see them. The compost bin has been filled again, although we have been burning the brambles, but we added  the ashes to the bin as well, as it will help to add minerals to it.

Burning down the allotment!

The allotment is absolutely overrun with brambles, so today was spent pulling them up and burning them. So of course we both now stink of fire smell, lovely. The boys on the allotment told us to use a rotavator, in fact they can’t believe that we are clearing the plot down by hand. But we quickly realised that we don’t want those brambles dug into the ground, as it would cause us far more work in the long run. Hard work now, and short term pain long term gain is how we are seeing it.

We reckon by next Christmas day we will be pulling up our own veggies to have for dinner, and are considering a polytunnel to resolve one of the key issues of having produce over the winter period. Storage is the other one, the plot is huge and will fulfill what we have in mind, but where to store it all will be our next problem to sort out.

Unlike a lot of people this Christmas day we spent it outside, digging, clearing, burning, and walking our dogs, most people don’t spend anywhere enough time outdoors, and it is vital that you get some fresh air, and sunlight on your skin. It is at this time of year when many people start to feel the lack of light, by getting SAD, or holiday depression as I see some people calling it. The lack of EFA’s in the diet, water, and light is key to preventing this from happening, simple things you can do which over time will help to make things feel different. We are beings that need light, and I know it’s cold but wrap up, and you will feel different I promise you.

What to do in winter?

Our first year on our journey to sustainability and, well winter is something which has stopped us in our tracks. Little food is available to forage, or wildcraft that we can see, we have some food in the garden but very little, unless all you want to eat are potato’s, chard and spinach, and R will be smoking some pork that he has bought from a local farm. This is going to be one of our biggest learning curves, understanding how to sustain ourselves through winter. Part of the problem currently is that we know we can just fall back on going to Tescos, but that isn’t our end goal, and we know we need to get out of that mindset.

We are busy researching, and learning about plants that grow in the different seasons, Plants for the future is helping this, and our allotment will probably have a polytunnel on it, to enable us to extend the growing season. We know we must be able to do it, and realise that a bigger place to live with somewhere to store food is going to be a must in the long run. People used to live off everything from their kitchen gardens so we know we must be able to do it, just regaining that knowledge which isn’t common place anymore.

Interesting how quickly we lose our knowledge of such things, within a really short amount of time, only 2-3 generations that common knowledge of how to grow food has gone. Everyone now just knows how to make their way to the supermarket instead!

Social networking sites!

You know the best social networking site I have come across is the allotment! Honest, you can’t beat it, everyone knows each other within hours of arriving on the site, people are loaning you things to help you to get started. Best of all? We have already been offered another half a plot, our ability to sustain ourselves just from our garden and the allotment will become possible.

Only last year we were discussing how we could become self sustainable in a flat on the edge of a small town. We didn’t have the money to buy anything bigger to fund a larger garden, but wondered how it could become possible, and it is. Slowly but surely, our dreams of self sustaining are happening, we are learning masses about what is available foraging on our very doorsteps, we have found allotments when others told us that land to grow on was prohibitive, and we are finding out that it is harder, but more enjoyable than we ever imagined.

It is amazing how when you focus on something you really want, in our case a way of life, that it starts to happen for you. OK so it’s not quite the way we would of liked it, the idyllic farm in the middle of nowhere, with acres and acres but parts of it, like a jigsaw are still happening all the same. Amazing what you can do with a bit of creative thinking, no money, and a dream!

Allotment!

Finally our weekend was made, we got a ring to say we were at the top of the list for an allotment over the other side of town and did we want to go and look! We couldn’t believe it, to think a few years ago I would of got excited over going out with my mates, now, well it’s about getting an allotment. But this means a lot to us, as it means we control even more of our own food, and don’t have to wonder whether organic really does mean organic! We can even grow old types of foods which are less hybridised, which are far better for us, and with more choice. Collecting our own seeds over time, means that we are not dictated to by the commercial seed companies, who are starting to control our food supplies more and more in this way, with few of us realising it.

We feel that we are taking back control, and although this is a small step its in the right direction and is quite exciting for us. Bit by bit our lives are changing, with us building our businesses to release us permanently from our jobs, and becoming more self sufficient our lives are changing in a way I could never of imagined. We both feel so much healthier for the choices that we are making and taking to change things, and although we are both people who want to make changes quickly and on a large scale, something which has really hit home with us both is that its the small stuff that grows over time that makes the difference.