Allotment 25/10/10

I sort of assume that if you read this nonsense you have at least a passing interest in growing food. Most of the people I know who grow (yes I liked the rhyme) try to do so “organically” but this can be a hard thing to achieve. Yes you've managed to grow lettuces without any fertilizers and slug pellets but what happened to the seeds before you got them? Many seeds are treated with chemicals, such as anti-fungals, before you get them so you have to look out for organic seeds when you are buying.

 The question I want to ask is why do you grow organic and if you buy organic from the supermarket, why?

 I grow organically basically because I can. I have great soil, I rotate my crops and I only need to produce enough food for significant other and me and if a crop fails, ah well, there is always Waitrose. If I had to feed my family or if it was what I did for living then I would probably use some chemicals if they were needed. I'm not here to preach at you because I don't really care what you do. Why you choose to grow in that way is up to you because it doesn't really affect anyone else.

 Now, what you buy at the supermarket does affect other people and the planet so this is a bit more of an issue. Has “Organic” simply become a middle-class term meaning “It costs more, look at me, I have lots of disposable income” because there seems no other logic in buying it?

“Well, it tastes better” is one well trampled argument which is obviously rubbish. If the strawberries that you are buying are Elsanta it will taste of nothing whether it was drench in chemicals or grown only in organically hand-knitted Quorn based compost. The variety is important in taste not how it was grown.

“They have more nutrients in though, they are better for you.” Again, no. Studies show that the nutrient content of organic/conventionally farmed veg is roughly the same.  The only argument that can, sort of, be made in this direct in about pesticides. There are more pesticides on skins of conventionally fruit and veg, this much is true, but give them a bit a wash and they are fine and the pesticides residues are all within very, very safe limits. If you want to say “Well I’d rather not have any pesticide residues in my food” then fine but it isn’t a decent argument, merely a personal choice thing.

“It's better for the planet that they don't use chemicals.” True enough but only if the food you are buying was grown just down the road and delivered to your supermarket on the back of a donkey. If your organic Mange Tout was air freighted from Africa then it really isn't any better for the planet.

 This brings me to another point. If you are trying to make the planet a nicer place why are you buying organic veg packaged in oil derived plastic? Conventional grown fruit and veg is sold loose, I never use the little plastic bags and Waitrose don't seem to mind, but the organic crops are all sold in plastic bags.

I understand that Supermarkets need to differentiate between the different types of product but it does seem a little pointless if you are trying to save the planet and then supporting the oil industry.

 Please understand that I am not criticising you if you want to buy organic produce but I do want you to think about what you are doing.

 Fairtrade is probably better than organic. Ooh and on that point, I want some sort of Fairtrade deal for British farmers as well so that they can get paid properly by Supermarkets for what they do. Oh and a Supermarket Ombudsman would be good too.

 “Oh, that would be expensive and we would have to pass that cost on to the customer” is the response from the major food retailers. Tesco alone made about £3.4 billion profit last year; I think they can absorb an extra little bit cost.

 I stopped now, there is some hoeing to do at the allotment, best I go and do that.

I might talk about meat next time.

Allotment 19/10/10

The first frost of this Autumn, in Dorset anyway, was on Sunday. Sunday was also my birthday. Do these 2 things occurring on the same day have any significance? Is it like the groundhog thing? Probably not, it just shows that winter is on the way so it's best to be prepared. If you get some of those dull jobs done now, such as digging over, then you don't have to do them in the middle of the cold, cold winter and that is why I spent about 6 hours last Wednesday moving my raised beds.
When I first got the allotment I had no experience of such things so the spacing between the beds was far too big and there was fair too much wasted space. It was a job that I had been putting off and finding excuses not to do as I knew it would be hard work but I had a surprise day off and the sun was out so no excuses.
I'm not going to bore you with heroic stories about how hard I worked but I did have blistered hands afterwards.
I did have to move a few plants but I'm pretty sure that they'll be ok. My chilli plants, however, have come inside. Last year I left them outside and the fruit didn't ripen leaving us with a lot of green chillies, which was ok but I wanted red ones. Having dug them up, replanted them and placed them next to my indoor chilli plants I noticed something interesting. The outdoor fruits are so much bigger. Really much, much bigger.




See. I have no idea why. Ah well, as long as they ripen I'll be happy.

Anyway, on to the main event. Nettle ale. What does it taste like?

Allotment 5/10/10

 So a while ago I told you of a useful upside of running i.e. that you get to see where stuff grows. Well yesterday I put this knowledge into practise.

 It was a beautiful day so I decided to make the most of it. With my rucksack on my back I mounted up. This little journey would require my bike.

 Firstly I headed out to the road that leaves Dorchester and heads towards Bere Regis (it's the A35 I think but I'm not sure as I'm not my Dad). This is quiet a busy road so care was needed but luckily they are doing some work on the Roundabout so there were some big gaps in the traffic. I was after apples.

 People like me throw their apple cores out of the car window and some of them grow. I think that my haul would have been a little more impressive if I'd been out a week or 2 earlier but I don't think it was too bad, well, all free stuff is good.

They are not the prettiest apples in the world but that really doesn't matter as they taste fantastic.

Now, I wasn't going to do sloe gin this year because we've still got a couple of bottles of last years left but there are so many sloes about this year (well there are here) it seems a little rude not to.  This time it was a different road that leaves Dorchester, the one that goes to Yeovil (B3147 that joins the A37 according to Google maps), and I didn't have to go to far to find them. Loads, everywhere.

So I went shopping in the afternoon and bought some cheap gin. Soon the two will be combined and a lovely thing well be created.

I have to admit that I was inspired to go out by a repeat of a River Cottage Autumn that I saw on Sunday afternoon. One of the things that HFW made was Nettle Ale so I thought that I would give it a go.

 Nettle picking is never the most fun you can have but a glove and some scissors usually protect you. The recipe is here. As it is the first time I have made it I have made half the quantity in the recipe but I have just had a sneaky little taste and it is coming along nicely.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Allotment 21/9/10

Does anyone one have any recipes to use up a lot of cherry tomatoes? It seems my experiment with a blight free tom has gone quite well. Seriously, I have fuck loads (I believe that is the expression I heard them use on Gardener's World.) and I made BBQ sauce and some tomato sauce for storing on Saturday but the BBQ one demanded skinning of the tomatoes which became very boring very quickly. It is very tasty though, do you want to recipe? Well here it is,

BARBECUE SAUCE

24 large ripe tomatoes, peeled, cored and chopped

2 cups chopped celery

2 cups chopped onions

1 ½ cups chopped sweet green or red peppers

2 hot red peppers

1 cup brown sugar

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 tablespoon dry mustard

1 tablespoon paprika

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon peppercorns

1 teaspoon tabasco sauce

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 cup vinegar

Combine the tomatoes, celery, onions and peppers in a large pot. Cook until the vegetables are soft, this will take about 30 minutes. Press through a food mill. Return to pot and continue cooking until mixture reduces by half, this step will take about 45 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and cook slowly until mixture is the consistency of catsup, about 1 ½ hours. As this thickens up, be sure to keep stirring frequently to keep the mixture from sticking. Pour into hot jars, straining out the peppercorns, leaving 1/4 inch. Process pints for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. This will make 4 to 5 pints of a very spicy barbecue sauce.

 As Autumn is sort of sneaking upon us, warmish days and cold nights, I decided that a bit of a harvest was needed so hence the large amount of tomatoes.

 I have had a good summer though, I hope you lot have too, and there was lots to pick. So there was the last of the melons, cucumber, beetroot, lettuce, carrots, runner beans, raspberries (a few anyway), cauliflower, sweet corn

and 8 apples from my tiny, tiny tree.

I am a happy man. Hurray for me.

 Hopefully it will stay warm for a while as I still have chilli plants in that are covered in fruit but they are taking ages to ripen, I now have a cloche on over them to try and encourage them to turn red.

 Over the winter I am hoping to move a number of the beds around in order to make better use of the space but I want to get it done pretty soon as I would also like to grow some green manure on the beds to improve my soil a little.

 I do think that we are going to have to invest in a small freezer to put in the basement though as our little one is stuffed full at the moment.

Allotment 17/8/10

Previous on Allotment blog,

“I’m impatient, is this melon ripe yet?”
“How do I know if it is ripe?”
Damn it! I’m just going to pick it and see!”

And now the concluding part of Melon of Destiny.

3 or 4 days after I picked the lovely looking melon I finally plucked up the courage to cut it in half and see what was inside. As the knife pierced the slightly unattractive skin of the melon juice flowed. This I took as a good sign.
I cut it in half and gazed upon the orange flesh. Well it looked lovely and smelt of ripe melon. So to cut myself a slice for the final test. To cut an unnecessarily long story short, it tasted bloody lovely. I rule!

One of the useful things about going for a run, apart from the getting fit, reducing the chance of heart disease thing, is being outside and watching the seasons come and go. You get to see the various blossoms of the hedgerow in spring and then as the year progresses different things flower and fruit.
As I have been running around Dorchester I have built up a little mental map of where various useful and edible plants are.
In late spring and early summer I can always find some elderflower but as we head into late summer and autumn more fun things start to reveal themselves in the hedges and on the trees, if you know where to find them.
This week I have found 2 plum trees in the hedgerows and the blackberries are coming on nicely, in some places they are ready to pick. There are also plenty of apple trees around that are covered in fruit.
Go on, go for a walk around where you live and see what you can find, you might be in for a pleasant surprise.

Allotment 9/8/10

I love this time of year. All the hard work that you have put in is literally bearing fruit (and veg). Just yesterday, for instance (and I use it as an example because it was a really good day) we bought home onions, peas, mange tout, 3 types of bean, radishes, lettuces, cucumber, courgette (anyone want a courgette by the way?) beetroot, carrots and my special prize, more on that later. Basically at this time of the year we can feed ourselves with vegetables. It is a joy to behold. Yes, you have to keep weeding and looking after things but it is so much more rewarding when come home with a bag full of things.

 And now back to my special prize. When I was looking on a seed selling website at the beginning of the year for tomatoes that don’t get blight (I bought a bush variety called Koralik and so far so good, fingers crossed though) I noticed some melon seeds that the website claimed would grow outside in the UK, I think I have mentioned this before. Anyway the seed were 99p so I thought I would loose less then £1 if they didn’t grow. I can confirm that my investment of 99p was well worth it,

To be honest I was a little inpatient. Some websites said that I would know when the fruit was ripe because it would smell of melon; well I think I may have detected the slight whiff of melon ness but that was probably wishful thinking. It has been looking the same for several weeks and I just wanted to pick it and see. Yes it is childish but I do have another 7 fruit to be more patient with if this one really isn’t ripe. We are giving a couple of days in the fruit bowl to see if we can make it smell melony. I tell you how it goes.

Allotment 27/7/10

Waitrose, home of the overly descriptive labels and a shop that nicely turns a negative into a selling point.
 I recently bought some nectarines from them (yes I know, air miles, but I can’t grow them yet and they only came from Italy and, and I think that this is the most important point, they are really, really tasty) and the label bore the legend “Home Ripening”. I’m sorry, what now? So they are not ripe yet? So they were picked when they weren’t ready to be? I know that bananas are picked when green and then ripened later but soft fruit? It doesn’t seem right some how. I pick my crops when they are ready.
 I know that if they were picked when they were perfect by the time they were transported here they would be spoiled but really, ripening after I’ve bought them?
 Waitrose do also, in a sort of ying/yang thing, “Tree Ripen” apples in the autumn leading me to scream, on the inside, were else would they ripen?! Although the answer to that is provided, I suppose, by the nectarines.

Would you like to see some pictures of some dogs in jumpers? Of course you would,



A patient at one of the places that I work bought this knitting book in for me after he heard that my wife knits. He did do it as a joke, I think.