broad beans on toast

allotment tales: early July

If every month was like July here in England then you could feed yourself comfortably, forever, off a 18 by 100ft allotment.

Broad beans are bursting to goodness right now and there's no better way to work up an appetite for lunch than pounding a handful of freshly picked beans to a paste with a pestle and mortar before spreading on toast. What's needed is;

a good sized pestle and mortar
a few grains of rock salt
a bunch of fresh mint leaves
a handful of shelled broad beans - the younger, the better, but they must be freshly picked, not shop-bought.
a little grated hard cheese - pecorino or parmigiana
a splash of lemon juice
extra virgin olive oil
fresh ground pepper to taste

start with the salt, leaves, and a few of the beans, and begin to mash them up real good. add more beans until you get a good blend of pasted and semi-crushed beans for texture, then add the lemon juice and cheese. Use the pestle to stir it all together, gradually adding oil to loosen the mixture as necessary. In the meantime, toast some homemade bread rubbed with garlic. When done, spread the bean mixture onto the warm toast and add pepper. Eat.

biota consumerism

I keep saying to all who'll listen, compost worms turn up eventually. Still people get their credit cards out and head to PayPal for a mailing of worms. Sometimes I feel I should offer mine on Freecycle but....maybe my worms are happy where they are.

Hot on the heels of eBay tiger worms, today I discover you can purchase all kinds of beneficial critters, for instance - ladybird lavae! (that's ladybugs in the US). The importance of these is they'll eat aphids by the truckload. Aphids, left to themselves, eat through your tender green stuff. It's kind of manipulating the ecosystem but probably better than indiscriminate genocide involving chemical warfare. Oh, it's good to be green!

But listen. I wish I'd had my camera because we have several of these lavae about the place - they just turned up, uninvited. Okay, they're on the fruit when they should be on the beans but at least they're in the 'hood. So, if your rich by all means buy them, but if your hard-up, just be more patient.

I had intended to post more frequently on the allotment progress. I don't know where the time goes. A quick update: so far this season we've enjoyed eating our own asparagus, rhubarb, early potatoes (rocket), baby spinach, lettuce (mixed), sorrel, cabbage (primo), baby beets, basil, strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, and redcurrants. Soon come - the broad bean and blackcurrant!

asparagus

Allotment Tales: Late April

After the forced rhubarb, the next crop we enjoy is asparagus. I say ''we'' but I'm the only one in our house who likes rhubarb. I can't fathom why. Nevertheless, we forced the smallest clump - we have three separate clumps, all inherited from the previous allotmenteer - under an old dustbin. I recommend forcing for rhubarb lovers who can't wait to get their rhubarb under an oaty crumble, with custard. It is the pinkest, smoothest rhubarb you can imagine. It's all gone now - the forced stuff - so it's on to the asparagus.

We've had two bunches from our bed already. We're lucky to have inherited it as a mature bed along with the rhubarb and several fruit bushes. Lucky because new beds shouldn't be harvested for the first three years! Even then, the cutting should be stopped after six weeks, and eight weeks on a mature bed, to allow the crowns to take in energy and gain strength. After the cutting season, the asparagus is left to grow into tall, elegant fronds which look attractive blowing in the breeze and are a coveted prize amongst flower arrangers. Don't let them! They're storing more energy for next year. Only cut the fronds when the berries appear to ripen, and before they fall, and cut them all down to the ground. Then give them to flower arrangers, if still desired.

Asparagus is a good choice for allotments. Considering what they cost in the shop in season, you can recoup your allotment rent in a few cuttings. Last year, our first year, we were eating asparagus 2 - 3 times a week for eight weeks. I noticed it was three quid a pop in the local farm shop! There are many ways to eat asparagus and with all that cutting we must have tried most but simply steaming and serving with butter and freshly ground black pepper wins hands down. Plot to plate in under half an hour - lovely.

the greenhouse

Here's a piece I wrote in March for another website. I was intending to include some allotment stories here, so, by way of a start...

Allotment Tales:
Late March

It's been ten weeks since I was last formally employed in exchange for money and I've settled into a routine so naturally, I can't quite believe it. My biggest fear now is having to go back to work, something that will have to be considered in due course unless providence shines its light upon me for the rest of my working life. For the first time in thirty years of working for a living I realise what ''working for yourself'' and ''being your own boss'' truly mean: literally that.

Needless to say all my working hours have been spent on the patch. We acquired a small greenhouse for nothing, we borrowed a van to collect it and replaced the missing glass by salvaging old wooden casement windows someone had thoughtfully donated to the communal allotment odds-and-sods store (which is in itself a fabulously thoughtful idea). Now we will grow exotics!

Had I still been employed - and I earned quite a decent wage - I may have given up waiting on freecycle and gotten my wallet out and bought a new greenhouse or polytunnel. It would have been so easy. Life is that easy. Too easy when you think of it. A brand new product being manufactured when a perfectly good one is going unused somewhere nearby. Consumerism has conditioned us to earn money by making or things for the marketplace so that we can go out and buy other things made by other people for the market place so they can earn money to buy stuff, maybe the things we made, to keep the economy going. Some people don't even make anything: they buy other people's made stuff, add ''value'' to it (good one that?) and resell it back to the market. Some call this enterprise. Of course, because bogus value has been added to it, it costs more so people need more money so they have to make more new things and persuade more people to make more purchases, and on and on. In control theory this is known as positive feedback; in layman's terms things get bigger and bigger until they go pop! And it's no good sticking a green star on it and calling it sustainable development or sustainable growth because there ain't no such thing. Eventually it'll go pop too; think about it.

Our allotment and that of my neighbours is shaded by trees. This reduces the amount of sunshine on our greenhouse end and reduces his growing potential. We got permission to cut them down but I like trees, so we pollarded them. This means cutting the tops down to the trunk at manageable proportions and allowing the tree to produce new shoots from beneath the bark, in turn these being cut each season to keep the height low and unobstruct sunshine. Now I've never done this before but if it goes to plan the new shoots harvested could be used for supporting beans and things rather than buying imported bamboo canes.

In any event I've recently learned that burning them or letting them rot is not as good as cooking them - turning them into charcoal. It's an astounding fact that the biosphere removes 18 times more CO2 than we humans pump into it. The trouble is this CO2 is soon returned to the atmosphere when the green stuff rots down or is burnt. Charcoal on the other hand is relatively inert and traps the carbon in for long periods. It has been proposed that if green waste is turned into charcoal rather than burnt or composted, and buried in landfills or in the ocean, the planet itself will go a long way to right the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But will we do that? No, because we are told composting is saving the planet. It's a crazy world, and one day it's going to end and it's our fault.
~
I took the photo (above) today - greenhouse doing fine. no results yet on the pollarding.