Food from our front garden

The first plums from out little plum tree. It was planted last autumn and in its first year it has fifteen plums. I wondered whether it would have any at all as it was in blossom when we had the late fall of snow back in April.

The tree is in our front garden which is a small plot about 6 x 15 feet beside the drive. It was originally lawn but it was hardly worth the effort to carry the lawn mower round from the shed in the back garden to cut such a small patch of grass so I got rid of it and planted perennials. Now I am trying to squeeze in some edible plants to make it productive as well as decorative.

In this photo the poor tree looks a bit dwarfed by the existing plants but I am making sure the area around the trunk is clear of growth so I hope it will soon be growing well, although not too well because it is only a small space!

I also have tomatoes in my front garden, three plants in pots by the front door. Not probably what you'd expect by a front door but its a good use of space and when they (finally) ripen, I think they will look good next to the red geraniums.

I also have some herbs, chives, thyme and two different variegated sage. I am wondering what else I can plant. In the winter when the sun is low in the sky the garden doesn't get any sun at all and it is quite a cold spot with the frost often staying all day so it will have to be something quite hardy. Unless I can think of anything else it will probably be spinach beet.

Potato harvest

I planted these potatoes in pots at the end February, two tubers to a pot. Today I had run out of potatoes so I decided it was time to see how well they had grown. The chickens watched closely as I tipped out a pot and found some good sized potatoes.

This pot contained 1 lb 8 oz of potatoes which seemed to be quite good considering they were in a relatively small pot. We ate them this evening, I always enjoy the first new potatoes from the garden.

If I had plenty of room I probably wouldn't bother growing potatoes in pots but it is a good way of getting a few potatoes from a small space.


After I had gathered up the potatoes, the chickens scratched through the compost eating anything they could see that moved. So potatoes for us and plenty of bugs for the chickens.

local or eco?

I try to think about the environmental impact of the food we eat. I thought that this was a relatively easy thing to do just by using a bit of common sense, obvious things like eating less of foods that had travelled long distances, avoiding foods grown out of season which require a lot of heat for growth and avoiding processed foods where the individual ingredients may have travelled long distances. I assumed we were doing quite well and that eating seasonal local/UK produce was a good thing.

It was a surprise then a couple of weeks ago to read this article and particularly the following paragraph.

New Zealand butter, for instance, sold all the way round the world in the UK, has less carbon emitted per kilogram of butter than English butter, even taking its shipment into account. How can this be so? Because New Zealand cows are able to eat grass, which grows all year round. In the UK they eat artificial feeds for part of the year, and are kept in heated accommodation.

The butter we usually eat is Rachel's Dairy which made in Wales (not too far away really) using UK organic milk. It seems incredible to think that eating this is more harmful (in terms of CO2 emissions) than butter that has travelled about as far as it is possible to travel from the other side of the planet. I have tried to find some actual figures so I can see how big the difference is but so far haven't been able to find any.

I am going to continue eating UK organic butter as at least it is supporting UK farmers and I'd like to see some figures before making any change but it has made me wonder if any other "common sense" decisions are not actually the most beneficial for the environment.

Perhaps we need to rethink the way we look at all year round basic foods. After all butter and cheese used to be made with the surplus milk produced during the summer as a way of preserving the fresh milk. We are used to the idea of eating seasonally in terms of fruit and vegetables, maybe we need to extend the idea to other foods like dairy products, eggs etc.

Mini salads.

When I got my mini-greenhouse last month I decided to experiment with growing a few pots of salad leaves during the winter. After four weeks I now have a few baby salad leaves to harvest.

A tray of mixed salad leaves.

Rocket and Red Oak Leaf lettuce (not very red but that is probably due to low light levels).

A tray of Ruby Chard which has taken longer to germinate but is beginning to put up the first real leaves.

I didn't sow much of each as I wasn't sure how well they would grow but I am pleased with the results. The plants look much healthier and are less straggly than when I have tried to grow them on a windowsill. I won't get enough for a large salad but I will have a few leaves to add to filled rolls for packed lunches. A successful experiment and I can measure the distance travelled in food yards not food miles!

Rosehip Syrup

This year the fruit harvest has been good both in the gardens and in the hedgerows. Blackberries, sloes and elderberries have been plentiful and I collected some of each as they became ripe. There are also a lot of rosehips about this year but I have not collected them since I was a child when we used to remove the hairy seeds and call it itching powder. Rosehips have twenty times the level of vitamin C as oranges and during the war when shipping was disrupted and fruit from abroad was not available, large quantities of rosehips were collected by volunteers to be made into syrup. From 1943 - 1945 the annual amount collected was 450 tons. The syrup was sold for 1s 9d (about 8p) for a six ounce bottle but mothers and children could get larger quantities at reduced prices from welfare clinics.

In the latest Permaculture Magazine there was a recipe for Rosehip syrup so I decided to have a go. The recipe in the magazine seemed to be based on the recipe given out by the Ministry of Food in 1943 and which I found reprinted in Food for Free by Richard Mabey.

The original recipe used 2lb of rosehips but I just did half the quantity.

Mince 1lb of rosehips and empty straight into one and a half pints of boiling water. It is important to put the hips in the boiling water immediately after mincing to minimise the loss of vitamin C.

Stop heating and leave to stand for 15 minutes. Then filter the mixture through a jelly bag. Put the mixture remaining in the bag back in the saucepan, add 3/4 pint of boiling water, allow to stand for 10 minutes and then filter thorough the jelly bag again.

It is important to remove all the hairs that cover the seeds as these will be an irritant if swallowed. The recipe suggested refiltering the first cupful of juice to make sure all the hairs are removed.

This close up photograph of the jelly bag showed a number of these little hairs so to be sure to remove all of them I filtered the juice through a paper coffee filter!

Place the filtered juice in a saucepan and boil until the volume is reduced to 3/4 pint. Add 10 oz sugar, boil for 5 minutes and then pour into hot sterile bottles and seal.

I didn't have any bottles so I put mine in jam jars.

The original storage instructions were to store in a dark cupboard and to use the syrup within one to two weeks of opening. I think that it would keep for longer than that if it was refrigerated as there is quite a high sugar content.

I have tasted the syrup and it does taste just the same as the "Delrosa" rosehip syrup that I remember from when I was little. Although Delrosa syrup has not been available in the UK for some years, it can still be found in some countries.

I wonder whether in the future when we need to depend more on locally produced foods, we will once again be gathering rosehips on a large scale to make this vitamin C rich syrup.

Local Food Shopping

Which is the most eco-friendly way to shop locally- do I walk to the shop in my village or do I drive to the nearest farm shop?
The food shop in our village while not one of the big supermarkets is part of a national chain. If I shop there I only buy fresh vegetables from the UK though they could still have travelled many hundreds of miles. The shop is just a half mile walk from home. The nearest shop to stock local foods is a farm shop about six miles from home and which aims to stock local food, grown or made within 35 miles if possible, maybe further afield at this time of the year but always UK.
Today, I had already shopped for the week and only wanted potatoes, some green vegetables ( to make a change from endless root vegetables) and a loaf of bread. So which would use the least fossil fuels, walking to buy food that may have travelled long distances to get to the shop or driving a total of 12 miles to buy just three items of locally produced food? Neither shop regularly stocks organic vegetables so that doesn't influence the decision.
Today was a sunny spring day and the walk won over the car trip but all the green veg came from Spain so I bought bread and potatoes and we ate parsnips from my allotment (again!).

New Year Resolution - reduce Food Miles

I took the Christmas decorations down yesterday, the tree is waiting to be taken for recycling and all the tinsel etc is packed away in the loft for another year. The house looked bare a first but it does feel calmer.

Time then to look forward. A list of New Years Resolutions always seems daunting so this year there is just one - to reduce the food miles our food has travelled to reach our plates. We've eaten more or less organic for several years but I'm only just beginning to think about where our food has come from. This year I will try to eat more locally and therefore more seasonally.

I've read Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan in which he describes living on a diet of food produced within a 250 mile radius of his home but have decided at this stage not to set a rigid distance limit. Instead my goal is to buy food that has been produced in the UK - of course living in the south means that food may still have travelled many hundreds of miles but at least its a start. This week I shall concentrate on fruit, vegetables, dairy, meat, flour etc.

I shall be doing my weekly shop tommorrow so I'll see how it goes