It's National Vegetarian Week...

I'm not a vegetarian, and despite my fussiness about the meat I eat, I don't aspire to be one. I believe we humans are meant to eat meat and animal products - that it is an important part of healthy nutrition. (This account from a young vegan forced to realise that not everybody can survive on a vegan diet is fascinating and eye-opening.) I also believe the replenishment animals provide to the soil is vital to farming; that the healthiest way to produce food is in a polycultural system where animals and plants support and feed off each other, and that a wide variety of produce reduces the need for chemicals and treatments and encourages a healthier, more natural ecosystem where 'good' and 'bad' organisms are in balance.

But I also believe the amount of meat many are accustomed to eating these days is far too much. The amount we eat can be detrimental to our health, and too-often takes the place in our diets of other essentials such as vegetables. The amount we eat forces producers to farm animals intensively, which compromises animal welfare as well as the quality of the meat we eat. The amount we eat necessitates vast monocultures to feed the livestock, which deplete the soil, interfere with natural ecosystems and are detrimental to the planet. The amount we eat is ultimately unsustainable, and if we all ate less meat - perhaps just two or three times a week - the world would undoubtedly be a better place.

So this week, why not try a few meat-free recipes and cut down a little? I don't mean baked potatoes and beans, or macaroni cheese, or a mushroom pizza - vegetarian food can be far more exciting and nutritious than that; if you're stuck for ideas, try here or here for inspiration. Or check out Meat Free Monday - a campaign to get everyone eating meat-free at least once a week, with lots of recipes to tempt you to join in! (I was thinking of feeding my lot meat-free all week this week and seeing if they noticed, but planned badly and have half a pack of mince in my fridge to use up, and I promised I'd do steak one night... but five nights out of seven still ain't bad!)

And here's a simple offering to get your mouth watering; a beanburger recipe I've been working on recently (loosely based on a standard recipe that's all over the internet in various forms) which my family loves. (Not exciting enough for you? You haven't tasted it yet!) It's not quite seasonal right now, I confess, but summer round the corner means burgers on my mind. It's seriously tasty, family-friendly, and couldn't be much healthier either. Give it a try!

Mexican Beanburgers
(makes eight large burgers)

• Finely chop a large onion, a green pepper and a red pepper, and fry gently in a teaspoon of olive or rapeseed oil.
• Peel and chop a large carrot, and steam/boil in a little water until soft. 
• When the onions are translucent and the peppers soft, add a small can sweetcorn (160g), a clove or two chopped garlic, 2 tsp ground cumin, 2 tsp ground ginger, 1 tsp chilli powder (or to taste), 1 tsp dried oregano, 1 tsp dried coriander leaf, a tbsp lemon or lime juice, a good grinding of black pepper and a pinch or two of salt. Stir in and cook for a couple more minutes, then turn off the heat.

• Mash the carrot (or puree in the food processor) and add it to the pan.
• Drain and rinse two cans beans (I use one can cannellini, one can kidney), pulse half in the food processor until finely chopped, then add the rest and pulse until coarsely chopped for texture. Add to the pan.
• Add 100g plain flour. Mix everything together really well.
• Separate the mixture into eight balls and flatten them into patties about 2cm thick. It's messy, but stick with it!
• Place on an oiled and floured baking tray, and bake at 200C for around 20 minutes, turning halfway through, until the burgers are lightly browned and firm.
• Serve in bread rolls, with guacamole (or avocado), salsa (or sliced tomato), salad and a little cheese.

Wild Garlic

As foraging goes, wild garlic has got to be one of the most desirable finds out there; it's plentiful, it's versatile, it's easy to recognise, it's garlicky... I particularly like the garlicky part... But in two springs of looking I've never found any in St Albans, so, except for a taster or two at Wild Food Nights, I had yet to experience wild garlic for myself - until recently.

Yep, we finally found some a short drive away, thanks to an 'insider' tip off! I thought he was having us on for a while - we scoured the area for ages and had nearly given up. And then we found it. Loads of it!

We picked a bagful, taking no more than one or two leaves per plant, and ended up with enough for several dishes!

Wild garlic is, obviously, similar to garlic in flavour, but with a grassy, fresh kinda feel. It's mild enough that you can almost use it as a leaf vegetable and throw loads in. And it keeps in the fridge for days!

First we used it to make chicken kievs - we pureed it with butter and seasoning, stuffed chicken breasts with it, coated in flour, egg and breadcrumbs (must be in that order!) and baked. They didn't stay together too well... but they were delish. I was afraid the wild garlic would lose its flavour with the longish cooking time, but it didn't.

Next, a quick wild garlic pasta, with mushrooms, butter and a splash of wine and cream. I used 6-8 large leaves per person, chopped finely. Gorgeous!

And finally a feast of curry dishes: wild garlic rice, wild garlic pakoras from here (I recommend pre-cooking the potato!), wild garlic and chickpea salan - a buttery south-Asian curry - with some added green beans, and a cashew nut curry which I improvised with coconut milk and a little tomato puree - rich and filling and lovely! I made the rice by crackling a few mustard seeds in a little oil, stirring in the rinsed basmati rice, adding twice the volume of boiling water, cooking for just a few minutes, stirring in the chopped wild garlic, then covering tightly and leaving to stand off the heat until we were ready to eat - about 15 more minutes. I was a little concerned the whole dish would be too garlicky, but it wasn't - it was wonderful!

Wild garlic is flowering now (the flowers are edible too!) and the season will be over before long. I'm very tempted to buy some seeds and scatter them somewhere nearby (or maybe under the trees at the bottom of the garden) so I don't have so far to go next year! It's a little invasive but... that just means I have to eat more, right?

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Come on now, this is getting silly. I know we're in a drought situation (whatever that actually means) but we still need sunshine too, and the man on the telly said only winter rain could help us so your efforts are wasted. I swear most of my warm-season plants have just stopped growing - even the ones that didn't get smashed to bits by hail - and a few are just rotting in their pots, including the artichokes I spent good money buying. The slugs and snails are doing so well, in the meantime, that the remaining plants barely stand a chance, and after frost got my first early asparagus spears, the next wave has been so slow to grow without sunshine that most of it's been eaten before it's big enough to cut! Beans sown under fleece have not sprouted yet, and I strongly suspect they're rotten by now. There's a serious amount of weeding to do before I plant my maincrop potatoes and it's such a muddy job when the ground is practically waterlogged. I bought one of those weed wand thingies to burn the weeds but I can't do that when they're soaking wet, can I? Frankly, it's just depressing and uninspiring and motivation-crushing when the skies are grey and gloomy all day every day, and I'm not usually one to complain about the weather, but seriously, we don't usually have three (or is it four?) solid weeks of the same. Enough, okay?

Of course, I try to look on the bright side. The early potatoes and most of the herbs are doing well (except the rosemary which doesn't like to be wet), and the peppers and cucumbers in the relative warmth of the greenhouse are doing okay, if a little slowly.

The strawberries are pretty happy and green, with a few flowers appearing, and a couple I thought I'd lost to vine weevil have suddenly bounced back. The radishes, lettuces and mizuna are doing really well, too, although it's a constant battle keeping the slugs off them.

The tiny pots in which I've sown my brassicas are getting a constant watering where usually it'd be a fight to stop them drying out! And I have now harvested the first of my asparagus, even if it doesn't look very appetising.

Having battled with the allotment weeds for five full years now to virtually no avail, I've given up on digging and bought, as I said, a 'Weed Wand' to kill 'em all with. The environmental (and financial) cost of the gas canisters is not ideal, but as long as I'm economical with them and dispose of them properly, I think it's got to be better than either of the other options, which are using chemicals, or throwing in the towel. The cell-damage to the weeds is supposed to kill the whole plant, so I have high hopes that with this we'll finally be able to gain control, and it's going to be so much easier and less daunting than all that digging! Once the weeds are dry enough to start, anyway...

I'm also delighted to report the arrival of the year's most awaited seedling! After the hail killed all my ancho peppers - the ones I was most excited about growing - I sowed the last few seeds I had to replace them. And I waited... and I waited... and everything else I sowed came up but them. Finally, one has arrived! I hope more will still follow in the coming days.

At this time of year I'm usually starting to think about the likelihood of any further frosts and looking forward to planting things out, but everything's so far behind this year! So come on, rain. Enough!

Hail Devastation

It all started fairly normally. Rain. It's April, after all. More rain. A little hail. I checked on the plants, laid out on the shed roof - I like to give them as much daylight as I can to keep them from getting leggy, and leaving them out in the rain too means no watering. They're also well-hardened-off this way and strong against winds - and anyway, there isn't room in my tiny home to keep them all in all the time. They were fine - they didn't mind the hail at all. They're big now. They're tough. And this kind of thing usually only lasts a minute or two, doesn't it? I took some pictures. The hailstones got bigger, but they weren't coming down very hard so still, the plants were fine. I took some more pictures.

 

And then it got worse. We're talking brutal. We're talking near-apocalyptic. And the damage was done in seconds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I couldn't get the plants in fast enough, and it fell so thickly I spent the next hour scraping it away from the stems in each pot in case it frosted them through at soil level. And then I spent the next hour cleaning mud and puddles out of my kitchen.

The hail also battered some of the flowers in the garden, and blasted all the gorgeous blossom off the amelanchier. It even knocked over a couple of pond plants. And there was so much on the ground that it hung around for the rest of the day.

 

 

 

 

Thankfully not everything in the garden was so affected; all the shrubs seem okay, except for damaged flowers, and my spinach and beetroot seedlings and lettuces, radishes and mizuna are mostly okay. The peas got a bit of a battering but I think they'll be fine. The strawberries have a few holes but are pretty hardy.

 

Mercifully, all the tomatoes, aubergines, two squashes and a couple of cucumbers were safe in the greenhouse and are unharmed.

The damage looks worst on the squashes, but it's the peppers, that I've been babying since January, that have really suffered, with the growing tips just smashed right off several, and I'm really not sure it's worth resowing them this late. Some young brassicas, too, have bent stems that may not recover. All the plants will be stressed and bruised and set back.

I pretty much feel like giving up right now.

But I won't. I'm trying to figure out whether or not to remove the damaged leaves, to try to reduce stress on the plants and get them thinking about new growth. Then I will spray them with seaweed extract, keep them indoors except in perfect weather, and reassess in a week. I already bought a little bag of seed compost for resowings, and I think I'll get some new ancho chillies started right away as I really don't want to miss out on them.

Oh, for a proper greenhouse...

Vanishing Onions and Other Worries...

You may remember we gave winter onions, shallots and garlic a try for the first time this year, planting at the start of November with the hope of a bigger harvest with less white rot come midsummer. I bought a pack from Marshalls containing Yellow Moon shallots, Provence Wight garlic and Radar onions, sprinkled a bit of onion fertiliser before I planted, and it all seemed to go very well to start with.

About a month ago, after several weeks away from the plot, I noticed a lot of the onions had disappeared. Almost all of them in fact, despite the garlic and the shallots doing really well right behind them.

Where could they have gone?? There was no sign of slug activity, and no sign of them having been pulled out by birds (this is common when they're still very small, but you usually find the onions lying around on the ground).

It's a mystery, but Wilkinsons came to the rescue, as they often do. I picked up a bag of 'Turbo' onion sets for £1.48 yesterday and filled in the (rather large) gaps. They said plant out March-April, and hopefully the name is an indication of how fast they grow!

The just-sprouting broad beans are having pest problems at the moment too; I thought I had mastered this last year, but something has got in and cut down the new plants despite a web of string all around them!

Is this pigeons, mice, or something else? I'd always thought pigeons, but now I'm not so sure. Mind you, some of the strings making up the cage had moved a bit in the rain and wind, making some bigger-than-usual holes, so maybe a pigeon still managed to get in... It's particularly frustrating because I don't have any spare seeds. Doh!

Finally, I wonder if anyone out there can tell me what's wrong with these tomato leaves:

Little patches between the veins have thinned, leaving silvery-brown papery bits that look the same on both sides. I've seen sunburn through water droplets do this, but these plants are kept in the plastic greenhouse (during the daytime - indoors at night) and I've been quite careful to keep the leaves dry. My other guess is magnesium deficiency, but I'm not really sure... Answers on a postcard if you have any ideas!