The passing of a couple of days means that with the arrival of March it is now time to finish digging and start sowing seeds and considering potatoes.
As I live in the south we are lucky enough to have relatively mild weather but still it doesn't do to be too confident. Last year we had frosts as late as mid May. I will carry on regardless full of hope for an early spring.
After a tempting spring morning, last weekend brought more rain and a drop in temperature. This means the soil is too claggy and wet to dig. Trying to turn wet earth makes it not only heavy, back threatening work but also that the soil structure is damaged and it encourages compaction which eliminates nutrients, water and air that plant roots need.
Despite not having finished last year's harvest of potatoes, I have already been sucked into planning for this coming year. Aldi had a special offer on vegetable plants and seeds and I fell for it. Now they are languishing in my kitchen waiting for me to plant them out. I also have last year's potatoes sprouting like mad.
I bought two variety of seed potato - pentland javelin that is supposed to be a good early variety that has a firm, waxy texture that is ideal for salads and Maris piper that is a good floury all rounder that is great for chips, roasts and mash. I'm tempted by a bag of charlotte's, another salad variety and would also love to try an unusual variety like anya or pink fir which are both long in shape and strangely enough pink fit is actually pink (wonder if it loses the colour on cooking like the blue potato does). However I suspect I have already run out if space. I still need to dig over the area I have allocated for the potatoes (clearly - as the picture shows!).
I am planning on following the advice on rotation and will be moving the potato area to where the tomatoes and squashes last grew. While neither tomatoes nor squash fall into the standard rotation groups and I am reducing the amount of brassicas I'm growing it still makes sense to rotate plants to reduce the build up of diseases and depletion of nutrients.
Also Aldi had asparagus crowns and I intend to devote half of one of the raised beds to them as they are a permanent crop that deserve being well treated. I did also have some last year but I fear they got trampled in the brassica harvesting.
It has been a dreadful winter apparently for British brassica farmers. While Lincolnshire would normally be awash with cauliflowers it has merely produced fields of brown slush. Apparently the harsh winter has stunted growth or stopped it completely.
It seems we will be reduced to buying our Brussels sprouts from johnny foreigner. (perhaps apt as Agatha Christie's archetypal Belgian is named after the French for leek.)
They should have come to new cross where the green stuff is still plentiful. Though now I'm fretting that the winter will have stopped my purple sprouting broccoli from sprouting and I will have hosted and tended them all year for nothing.
PS while looking up statistics from the news for this blog I discovered that someone actually goes to the effort of publishing a fine periodical called Brassicas Today. With a website. And they have events. Oh my.
Feast and famine.In my work life I work on Cadbury and as part of that I get to taste quite a lot of chocolate. Great on one hand but not so good if you want to get healthy.Obviously the exercise involved in preparing the plot by digging and weeding does some good but it can only do so much. Especially when the weather encourages me to stay indoors.So I also rely on the hoped for health benefits of the vegetables we grow.The general principle seems to be don't over cook the vegetables - the fashionable way is to have them with a little bite. Steaming or stir frying tends to get the required result without leaching all the goodness out. If you do boil, then try use the water with nutrients in - maybe as a stock or in the gravy.I have been brought up on my aunt's veg which, though microwaved, is usually meltingly soft so I find the crispy veg thing still a little alien to me - I'll have to force myself to be fashionable. Actually it's not just modern tastes that discourage overcooking. According to the excellent ministry of food exhibition at the imperial war museum (sadly finished now) -during the war much effort was put into improving the nation's health and getting the most from the limited food we did have. Never mind that part of the motivation was to have enough healthy men of fighting age to send into an essentially unhealthy situation, war. The legacy of vitamins and food for health was a good one that lasted. At least until ready meals and fast food came along. Some people shy away from frozen vegetables as they worry it has been tampered with or lost its goodness somehow but in fact the vegetables are often frozen within hours of picking so can be fresher and retain more nutrients than the unfrozen vegetables you see on the supermarket shelves. The general rule though for healthy veg is that the closer to raw the better. However rules are made to be broken and some foods are healthier cooked. Tomatoes in particular contain more lycopene when cooked than raw. Lycopene is good because it has Free radicals that have key cancer fighting properties. They are also apparently easier to digest.
A quick visit to the allotment to harvest the cabbages that look past their prime.
When trimming them there are more leaves discarded than salvaged. The slugs and worms are quite disgusting. Still, there was over 5kg of cabbage to process and find uses for. A mixture of crisp white cabbage and savoy cabbage rescued just in the nick of time.
Looked up a sauerkraut recipe but it seems you have to work it over tens of days and it involves skimming off scum from fermented juices. Strangely enough, I didn't feel like doing it after all. Though I made a great potato and sauerkraut bake (from a jar) tonight.
Stir fried the cabbage with stock and lemon juice and added a couple of tablespoons of sherry as suggested. Hope to find something to do with it all soon.
Vast amounts of coleslaw was made last weekend but it's a week later and I still don't feel like cabbage when I get home.
Excited to see the elephant garlic is sprouting - fingers crossed. It's amazing roasted on french bread.
The days are starting to get longer but the cold weather isn't behind us yet. While last weekend brought sunny skies and temperatures of 8 degrees we are due for a cold snap again.
While I'm impatient to start sowing seeds I know that there is little point if I can't plant them out in March.
The remaining potatoes are sprouting away in the cupboard but I will just have to concentrate on cooking rather than growing them.
Ordinarily I would attempt potato dauphinoise but I have the added complication of starting a new health kick so for the next 12 weeks at least I intend to only use healthy recipes (at least once the apple custard cake is finished).
The red cabbages on the plot are starting to look a little sorry for themselves so I guess they will have to be next. Ordinarily I would combine them with bacon or chorizo as I find even the most uninspiring vegetable benefits from being combined with a salty pork product. This time I will have to find an alternative. Magazines often suggest chilli but I have a wimpy palate the can't cope with hot spice so I'll have to investigate some form of bubble and squeak or rosti.
