Home Grown Sandwiches

Yesterday felt like a kind of personal milestone.  I made a meal for the first time using ingredients I had either grown or made myself.

As you can see, in a matter of months, I have mastered the art of baking bread.  Have you ever seen a more perfect loaf than this?

Shaping your dough gently into the loaf tin just after the second kneading is the trick.  Up until this loaf I've been just whacking it in there, which has led to some uneven, less presentable (though just as tasty) loaves.  This one, however, looks as good as it tastes.  And you don't need to use "bread flour" (£1.15 at the Co-op) - bog standard white or brown flour works just as well (60p for a bag of white; the Co-op doesn't even seem to sell brown).

But to the main event.  Straight from the allotment, I harvested spinach, borage, peas, mint and nasturtiums flowers.  How much?  This much:

The spinach is delicious raw, so I whacked that between the sliced bread with a dash of oil, and that's what you call sandwiches.  Then I stir fried the peas in their pods, with the one massive borage leaf and sprigs of mint, and ate them on the side with the nasturtium flowers.  High tea.

It's hard to put into words how wonderful it feels to do this and at the same time, how completely normal.  Like everyone should do exactly this, every day.  Time was of course, we did.  But time was as well, that we weren't entering an insect Armageddon.  All of this may be far too little, far too late.  At least now we have the technology to instantly share pictures of our food with what's left of the world.  Oh, progress.

I find myself wondering again how I might be able to multiply such activity by (365 x 3) = 1095 to be able to source all of my food myself through my little allotment.  It's been so rewarding to have done so even once, I might actually start making the calculations.

Related posts

My Windowsill Herb Garden
In Praise of Bread
The Continuing Story of Bread
Potatoes, Onions, and a Good Luck Charm
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Herbal Harvest

I love the idea of being able to grow enough food on my allotment to be completely food self-sufficient, but I've no idea yet if that's actually possible given the amount of land I have. Finding out will be a slow process, I think, and there's joy to be found here that's absent from the kind of meticulous planning that might yield answers sooner, and in the meantime I'm more than happy to indulge my passion for herbs. Man shall not live by herbs alone, but this man probably would if he could.

Down on the allotment this evening, another fire smouldering, I gathered this bag of greens, featuring chives, sage, rocket, borage and spinach, which seem to be growing just now at a rate faster than I can eat them (imagine if potatoes were like this).  I've been hanging up bunches of sage to dry around my flat.

Chives don't seem to want to dry quite so straightforwardly, and paper bags or even oven drying may be required here. More things to learn.

Chives

The same chives, chopped.

The rocket is almost inedibly spicy, but along with the borage and spinach, I've been throwing it in to the slow cooker to simmer in with my chilli, to very satisfying results.

Very herbal chilli

Spinach is great fresh, too. The patch of earlier plants is now bolting, which had given me something else to add to my list of things to learn: collecting seeds. Part of being food self-sufficiency would involve being able to harvest enough seeds from one year's crop to plant the next one.  No doubt possible, but something about which I know next to nothing. Head down, mouth open, belly full.

Bolting spinach.

Related posts

Sun Day
The Decline and Fall of Clarence Park's Sensory Garden
My Windowsill Herb Garden
Herbs and Shoots
A Bit More Foraging
Harvesting Sage and Feeding Worms
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Return of the Bay Tree (Or, in Praise of the Occasional Beheading)

Another plant I'm happy about is my bay leaf tree.  I had it indoors in a presentable looking pot by my cooker for about a year before I got my allotment.  Though it did provide a steady supply of fresh bay leaves (rarely unwelcome in any recipe) I felt it really wanted and deserved to live outside.  So around September last year I found a spot for it on my allotment and left it to nature's devices.

Right through until around April, it was starting to look as though this had been a mistake.

Three or four sorry brown leaves were all that remained.  Until I noticed this:

A new branch!  All green, and everything.  As concerned the tree itself, there was only one thing for it.  I would have to chop its head off.  So I did.  Cut it right back to just above where the new branch had sprouted.  Two months later, I'm proud to present:

A healthy and productive new branch.  Lesson learned: trees, unlike humans, don't mind having their heads chopped off every now and again.  In fact, they often seem to thrive from it.

Historical footnote: beheading humans has, on occasion, been observed to advance the cause of freedom and democracy. 
Sort of.

Related posts

Give and Take
Northern Forest
Why isn't everything beautiful?
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Prayer Plant Pregnancy

After a little and not quite intentional blogging hiatus, I'm back.  There's a lot of things I want to post about but just as a way of easing back in to prolific posting, I'd like to say that I'm happy today because of this.

What's this?  Let's take a closer look.

See that little green speck in the centre of the picture?  That's a prayer plant shoot, that is.  Way back in January, I got a little too excited about the prospect of an imminent spring (a whole two months before the Beast from the East descended to prove me humiliatingly and spectacularly naive) and began to propagate my prayer plant.

Some of the cuttings did not survive.  In fact, more of them died than didn't.  But a few lingered on, slowly, sadly, nonchalantly.  The leaves began to whiter, and as recently as last week, I considered abandoning them to the compost heap altogether.  Then this morning, I noticed the shoot sprouting from the cutting in the kitchen.  I went into the bedroom, where I also keep a potting cutting, and there, too, a shoot:

The parent plant, meanwhile, looks like this.

I was beginning to wonder if my zealous trimming back of the leaves had been a mistake.  Take a look at these somewhat stunned specimens:

But here's another just as recent unfurling, that looks already almost as healthy and vibrant as its older sisters:

Kept out of the strong direct sunlight, that causes prayer plants to shrivel, and the parent continues to thrive. Plants, again and again, teach us to be patient.  Humans live day to day, plants live more at the speed of months.

Related posts

Prayer Plant Propagation
Prayer Plant Progress
The Beast From the East Murdered My Greenhouse
Prayer Plant Curiosities

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