GreenFriends™ UK

Gardening Corner: August 2009

"Shouldn't we express our gratitude to Mother Earth, who patiently provides her lap for us to run, jump and play upon? Shouldn't we be grateful to the birds that sing for us, the flowers that blossom for us, the trees that provide us with shade and the rivers that flow for us?"

From the speech Amma delivered during the Cinema Verite's 2007 Film Festival award presentation ceremony

Preserving Produce

This week with harvest time now well underway we will be talking about how to preserve our produce. From August to October there is so much food from the allotment that there is no way anyone could eat it all. So we need ways of preserving it so that we have something to eat during the winter when very little comes in. There are many different methods for this.

1 Drying

Some produce simply needs to spend a bit of time drying and then it will last for months. This includes garlic and onions.  We harvested our garlic in mid July, and we have had it tied up in bunches since then (being careful that bulbs do not touch each other so that there is good circulation of air around them), and will keep it like that in the dark until we use it. Being kept in the dark stops it sprouting prematurely. The onions we have been drying individually on newspaper as it was raining alot when we harvested them in late July. They will also be hung up in the dark eventually.

Herbs can also be dried. We harvest fennel seeds every summer and they are hung up on their stalks away from sunlight for a few weeks to dry well.

2 Freezing

Some of your home grown food can be stored in a freezer. This includes spinach and kale, which can be put straight into bags and into the freezer without any cooking, but also things like runner beans. These benefit from being blanched (just put briefly into a pan of boiling water), before being cooled thoroughly and then put in the freezer in bags. Blanching stops flavour and colour being lost so quickly.

3 Bottling

Many fruits can be very easily bottled. There is ample information available on the internet regarding this, but we have found a very simple method of bottling ripe raspberries and blackberries. Heat up the fruit until it has boiled for five minutes, meanwhile sterilise the jars you are going to use by filling them with boiling water. Also use boiling water to thoroughly sterilise all the lids and all equipment. Then simply fill the jars with boiling fruit as full as possible (for example 0.5 cm from the top), and put the lid on very tight immediately. As it cools the centre of the lid should be pulled downwards (some of them "pop") due to the vacuum created by the hot liquid. If this does not happen then the seal is faulty, and you need to reheat the fruit and use another jar. Sterilising all equipment plus the high acid content of the raspberries and blackberries is what preserves them. We have eaten one year old fruit preserved in this which has been delicious. But you must make sure the fruit is boiling and the lids, jars and utensils are thoroughly sterilised.

4 Pickling

Beetroot and cucumber pickle very well. Again there is ample information on the internet regarding this but we have a very effective and simple method for pickling beetroot. Cook the beetroot whole so as not to lose any flavour. We use a pressure cooker which takes 20 to 30 minutes to cook beetroot, boiling it will take 1 to 2 hours! Meanwhile heat up your vinegar until it is boiling and again thoroughly sterilise all jars and equipment. Peel and slice your hot cooked beetroot (don't burn your fingers like we do!) pack it well into the jars to near the top and fill up with hot vinegar. Then put the lid on tightly as above and wait for the centre of the lid to be pulled downwards. Bobs your uncle! Leave for at least 3 months for maximum deliciousness!

Allotment Diary

As we said above, the harvest is now in full swing. We are picking every week about 7 lbs of runner beans, 7 lbs of spinach, 4 lbs of courgettes, plus pumpkins, aubergines, tomatoes, raspberries, blackberries, cucumbers, kale, yellow squash in varying amounts. Thank goodness for the preserving methods above plus friends who like vegetables. One of the lovely things about growing your own food is giving a bag of nice vegetables to friends when you have a surplus.

Our garlic crop and potatoes are now dried and stored in darkness to preserve them. We had to harvest the potatoes early due to some of the plants getting potato blight, a fungal disease thriving in the cool wet conditions we have had for alot of this summer. It can mean the loss of your whole crop if you don't act quickly. We had been advised to remove all stems, leave for a week or two and then harvest. We did this and probably lost 10 - 15 % of the crop but it could have been alot worse.

Ours onions were ready to harvest in the middle of the cool wet period. This has meant they are taking along time to dry out, plus a certain amount have to be thrown away. We hate throwing away food but sometimes it seems you have to.

We have also been bottling and pickling over the last few weeks using the above mentioned methods, which can be very satisfying.

As a last note, if our allotment diaries sound like growing food on the scale that we do is alot of work, that's because it is ! But it is worth it for many reasons, for growing safe, healthy organic vegetables, for having plenty of exercise in the fresh air, for becoming more aware of the way nature works, and many other reasons. Also, how often in our society do we appreciate the great deal of work that goes into supplying our basic needs such as food, water, clothes etc. Probably not very often. Growing your own food definetly helps you to see this more clearly.

Happy gardening and see you all next month

- Richard and Kaivalya

For GreenFriends™ events in the UK Click Here for events for everyone and here for Youth events.

To read more about GreenFriends™ click here