Articles

It’s hard to believe that we’re now in the sixth month of the year already, and that the longest day of the year is a mere three weeks away. At the risk of getting a slap in the head, let me say this much: it will be Christmas before we know it!
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There is a wonderful Ted Talk by New York-based chef Dan Barbour about a small farm in Spain that produces foie gras humanely (without the force feeding that the product is often lambasted for). Raising his geese in a natural environment, farmer Eduardo Sousa re-discovered that if geese are allowed to forage at will, they will naturally gorge themselves in the autumn to build up fat for the winter. The result? A ‘natural’ foie gras. The important word there is “re-discovered” because there is nothing new in this.
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A few months ago, I was giving a talk about growing things (as you do) to a GIY group and was discussing the growing of spuds when a woman put up her hand to comment. She told us about a tradition in her family when the first new spuds of the season were being harvested. Her grandmother would always take a small batch of new spuds and put them in a biscuit tin, throw in a small covering of soil, put a lid on top and then bury the tin in the garden.
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Tomatoes have a long growing season so to get good fruit you need to get the plants started early (if you are growing from seed). I sow my tomatoes on a heating mat in the potting shed in mid February, so by early March they have germinated.
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2015 is the UN FAO’s Year of Soil. The year-long project aims to raise awareness in society about the ‘profound importance’ of soil for human life and promote the sustainable management of soil. FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said that we are not paying enough attention to soil, our ‘silent ally’, which I reckon is an understatement – as a society we’re paying no attention whatsoever to our soil.
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New Year's resolutions sometimes get a bad rap, because they seem to represent the folly and flightiness of the human spirit. We start off the year with grand intentions to eat only salads, walk/run/swim 100 miles a week, and to do Bikram yoga in a sauna until we weigh as much as a baby sparrow. But then by the end of January we've quietly abandoned our good intentions and reverted to guilty, bloated type.
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This year I managed to fill 3 large hessian sacks with spuds for storage and we've been tucking in to them every other day as required. It's very handy to have them there, waiting patiently in the garage for their moment of destiny in the kitchen.
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With Halloween over, the countdown to Christmas is truly on, and as a result we have turkeys back in our garden again. Each year we rear about 4 turkeys, with one becoming the centerpiece of our Christmas Day celebrations, and the balance jointed and put in to the freezer.
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Yesterday morning I went down to the polytunnel to get a few fresh tomatoes to go with our breakfast eggs, only to walk in on a group of birds conducting a daring raid. They had managed to pull a few ripe tomatoes off the plant, and were busy gorging themselves on the fleshy fruit.
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It's hard to fathom, but it's already August and the seed-sowing year is almost over – this month is the last opportunity to sow seeds and marks the end of seven months of fairly intense seed sowing activity that started way back in the dreary days of February
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