Monday, September 26, 2011
Foraging
A spate of bad weather and busy-ness kept me mostly away from the allotment for the last 2 weeks, except for a few brief harvsting spurts. We are still eating lots of greenery - coriander, lettuce, parsley, rocket, mint - and also french beans, sweet peppers (good harvest of those this year), raspberries and strawberries and obviously the spuds and onions and garlic already harvested, and now we have started eating the kale and the first Brussel Sprouts!!! yes already. still waiting for carrots to be big enough to eat.
The pumpkins are ripening nicely, yesterday my hubby, for once, was at the allotment and was rather alarmed by them. Firstly he said they are growing onto the path, which is against his world view, and then he counted them and said what are we going to do with all of them!? (Eat them , you fool!).
The spud patch is now completely dug over, there is a box of red Desirees in the cellar and another in the pantry so plenty of spuds for a while. In its place I put in winter spinach and lamb's lettuce.
Another thing we have been doing lately is foraging. This year the big thing is apples. A friend was cheerfully throwing away all the apples on her tree, which was heaving with hundreds of apples. She said they tended to have worms... oO
Complete shock horror to me, who went and harvested them and I now have 3 boxes of apples in the cellar and another big bag in the pantry of the slightly damaged ones, which I am slowly turning into pies and applesauce. They are some kind of wild Reinette and I think rather tasty.
I also found, with a good tipoff, several apple trees hidden on a pathway on our local common. Unfortunetly I only had a wee bag and realised that the scale of the operation was way over that! there were still dozens of apples on the trees. I need to take a ladder down and a few boxes and pick them before they all turn into windfall.
The pumpkins are ripening nicely, yesterday my hubby, for once, was at the allotment and was rather alarmed by them. Firstly he said they are growing onto the path, which is against his world view, and then he counted them and said what are we going to do with all of them!? (Eat them , you fool!).
The spud patch is now completely dug over, there is a box of red Desirees in the cellar and another in the pantry so plenty of spuds for a while. In its place I put in winter spinach and lamb's lettuce.
Another thing we have been doing lately is foraging. This year the big thing is apples. A friend was cheerfully throwing away all the apples on her tree, which was heaving with hundreds of apples. She said they tended to have worms... oO
Complete shock horror to me, who went and harvested them and I now have 3 boxes of apples in the cellar and another big bag in the pantry of the slightly damaged ones, which I am slowly turning into pies and applesauce. They are some kind of wild Reinette and I think rather tasty.
I also found, with a good tipoff, several apple trees hidden on a pathway on our local common. Unfortunetly I only had a wee bag and realised that the scale of the operation was way over that! there were still dozens of apples on the trees. I need to take a ladder down and a few boxes and pick them before they all turn into windfall.
Labels: apples, autumn, beans, lettuce, potato, pumpkin, spinach
# posted by antipodesgirl @ 10:42 AM 
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