Colourful Meals from the Garden

Happy New Year to all!

I don’t seem to find my way to the computer very often these days, and the garden is still suffering a bit as well. Owen is a delicious baby and I treasure all the time I spend with him, but miss writing Farmlet updates, and have made a New Year’s resolution to write at least one post a week. Hmm. . .but here it is the 9th of January and I’m just writing the first post of the year, so we’ll have to see how things work out!

Our rather neglected garden is still yielding some lovely vegetables. We made a baked vegetable dish last night comprised of “bull’s blood” beets, two kinds of carrots, zucchini and burdock root. I thought the bright colours of the vegetables looked like jewels, and begged Kevin to take a photo.


Vegetable melange

It is very gratifying to be eating carrots from the garden at last. I had three failed attempts at direct-seeding a bed of carrots before finally deciding to sow them in flats and transplant them into the garden at 4-inch spacings. Anyone who is familiar with carrot seedlings will appreciate that this was rather fiddly work! I think Kevin was wondering if I’d gone a bit nuts — or, since I was pregnant at the time, he may just have surmised that I was putting a horticultural spin on the nesting impulse. Anyway, after spending all that time transplanting carrot seedlings, I would have been gutted if the crop had failed. I planted two kinds of carrots, Scarlet Nantes and Nutri Red. Both are cropping well. The Scarlet Nantes are your typical sweet orange carrot, while the Nutri Red are a pinky-red colour, and supposedly have a higher nutrient content than most other carrot varieties. They are not quite as sweet as the Scarlet Nantes, and are nicer cooked than eaten raw. We love the extra colour that the red and orange carrots are adding to our meals.

Coming soon:
Update from the cow paddock (Herman Beefsteak is growing up big and beefy!)
More news from the garden
An updated baby photo
and more. . .

4 Responses to “Colourful Meals from the Garden”

  1. Rebecca KS says:

    Yes, an updated baby photo is in order! 🙂

    Those vegetables look delicious–my little balcony can’t keep up with your garden in terms of vegetable production, but the basil, parsley, green onions, rosemary, and peppers that I used on my roasted potatoes this week were enough to keep me from being too jealous… for now.

  2. Doug says:

    Looking forward to the ongoing “weekly” updates, as often as the Mighty Owen — and the seasonal chores of spring and summer — allow them to appear… =)

    Just as with the inaugural year of Farmlet, while we harvest, you prepare, and now vice versa. While we work our way through the containers of apples, beets, carrots, potatoes and other staples of northern European winter grown right here and stocked in our cellar (one of the main reasons we truly love this old pile of Rhenish rocks), our Doppelgangers down under display the colorful cornucopia of spring in all its edible glory.

    Thanks once again for your online efforts with the Farmlet. Though comments from our direction are surely too few & far between, we both take pleasure in the knowledge that there are others out there like ourselves attempting to construct islands of sanity in a world going slowly mad.

    Re-learning and applying the nearly-lost traditional nutrition and agricultural practices, so heavily snowed under by several decades of industrial “progress” and propaganda, feels as noble a pursuit as one can chase as the humanity moves toward what those of us who “gaze at entrails” and roll bones suspect will be uncertain times at best.

    Meanwhile, our collection of housepets, from the chickens to our loyal scobys, even the wild flora that ferment all of our sour cream and chew through our compost, continue to diversify and flourish. If all goes well, I will have the property fully re-rigged for additional livestock — and additional heads & hands — over the next couple years.

    It’s been a long and lonesome road just to get to this point: done clearing and cleaning and propping-up and repairing, and finally starting to genuinely renovate and make ready to rebuild and repurpose the existing structures. I also have enough work in our various stands of timber to keep me busy for the rest of my natural life.

    On the upside, we will never lack for raw materials for building, craft, cooking or heating, so long as we care for our forests as well as they ultimately care for us. Strangely, what would have seemed a sentence in my youth, a slavery of sorts, today is a source of comfort, enjoyment and good exercise. I begin to suspect this is what they call “growing up”, but I’m still in wait-and-see mode on that one.

    I say this because despite dangerous signs of maturity on my part in recent times, I have at once become a somewhat fanatic tool collector. Kevin understands this compulsion as realistically as I try to, being a one-man army like him much of the time myself. The “Benzinsklaven” I call them, my little army of hydrocarbons and me.

    So, now to the practical questions bursting from my seams, waiting for me to finish blathering on above:

    1. What sort of options exist in your area — and which are you considering — for Herman, when he reaches the beefsteak stage of his career?

    2. Beyond your oh-so-intelligent manouever to produce your own raw milk on-site, what options exist in your part of the world for those who can’t/don’t/won’t?

    3. Beyond the WAPF circle of traditional knowledge and wisdom, what other resources are your primary go-to “manuals” when it comes to expanding your range in matters culinary/nutritional/health-related? (as far as I can tell, at some point in the learning curve, one eventually realizes that these three realms are inseparable, siamese triplets if you will.)

    I’ll leave off there, with the additional thought that if you do have the time to approach the questions, using a future thread(s) or topic to do so is just great. Kevin keeps dropping not-so-veiled hints that I should be making my own joyful noises here on the web as well, and I keep making the excuse of time, though I know deep down it is mostly a matter of lack of commitment. That you two have such a strong sense of commitment to this, the public education aspect of what our lifestyle changes genuinely represent, only raises you further in my esteem.

    The only question that remains is: what will Owen’s first word be? Will it be spoken, or perhaps typed at the laptop with Dad, already showing him the ropes? =)

  3. Michelle says:

    Nice carrots, all I have growing is turnips.
    Thanks for the update, I look forward to
    more.

    Michelle

  4. kermujin says:

    Well good you’ve got a secure supply of turnips, Michelle, so you won’t have to trade for ’em… ;D

    The veggies look spectacular, Rebecca! Looking forward to baby and beefsteak updates…