Collecting

With each passing day I can feel colder weather approaching. Autumn is a beautiful time marked by some of my favourite seasonal celebrations, Halloween and fireworks night are always such fun. I am feeling the increasing urgency to gather everything in, in preparation for the winter that lies ahead.With that in mind, we have been collecting lots from the garden recently.

We have a small wooden box divided into even smaller sections that we use for collecting and displays. Middle daughter C and I had fun in the garden this week making the collection pictured below. It lasted just long enough for me to take the photo, then it was destroyed by a rampaging baby. He sampled lots of the flowers too!

The Sweet-peas have been amazing this year. At the height of the summer I was picking bunches every other day. I had never had great success with them before, but this year they were planted in a very fertile bed in full sun and they thrived. So we are saving lots of seed for next year. These seed are so fiddly to pop out of their papery wrappings.

The Runner beans have also been good. If I had a bigger freezer, we could be kept in beans for months. I did make pickled runner beans one year, but it’s not particularly an experience i want to repeat! So we have eaten a lot of fresh beans. Have you tried beans with balsamic vinegar?

I love planting runner beans with children. The seeds are a great size for little hands to cope with and the huge size of the final plants is exciting for kids. At the outdoor playgroup I am involved in (more about this soon) we planted a runner bean den. It was a willow structure planted up with beans which rambled all over it and created a cosy green place for children to hind. That I definitely will be doing again.

Earlier this week we visited the woods where our cabin is. We had an autumn walk, filling our pockets with interesting finds along the way. We always do an autumn display of conkers, acorns, beautiful leaves, figures of woodland creatures and autumn themed books.

I enjoy observing the seasons in this way and I think it is useful for the children to help them understand the cycles of the year. We also do a display for winter, but despite my good intentions to follow this through for Spring and Summer too, these never seem to happen. On reflection I think it is because at those times of year, my attention is focussed outside and decorating the house does not seem as important. During autumn and winter, more time is spent indoors and anything that brings the outdoor in, is vitally important for our well-being.

Our eldest girl, E, did the seasonal table all on her own this year, isn’t it lovely.

Produce no waste. My Kitchen

I recently took part in a Zero Waste Week challenge http://www.zerowasteweek.co.uk

The theme was reducing food waste. It made me think again about how I buy food, how I plan our meals and the things that we waste. I try my hardest to be an ethical shopper, but my good intentions do sometimes go to pot.

The village centre closest to where we live is great. It has a number of greengrocers, bakeries, a Waitrose and an Aldi. Also lots of charity shops and a library. So we are pretty well catered for across the board. We also have a health food shop and farm shop within a short drive and a farmers market once a month. However, when it is rainy, cold, the kids are moaning or I am in a hurry, it is all too easy to pop in the car to the huge supermarket and spend all our money there.

We grow a lot of fruit and veg in our garden and on the community allotment too. This is fab in the summer and autumn, but I have never really got the hang of growing throughout the whole year, so the garden tends to grind to a halt in late autumn leaving us without homegrown food for a good 4 or 5 months of the year. So, my challenges are……

1. Try to extend what I grow to eat throughout the late autumn-spring season.

2. Keep shopping locally and try to avoid the lure of the cosy supermarkets this winter

3. Keep an eye on what is in my fridge and try to minimise food waste.

I intend to do a Permaculture design for this area of my life.

I can’t really imagine anyone else would be the slightest bit interested in the contents of my fridge, so this is rather self-indulgent. However, It is a useful exercise for me, to remind me to be aware of what is lurking in my fridge before I plan meals and go out to buy yet more food. That fridge looks pretty good I recon, fresh eggs from our hens, green beans from the garden, homemade lasagna, humous, sprouted seeds and fresh tomatoes. How very middle-class of me. (I won’t mention the fruit-shoots and jammy-dodgers left over from my daughter’s party or the almost whole melon neglected at the back of the fridge that I need to throw away.)

One great tip that I got from the zero-waste challenge was to turn your fridge upside-down. Move the fruit and veg out of the boxes at the bottom of the fridge and put these into your eye-line. Jars, packets and bottles can go into the boxes where you can ignore them and they will be perfectly fine for ages. Since I have done this, we do waste a lot less fruit and veg – try it, it really does work.

I will finish with 3 lovely things I will be eating over the next few days; a Romanesco Cauliflower, Date and Walnut bread, fresh eggs from our hens. Yum

Off to Market

The kids had an unexpected free day yesterday, so we were able to do one of our favourite Tuesday activities and visit the livestock market! It is the poultry that we are especially interested in. We have ten chicken at home and are always dreaming of more. I particularly had my eye on some Silver-laced Wyandottes (first picture below) These are really striking looking birds. There were a few for sale, but one bunch looked rather old and the others had a cockerel with them. He was a hansom chap, but we can’t really have early morning cock-a-dooing in our suburban garden unfortunately. So we left empty-handed on this occasion, but we will be back.

In the car, my eldest daughter told me in great detail about the farm that she will one day own and the wide variety of animals she will look after there. It sounded like a lovely place and she assured me of a place to live on the farm too, as long as she was the chief farmer. Sounds good to me! We have always wanted our own small-holding. I spend lots of time browsing websites for details of places for sale and wondering if one day it may just be possible. I do feel that studying Permaculture takes us one step closer to achieving that dream. It makes me consider the practicalities, especially how to make it work financially. Maybe that would be an interesting Diploma project, using the (tiny amount) of funds we could make available to buy somewhere and how we would split the workload of kids/ jobs/ farming to make it work?

The kids liked looking at the cows and braving a peep over the stall at the huge fierce bull. They especially liked the calves sucking their mothers. I hope they were sold as one lot and we were not witnessing the final moments of mother and daughter together. I liked the birds the best, there is always a varied selection at the market, we saw quails, geese, pigeons, ducklings, every type of chicken and bantam and even a peahen!