Month: April 2019

The first vegetables went in today: the tomatoes, zucchini, and basil, all grown from seed. The tomatoes are a bit spindly, but I’ve put them in to a well-composted bed (thanks, CompostNow!), so fingers crossed. I’ve also put in two Monarda plants to replace the ones that didn’t come back last summer. I’m still trying to decide where to plant the other starts. All my initial ideas were overturned as I looked at the garden today. I think I’ll put the artichokes in with the rhubarb (and not the baby brassicas). Yes, I’m trying artichokes again. Third time lucky, I hope. I’d also like to plant a three sisters bed, and revamp the rocket (arugula) patch into a mini herb garden. Some rocket has come back already, but that space is a weedy mess right now. Only the sage is holding its own.

In other garden news, the blueberry bushes are in flower, as is the comfrey (see above). Both were attracting butterflies and bees.

Apart from sage and also mint, nothing is ready to eat. The rhubarb has already bolted (!) but after a quick internet search (thanks, The Daring Gourmet), I find I don’t need to panic about that. I’ll cut the flowers off and perhaps still get to enjoy some home-grown rhubarb.

If my rhubarb is (sort of) in season, then I must be able to buy it locally, but I’ve not seen any in the shops yet. The one item I was excited to see in Wholefoods Durham were local strawberries. I confess, I have a bad track record of buying strawberries on impulse, thinking I’ll do something special with them, but then leaving them in the fridge for weeks until they’re good for nothing except compost. Not this time! These will get eaten, not the least because… Enter my new juicer (one of these)!! I have frozen one of the punnets to make sorbet, and fruit from the other will be added to juices. Strawberry and apple juice for sure…

The first week of the eating local challenge has gone quite smoothly. It helps, of course, that I had lots of store-cupboard ingredients to hand – oatmeal, flour, sugar, pasta, canned tomatoes, yoghurt, parmesan cheese. What will I do when the oatmeal runs out, or the ingredients to make soda bread, which has been my breakfast these last few mornings? If I buy bread baked locally, will that count, no matter where they sourced their flour? For a long time now, I’ve been the kind of shopper who scrutinizes the ingredients list on a packaged item, usually to check that it doesn’t contain any hidden, non-vegetarian surprises. It adds another layer of complexity to be worrying now about how far individual ingredients have traveled. In fact, I can source regionally grown and milled bread and pasta flours (from Anson Mills), so I could make my own bread… If only my bread machine hadn’t died.

The biggest change so far – and this is the kind of shift that Barbara Kingsolver talks about in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – is that dinner doesn’t begin with an idea for what I’d like, a shopping list, and a trip to the supermarket. Instead, I’m starting with what I have to hand – the fruits and vegetables in season here, or that came with my Ungraded Produce box – and figuring things out from there.

Two of the best meals this past week, made with in-season, locally grown produce, were pasta with asparagus sauce, and a lemony pan-fried kale dish. A confession: citrus trees don’t grow in North Carolina (to the best of my knowledge), but lemons, like coffee, are something I don’t think I can live without.

For pasta with asparagus, cook the asparagus in boiling water (the tips will take only a minute or two), puree the stems with lemon zest, and then combine with the pasta, asparagus tips, and plenty of grated parmesan.

For the sautéd kale dish: sauté chopped garlic and dried oregano in olive oil, throw in handfuls of chopped kale (stems removed), salt and pepper, a little water, and a lot of lemon juice.