Down on my allotment plot, the Circus Garden, I’ve been busy of late sowing and planting in preparation for the new season’s vegetable crops. Although my focus is primarily on the future, I still have produce from the old season which has survived the mild winter and continues to provide us with fresh organic vegetables. Leeks, kale, spinach, chard and purple sprouting broccoli have done particularly well and are still […]
During the transition between the end of winter and the middle of spring is a period which traditionally was known as the “hungry gap”. This marked the grim phase of the growing calendar when the last of the hardy winter crops had been used up and the new season’s first crops were not yet ready to harvest. In times gone by the poor had to rely on whatever food they […]
Cargill may not mean a great deal to most of us. But it is a major player on the world food stage. Just as Monsanto has a growing stranglehold over the seeds and chemicals used for growing our food, so Cargill looms large at the other end of the global food business conveyor belt. As the company boasted in a corporate brochure a few years back: ‘We are the flour […]
Growing and cooking in harmony with the seasons, as I am trying to do, is based upon the fundamental recognition that no crop has a year-long life cycle. Of course, a wander up and down the fruit and vegetable aisles in our local supermarkets would suggest completely the opposite. There, fruit such as strawberries, raspberries and blueberries appear to be in magical, perpetual supply, despite the reality of their relatively […]