Alice’s Diary: Week 2

Week 2 started with the delivery of our first veg box from Phantassie farm. I should have written down what it contained there and then but from memory I think it was

lettuce
potatoes
tomoatoes
courgettes
green beans
chicory
red peppers
carrots
onions
chard

which are many of the things we couldn’t get our hand on the week before. Rather than spend a day going round various other places we only needed to do a small shop for the staples (milk, bread, eggs etc) and we were good to go.

So the week started great with a menu of veggie quiche, homemade pizza, caesar salad, omlettes and Niall made a magnificent spinach curry, all using locally grown ingredients. Then I got sick and I’m sorry to say all things local went out the window and I resorted to tins of soup and the softest and whitest of sliced white bread (not local).

So as I don’t have much to tell you about this week I thought I’d tell you about my veg patch.

Niall and I moved into our house about 18 months ago. The previous owner was a vegetable gardener and the sight of the neat rows of vegetables was partly what attracted us to the house. Then over the next year while we were working on the inside of the house we let the garden go wild – leeks grew taller than people, the local cats used it as their hunting ground, the lovely rows of vegetables disappeared from sight.

This year we decided to get on top of it. We cleared a small strip, bought wood for Tyninghame Sawmill and built 3 raised beds which we planted with the usual novice gardener selection of veg (carrots, spinach, rocket etc). We got a wormery from Andrew at Sustaining Dunbar to make our own compost. And lo and behold things started to grow. Granted, not everything but for year one certainly much more than we expected and to be honest a bit more than we can eat. Spinach, Kale and Rocket – I chose to grow these because I thought it would save us from the soggy leaves at the bottom of the bag – we could pick fresh ones whenever we wanted. However it seems ‘whenever we want’ isn’t often enough. The curry I mentioned earlier was Niall noble effort to make a dent in the spinach patch. This got me thinking about a an initiative they have in the States. It is called Ample Harvest and it connects local gardeners with local foodbanks creating a supply channel of
fresh fruit and veg to people who really need it. Clever eh? You can find out more at http://www.AmpleHarvest.org/index.php.

Anyone for spinach?