Hello, today I'm going to give you five tips for eating seasonally.
I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther farm.
With a few simple strategies and a little bit of planning,
you can eat fresh vegetables all year round.
Although I ought to add, in
some places, where you're still under three feet of snow and are for most of
the winter, that's going to be harder to achieve.
So my first tip, with the help of
my able assistant here, Monty, is to think about substituting foods that you would
normally eat with a meal for something that is actually available. So in the
winter we really like soups and stews and things like shepherd's pie and
they're topped with a layer of mash, or even something like sausage and mash.
Anything where we would use mashed potato you can change that and instead
of it being mashed potato, you could use a vegetable that will sit in the ground all winter.
These are parsnips and they are actually better after a frost,
so we can start using them after our first frost in about November here.
And they will, in a temperate climate, sit in the ground for the whole winter.
Now a really, really useful tip that I saw on the internet quite a while ago, is
instead of digging your no dig vegetables, you push down and that kind of releases
them and then they will just lift up out of the ground. Now I've got to say this
doesn't work all the time and it doesn't work on the really big parsnips, but on
these smaller ones and where they're straight, it works really well . So all I'm
doing is loosening the soil a little bit from around the top of them, pushing down
and that allows them to just come straight out.
So instead of potatoes we
can use parsnip or swede (rutabaga), celeriac, carrots.
This is a difficult one!
This isn't going to come out easily. (Music)
I just want to show you it's not always as easy as push down and lift out, but
there we go! And that's the reason why, because it was quite a big parsnip,
it was quite a long one but there you go.That's without digging a huge amount.
That soil I can cover that back over, let the worms carry on doing their job.
And one of the other root vegetables that we've discovered this year is root parsley.
I sowed this in the spring and it grew and we used the leaves, the greenery,
as parsley for the whole summer and then as autumn arrived we started
using the roots. And these are small, white roots. Actually some of them have
been an okay size and now I won't be able to find a good sized one to show you.
Oh these are quite a good size and they've got...ooh there's a nice one, they've got a
mild parsley flavor, but to be honest by the time they're cooked, that's not, it's
not an overwhelming flavor, it's just the light pleasant flavor.
We've had these in soups, stews and used them has an alternative to mashed potato.
And I'll leave links for the seeds for all of these vegetables in the information below.
And one of the other things that I've been doing for the last
couple of years, is pushing the boundaries in terms of sowing times.
So most seed packets give you a guide of roughly when they can be sown and then
I'm extending that I'm sowing a little bit later in the year, in the hope that
plants will overwinter and give me a very early harvest in the spring.
These are beet roots that I put in late summer, early autumn, could
have been as late as mid to late September. And let's just have a look.
Well, it's golf ball-sized, this is, this is a beetroot Cylindra, so doesn't
get round, it's gets a long thin beetroot. But that little beetroot, a couple of those
added to a tray of mixed vegetables or into some some soup will be absolutely
lovely and really welcome addition, just to give us a broader range of vegetables
that we can eat during the year.
We're heading towards what they call the
'hungry gap', where the winter vegetables are mostly gone and the spring and
summer vegetables haven't yet got to be ready to harvest.
And those are the times that we rely more and more on our stored food.
But there are still plenty of
vegetables out here at the moment that we can eat. This is purple sprouting broccoli.
And one of the things that I love about this is that the more you
pick it, the more it comes, and only if you leave it too long it will start
going to seed. So it's one of those little and often vegetables. You can also
eat the young leaves like a kale or a cabbage.
So in my efforts to bridge that
hungry grap, I've been looking at ways to extend the growing season. So there's
planting seeds a bit later than they say, in the hope that the plants will grow a
little bit and then give us an early crop of baby vegetables is one way.
And the other way is to grow under cover. But if you're not as fortunate as me and
you don't have a greenhouse or a polytunnel,
there are ways to do that in the garden.
And it really doesn't matter whether you
have great big growing beds like I do or a very small space or even a windowsill or
a window box. Tere are still ways that you can get your soil ready sooner and
get your plants growing sooner. What I'm going to do is create a mini
greenhouse or a cloche over the soil to warm it up.
Now this is, underneath here,
is the soil that we grew in last year. I've kept this we reasonably weed free
by putting used duck bedding on it, but it doesn't matter if you haven't done that.
I appreciate not everybody has ducks to be able to do this, so you could
also cover the area with black plastic or layers of cardboard, anything
that will block out the light and prevent the weed seeds from germinating.
So the next step is to find some plastic to make a covering. Now you could use glass panels,
you could use old windows and if you can find them there are things like
barn cloches, there are cloches that you can buy. I'm going to do this with some offcuts
of tubing from a building site and some polythene that we had leftover from when
we did the polytunnel.
And I'll leave this like this for a week
or two and then get sowing in here. Now if I'd done this at the beginning of
February I could have been sowing mid-february in it. But what does matter
is what you're now sowing in this. You're not going to build to sow vegetables
that need a very warm germination. But you could get carrots in there, you can
get some peas, you could get salads in there.
But it will help you extend your
growing season if you don't have a greenhouse or polytunnel.
My next tip is to only grow what you like to eat.
There's absolutely no point in growing things just because you like to grow
them if you want to be self-sufficient in your food. Ao this is Asturian Tree Cabbage,
which I really like the taste of. It's cabbagey but it's really mild,
it's very fresh, I even like that the color is so bright on our plate.
I don't grow a huge amount of it because
we actually have quite a lot of brassicas to choose from, but a bit is very nice.
Asturian Tree Cabbage is a fairly short-lived perennial, so this has
been, this third year, it has started going to seed, it's started flowering, so I'm
breaking the flower heads off and we can eat those like you would a broccoli.
But that will help prevent it going to seed. If it goes to seed, it won't grow
again next year.
We also grow Chard, now I am not a huge fan of chard, and so
having just said grow what you like to eat, this seems to counter what I've just said.
But, they're very squeaky at this time of year, but I do like the young
leaves in salads and I also like the stems chopped up and roasted. So I take
the leaves off of the older, these older leaves and they go to the chickens, this
goes to the kitchen - none of it gets wasted.
So how do you know whether you like something or not? Well, the only thing you
can do is grow it and give it a go and try it and if you like it, like we did
with a Hamburg Parsley, where we just grew a small amount in 2019. We know we like
it, so we'll be growing much more in 2020. If you don't like it, well, it's not
necessarily wasted because you could swap it, barter, with other friends and
gardeners who might grow something that you don't have and then you can give
them your 'whatever it is that you aren't very keen on' and they might have
something they're not very keen on or something that they just have a glut of.
Around this time last year I launched Grow A Gift 2019. Well, it's probably
time to do2020, so I will talk about that in another video, but I really
do think if you have the space, it's worth growing a little extra so you can
share it with other people.
Well I'm going to take the celeriac with all the
other vegetables I've harvested this morning, get them into the kitchen and
cook some roast mixed vegetables and I'm going to use some celeriac and
parsnip and root parsley to make some mash to go on top of a shepherd's pie.
And when I cook, I always cook in bulk - so more than we need just for one meal -
and portion them up and get them into the freezer. Because that saves my time and
my energy, but also the electricity for cooking with.
And so wherever you are in the world,
and whatever you've got planned for today, I hope it's a good one,
and also hope you'll join me again next time!