Today is Lammas, Lughnasadh in the Southern hemisphere. It’s the end of the long lazy days of summer holiday, and the start of the autumn season of bringing in the harvest. It’s the start of the season where you reap what you have sown, for good or bad.
My Burundi neighbour introduced me to bitter leaf. It’s a well-known, widely cultivated culinary and medicinal plant in Africa. She uses it for her diabetes, and when I started looking I found quite a lot of research supporting its folk medicine reputation, especially as an antidiabetic.
I love the chair. It saves me the angst of murdering perfectly healthy seedlings, or worse, being tempted to plant them and use up all my precious garden space on more basil or zucchinis than any household can stand. The chair brings me into lovely conversations with passers by who garden, even just pots on highrise balconies. Because I am sharing what I am myself planting, it creates conversations about…
The catbird, for some reason only known to its birdy mind, doesn’t like the teepee as a perch nearly as much as my vertical or arched wire trellises. So I have accidentally solved the problem of growing pole beans in the garden. Which I am very happy about because these beans make an excellent cannellini bean substitute.
Give ginger the right conditions and it thrives so well that it’s not hard to keep a year round supply sufficient for making curries from scratch, adding to stir fries or tea, making pickled ginger for rice paper rolls and sushi, taking in a care package for pregnant friends, and crystallising for seasickness lollies or treats.
I try hard to avoid gluts. It was always a goal even in rural homesteading with lots of room, but I’m even more motivated now in suburbia, where every glut is using space that could have been saving a trip to the supermarket. But I don’t mind full day in the kitchen every so often if the product is worth it.
Someone asked me in a comment what I do with the Madagascar beans. So … Beans feature in many traditional (and blue zone) cuisines. They’re hugely healthy. Madagascar beans adapt to most Mexican, Tex Mex and Central American recipes – which is one of my favourite cuisines. Madagascar beans also adapt well to most Mediterranean recipes – which is another of my favourite cuisines.