I have chickweed (Stellaria media) going beserk in my garden right now. It is edible – lots of vitamins and minerals and not too bad an addition to a salad. But that uses at most a cupful, and I have a wheelbarrowful. But for those of you with chickens, look out for this herb. It’s a low growing tangle of stems with bright green soft-crisp leaves and tiny white flowers,…
These are the seedlings I potted on last leafy planting day, the seed that I planted the leafy planting day before, way back in mid winter. It is now eight weeks since the seed went in, seven weeks since they germinated. In another three or four weeks, they will be ready to start harvesting. So for more than half their life, they have not used up or needed any garden…
Just over a month ago now (a week or so late), I planted this season’s seed potatoes. They are already up to the stage where they need hilling up, so this morning, before work (dressed very inappropriately in skirt and stockings) I tipped a couple of buckets of compost around them. Job done.
We’ve just harvested the first of the coffee beans for the season, and now begins the slightly laborious process of processing them.
I’m planting another round of all my root staples – carrots, parsnips, spring onions, beetroots – starting seeds off in the shadehouse, and planting out the seedlings started last month. If I do just a tray like this every month, we have a good steady supply. But my main little task today is to dig up some turmeric to take some rhizomes for planting.
It is one of the reasons I use a lunar planting calendar though: in the hurly burly of arbitary fixed deadlines, it reminds me to make time for the more elastic but more real deadlines of the seasons. And then, by doing so I create real wealth – good food, health, beauty, integity, freedom.
It’s hard to imagine now, but by the time these babies go out into the garden, we will be into what is normally the hot,…