This week’s Small Share (week six) has asparagus kale, salad leaves, Spring greens, chard, herbs and some kind of allium.
Alliums are the garlic/onion family. At the moment I have some Spring onions, green garlic and garlic scapes. I’m growing elephant garlic and standard garlic in the greenhouse. A scape is a flowering stalk produced in the Spring. Scapes look like an arrow, just cut off the pointy bit and the stalk can be chopped into batons and fried in olive oil/butter. These are appearing a few at a time so I’ll distribute them over the next few weeks. A website with loads of good garlic recipes is https://www.thegarlicfarm.co.uk/blogs/recipes.
The herbs will include some sage, I know this is a Christmas herb but that makes no sense at all because it’s at it’s best in May! Garlic scapes and sage, fried in butter sounds like a good combo to me, maybe with Spring greens and a cheese omelette (plenty of eggs in the egg box.)
I keep meaning to write something about packaging. At this time of year most of the veg is of a leafy nature and can’t really be packaged in a paper bag. Unfortunatly there’s nothing quite like plastic for keeping vegetables fresh. Biodegradeable/compostable options are hard to find and more expensive than standard plastic bags. Also I can’t find much info about what the compostable options are made from. It seems unlikely that plant based bags are organic (the price would be stratospheric), are they made from GM crops – I don’t know? I think recyclable plastic bags are probably a better option but not one available to us on Skye.
The compostable/biodegradable bags I’ve been using do appear to break down in a hot composter. I suspect a typical garden compost bin won’t do a good job or may take years. If any customers want to return bags to me I can put them in our hot compost bin. The cloudy bags labelled “compostable” have the best chance of fully composting.
I’m still planting. The end is not in sight, but all the first Summer crops are in the ground, so expect mange tout, broad beans, various broccolies, radishes, cavolo nero, French beans and courgettes in July (poss June.) I’ve just planted something called Austrian tree cabbage, it’s a kind of loose cabbage which grows very tall and can be cut back and allowed to regrow over several years. Let’s hope it tastes good!
The sugar snaps in the Polycrub are flowering so hopefully there will be a small crop of them soon. There are also baby broad beans in there. It’s possibly too hot for a really good crop of broad beans, not a usual problem here, but we’ll have to wait and see. For anyone who hasn’t grown broad beans their flowers have the loveliest scent. I don’t think “eau de broad bean” would sell, but it would smell amazing!
When I was planting the peas I disturbed yet more voles. The babies have no sense of danger and just scuttle around at my feet. The mum seems to have moved them now thankfully. I didn’t spend hours planting peas to feed the next generation of voles.