Earthy Sweetness

I’m using the time before everyone gets up to get some ordering done. I usually wake up as it starts to get light, which is about 5ish at this time of year, let the chooks out and have a wander through the garden. We went up to Sue and Rob’s last night for a roast, including some roasted beetroot and parsnips from our garden. Delicious. The beetroot caramelises as it roasts, intensifying the flavour and adding depth to the earthy sweetness. The parsnips are the first of the season, still small but long and straight. My parsnips are going off this year so I can afford to pick some early, pretending to myself that I’m thinning them but really just impatient to see how they taste and keen to avoid a glut later. It was a moment of such anticipation, grasping the first one and pulling it free, surprised at how fantastic it looked.


The garden has been getting a bit more energy in the last couple of days. I netted the tomato bed to keep the bower birds out and then yesterday we worked on extending our latest bed. It is another good sized space and we’re still deciding what to use it for. I like the idea of planting sunflowers along the fence so they lean to the north and over the chook fence. If we plant the ones with the enormous heads that are full of seeds the chooks will love it. For the rest of the bed we could use it for growing more chook food like amaranth or maybe turn it into a perennial bed for a big crop of sweet potatoes or rhubarb.


The grass really likes our rich beds so keeping it out is a constant focus and something that we’re paying more attention to, pushing it back and trying to work out how to keep it out with the least effort. We’re trialling comfrey, hoping that the deep clumping roots combined with the thick foliage will do the job. I say trialling but really once it’s in I think we’ve got no chance of ever removing it completely, every little piece of root left behind will shoot and shoot again. Fortunately it’s a good bio-accumulator, rich in potassium and excellent for stock feed, mulch and compost.


The ordering I’m doing is for our food co-op, adding bulk dry goods to our fruit and veg. We’ve recently set up an account with an organic distributor and everyone is pouring over 14 pages of things like raw cashews, dried cranberries and unhulled tahini. Everything is so much cheaper than the prices we pay in the shops and makes eating organic more affordable. Between the garden and our co-op ordering I feel swamped with food at the moment, enjoying the abundance and at the same time aware of a lengthening shadow cutting out the sun and threatening to drown us in a rapidly approaching tsunami of food. We need a chest freezer.