The remaining borlotti will be sufficient for little more than a particularly diminutive casserole…
Read moreHow to grow your dinner
Lockdown happened, and interest in growing your own food exploded. No-one’s going to become self-sufficient over night, but being less reliant on vulnerable systems seems more attractive by the day. Which is all very well if you have acres, but what if you garden is a balcony, or a window ledge? With this book published today, Claire Ratinon shows us how to grow fresh, exciting vegetables in the smallest of spaces.
Read moreThe Gardens, weeds & words podcast, Series 2 Episode 8
A chance to discuss our relationship to the land and the food it can produce with organic grower Claire Ratinon, whose urban veg growing exploits began on a New York rooftop and continued in London’s East End. I’m introduced the concepts of the “delectability of vegetables”, food-as-love, and what it feels like to be a grower of colour.
Read moreDay 260: ruby chard
Is it possible my ruby chard will remain unslugmunched for the duration of the colder months? I do hope so. This is one of the aesthetic vegetables that really make the kitchen garden sing with colour, texture and structure…
Read moreSpud man
Is there anything more wonderful than digging your own potatoes out of the ground just in time for dinner? I can’t think of anything right now.
Everything about the experience is thoroughly rewarding. The spring in your step as you march confidently to the vegetable plot, in the comforting knowledge that you’re not entirely reliant on Sainsburys for everything. Then there’s plunging your fork into the ground, and turning the rich soil to reveal the buried treasures, which always somehow surprise me as they appear between the tines. One, two...three, then an unexpected fourth, fat, yellow, joyous spuds which – if you’re really lucky – you haven’t put the fork through (I’m getting better at this - the trick, I’ve found, is to stick the fork into the earth further back from the yellowing haulms of the potato plants than you might think, and then agitate the soil with a rocking, twisting motion to tease the tubers up unharmed). And then as you stoop to pick up your prize, rubbing the flesh clean with your thumbs, the smell of fresh soil and that earthy, nutty crispness somehow simultaneously knocks you off your feet and roots you firmly to the ground on which you stand.
This is soul food; and you haven’t even got them back to the kitchen yet.