(Above: today’s bounty from a little wander around my own garden.)
Do you buy sprouts, bags of mesclun mix or microgreens from the supermarket?
Winter is a great time to find volunteer (‘weed’) microgreens, or young greens, around your garden or local park for FREE!
Because of winter’s rain and damp, the young weeds will be beautifully bright green, healthy and not heat-stressed.
To share some likely contenders with you, I took a walk around my small urban yard and here’s what I harvested.
I took care to only harvest volunteers/weeds and nothing that I’d planted intentionally. (Violet grows like a weed in my yard.)
The trick is to just harvest the young leaves, or the tips in the case of the dead nettle.
These wild ‘microgreens’ can be used in a salad, or chopped and sprinkled on top of soup, or in sandwiches, or blended into a smoothie…the same as you would use supermarket or homegrown microgreens.
I numbered the plants for ease of ID-ing them:
Nasturtium leaves. These are peppery in flavour so great in salads and on sandwiches, not so great in smoothies.
Dead Nettle tips. Great stand-in for lettuce.
Young violet leaves and flowers. Use in salad or cook as your would spinach.
Young ribwort plantain leaves. Important to pick the young ones as the older ones get stringy. The young leaves have a nutty flavour.
Chickweed. Such an enthusiastic garden volunteer. Use the young growth and chop finely.
Young dandelion leaves. These add a nice bitter element to a salad or sandwich. Not so great in smoothies.
Oxalis (known in the UK as ‘wood sorrell’ and the USA as ‘sour grass’) Has a sour, lemony flavour similar to sorrell. Use just a little at a time as it contains oxalic acid. Treat it more like a herb than a main vegetable.
Young mallow leaves. Mallow (also know as ‘Malva’) is a much-used vegetable in Middle-Eastern cuisine and parts of Italy. You can make dolmades with the leaves in place of grape leaves, making it useful during the winter when there are no grape leaves about. Young leaves are good in salad or cooked like spinach.
& of course, these plants have medicinal properties as well, (most plant food does.
I hope this inspires you to have a close look at what might be growing in your own back yard and save yourself a little money (or time) by eating some of the weeds around you.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
(Above: plastic rubbish I picked out from my vegetable beds last week. I collect around this much rubbish each time I tend or harvest from my vegetable beds.)
I enjoy the writing on The Dark Mountain Project. It’s an ongoing project (based in the UK) that publishes ‘uncivilised writing’, holds gatherings, creates a space for conversations about all manner of unsettling and challenging elements of living at this point of human history. There you will find writing beyond polite eco poetics or nature writing that merely holds nature in a human/nature binary of saccahrine reverence. I don’t always agree with what I read there and that is why I like it.
At first it seems a deceptively simple piece of writing, Amy describes a group of parents at a childrens’ birthdday party. One of them brings up the subject of the finding of microplastics in human placentas. The piece explores plastic: our culpability and the unavoidable enormity of the tsunami of plastics in our lives.
I have a fairly high threshold for ingesting media about climate collapse and environmental degradation. I don’t have my head in the sand.This is not because of courage but more that I am an anxious person who approaches life in a ‘forewarned is forearmed’ sort of way. I like to know something of what’s coming so I can consider in advance how I might respond. (I’d prefer not to be built this way but there is only so much you can do about your neurological wiring.)
I was surprised by my visceral reaction to this piece with it’s blunt presentation of human culpability in terms of the use of plastics and refusal to look away from the idea of microplastics in human placentas, in human bodies. ‘Now we recognise ourselves less and less’, Amy writes. A familiar feeling for the eco-anxious amongst us and a statement that works on many levels.
A few years back I wrote a poem in a similar vein about digging up the backyard of my crappy Wellington flat to grow food for my oldest son when he was a baby …only to years later find out that backyard had been a dumping ground for old car bodies and broken machinery and was no doubt full of petrol and lead and other toxins. In my youthful naiveté, I hadn’t considered the urban soil’s history.
These human missteps we make in the name of love: a birthday cake served with a plastic fork, feeding a baby mashed carrots grown in polluted soil…the hell we plod towards on our road of good intentions.
The depth to which I was triggered by Amy’s writing surprised me at first (I thought I was made of tougher stuff by now). But then when I thought about it, I realised it touched on a tender spot in my own gardening practice…a spot where I choose to put blinders on.
I live in the centre of a city. Every time I weed or harvest from my front yard garden (tended so carefully with the best organic soil amendments and lovingly homemade compost) I fish bits of plastic out of my garden: plastic bag fragments, fruit stickers, junk food packaging, lollipop sticks. Some of it seems to get into our compost somehow, despite careful sorting at the kitchen end. The plastic in the vegetable beds seems to blow in from the street.
(I wondered if this plastic trash were an urban problem but a friend who lives rurally said that there is just as much plastic trash out her way, in the road gutters, in streams, from the plastic packaging of hay bales and farm products.)
I throw the bits of plastic into a colander that I have with me in my harvest basket then put them in the rubbish bin where they will travel in a plastic bag to the plastic afterlife, which is to say slowly deteriorating into microplastics in the city’s landfill.
I dwell in a space of both knowing that I have my stubborn blind spots (the macro and micro plastics in my own food garden and in the soil I am creating in my compost) and also having no inclination to stop. I will carry on composting. I will carry on growing food in this microplastick-y soil I am making.
I enjoyed this essay about composting by Scottish writer Fraser MacDonald (found via Pip Lincolne) He, too, is carrying on composting on despite tangible evidence of plastics in his compost. He writes:
‘I make my own compost so that I can convince myself that even when the world seems socially and ecologically broken there are still mechanisms for recovery: it shows that change is possible. Composting is a simple habit of composition or gathering together that integrates past fragments into a future whole, so that what matters is not the individual ingredients but the fertile new thing they can become.‘
& that ‘fertile new thing’ possibly contains microplastics…yet still I persist in habits which put me squarely in the ‘doing’ space of the world, in flawed creative acts which give me a sense of agency and regenerate my spirit if nothing else.
(Above: many hands make work fun. A harvesting and chopping working bee at Kirsty’s place. Photo by Kirsty Porter.)
Fascism is on the speedy rise, climate collapse is escalating, increasingly our governments and power structures are unreliable at best, malevolent at worst. What is there to be done?
I’m in a couple of ‘conscious-collapse’ groups. One is aimed more at emotional support and mutual aid (deep listening, space-holding, nourishing one another with beauty and soothing art), the other is more about practical supports, and intentional-relationship-building over time (working bees, resource sharing, fun gatherings.)
While both groups have group chats in messaging apps, we make a conscious effort to take them offline and get together regularly, because actually being together is so much more healing than more time staring at our phones.
The photo above is the latter group. We had a working bee to harvest all the end-of-season green tomatoes, then we sat around Kirsty’s kitchen table and chopped up the harvest. We filled four buckets (!) with chopped green tomatoes. Kirsty kept two, M & R took one and I took one. Kirsty, M&R turned theirs into Kirsty’s Grandmother’s recipe for green tomato chutney and I turned mine into a spicy Mexican green sauce.
While we worked, we chatted, we laughed and the folks in the group who had only recently met got to know each other better. It might not seem to have much to do with the mitigation of fascism & climate collapse…but it was a practical, positive, soul-warming way to spend an afternoon. Every small action like this brings us closer, braids us together a little more…all while we work on our food resilience skills.
Kirsty might have struggled to ‘capture and store’ her green tomato abundance alone…but with five of us at work…we got it all done in a couple of hours.
What sorts of things are you doing to nourish yourself in these challenging times?
In other tomato news…I like to challenge myself to memorise high-rotate recipes, like fruit crumbles, scones, pikelets, simple cakes…so in the unlikely event I am somewhere I can’t use my recipe books or the internet, I can still make these things. I figure it’s good for my brain, at the very least. Also, it makes me feel next-level to be able to bash them out without cracking a book.
This winter, I am attempting to perfect and memorise focaccia. I made this one with one of the last crops of cherry tomatoes and basil from the garden.
In my household, we are seasonal eaters, which gives the last tomato harvests a real poignancy.
The basil is valiantly carrying on, despite some colder nights…but how much longer for? Time to make some big batches of pesto, I think.
Apple cheeks, apple weeks, the race against the birds…
The inherited tree which has the codlin moth – I know it’s time to strip the tree when the birds begin to peck at the apple tops – this means they are sweet and ready. Cutting around the moth tunnels, making apple sauce which turn into breakfast or crumbles or just eaten with a teaspoon standing at the fridge when I realise I’m starving but have to do the school run in two minutes. (I continue to ‘battle’ against the codlin moth. They are determined creatures.) The commitment of using seasonal abundance. It’s a gift, sure, but it’s work. Sometimes hours and hour of work. Sitting at the table, making the meditation ‘can I take all the peel off in one go?’ Buckets and buckets of practice later tell me that I can’t, but it’s fun trying.
The Ballerina apple tree which was a wedding present 20 years ago, and moved with us from flat to flat in a big pot, finally planted into the ground here and produces the most beautiful green and red apples, like the ones from Snow White…
This tree on an abandoned section – the way fruit trees give and give, regardless of how they are tended or neglected. Walking onto ‘private property’ to pick the apples. Respecting the tree’s gift more than the human’s claim. Not wanting the generosity of the tree to go unnoticed, unappreciated. Leaving plenty for the birds.
At my permaculture course, Duncan brings two beautiful baskets of apples from his small farm. Four heritage varieties – enough for everyone to take a few home to taste. On the permaculture course, people are passionate about plants, about fruit trees, about the earth. People have strong opinions – in discussion time the debates are weighty, rich, sometimes a little heated…but at lunch time, we sit around munching Duncan’s apples. That they are fine, crisp, tasty apples, we all agree on.
The beauty of the simple backyard apple, wet from being rinsed in cold water, fresh-picked off the tree.
Happy New Year! I’m starting my year on the blog as I mean to go on – with excessive photographs of plants.
Here is a snapshot of the garden on January 1 2012.
There are new peas everyday – they never make it inside because we always eat them right there, standing beside the garden. It is my personal garden snack bar…
The corn is getting taller…
The apples we will enjoy in autumn are starting to look like apples, rather than little swollen buds….
The herb garden is running riot: oregano, marjorum, sage, borage, mint, parsley, chives…
The hydrangeas are doing their purple-pom-pom thing to the fullest…
Helen Lehndorf 