I enjoyed it, more than I had expected to. Philippa leaves her settled life in Dunedin for nearly three years and goes volunteering on (mostly) organic farms which are part of the Willing Workers on Organic Farms scheme. New Zealand being a small town where everybody knows someone you know, I loved seeing some familiar names and it also gave me some more names to look for when I'm trying to source New Zealand grown organic produce. For example, I've met the owner of Treedimensions once before when he did a market stall in our small town and acquaintances have also recommended his fruit. I've sent him an email now to go on the list for his fruit boxes from late January.
All that organic food reading got me thinking about bread and gluten and family health again. Several bloggers I like to read have made wonderful looking and sounding bread in recent months: Bean Sprout, Sharon and Rachael especially. Our son Fionn has been on a gluten free diet for the last 19 months, on the recommendation of an allergy specialist and it has helped his eczema. He is also egg free because that seems to help a lot as well. Meals are easy but I am so over cooking gluten free baking and I'm also keen to do some bread making but not necessarily two different kinds of bread at a time. So I am building up to having a go at sourdough and also at low gluten breads like spelt and seeing if he can cope with that okay.
I also have a Bill Mollison ('father' of the permaculture movement) book out of the library at the moment and he has an interesting section on turning annuals into perennials. Mostly by having good ground mulch around annuals and letting a portion of them run to seed and then self-seed in the garden. He also wrote that if you leave garlic in the ground for two years, then you will get a continuous supply, but I can't fathom that as yet.
4 comments:
I have nothing good to say about gluten-free bread or baking. I haven't tried using spelt in my bread yet...worth a crack.
Ditto Sharon. I've had acceptable muffins and acceptable chocolate cake but nothing wonderful and even the muffins and chocolate cake are acceptable substitutes, not recipes which would be my first choice if I had flour and egg freedom.
I used to use spelt in the breadmaker in the UK with good results but if I do bread this time, it will be sans machine.
I love spelt bread! It's unreasonably expensive, but we can sometimes get it at our local market.
Leaving garlic in the ground for more than a year is risky. White rot is becoming a very common fungal disease, and the only known way to effectively prevent or treat it is with good crop rotation.
If white rot becomes established in the ground, it can stay there for 20 years or more. A lot of garlic used to be grown in California, but in many areas of the state it's not possible any more in part because of white rot.
It's such a serious problem, and some gardeners are so afraid of it, they make it a point to never use the same ground twice for garlic. This is probably going a little too far, and using ground once every 4-5 years for garlic is probably pretty safe.
Thanks Patrick - I was hoping you'd see this question. Planning my next lot of garlic for next year around roses.
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