Kale

This winter was my first attempt at growing kale. It has been a mostly successful experiment. Kale has enlivened many soups and casseroles in recent months.

I am going to change varieties though. This year I grew Kale Squire (above - both pics come from the Kings Seeds catalogue). This year the aphids took a distinct shine to my kale. They are grey aphids (as if aphids of any colour are welcome!) and they particularly like to hang out and cause destruction in the tightest curled parts of the leaf. Getting rid of them takes ages of rinsing in the kitchen sink and some is unusable. So I'm thinking that next Autumn I'll be planting Red Russian Kale (below) as it looks much easier to wash and I'm hoping it will be less attractive to aphids.

100 square metres

In the gardening section of the Christchurch Press on Saturday, Mary Lovell Smith mentioned it taking at least 100 square metres to provide vegetable for a family of four. She made no mention of where she got that figure from, but it did inspire me to get the measuring tape and the calculator out.

I measured all parts of the garden which get sufficient sun to grow food in all year round. I have been creating bits of garden against walls and fences for the last two years so I labelled each patch and then calculated how much garden we had growing food last summer and how much will be onstream this summer. Last year was 17 square metres after taking into account tomatoes in pots. This forthcoming summer looks like it will be just over 27 square metres. We do have room to enlarge our vegetable garden but slowly will be the most effective course of action I think. Putting another ten square metres of garden in each year is plenty enough work and quite doable. I've since stumbled across discussion on this topic online which I will go back to and read more closely. The ones which say at least a quarter acre (1000 sq metres) may well be right. But our entire section is only 809 sq metres and I'm not about to pull down the house and garage just so we can live in a tent and still need to buy some vegetables.

I also looked up one of my gardening books for instructions on growing asparagus. They say I'll need at least 25 plants for an average sized family. I expect we are quite averagely sized, but I don't think I'll be spending $50 this week buying asparagus crowns. I'm also supposed to plant them deep enough that there is 15-20cm of soil covering them. I've planted one so far, covered by only about 8cm of soil. It is probably not in the best place either. Up where I've started digging out the tobacco plants appears to be much better draining and perhaps I'll put the other two asparagus crowns up there, beside the one echinacea plant which survived last year. Poor potatoes, they often get squeezed out of my plans. There should be room for some still. Perhaps I could reorganise to one row of asparagus and echinacea (still have seeds for another go this spring) and peas and then a row of potatoes. The peas are annuals and nitrogen fixing and the asparagus is perennial for 20 years and the echinacea should be in the ground for about three years before being dug up for the medicinal properties of the roots.

Walked down to the beach this afternoon and found some logs brought down from the river/up from the sea by recent stormy weather. Brought two back for various garden projects.

sunshine and seaweed

Today was Saturday, the sun shone and no one in our house was sick. Such a combination, we have not experienced for many many weeks and thus we abandoned the house jobs and went to the beach this afternoon. We collected three supermarket bags of seaweed and then went for a walk up a hill to look out over the township. Interesting how looking down on a town shows quite different shapes to walking through it.

First thing this morning we received two trailer loads of wood. Beech and Eucalyptus, cut up and semi dry. The teenage son of a work colleague had cut this wood up himself and was selling it to raise money. This wood is, hopefully, the beginning of our project to collect wood a year ahead of when we need to use it.

food mindfulness, mindboggledness

Thank you Joanna for alerting me to this discussion on food miles and locavore practices in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. As far as I can work out, raising my own chooks and eggs and growing my own vegetables and fruit is all good. Anything involving the rest of the world is more complicated.

Indeed it is more complicated. I think food is a class issue. Of course not everyone is interested in talking about class in these post-modern times, but I'm a leftie who won't give up. The benefits of my university education, the time I spent travelling, the interests I have in reading about food and politics - all these things have given me a fairly middle class view of food issues.

But we live in a predominantly working class town and I like being part of our small town community. I want to participate in the life of our town. Doing so shows me very clearly the role of food in community endeavours and I can promise you that we don't talk about food mindfulness (as they do in the second link in this post) on the sidelines at Rugby League.

This morning I took the children with me to support our local high school's Kapa Haka group, which is fundraising to go to Australia at the end of this year and participate in a big indigenous peoples' festival. I know some of the young people in the group and I'm proud to watch them shine. They started off with a garage sale and I am in horror of garage sales these days as we have too much stuff already. But they did have a sausage sizzle out the front and Fionn was delighted with his hunk of processed meat wrapped in soft white bread and drizzled with bright red sauce. I bet there is a lot to criticise about such a food choice. But it was a way of supporting the project without cluttering up our house any further.

The Kapa Haka group performed in fine style and I also loved watching the pleasure my own children experienced watching them.

Then it was time to go to League, where today was something called fun day where all the teams get mixed up and play wearing different shirts and I nearly fell over with admiration for the adults who organised this rather complex process. At the end, everyone in Fionn's team was given a lollipop and later received a spot prize of a new mouth guard and a boots bag festooned with logos including the golden arches. Generous sponsorship by Solid Energy, which has several coal mines in our region, was acknowledged on the cones marking out the junior-sized playing fields. Pies, chips and hot dogs were for sale on the sidelines. I expect these are also fundraisers for the host club.

We paid $20 for the season for our son to play Rugby League and every single week I am bowled over by the generosity of the coaches, the sponsors and the managers. I have no wish to suggest that food, a commodity which has always oiled the cogs of community, must meet my personal standards.

Mary Washington

That's the name of the asparagus crowns I bought today. I've never grown asparagus before and now seems a perfectly reasonable time to start. The plot I had planned to put them in is not dug over and ready, so I'm going to slot them in amongst the veges in my January raised bed. I bought three for the moment, at $2 each. I haven't really got a clue how many I want but some has to be a massive improvement on none.

One day, when it stops raining (i.e. at least next month), I shall plant out the asparagus crowns and also get going creating the plot which was for asparagus but now is for cucurbits of some kind. I've been eyeing up costata romanesco zucchinis, the rampicante ones and I plan to fit some pumpkins in as well.

I meant to protect the tamarillo from wind and frost but haven't. It's still going out there, but leaning steeply sideways.

locavore schmokavore

The mad man from Hoki has been advertising this week that he will have his cart (home grown veges plus free range eggs) in our town today and tomorrow afternoon. So I don't bother putting a delivery order in with the excellent people who drive produce over from the markets in Chrirstchurch. I plan to buy spuds and pumpkin from the local cart and if I can get fish again, then together with my own greend veg, a locavore meal is possible.

But the mad man doesn't bother turning up.

So tonight we have bought fish and chips for dinner and I'm still considering throwing budget smudgets out the window and using more fossil fuel to go buy some wine.

We've had rain, hail, thunder and lightning here in small wet town over the last 24 hours. Apparently we're in for rain for two weeks solid. And it is dark a lot. My Danish friend Nina has organised a group of families to go burn a witch on the beach this Saturday - to do with the shortest day, or being only a week after the shortest day. I guess that will be after the high school kapa haka fundraiser and the rugby league 'fun day'. So much for hibernation.

No I haven't done anything in the garden lately. I did get some books out of the library - some on herbs which I've had out before and another by a young man from the UK who spent two years in Tuvalu as a VSO local lawyer. And a book on New Zealand artists and their favourite foods. I wish Barbara Kingsolver would write another book soon though. Her prose is beautiful.

Gala Day

Our local primary school has one major fundraiser each year - The Gala. It involves enormous amounts of work and the result is far more than just funds for new equipment for the school. The result is community. Tonight I rang someone called Margaret, a saint wearing ordinary women's clothing, who is coordinating this year's gala. I offered to make a pork dish for the lunch and bring it down in my crock pot. Margaret accepted with enthusiasm. Other people will be making nachos, chicken or beef dishes also in crock pots and white bait sandwiches. That's just the lunch part. The baking room (yes room, not just table) will be full of home made sweet concoctions and will sell out within twenty minutes. I never buy from the baking room as I haven't the stamina for the crowds, but I'm in the (female) minority.

Lots of other activities take place, many for fund raising and quite a few performances from the school students. I come close to crying watching these and that's in years before I had my own child performing. This year we are paid up schoolie parents and The Gala is such a big deal that the South Island grandparents are driving over for the day.