Planet Savers blog

If, like me, you are used to a grocery delivery, the recent weather has probably changed things a bit. My Riverford delivery could not get through so I foud myself having to do a ‘big shop’ – not something I’ve needed to do for a long while. I rely on Riverford from my dairy and groceries, Hazeldene for my local organic meat, Darvell’s for delicious bread, and Lucia’s for ham, oil, pasta and anything else that looks tempting. Eco cleaning materials come from Healthright mostly or mail order. Which leaves Waitrose for biscuits and… oh yes, fish…

…well, as you can see, I’m not a ‘big’ shopper’.

But, running low on everything saw me with a piled up trolly in Waitrose. I was turning the clock back about three years and looking at the system with new eyes.

The choice we have! We could be hungry and walk into a supermarket and get confused about what to eat. We are, literally, spoilt for choice. We say: what do I fancy? We hum and ha. What kind of meat? What kind of fish? It’s all there, so much to choose from. You are almost surprised if they don’t have something. Surely they can fly it in from Israel, of the USA, or South Africa. Someone has to have it, we need it for a recipe!

If I’m honest, the site of all that food makes me sick.

Yes, it’s great that people who ‘can’t cook won’t cook’ can pop in and get a ready meal at the end of a busy day. And in our hectic life cooking can take up so much time. I can see how it all happened. It’s all about demand and supply.

But, and it’s a big but for me, if we lose our relationship with our food we have lost our relationship with something vitally important. We eat to sustain ourselves, we eat to keep alive. Food is how we take in minerals and vitamins that sustain our bodies. This is a pretty important stuff.

Yet, here we are relying on some complete unknown commercial manufacturer to make it for us and add ’stuff’ to it so that it will last a week or so longer before going off. Yes, there are rules and regs about additives, of course it’s ’safe’ to eat. But how much goodness is there in it?  And I mean real goodness, not chemically manufactured additives and the nutritionalists recommed for daily intake.

And why does everything contain ‘flavouring’ as if the food doesn’t have any?

We need to have a relationship with our food. We need to know what we are eating. We need to understand what it is to eat the right food at the right time of year. Seasonal food provides the goodness we need for that season. There is a lot of stored energy in root veg.

I nearly didn’t publish this as it sounded like a “bah humbug”, but then I read this article in the Economist.

This supermarket monopsonist system is not sustainable. But who is going to say so? Not the farmers. Not the supermarkets. Not the shoppers who are laregley unaware of the problem. Not the government unless the people ask them to…

It’s down to us, guys. Anyone who reads this and agrees.

It’s down to us…

By the way, it’s home made cottage pie tonight – full of all it’s own flavours;>)

Just a bit of sun and those sharp, hard bullets of blackberries turn into sweet, lushious, melt-in-your-mouth packets of juice. Fortunately, blackberries seem to have evolved alongside our ability to eat them and have a way of spreading their fruiting period over several weeks. We can still see flowers alongside ripe fruit.

This is just as well because six pounds of blackberries takes some managing. Three pounds became jam, two were bottled or dry frozen (bite into one of these and it’s like eating blackberry sorbet – hmmm, there’s an idea…). The last pound was also preservedwith the help of sugar – and brandy! I think I’ll do another batch in vodka so that we can have fun at the comparison stage:>)

Before the Autumn takes hold, I wanted to get our polytunnel constructed. Hopefully, this means I will be able to get some seeds up and ready for planting next year but, most of all, I’ll stand a good chance of having some tomatoes that turn red before the weather turns. England must be the home of green tomato chutney!
All we had to do(!) was bury six poles into the ground a couple of feet, connect the frame parts together, and push them into the pole supports. If you have a nice flat garden with a good layer of soil this is probably not too much to ask. When you have a garden on a slope with topsoil of about twelve inches before hitting the chalk bedrock, this is a little more tricky.
Bobbie had spent a couple of days creating the level base before the weather broke. So, with good weather this weekend, he wanted to make the frame.
This involved sledge-hammering an iron spike into the ground in order to make a hole that he stood a chance of sledge-hammering the support into. It was a hard day’s work but he was well chuffed at the end to find that the frame was pretty much level.
I think the least I can do is imortalise his efforts in this blog :>)

One of the fab things about taking on a new garden is that you don’t know what is in it. So the Spring is full of surprises. March gave us a slope covered in violets and the promise of rhubbarb. The violets have now been replaced with a mass of primulas in all shades, along with the indigo coloured self-heal and forget-me-nots. Its an absolute picture and very popular with the bees, I’m glad to say.

We have a lot of bumbles, some seem to be residents, and we have been visited by honey bees as well. I’ve bought a WBC hive which is ready to assemble should a swarm decide to hang in one of our trees. If not, I shall have to buy a nucleus next year.

I’m also trying a bit of an experiment with potatoes. I didn’t have time to prepare a bed, so I put the seed potatoes into a few cardboard boxes, covered them with compost and just plonked them on the ground to do as they pleased. I’ve seen at least six poke through so I’ll just keep covering them with compost and look forward some fresh picked spuds later in the year. With any luck, they will have done some prep work on my potential veg plot as well.

This is a grand story for the new year. Modern methods of using chemicals to enhance yield were forcing Jailos Kanyanga deeper into debt. He decided to revert to the old ways of farming – by making his own compost and using manure to feed the land. His yield doubled and soon others followed his example. His story is told in the Independent.

The natural way of managing the land has taken these people out of poverty and given them money to spare. Their children can be educated; ‘luxury’ items, like beds, can be purchased; and, most of all, they have reasserted their independence from the chemical manufacturers.

Waitrose are pioneering a new way of dealing with waste food. They are turning it into energy!

Five of their supermarkets are involved in a trial which, if successful, will be spread out to others.

I was pleased to see that the Uni of Siena in Italy had made a study of two wine producers in Tuscany. Organic methods came out tops for environmental impact with half the eco-footprint of the non-organic producers. The non-organic methods were high due their not using recycled glass and also because of mechanisation.

Makes it taste even better, doesn’t it?

It’s a big question many of us are struggling with and one that global exporters are feeling the need to justify. With regards food, soft fruit are one of the most obvious of the unseasonal items we see in the supermarkets. The English soft fruit season is a short one yet strawberies are now available all year round. Whilst it is true that much can be achieved by heating a greenhouse, much of this produce comes through imports. And should I be more worried about the carbon footprint of the foreign imports or the carbon footprint of heating the greenhouse?

In the case of strawberies, my ethics say buy local and buy seasonal, and thank the sun for what we receive.

But what about bananas? If we stop importing them, what happenes to the economy in the Canaries? What about red wine? We can’t grow those kind of grapes here in the UK, so have been importing wine from Europe since we cultivated civilisation. But now it comes from South Africa, Australia, California, and Chile…

South Africa relies on exports of fruit and wine. The UK is a viable market for them so would it be ethical to stop buying their goods? The answer is much bigger than us as individuals for we can decide for ourselves if it is OK to buy imports or not. But how should we react as a country or wider still, as a community of Eruopean countries. Or what would happen if every nation decided that importing was wrong and we cut out foreign freight altogether? Every economy would collapse and the UK would be hard pressed to feed its own population.

So, for the time being at least, I feel I can justify enjoying last night’s glass of Fairtrade Organic Melbec from Argentina! Thanks Rob :>)

This will be an interesting blog to watch:

Chris Jeavans of BBC is going to live without buying anything plastic for the whole of August.

I’m not sure whether to rejoice or scream!

The National Geographic reports that the EU’s farm chief has suggested allowing misshapen fruit and veg into the supermarkets in order to help with the food crisis.

When I was a kid, I remember noticing that the misshapen fruits and veggies were usually the sweetest and tastiest. Somewhere along the way supermarkets decided that only those that fitted the packaging were ‘perfect’ and we lost out on the fun of ‘eating the knobbly bits first!’

So I rejoice in the fact that the issue has been raised. But I scream because of the question it raises: If allowing misshapes into the supermarkets is going to help with the food crisis and keep costs down,  what has been happening to the misshapen fruit and veg all these years? I’d kind of assumed that is was all going into some other process like soup or tins. But this item seems to suggest that we have been discarding it.

Does anyone have the answer to this?