SOOOO busy!

Too busy to blog!

I've got some work as a sessional tutor by our local college to teach gardening to community groups, and this week I'm starting three courses on growing veg from seed. So I've been getting my head around lesson plans, teaching schedules, enrolment forms... until my head hurts. But it's great to be able to plan learning around something I love and feel I know enough about. I realised the other day that the best thing about this sort of teaching is that I can be me. When I was doing secondary teaching I always felt I was pretending to be someone else.

I'm also doing lots of gardening as well as talking about it, and a couple of years after swearing I'd never do events again, I'm getting mixed up in organising events connected with Nottingham's Transition Town movement. The Great Spring Sowing has so far involved meetings which manage to be unstructured, well-organised and enjoyable all at the same time. Chair? Shmair!

I've also - unusually for me - been watching quite a few telly programmes. For some reason the period after Christmas always seems to be good for telly. I've been enjoying the 'Round the World in 80 Faiths' programme. I thought that the presenter, Peter Owen Jones, was going to be pretty irritating, but warmed to him as he gave most things a go, getting into some rather harrowing situations and some very moving ones too. I'm amazed how many different faiths there are, and I imagine the programme could have wound up some people either by leaving out their particular faith , or by showing a too-quick snapshot of it. I was a smidgin annoyed at the example of atheism - but then I realised that this was just the sort of response that all the other 79 were creating in someone, somewhere. I'm also enjoying the series 'Christianity - a history', each episode of which is presented by different people so each one is very different from the others. I feel that the programmes presented by atheists are more acute and bolder in their approach, while the others tend to be descriptive - but still interesting. Cherie Blair next week on the future of Christianity... So television is rubbish these days? Not in my opinion. Let's hope that the BBC and Channel 4 do manage to carry on producing such good stuff.

Similar but different: the current bevy of Darwin programmes are looking promising. The recent Attenborough one - 'Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life' - was terrific. No longer on i-player but the tree of life animation (a bit devoid of plant life! But still stunning) is here. The first of Attenborough's Natures Great Events series was heart-wrenching. Not looking good for polar bears... The Natural World programme 'A Farm for the Future' was cracking. Even though I know a bit about the subject matter there were plenty of shocks. There was a more upbeat message too: it included the best short descriptions of permaculture and forest gardening I've seen, and demonstable links between older farmers and the younger ones trying to cut their energy use.

Which kind of brings me back to where I started - growing food. Quite important really.

Green in Snow

I’ve been helping out at a super project - FRESH is part of EcoWorks in the St. Ann’s Allotments. It’s a social enterprise, one arm of which supplies fresh vegetables to discriminating cafés in the city. So what can FRESH provide fresh in winter?

Claytonia (Claytonia perfoliata) (above) is a plant originally from the west coast of North America where the miners used it to prevent scurvy. It’s got lots of vitamin C and is also known as Miner’s Lettuce. It was introduced to Britain and grows wild where it is known as Spring Beauty. It takes to polytunnel life very well, popping up all over the place. I’ve noticed that some has started flowering, despite the cold.

Cornsalad (Valeriana locusta, also known as Lamb’s Lettuce) is also found wild, but with much smaller leaves than the salad variety. Also like Claytonia, it has high vitamin C levels and can even be grown outdoors. It's the dark green rosettes in the middle of the photo (taken before the snow meant more urgent tasks were impossible and we did a lot of weeding!)

American Land Cress (Barbarea verna) tastes like watercress but is easier to grow. Apparently it’ll even grow under Jerusalem artichokes, runner beans, corn, etc. Like the above, it has naturalised in Britain.

You know that mustard you grow to put with cress in an egg sandwich? This is what it looks like if you let it grow:

Each leaf is about 30cm long and wonderfully hot. It’s called ‘Giant Red’, and is a form of Mustard Greens (Brassica juncea). Its Wikipedia entry has interesting information about its role in Soul Food and remediation of contaminated soil. Also nice in salad, and I believe that mustard greens are the ‘methi’ in Indian food and appear in far eastern dishes too.

Green in Snow is Giant Red’s less powerful brother but still packs a punch. We've a whole greenhouse full of it!

FRESH also have Pak Choi, Tatsoi, Mizuna, Mibuna and various other tasty leaves.

Seeds and more info from the nice people at RealSeeds. Cultivation info on all these on the RHS website or BBC Gardening.

I'm sno' angel

Pictures from my local park. Not quite as many as there might have been, as the camera batteries kept packing up and I had to keep warming them in my hand. It's to do with the slowing of the rate of reaction in the batteries in the cold (said in a science-teacher voice...)



Dog was very unsure about this strange creature!

The snowman had disappeared by the time I walked back: a bunch of teenagers had dismantled it and were trying to make even huger snowballs. It's been nice today to see kids like them have a great time sledging - they've mostly never had a chance to do it before, at least not in their local park. Whereas back in the day it snowed EVERY CHRISTMAS.