Lettuce

Vegetable gardening at home offers the potential to grow high quality organic produce just outside your back door.  This is the first post in a series that is aimed to give you some more information of how and when to grow specific vegetables in your garden (and there might be the occasional side-step into fruit and herbs as well).

Lettuce
Botanical Name: Lactuca sativa
Family: Asteraceae

• Lettuce can be sown all year round in the temperate regions of Australia, however during the hottest moths it is best to provide some shade to prevent them bolting and going to seed as this gives them a bitter taste. 
• Sow them directly into rows in the garden or into seed trays and plant them out later. 
• They will be ready for harvest in 8-12 weeks. 
• They have a fairly high nutrient requirement, so some added compost or regular liquid feeding with something like seaweed is beneficial, and as they have a shallow root system regular watering is important, especially during hot weather to ensure they don't dry out.

There are several different varieties of lettuce you can choose from:

• Mseclun salad mix - contains a variety of greens, or you can make your own by mixing a selection of seeds suited to your local climate.
• Iceberg, Imperial and Great Lakes are traditional hearting or crisphead varieties.  These can be a bit slower to grow and can bolt to seed easily.
• Cos or Romaine types are you clasic ceaser salad variety.  These can be picked whole, or a leaf at a time.
• Non-hearting varieties such as Lollo Rosso or Royal Oak Leaf form loose bunches of frilled or crinkled leaves that you can pick as you need them.

Make sure you protect your young seedlings as they are especially attractive to snails and slugs.  Regular foliar feeding with a liquid fertilizer will help build disease resistance, and avoid mildew problem by not wetting the foliage during watering.

Lettuce is an easy to grow addition to the home vegetable garden, and a must have in the summer salads.  Plant some today and enjoy.

Plums

There is an abundance of plums in the garden at the moment.  Plums must surely be one of the most productive of fruit trees.

I have made several jars of Plum Jam using this recipe:

• 1.8 kg tart plums
• 1.5 cups water
• 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
• 6 cups sugar

1. Cut the plums into quarters and remove the stones.
2. Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan.
3. Bring slowly to the boil, stirring occassionally until sugar dissolves.
4. Cook rapidly, almost to jelling point.
5. As it thickens, stir frequently to avoid it sticking.
6. Pour into hot sterilised jars and process in a boiling water bath (5 mins for 250 ml jars).

A very simple recipe, and now we have lots of jars of plum jam to enjoy for the next year.

Busy Springtime - Vegetable Gardening in Overdrive

Well spring certainly is a bust time of yearin the vegetable garden! Lots of seeds and seedlings have been planted out in our garden. Things like tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, capsicums, chillis, lettuce, beans, carrots and sweet corn. I find some things are really easy to grow from seed sown directly in the garden such as peas, beans, corn, carrots and beetroot, and by doing it this way it can work out cheaper too. But other things I find it easier to buy the seedlings and plant them. It can also be useful if you only want one or two plants, why buy a couple of hundred or even thousand seeds?

We are already increasing or harvest from the vegetable garden with the warmer weather as well. We have picked some lovely big bunches of silverbeet, crunchy carrots, lettuce, and some fantastic cauliflower and broccoli. These combined with the eggs that we get from our chickens have been making some wonderful vegetable frittatas. We also have some strawberries beginning to ripen, but in order to save them from the birds (who have already stolen the first couple!) the bed got covered this morning with bird netting so we will be able to taste them as well. Just remember to keep the water up to your new plants, don't let them dry out, and we like to give ours a liquid feed with a seaweed solution about every two weeks. It helps to keep them growing nice and vigorously (and fast grown vegetables taste better, sweeter etc).

We also have plans for lots of other projects in the garden this summer, one of which is a solar food dryer/dehydrator. We are still researching this at the moment, but watch this space!

Enjoy you garden, it's still not too late to get your planting started.

Here is our recipe for Vegetable Frittatas, but you can change the vegetables to suit your taste, or what you have in the fridge, we do.

Firstly, chop your vegetables into small pieces (or whatever size you want, but smaller cooks quicker) and lightly steam your vegetables until they are almost cooked but still firm.

While they are cooking crack some eggs into a bowl and lightly beat them (we use 8-10 eggs for a large pan).

Lightly oil and heat a large frying pan, and tip you steamed vegetables in (make sure they are spread evenly over the surface of the pan).

Pour the eggs carefully over the top, give the pan a little shake to make sure you fill all the gaps.

When the eggs are almost cooked through you need to cook and brown the top of the frittata. You can do this by either putting the pan under a griller for a couple of minutes, or flip it. To flip a large frittata is a bit tricky, firstly put a large plate over the top of the pan and flip the frittata onto it, then remove the pan and place another plate on top and flip again, remove the first plate and replace it with the pan and flip one last time. The bottom should now be on the top and the top on the bottom. Cook for another couple of minutes and then serve.

It's very nice served with some fresh salad from the garden, and any leftovers keep well in the fridge and can be heated up for a yummy lunch at work the next day!

Sources of Inspiration

I was thinking recently about what started me on my current journey of organic vegetable gardening and trying to move towards a more self-sufficient life, and it all started with buying a book. I love books, and can never go past a bookshop without having at least a quick look inside. Well, one day I was browsing through one such bookshop when I came across the book 'A Slice of Organic Life'. I found it a fascinating read, very easy, with lots of little suggestions of changes you can make to lead a more sustainable, healthy, organic life. It also opened my eyes as to some of the toxic things that we are exposed to from everyday materials and products (did you know that the aluminium contained in most deodorants has a possible link to breast cancer?). The first thing I did was resurrect the neglected vegetable garden, which had not grown vegetables for several years. Since then I have greatly expanded our growing efforts, as well as made many other changes, but it all started from reading this one book. This started a thirst for knowledge, firstly you want to know how to grow something, then when you grow it you want to learn how to preserve your excess, then there's organic bug control, companion planting, the list goes on.

There are many good sources of inspiration out there. In England, the late John Seymour, author of 'The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency' was a bit of a pioneer, now there is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, if you are able to catch any of his 'River Cottage' television series (shown on the ABC occasionally in Australia) I highly recommend them. Closer to home (Australia in my case), there are people like Jackie French, Peter Cundall and Jerry Colby-Williams, not to mention the founders of permaculture, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, and many others. It may require you to take a closer look sometimes, but there are individuals, as well as small groups all over the place doing amazing and inspiring things. You just never know where it may lead you.

It's official, organic is better!

Here is some interesting information that I have just come across that I thought I would share. A review article has just been published in the scientific journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development, and has been written by the French Agency for Food Safety (AFSSA). In 2003 the AFSSA published a report (in French) giving their results of a 2 year review they did to evaluate the nutritional and sanitary quality of organic food (if you are good at reading french you can access the original report here). This new article is an english summary of that original report with some updated information included, and it is available here.

But if you don't feel like reading the whole thing, the major points of the article are:
· Organic plant products contain more dry matter (more nutrient dense).
· Organic plant products have higher levels of minerals and contain more anti-oxidants such as phenols and salicylic acid (known to protect against cancers, heart disease and many other health problems).
· Carbohydrate, protein and vitamin levels are insufficiently documented.
· 94–100% of organic foods do not contain any pesticide residues.
· organic animal products contain more polyunsaturated fatty acids.
· Organic vegetables contain about 50% less nitrates (high nitrate levels are linked to a range of health problems including diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease).
· Organic cereals contain similar levels of mycotoxins as conventional ones.

It is good to know that there is now strong scientific evidence supporting organic food and its benefits.  So get out there and start your own organic vegetable gardening today!