One of the oldest and most documented medicinal plants in the world is growing like wildfire here and has made a home among the broad beans. It is probably in your arsenal of herbal teas right now. Chamomile has been used for centuries as a healing medicine with a vast array of uses. I plan to dry the flowers by the bucket load and share them with friends. They are also thriving in almost overwhelming quantity in the chicken enclosure. This could help to explain why my chickadees are so relaxed most of the time! It is positively knee-deep in there with trails through it stamped out by the chickens. Soon the chamomile will be ready to harvest, preferably when the moon is ascending and on a flower day. Then the goodness will all be concentrated in the cheerful little flower heads for best results. It is an enchanting sight to see the way they are intermingling with the beans. I enjoyed kneeling before them today as I tackled a few new nettle shoots that keep catching me out. I picked my first two broad bean pods that ended up in a raw pea, broad bean, spring onion salad with soy sauce, Japanese vinegar and honey dressing. Lovely combinations of plants are happening all around as we enter the second part of the summer. There is more Fat Hen growing through the peas, a second flowering of purple dead nettle in the cauliflower patch and countless wildflowers springing up all over. I found a large form of cress with a superb peppery bite among the cauliflower also, and yarrow is beginning to flower along the path. I filled my enormous red colander with green goodies to use for supper earlier. The children took pleasure in using scissors to harvest handfuls of tender pea pods of which several didn’t make it into the container. What joy for them to open up the pods that had fattened to find sweet delicious peas inside. It is a fun way to get them to enjoy green vegetables and hopefully create strong memories for their future lives in food. They also particularly liked the smell of the broad bean pods today. My son said they smell like ‘green’. Indeed they do. I think all colours should have an associated smell. We carried the harvest to the kitchen in time for a dark cloud to hide the sun just as we were satisfied with our pickings. Thanks to an amazing new friend, I knew exactly what to do with the variety of green leaves. I had mostly cauliflower shoots after giving the rows another thinning, some Fat Hen, plantain and yarrow. It had to be Okonomiyaki, a simple but completely delicious Japanese savoury pancake we now enjoy regularly. These beauties are packed full to bursting with shredded cabbage, spring onions and ginger normally, but being me I had to try it with some homegrown and wild greens. I make it gluten free very successfully with trusted flour, cornflour, a small amount of water, three eggs, a nori sprinkle, and rice bran oil I have to hand. The children quite like to have just the pancakes without any ‘green bits’ so a second batch is always needed. I top our grown-up ones with squeezy mayo, a special Okonomiyaki brown sauce from my friend and freshly grated ginger. My partner can’t have the special sauce so I give him extra rice vinegar and gluten free soy sauce to splash on his. Satisfaction guaranteed! It is filling and a great way to pack a lot of nutritious veg into your diet when it’s soaked in Umami flavour. Some of you may be thinking that I cook a lot of asian inspired food and you would be right, but there is so much to love about all of the exciting spices and endless combinations of sweet, salty, sour and spicy flavours to explore. In addition to this love, I also go to my Yotam Ottolenghi book, ‘Plenty’ regularly for inspiration. He is an Israeli-English chef and food writer if you haven’t already heard of him. His food is transcendent and for me, he has the ability to elevate the most humble ingredient with exotic flair. One to look for if you like to use food to cure yourself of any form of malaise like I do. When our carrots and sweetcorn are ready to harvest I might find that very minimal cooking will suit them best. I tasted my first carrot today and the intense flavour and crunch spoke for itself. It was only about the length of a finger but was calling my name when I saw its orange top showing above the earth. I shared it of course! I feel a mass chamomile flower harvest will come any day now so I will need to prepare a drying line or two to hang them upside down from. I’m hoping the house will slowly start to look more and more like a medieval apothecary as the summer goes on. I have a jar of purple dead nettle tops infusing in organic olive oil from mid April I dried for making into salve and calendula flower heads on tea towels next to a stovepipe drying beautifully as well. I haven’t bought chamomile tea for a long time so I am looking forward to a fresh pot of wild homestead medicine. Watching the chamomile grow is another confirmation to me that by lovingly managing our land, nature shares its bounty with us so that we may thrive along with all of the other creatures that depend on it. I’ll drink to that.
Tag: Biodynamics
Strawberry Moon
I wasn’t planning to write anything tonight, but after going on a little midnight walk to see the full moon, I can’t resist sharing the magic. I have been anxiously awaiting tonight’s peak all day and have been busy ‘getting ready’. The children and I have been spending extra time with the chickens these past couple of days. I did some necessary tidying of the coop and even threw in a few flower petals as a treat for them. We cut the grass on the main lawn in time for a change in the weather again. It’s supposed to start raining sometime tomorrow afternoon I see. I even managed to re-sow new pots of spicy salad leaves which will hopefully last us several weeks like the last ones did. In the Biodynamic calendar, today was a ‘leaf day’ right before the full moon so germination is good at this time for plants you want to grow for their leaves. Also, when the moon is in its descending position in the sky as it is now, the focus is on what is happening in the soil. The full moon tonight is in a very low position in the sky from where I am on Earth, despite our hilltop position. So low that its glow is appearing by way of shafts of moonlight across our land. I had to search for it a little by finding a bright beam to stand in. It’s incredibly bright! Luckily, it is windy and there are only a couple of small oddly stretched clouds around. One of our cats appeared out of a dark cover of trees in the lane, greeted me and rubbed himself against my legs while we watched. The “Strawberry Moon” coincides with the ripening of the wild strawberries that grow on verges and in the cracks between paving slabs we have been enjoying this week. The tiny red pearls packed with sweet strawberry flavour that I wish I had a whole jar of to preserve for later. I’ll see if I can collect a few tomorrow for a tiny pot. The beauty of them is also in the rarity, so I think it would take a lot of luck to find enough. Besides, they are far too lovely not to share with all of the other creatures and children that love them too.
A Little Light Weeding
It was one of those lovely productive kind of days. The sun was shining, it wasn’t too hot and the children allowed me to get on with a few overdue jobs in and around the vegetable garden. My partner even built a new door to the chicken coop so that I can start shutting them in at night. I have a little ‘egg disappearing act’ going on I’ve become wise to. I’ll have to start getting up earlier in the morning to let them out to avoid getting chicken guilt. I didn’t have any biodynamically relevant jobs to do today in the vegetable garden as it was a ‘root’ day on a ascending, waxing moon. For those of you who haven’t the slightest idea about what that statement means, I’ll explain a little. Put simply, it is farming and gardening according to the phases of the moon and where the moon is positioned on a particular day. The methods are all organic, where soil health is key, only natural fertilisers are used, and it also incorporates an element of well-being and spirit in nature for the gardener. Sound good? I will allow you to look into it further yourselves if you are interested so as to not alienate anyone. It is the way I have chosen to garden here and I have a superb calendar that keeps me ‘in tune with the moon’. I’ve always had an intimate relationship with the moon throughout my life and it just makes sense to me that the moon’s effect on all living things and its powerful gravitational pull must be a force to work with. Back to the patch, I noticed today that the wild plants have put on a lot of substantial growth in the past week with all of the rain and warm days we’ve had. I found that I was concentrating mainly on trimming dock and nettles back from our many paths across the field and around the chicken enclosure. That’s great exercise I can tell you. I want to ‘re-wild’ the top field and meadow as I have said before, so I’m using only woman power to keep large growths of what the children call “naughty plants” down. I opened the gate to the vegetable garden and proceeded to trim the long grass, dock, a few nettles and edges of the beds. Still no “weeding”. As a lover of wild plants and those that are useful I am allowing a few to grow and flower in there for bees and for my needs. I’m using them for defense purposes too, disguising the succulent cultivated plants I’ve grown from seed. I say quietly, it is working but for many traditional gardener friends reading this, it does look messy. My feeling on the matter is that it’s a garden for producing delicious home-grown food, not for entering into any kind of competition. In my eyes it’s just how I want it and I love it. The children love it too and it has a wonderful fairy house we made together right in the middle of it out of old bits from the barn. We did have a blackbird last week that came in and turfed up a few small seedlings but they needed thinning anyway. The radishes and carrots that were flattened sprang back up so I didn’t mind about that either. I was hesitant today to start “weeding” among the broad bean plants, peas, corn, pumpkins, and cauliflower seedlings. After all, “weeds” are perfectly nice plants just growing somewhere we don’t want them to, right? They grow so vigorously in soil that is suited to them. My thoughts were turning over an intriguing idea that I read about a couple of months ago when researching ways to start a new vegetable garden. It is called “Do Nothing Farming” developed by Masanobu Fukuoka who was a Japanese farmer and philosopher. He developed a system of natural farming where he did not plow his fields (no digging), used no pesticides or artificial fertilisers, did not flood his fields like so many were doing and yet his yield equaled or surpassed the most productive farms in his country. With no “weeding” or agricultural practices, a farm or garden is considered a complete ecosystem that is self-supporting. This resonates with me in relation to working in harmony with nature here and not wanting to constantly be at war with it. Nature decides what grows and what does not. I find this an extremely eyebrow-raising notion, in a good way. As in biodynamic gardening, I have already established “companion planting” where the plants help each other to thrive. This happens because of a belief that certain combinations of plants offer support mutually by deterring or attracting insects and improving nutrient imbalances in the soil. My garden will have to grow a bit more before I can report on any successes with that one. My hope is that the munching little critters like mice, deer and insects steer clear so that we can enjoy one or two peas this year! I knelt down in the soil and decided to do a bit of light “weeding” just so that the new vegetable plants I sowed would have enough light and water to get ahead of the game. It also helps if you are able to see where they are. I only removed a small amount of so-called “weeds” so hopefully, Masanobu Fukuoka won’t mind too much.
This Wild Homestead 