Fresh food, or the freshest food?

Lettuce in a terracotta planter.

The first year or so for my garden wasn’t very productive. The few edible plants that did grow were eaten by pests or not big enough to bother harvesting (this is what I get for using the cheapest available potting mix).

I buried most of the plants as they ended their productive lives. This made the soil richer, which meant that over summer there was some food actually worth harvesting – mostly zucchini and tomatoes. Heading into this garden’s second year, we’ve also harvested one onion (with more still growing) and a fair amount of lettuce and parsley (again, with more still growing).

The biggest challenge is keeping bugs off the lettuces. I’ve been squashing them as I find them, and we’re getting help from a gekko which recently moved in. It tried to get inside the apartment but I caught it and put it among the pots, it seems much happier there.

So, why grow your own food?

• The fresher food is, the better it tastes. And you can’t beat “picked less than 2 mintues ago” for freshness.
• Commercially produced food varieties (like you find in supermarkets) are generally chosen for how long they last and how well they travel, and flavour usually suffers. With home gardening, travel and storage are generally non-issues, so you can choose better tasting varieties.
• Setting up the garden cost a few hundred dollars, but in the long run eating our own stuff will be much cheaper than buying food. Aside from the initial setting up, I have to do around an hour a week of work there. To buy what it produces would cost more than an hour of my wages in my day job, so it makes sense financially.
• It gives me something to talk about with the neighbours.

We’ve just put in seeds for leeks and have some winter fruiting tomatoes & a something else coming soon (i.e. when I get around to collecting them) from my brother. I’ve also got some kind of flower (I forget what) starting to come up in some of the unused planters, and I plan to get a dwarf variety of some kind of fruit tree.

Sunday tutorials – Cooking videos.

As part of my preparation for uni this year, I’ve done a lot of multimedia tutorials online. I’ve found this habit is now expanding into other areas. For example, this morning I went looking for a video tutorial on how to poach an egg.

I decided that each Sunday I will share five tutorials from the last week. Except this week, because I haven’t been keeping a record of what tutorials I do and which ones are useful. So for this first one, I spent some time on Youtube and rediscovered five cooking videos which have been useful to me in the past… well, rediscovered four videos, and discovered one.

The first one is how to poach an egg. I felt like a poached egg for breakfast today, but had never done it before. So I asked Google. Several videos came up, but this is the most straightforward. Note he says you should cook the egg for 10 minutes, that iw for a firm yolk. Mine had firm whites and a runny yolk after 2-3 minutes.

Cooking with fresh garlic tastes so much better than garlic from a jar or powder.

Onion are hard to chop without crying. Gordon Ramsay’s method works nicely.

In winter I make lots of soups, and stock can be expensive. So you can make your own.

Many years ago, somebody showed me this method for telling if a steak is done. I prefer to poke the steak with a pair of tongs rather than my finger.

So there we go, you can now cook a steak with onion and garlic soup and a poached egg. (hold the spam)