urban farming

Batman broccoli,wok and work

I’ve been trying my hand at growing some new vegetables in the garden.
These choices have been based on a value for space ratings provided in Joy Larkcom’s excellent and informative ‘Grow Your Own Vegetables’.

One of the vegetables that got a high rating was broccoli raab aka broccoli rabe aka rapini aka cime di rapa . The name ‘cime di rapa’ means ‘turnip tops’ in Italian. I planted about 0.5 sqm around mid March and about 2 months later this is what I got, a sort of raggedy leaf with spindly shoots and florets…

Ideally I think that the plants are supposed to have more of a floret but as they where starting to flower it seemed like a good time to bring them in.

I’ve cooked it twice, once in a pasta and sausage dish and today with a beef stir-fry It tasted good to me, like a sort of Batman broccoli, dark and broody, sort of bitter and complex. I like it and will grow it again though it might be a bit heavy/bitter for some taste.

( broccoli raab = 430g)

For the stir fry I also took the 2nd cut of some stir fry greens after getting about 100g of young leaves for an oriental salad a few weeks ago.

The main thing I couldn’t help noticing about the stir fry greens was how beautiful the leaves are to look at. It seems a shame to eat them.

(370g stir fry greens)

I was out watering the vegetable beds this morning at about 8am, it was so beautiful and peaceful, the closest I’ve had to a ‘quiet time’ in a long time.
Then my sense of peace and contentment is nagged by thinking that it’s all very well for me to watering plants at 8am but if I was a real man I wouldn’t have time for so much gardening, I’d be careering of to a job like my neighbours, I wouldn’t have time for faffing around with mizuna and broccoli raab or writing a blog.

So often I wrestle with God in the garden. It is an odd mixture of guilt and delight, pleasure and pain. What is work? What is a job?

The questions comes thickest in the carrot bed. I’ve weeded that carrot bed so many times already, the weeds keep coming up.I’m aware of the threat of carrot flies. If I’m lucky for hours of work I’ll get 50 about carrots. I can buy a bag of them up at Joyce’s for 39c.Is it worthwhile investing precious hours on growing something which has a combined worth of about €4 according to Joyce’s?

They might be loss leaders or whatever but that nearly makes it worse. Carrots are being treated as a commodity or bait to encourage people to spend their money on other more worthy groceries and good.
In a world where our value and worth to society is measured by the benchmark of money and the Market weeding a carrot bed for 50 carrots throws up questions, questions about what is worthwhile work or who gives value to work, what work should you be engaged in.
Are you crazy or is the world crazy?
Is this just a middle class privilege thing or is their work of true value in growing a turnip?
Turmoil in the turnip patch, serpent in the garden.

rough plan for a street

instead of bowling clubs

Sometimes I imagine loads of Presbyterian churches equipped with nice homely (but not expensive) dining rooms and a lounge for lazy Sunday afternoons (instead of drafty halls) and big pots of soup made from vegetables grown on the gardens that used to be their lawns (or from land donated by a church member with spare land).
When it came to dishes time everyone washed them in a relaxed way not eager to rush home, and the men would be in the kitchen just as much as the women. There would not be someone trying to rush the people out of the hall because he had to lock up and wanted to go home. The last person out can lock up.
If there was soup left over it could be frozen and given to people who are sick or poor, there would be boxes of vegetables to distribute to the needy or just for people in church.

I have been clearing out an old USB stick this morning and found a folder called urban farming with links to various things that at one time or other I’ve found interesting.

The Vegetable Gardeners of Havana

Making a self watering container

Chervil St.

it can’t go on forever

‘Petroleum, perhaps the single most important input in modern food production (it serves both as a fuel for tractors and transportation and as the chemical base for fertilizers and pesticides), is gradually becoming so scarce and expensive that many of the assumptions underlying a global industrial food system are now in question. Nearly everything about the way our food system has developed over the last half century – from our ability to manufacture fertility to our capacity to move food to import-dependent nations – could not have occurred without cheap energy, and the degree to which that system can continue in a world of high energy prices is a frightening unknown.’
Paul Roberts, The End of Food

alternative Castle Gardens, Lisburn (again)

I couldn’t contain myself yesterday and ended up dandering past Castle Gardens, Lisburn looking over the town (sorry, I mean city)and tried to imagine what it would look like with some poly-tunnels for a mini-farm over the various terraces. Above is a quick rough sketch of what I had in mind. I’m not sure it would work, but the terraces below the main part of the park seem to me to be nothing but grass and walls.

Here’s where my imagination sometimes takes me.
If you are going to let Tesco, Dobbies, Sainsbury, M&S and John Lewis build huge stores on the outskirts of town fine – but charge them an environmental tax. Maybe that is included in the rates they pay to the council already etc, but my thinking is that if people should have to pay parking fees for the centre of Lisburn to cut down on congestion in the town centre, why shouldn’t they also pay to use car parks round the Sprucefield site which is often congested?
Or else drop the parking charges in town centres so that its not one rule for the big boys and another for the small retailers.

With the money raised through the environmental tax put a roof over Market Square and turn it into a proper sheltered market, like St. George’s Market so that you can have a market with shelter from the Northern Irish weather. Make this space an independent area with fair rates, not crazy over-priced rates.
Also build a little farm on Castle Gardens, so that it can supply good healthy, organic food in the area (maybe a vegetable box scheme?) to places like the Island Centre, Lisburn College, the schools. Maybe the college could run courses in conjunction with the farm and kids from local schools could come up and learn about growing vegetables, keeping chickens or looking after our dwindling natural resources. You could have cookery classes and a small cafe/shop supplying Fairtrade, organic things. You would need farmers to grow things so it would give a few people work. They could sell the produce down at the market as well.

Tag: urban farming