Myth Eight: It’s a Cornucopia
of produce
Quite frankly there are always far too many Zucchini’s – and
never enough watermelons. Yet they come from the same family. I want
to know why? Living seasonally is a great concept, but what about the hungry
months of spring when it’s old and hoary potatoes, limp carrots and mouldy
cabbage?
Myth busted: living
seasonally and out of the garden is difficult and your culinary skills are
often challenged by the repetitive nature of your main ingredients.
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You can always try giving it away. I’ll never forget offering a neighbour excess
zucchini, he swore at me. I won’t repeat the exact words, but the nature of it
was pretty much on the level of, ‘not on your nelly’ and he leapt a fence to
safety. He makes himself very scarce
around peak zucchini season every year.
I‘ve discovered that giving them away is a successful
strategy in warding off less favoured neighbours. I have more strategies to deal with zucchini, planting
less never seems to be one of them. Why do punnets of zucchini come in nothing
less than 6? I find opening the back door and throwing them to the pigs works
for a while, but after that they start looking at you funny and I worry about
them pushing through a fence. Cooking zucchini up with a 50% ratio of something
more interesting and putting it in a jar can reduce their numbers. My favourite one though is going out early in
the morning and picking the female flowers , stuffing them full of fetta cheese
and chilly and deep frying them in a light batter.
The truth is growing
your own is managing the glut while craving mangoes and other delicacies that
won’t survive a frost.
Tomorrow: Myth Nine - Everyone
understands the need to get sustainable.
4 comments:
I can get sweet potato to grow here like a weed, but there's only so much sweet potato a person can eat. I always mange to skewer them with the fork as I dig them out too. Don't you just love dislodging fillings, when you stumble on the one stubborn piece of dirt you didn't manage to wash off!
All it takes is one minute pebble, and I mean 'tiny' to crack your teeth and send you reeling into "bloody sweet potato" mode again.
I actually like sweet potato and I seem to be able to give it away here. But I learned on the first year with zucchini, I don't eat it much to warrant it's tenacious tendrils taking over the entire garden.
It is feast or famine when you grow your own. It's good if you know people who grow something else and you can swap. :)
Again with the Little House on the Prairie books - I was always amazed at the fairly limited diet they seemed to subsist and thrive on. The truth is that I guess small subsistence farmers everywhere live on a very limited diet - what grows well in their region. Maybe our diet is freakishly varied compared with history and geography's norm..
I remember Laura (Little House on the Prairie)had a birthday and her mother did a special treat of beaten egg whites and sugar (meringue) and that horrid Nelly dissed them as poor people's food. Never did like that Nelly.
I can't remember what the stats were but our diets have far greater variety than in the past. There is a stat I can't find that goes something like... in the last 100 years our diet has grown from 50 foods to 300...(if someone knows it, I'd love to know.)
Oddly enough we get bored more quickly with the greater range than ever before. Possibly because food has become recreational.
If Trev was to be asked, do you eat to live or live to eat? I know which one he'd choose.
Yes! Two watermelon and 1 million chokos. More of one and less of the other would have been nice.
I still don't have to buy anything though and we will never starve but...a few more watermelon next time please.
Barb.
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