Sunday, June 03, 2007

Very Low Food Miles



Polytunnel World goes from strength to strength. Besides the strawberries, which we've been eating for three weeks now we had our first courgettes yesterday, admittedly baby ones. The corn, French beans, pumpkins, squash, peppers, aubergines, coriander and tomatoes are all coming along fine. The first fruit have appeared on the tomatoes in the pots - the ones we put in early.






The excess of strawberries has meant the strawberry vodka has been started this morning. The strawberries are in a Kilner jar and then covered with vodka, no sugar though as this appears to be incorrect from consulting recipe books various.


Right beside the polytunnel a pheasant has made her nest. It's two eggs short as one of the dogs found the nest, scared off the hen and devoured two before we could get a hold of her. Click on the picture if it's not too clear and you'll see her tail poking out of the grass. Nevertheless I'm going to tell the gamekeeper that they owe us some extra pheasants this year - roll on pheasant pate!

2 comments:

Rachel Joyce said...

We did well with our tomatoes last year and they were so nice compared to supermarket stuff that we have planted up half of the garden with fruit and veg!! I don't have a nice tunnel like you do but I have a lovely fruit cage. It looks nice and is meant to stop birds and butterflies going in - but a small butterfly was spotted going in and out the other day - hope the cabbages will survive.
My food miles are definately improving since the local market on Saturday has now essentially turned into a farmer's market - nicer food again than the supermarket - yum!

Richard Havers said...

Rachel, the only reason we have a polytunnel is because we lve at over 700ft up in the hills and without it tomatoes may never ripen!

We lack a decent farmers market, although there is one in Haddington but that's near enough 17 miles each way. On the other hand our farmer neighbours supply all our meat which is an amazing bonus. Pork, bacon, lamb and beef a plenty as well as mutton which is absolutely lovely but hard to find at butchers and supermarkets