Value Space Rating – Summer’s Top 5

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Liz

Ever since Mark began posting about Value Space Rating or VSR I have been giving some thought to how it works in my garden.  So in the fine tradition (or in the true nerdish style depending on your attitude to spreadsheets) of Laura at the Modern Victory Garden and Robyn at the Gardener of Eden, amongst others, I created a spreadsheet.  Of course for my spreadsheet to be of any use at all I had to work out a formula for calculating a plants value.  I decided on the following:

Amount of money it would cost to buy vegetables at the shop divided by months in the ground and square metres used to grow crop.  I then gave the plants additional points to  a maximum of 5 in the following categories:

  1. Value to garden – Does the plant make the garden prettier?  Does it improve the soil?  Does it bring beneficial insects into the garden and so on.  Broad Beans would get top marks here for the nitrogen fixing properties, rainbow chard might get top marks for attractiveness.
  2. Taste Differential – Does the plant taste much better when home grown as compared with shop bought?  Slicing tomatoes are an obvious 5/5.
  3. Hard to find – Can you buy the product locally?  Easily?  I would give horseradish 5 in this category as its very difficult to find fresh.
  4. Freshness – Does the freshness of the product make a difference?  Herbs – things like parsley in particular have a much better taste and texture when fresh.  They also have much better vitamin levels.
  5. Convenience – Does having some to cut when you need it make a difference?  Pick and come again crops like loose leaf lettuces and celery would score highly in this category.

I was quite surprised about how well and how poorly some items scored.  The full list is here: VSR Spreadsheet PDF.

However if you’re only interested in the best then the top 5 plants based on harvests over the 3 months of summer were:

1. Herbs – or more specifically, because they are the ones I weigh and so can assign a monetary value to: Parsley, Basil, Mint & Chervil.  Herbs came top not so much because of of a combination of money I saved by growing them and because of the difference in taste and freshness as well as the convenience you gain by growing your own.  Prior to growing my own I used to open the fridge only to be greeted by sad looking bunches of herbs looking accusingly at me from the vegetable crisper.  Either I would buy them and forget I had them, or buy them and only use half, or worse still that was the condition they arrived home from the market it.  Growing them enables me to use as much of them as I want whenever I want and it is absolutely fabulous!

2. Lettuce – Lettuce came second, partially because it is expensive to buy, particularly as mixed leaves, and partially because if I grow them on in small pots before transplanting  so they only occupy bed space for a short period before they are at a harvest-able stage.  I also scored lettuce highly for freshness and convenience as its so nice to be able to go out into the garden each night to gather lovely crisp leaves for a salad to eat with the evening meal.

3. Cucumber – I was quite surprised by this one – not sure why but I was.  Cucumber scored well because it tends to crop well for me in a relatively small space.  I grow it vertically and so it only uses about 1/2 a square metre per 3 plants.  I also gave cucumber bonus points for both freshness – the crispness of a freshly picked cucumber is so nice, and also convenience.  I do find that it’s so convenient to have salad ingredients on hold – it means I always have something for lunch, or to serve with dinner.

4. Tomatoes for slicing and sauce – I separated larger tomatoes for slicing and sauce from the cherry tomatoes because I think there are different merits in each type.  Surprisingly, because they are a lot cheaper to buy, the slicing/sauce varieties came out with a better VSR than the cherries.  They did well on volume per square metre, taste differential ( I do find that you can find decent tasting cherry tomatoes at the green grocers but very rarely do I find decent tasting larger varieties), and by virtue of being hard to find.  By hard to find I mean a range of varieties rather than slicing tomatoes per se.

5. Potatoes – I was so pleased that potatoes made the top 5 as I’ve fallen in love with potatoes all over again by growing them this year.  Potatoes made the Top 5 by scoring pretty well across the board (although I didn’t really save that much money by growing my  own).  I think they are so much nicer when fresh, all too often I’ve brought home limp potatoes from the supermarket and been so disappointed with them as a result.  Home grown potatoes do taste better, you can get a wider range of varieties (although this is changing) and they are good for the garden being good for readying a bed for future crops.  The other benefit, and I have included this in my benefit to the garden score, is that they are fun to grow and more specifically dig – especially for the kids.

And they were the Top 5 plants I grew this summer based on my VSR calculations.  I do think my calculations could do with a little refining, for instance shallots did badly due to length of time in the ground but much of that time was in winter and I think it may be appropriate to weight time in the ground differently in winter and summer.  There are also plants listed here, chard for instance, that were not at a harvest-able stage for the whole period whilst they will be harvest-able from now on.  Presumably they will feature higher in the list when I redo it at the end of Autumn.

A few weeks back The New Goodlife also did a Top 5 on the best performing plants in her garden, over summer – you can find it here.  For those of you with a literary bent her Top 5 this week is books that she’d love to read one day.

 

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Monday Harvest – 12th Mar 2012

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Liz

This weeks harvest is more of the same with a couple of different things thrown in for good measure.  To start with the different, I harvested my first lot of beetroot since Spring.

3 Chioggia beetroot, a golden one and a small Detroit Dark Red.  Although they look pretty I do find the Chioggia lacking in flavour sometimes and whilst the golden one was lovely in the salad I made out of these beets, their leaves and some pumpkin seeds, I do really prefer the dark red varieties for flavour.

Whilst eggplant is not quite new, this week saw the first volume harvest, with 3 large Bonicas being cut.  Unfortunately my first attempts to photograph them were unsuccessful and by the time I realised they were unuseable I’d turned two of the eggplants into Baba ganoush.  I think this one is destined to become Eggplant Masala tomorrow night.

Other than the beetroot and eggplants my harvest was pretty much the same as it has been for the last few weeks.  Tomatoes, chillies and the occasional fig:

 

I’m still battling against whatever is eating my (well actually my neighbours) figs so the occasional one I get to harvest goes straight out of the basket and into my mouth.  I would love to have more to make jam, or salads with but it is not to be.

What I am making salads out of is: lettuce, spring onions, herbs, and French Breakfast Radishes which I’ve grown in a polystyrene box.  I do find old polystyrene fruit boxes are great planters – particularly for things like radishes.  I know that Diana at Kebun Malay-Kadazan girls also uses them for a whole range of veg as well as strawberries.

We are getting heaps of the Scotch Bonnet Chillies at the moment, I harvested about 500g this week with a lot more left on the plants.  I see some more Sambal making in my future.  The beans are drying up though – the ones below are some of the last I’ll get for awhile.  Except for borlotti beans that is, they are about to start producing.

I am so pleased with my herbs at the moment, they are all looking happy I’m cutting them like mad at the moment.  The parsley’s doing well and I put in a few more plants this week as you can never have enough parsley in my view.  I use thyme regularly and have a few plants scattered throughout the garden.

The basil is also doing well at the moment.  We had spaghetti with pesto for dinner tonight, I also put some pesto away in the freezer.  The plants are getting really big so I should be able to freeze a few more batches before the end of Autumn.

To see what others are harvesting this week, head over to Daphne’s Dandelions for pickings from around the world.

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This Summer’s Beans

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Liz

I love beans, in some ways they are the quintessential summer vegetable, as they are one of the relatively few veg I really only ever eat at this time of year.  I tend to favour rounded dwarf bush bean varieties but I also like drying beans although my knowledge in this area is pretty limited.

This year I grew 5 varieties of bush bean, I bought New Gippsland’s Bean Collection which contains: Jade, Royal Burgandy, Beanette, Majestic Butter, and Windsor Long Pod.  I also grew Tongues of Fire (a drying bean similar to Borlotti), some dwarf Borlotti and I recently planted some scarlet runners.  The dwarf Borlotti and the scarlet runners were both planted too recently to have produced yet but the other varieties have all cropped twice from October sowings and have pretty much finished for this year.

I grew many of my beans in pots this year, this was due to a desire to rotate crops in the beds so every 3rd year they have a turn in the pots.  I also grew a few in a side bed that I didn’t think would get enough sun for them but they actually did quite well on a couple of hours afternoon sun.

This is what I thought of each of the varieties.

Jade (pictured on the far right in the top photo above): I love Jade beans, they are a beautiful deep green, with nice long round shaped pods and a nice beany taste.  Once established (they take awhile) the plants crop well in both their initial and follow up cropping.  Unfortunately they also have shockingly bad germination rates – about 25% this year from the seed that came with the Bean Collection.  0% from my seed saved from last years planting.  I will persist with Jade (I’ve grown it for the past 5 years) but I would love suggestions about how to improve the germination rate which seems to get worse each year.

Royal Burgandy (the purple beans pictured below): I didn’t think a great deal of this variety, they didn’t crop particularly well, the seeds inside the pods grew too quickly and so to eat them as green beans you had to harvest every day to ensure they didn’t get too big.  The colour was nice though and to be fair they were pot grown and didn’t get as much sun as beans would generally like.  I will try them again next year but if they don’t perform again that will be the last time I bother.

Beanette (pictured below):  A fabulous bean, nice compact, relatively fast growing plants producing small skinny beans.  The perfect bean for using whole.  Great for stir fries as well as side dishes.  Excellent flavour and texture.  They were probably the most prolific of the beans I grew (in number of beans anyway – as they are small they probably didn’t weigh as much as the Jade or Majestic Butter crops).  I grew them in a bed which is a bit depleted in terms of organic matter and only gets direct sun for a few hours in the afternoon – so not ideal growing conditions but despite this they did well.  I will definitely grow them again and would highly recommend them.

Majestic Butter (the pale beans pictured below): This was the first of my beans to crop this year and they cropped well despite being grown in pots and not getting that much sun.  Good flavour and texture.  The seeds inside are a beautiful black colour when mature.  I haven’t eaten any at the stage but it might be worth saving some to try.  I will definitely grow this bean again next year.

Windsor Long Pod: This is a flat podded bean which didn’t seem to appreciate being grown in a pot without enough sun.  I tend to prefer the rounder podded beans from a culinary perspective so I’m not sure I would bother with this again.  Having said that the flavour was fine and they may do a lot better in more favourable growing conditions.

All in all this was a good variety of dwarf beans despite my negative comments on a couple of the varieties.

I also grew Tongues of Fire beans for the first time this year.  I ate all my first crop for lunch one day – whereupon I excitedly planted out some dwarf Borlotti beans.  The tongues of fire look like they’re about to produce a second crop so I’m looking forward to another lunch next week.  I liked them a lot and will definitely grow more of this type of podding bean next year.

The big gap in my bean growing this year has been climbers.  I planted some scarlet runners very late and they are yet to crop but other than that I didn’t plant any.  I grew Purple King last year and whilst it cropped well I wasn’t super excited by the flavour.  Dad’s grown Blue Lake in the past but I don’t like how the beans tend to go woody if left on the plant for what seemed like a fairly short period.  If anyone has a good climbing bean recommendation for me then I would be most appreciative.  Next year my rotation system means I’ll grow a lot more beans in the ground so climbers will be very useful.  A nice climbing bean for drying would be great too.  What should I be growing?

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Dead ‘orse

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Liz

I have been preserving tomatoes this week.  Not my tomatoes, my father’s, so I have given this post his name for tomato sauce.   My dad always used to call tomato sauce dead horse – I suspect he’s not alone in this, its the sort of thing dads seem to find endlessly entertaining, especially when they have teenage children.  I haven’t heard him call it that recently so perhaps you have to have teenage children to roll their eyes at you to find rhyming slang entertaining…

I haven’t really had enough of my own tomatoes to do anything other than eat them and make the occasional pasta sauce, so I am grateful for any donations.  This particular donation was of too many tomatoes to eat but not really enough to make many bottles of passata so instead I decided to make a batch of tomato sauce – sauce as in ketchup.  The recipe I use is based on a recipe from Stephanie Alexander’s Cooks Companion, but I have given it a few tweaks.

Tomato Sauce, makes about 2 litres

  • 1/2 tbspn cloves**
  • 1 tbspn black peppercorns
  • 1/2 tspn ground allspice (pimento)
  • 1 tbspn ground ginger
  • 1/2 tsp chilli powder
  • 5 kg tomatoes – chopped
  • 30g salt
  • 600ml apple cider vinegar
  • 1 kg sugar

Tie the whole spices into a piece of muslin.  Place them and the rest of the ingredients, except sugar into a large saucepan.  Bring to the boil and simmer for one hour, stirring occasionally.  Add the sugar and bring back to the boil.  Simmer for another hour*.  Remove the bag with the whole spices in it.  Give it a quick whizz with a hand held food processor.  (I do this last step to break down any large lumps of skin etc, you could use a mouli instead to remove the skin altogether).  Bottle in sterilised bottles and seal (I use a funnel to pour it into the bottles).  Leave for 6 weeks before opening.

*I have made this recipe a couple of different ways before.  This is version I made the last time I did it.  If you want a fresher tasting sauce you could reduce both the pre and post sugar cooking times by half.  If you prefer the really concentrated tomato flavour you find in commercial ketchup then cook it for another half to full hour more than I have indicated here.  My preference is for in between hence the 1 hour cooking time.

** I originally published this recipe with 1 tblspn of cloves which does produce a clovey tasting sauce.  I think that half the amount will probably suit more people’s palates and so have reduced it accordingly.  If you love cloves in your sauce then a whole tblspn gives you a fairly clovey tasting sauce.

This sauce is a nice home made version of tomato ketchup so I eat it: on sausages, in rice dishes, stir fries, on burgers, the list is endless, particularly if you are under the age of 10 I find…

For other ways to cook and preserve your harvest head over to the Gardener of Eden’s place.

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Tuesday’s Top 5 – Things I like to rant about

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Liz

Oh this list could be long…but instead of going on forever I will try and stay specific in my ranting.  These are the food related issues I personally find most irritating.  I do however, reserve the right to be irritated by entirely different things tomorrow!

1.  Food Miles – Now I am not a food mile zealot by any means, I actually believe that some food miles are good and even appropriate.  I’m partial to Ethiopian coffee for instance and as long as its fair trade then I have no problem with buying it as I think the export income it earns Ethiopia is probably more important than the food miles it generates.  Ditto Sri Lankan tea, spices from India etc.  What I do have a problem with is products like Water Crackers (ingredients: flour, salt, water, vegetable oil) being made in China and then shipped to Australia.  Has Australia suddenly become deficient in one of these items?  We have wheat silos that are overflowing (largely due to inadequate rolling stock on the railway lines).  We produce salt.  The drought has finished for now so it can’t be the water.  So perhaps its the vegetable oil, not enough palm oil perhaps….. ???  I ask you –  How can it possibly be a good use of the worlds resources to ship water crackers from China to Australia?

2. Food Labelling: –   Australia has some very odd food labelling laws, which I think at best confuse consumers and at worst are pretty misleading.   I’ll give you an example: for something to be labelled “Made in Australia” the product needs to be substantially transformed here and  50% of the cost of the product has to be incurred here and that includes the packaging.  What this means in reality is that you could import orange concentrate from overseas, substantially transform it by adding some water to it and then provided that process and the packaging cost more than the concentrate you can label it Made in Australia, despite that fact that its major component – the oranges, were grown elsewhere.  Equally confusing are ingredients lists, often an ingredient only has to be listed if they reach a certain proportion of the total.  For instance a product only has to mention it has genetically modified ingredients if they are more than 1% of its contents.  Finally and for me most frustratingly ingredients are not always what they seem.  For instance palm oil is able to be labelled as vegetable oil.  Palm oil production is the single biggest threat to South East Asian rainforests, and with them the Orang U Tan.  Zoo’s Victoria is just one organisation which is campaigning for distinct labelling of palm oil to allow consumers to make informed decisions.  Shamefully both the Labour Party and the Coalition opposed a recent private members bill designed to ensure that Palm oil be listed separately as an ingredient on food labelling.  Why companies are allowed to get away with anything other than completely transparent labelling I find baffling….Well it would be baffling if there weren’t such large amounts of money at stake….

 3. Supermarket duopoly – In Australia we have two main supermarket chains, Coles & Woolworths, who essentially operate a duopoly.  What this means is they have huge buying power and control over food retailing.  This power is worrying, primarily for producers but also for consumers.  At the moment Coles is in the process of offering large discounts on a range of ‘everyday’ items, specifically milk and fruit & veg.  They present this as a great opportunity for their suppliers to sell more and for the consumer to buy at reduced prices.  What this does is put huge pressure on both those producers who don’t supply Coles and the independent retailers they supply.  To my mind Coles (and I don’t imagine Woolworths is any different) seems intent on driving the independents out of business, ensuring more people shop with them and forcing more producers to have to deal with them (on Coles’ terms) or go out of business.  After living in the UK where many high streets don’t have a green grocer, or a butcher, or a fishmonger, or even a baker, I truly value ours and I really don’t want to see a time where I have to shop solely at supermarkets because the other options have all gone out of business.

4. BPA- Why are food manufacturers still allowed to use BPA in their packaging?  Its potential health effects are pretty well documented and yet it is still used.  Why?  I’ll ask again Why?

5. Cage Eggs – In Europe there are many mainstream retailers who do not stock eggs from caged hens, or use them in their products.  Many British supermarkets sell only free range eggs, yet in Australia the majority of eggs still seem to be caged.  Corn fed caged eggs, Barn Fresh Caged Eggs, No Frills Caged Eggs, Omega 3 Caged Eggs, Environmental Caged Eggs and so it goes on, all the most ridiculous names imaginable for what is a fairly reprehensible product.    Interestingly I heard recently that Victoria is suffering from something of an egg glut because so many people are choosing to keep chickens in their gardens…perhaps the Egg Board might like consider why…..

I could add a myriad of other issues to this list – the seemingly unfettered use of large amounts of salt, sugar and fat in processed foods being a good one, not to mention the marketing of ‘pretend’ health foods, but if I started I probably couldn’t stop.  Instead I’ll leave it up to you to add your own personal bug bears to my list, if you have any of course.  Alternatively you could head over to The New Goodlife for a more uplifting experience – her Top 5 Guilty Food Pleasures.

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