Krishikari

Mostly about northern hemisphere temperate zone urban food growing

[krishikari]

Hot July vegetables

[krishikari]

Hot July flowers

#lily #snapdragon  #calendula #elacampane

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First week of July 2018 Courgettes ready and pumpkins growing fast!

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Drought in Europe; the bright side

When you have clay, lack of rain and hot weather is not such a curse. Clay soil holds water and slugs magically disappear.

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June harvests!

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Perennials also doing well in Mid-May. horse radish, comfrey, elacampane (medicinal herb) and strawberries in bloom

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Mid-May 2018, last frost date past! From top: fava beans blooming, potatoes and onions coming along great, lettuce and peas looking lush, courgettes and squash planted out!

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The rhubarb and Alexanders (zwartemoeskervel) are flowering! Rhubarb grows surprisingly quickly from seed and I’m looking forward to collecting them.

Slowly getting rid of the grass and putting down woodchips. Very slowly. If you feel tempted to have pretty grass paths in your vegetable patch, be warned that they are perfect hiding places for slugs and very tough to remove.

[seedkeeping]

We started our Black Peanuts and Speckled Bambaras today! We soaked and inoculated them - see last couple photos for the transformation. Holding/loving/planting the seeds: Amirah, a Truelove Seeds apprentice focused on crops of the African diaspora. Peanuts are from Paraguay/Brazil and bambaras are from West Africa. While they are both legumes, they are not closely related. Bambaras are close cousins to the black eyed pea, though like peanuts, their fertilized yellow flowers send “pegs” directly down into the soil and form “nuts” in pods/shells. When peanuts arrived in Africa, presumably via the Spanish, they were a familiar new plant. The peanut in Africa usurped the bambara’s names: groundnut, pindar, goober. Peanuts and bambaras kept these various names in North America as well. It is debated whether enslaved Africans or Europeans first introduced the peanut to the American South in the early 1700s, but it was certainly the Africans in America that most used this groundnut in their cooking. Later George Washington Carver, whose campaigns to help the poor Southern farmers out from under King Cotton, widely popularized it (and MANY other crops and ecological techniques) even further. Bambara is very nutritious, very drought-tolerant, does fine in poor soils, AND gives back via nitrogen fixation. You can boil or roast the fresh seeds, or dry them to make a flour for dumplings, cakes, or porridge. #bambaragroundnut #vignasubterranea #blackpeanut #arachishypogaea #seedkeeping #goobers #pindar #mpinda #groundnut #bambaragroundnut #legumes #innoculation

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Learned something new today. 

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April 2018

Warm springs days! Grass is growing faster than I can clear it! So far planted onions, kohlrabi, favabeans, peas, lettuce, beet seedlings out and sowed carrots and arugula. Harvesting perennials like chives, alexanders, rosemary, horseradish and rhubarb.

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Cool weather spring annual plantings

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Garden perennials greening up nicely for spring 2018

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Seedling time! Yes, even a “professional” gardener cannot resist the Dutch supermarket chain giveaway “moestuintjes” - little veggie gardens. Also coming up koolrabi, tomatos, sunflowers, peas and fava beans.

[krishikari]

March is almost done, and this is my first post of the year. Been very busy ordering seeds, starting seedlings for the 2018 growing season, sowing fava beans, peas and arugula, and building willow structures for school gardens!  Hmmm... also repairing vandalised willow tunnels in school gardens.

[krishikari]

Week 46 Radiccio, mustard greens, peashoots

[seedkeeping]

Malabar Spinach flower buds. This climbing plant is cooked as a leafy green like spinach, sautéed with rice, and used to thicken stews (it is mucilaginous). Originating in India, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea, it is used widely throughout tropical Asia and Africa, and has also naturalized in parts of South America, the Caribbean, and Polynesia. Though my partner has been growing this vine for years at his farm, I’m fairly new to it. Any tips/recipes/further info welcome! Last time I posted about this, @tamara_stanger said to pick the bright purple buds and purée with prickly pear or other fruit! #malabarspinach #basellaalba #climbingspinach #creepingspinach #buffalospinach #basella #seedkeeping #seedsaving

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Malabar spinach. So easy to grow and save seeds from.

[krishikari]

Week 43 harvests Crosne, peashoots, Jerusalem artichoke