Inside the secret gardens of our culinary elite

August 19, 2006

Photograph of photographs of Terrance Conran and his cabbages by Peter Dench at Telegraph Magazine

Last Saturday’s Telegraph Magazine reported on the kitchen gardens of twenty-three of England’s most ‘reknowned’ ‘cooks’. From several versions of elaborate kitchen gardens, to modest collections of herb-filled terracotta pots, to berry bushes and stonefruit orchards, a goodly array of food growing is displayed in the most fashionable possible way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Debra Solomon’s Occitanian kitchen garden

It was refreshing that the English culinary elite display a diversity of approaches to food growing and of gardening personality in general. Not that I need any reassuring about whether my garden is too wild or unproductive I mean organic, but because food-growing is so often portrayed as something that requires a great deal of expertise. Plants do tend to grow themselves and if you, your family or your restaurant don’t need to survive off the fat of your land, it’s delicious to indulge in a few years of pissing about, I mean finding your own style, I mean conducting some thorough active research and experimentation. Condoning this much diversity is an unusual and positive message from such a popular media source!

Photograph of photographs of Sarah Raven and her funky archway (that curiously resembles the culiblog vertical garden arch) by Tara Darby © Telegraph Magazine

But because I seem to be obsessed with growing my own and eating locally grown food (and using less petrol to grow and move food around), I couldn’t help but read ‘Inside the secret gardens..’ from an energy descent point of view. Is the fear of Peak Oil creating such a positive trend towards food gardening that more and more fashionable people are being shown to do it? Or is it a chicken and egg thang; more and more people are affected by the imminent energy descent meme and therefore grow their food? Either way, bon courage.

Culiblog kitchen garden trend, the vertical garden: efficient land-use and architectural sculptability

View from vertical garden into the upper kitchen garden just seconds before cloudbreak

Sadly and stupidly the Telegraph Magazine doesn’t have a worthy web-presence. The following authors contributed to the Telegraph Magazine issue, Inside the secret gardens of our culinary elite; Carolyn Hart (food editor and writer) with writers Isabel Albiston, Simon Beckett, Drusilla Beyfus, Daisy Bridgewater, Caroline Donald, Emma Hagestadt, Summer Nocon, Rose Prince, Francesca Ryan and Sally Willams.

• Culiblog review of architects Viljoen and Bohn’s CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes
• Designing Energy Descent Pathways: Rob Hopkins talks us through how he helped turn one small town onto the problem of Peak Oil
• Robert Hopkins’ good news blog about energy descent, always a pleasurable read
• Energy Descent Primer
• Look how often Robert Hopkins’ name pops up in this Google search for “energy descent”

debra at 12:22 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us

Ziggizagna, pasta folds of summer harvest

August 16, 2006

Julie Upmeyer puts her face in a bunch of freshly picked purple basil and miraculously sheds 16 years!

Normally mid-August is time of change in the Occitanian weather; no more highs in the 40’s and we can start expecting violent thunderstorms. But this year Mama Nature has heralded an abrupt and unusual end to summer, summoning the mind back indoors for another season of Zitsfleisch procurement. Suddenly we’re layering the bikini with socks and sweaters and going to bed sporting PJs! Hopefully the kitchen garden can handle this weather blip and still come up with a second crop of tomatoes.

Ziggizagna, individually folded, ad hoc et à la minute

Ziggizagna, short for zigzag lasagna, is a collaborative recipe for an ad hoc lasagna prepared right on the plate, each fold presenting a new filling or course, an everlasting gobstopper of a summer pasta dish. Now that the Meat Master has temporarily returned to the Polar Circle, us girly-gals (and lone manly man Floris) have taken to preparing a lighter menu with garden fresh ingredients that fit in our baskets and can be transported on back and/or bike. This Ziggizagna has fresh tomatoes, purple basil and chard from the garden, apricots, olives, garlic and almonds fresh from the market. The brebis (sheep milk cheese) is also local, sold to me each week by an exceedingly tall and handsome man from le Fermier des Garrigues. We home-aged it with the help of some early onset Oldtimers, to give it an even sharper flavour. We’s lovin’ the Ziggizagna! (Please read more… )

debra at 11:50 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us

Actually, this IS my harvest

July 28, 2006

Back to square one, but with better soil composition

At the kitchen gardens, the question on everyone’s lips is, ‘Don’t you feel utterly demoralised by the fact that since January, you’ve only been able to produce a shitload of weeds?” But because I can’t admit defeat in front of my neighbours, I usually answer that I grew these specific plants on purpose as green manure to improve soil condition, and that they they should count themselves lucky to bear witness to this premier harvest of green manures. One woman, a dislocated urban Algerian that has befriended me because I seem to fulfill her misguided notion of rural bliss and independent thought, brought her boyfriend out to ogle the melange of green and brown veg, saying that she would like to grow next season’s potager in this ‘fashion’ (façon), as if it were a bedhead coiffure.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how my ridiculous notion of gainful employment caused me to miss out on an entire summer season of ambling fruit. In the lower garden, my entire crop of melon plants (cantaloup, galia and water) rotted underneath the burgeoning weed mass that grew faster and higher than the ‘other’ intended crop. My peppers and luffahs never even emerged, my cukes wilted once exposed to the sunlight, and only the gourds, pumpkins and spaghetti squash dared enter the survival contest, competing with the weeds for sunlight and soil nutrients during the growing season that occured while I was up in the Polar Circle.

A tangle of courgettes

During the first days of weeding, I engaged in the acultural act of wing-flapping every time I discovered a fruitbearing plant that had survived underneath the ‘canopy’. My vertical gardening arches are not exactly being used as I had intended, and I’ve just laid the surviving plants over the first rung, hoping they will get the hang of climbing before August. My neighbours feel sorry for me and give me piles of tomatoes, peppers and aubergines. In return, I give them fat bouquets of shiso, but everyone knows that to a French person, a tomato is worth a heq of a lot more than some strange hippy herb that their wife is just going to throw away anyway.

View from upper garden, weeds used to mulch the preferred plants. Looks sloppy, but smells good and is less dusty. Hoping the intended plants will fill out a bit and get the eye to focus on their bountiful shapes instead of the mulching.

Closeup of le potager bas

On the bright side, I am truly impressed with the 15cm thick mats of vegetation that are quickly turning from mulch to compost right on what will soon be my autumn beds and I remind myself that I did intend to increase the soil’s organic matter by growing these particular plants. Under the parts where there is still remaining weed layer, I reach in and yank the alfalfa and buckwheat by the roots and roll the mat back over itself. When I’m done with a section of the row, I have voluminous ‘felted’ piece of weed mat that is easily manipulated to cover the planting surface. The soil texture is superb, dark and moist, so that the weeding process goes quickly, but every now and again I look at all the other folks’ gardens, nice and neat, light sand, scraped clean of all organic matter, and think about how dogmatic I am. Sidi ElGouche still jokingly refers to the mustard covercrop I grew last Spring as mayonnaise. It all reminds me of the intro in Masanobu Fukuoka’s book One Straw Revolution, where he talks about how often he screwed up before getting the hang of his own form of no-till agriculture.

Enough talking shit about my garden, the courgette, calabash gourds, spaghetti squash and pumpkin plants all have numerous flowers, and I’ve seen a bunch of slutty bees engage them in some thorough and lengthy deep-kissing, only to go on to the next plant when they’ve had enough, flitting back and forth from the sunflowers. The summer isn’t halfway over.

When the plants fill out in a few weeks, I’m hoping that some of my intended colour fields will begin to emerge.

• LINK: What I aspired my lower garden to become back in May
• LINK: The lengthy upper garden inventory was handy-to-mouthy as I uncovered all the plants. Most everything lived, the horseradish is even thriving! But I learned from the lower garden to try less agressive plants as cover crops. Next try will be some Dutch or White Clover. Alfalfa and buckwheat are too hardy and kick ass on my baby plants.

(Please read more… )

debra at 19:14 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us