Treacletart

Being brought up in the country, as children we knew at an early age where milk came from, how a lamb was born and that vegetables and fruit grew in the garden. At home and at my grandparents I could see a wide range of things growing, that if we were lucky, we would get to eat in some form or other.

Having said that, we were not very rural, or indeed very “Good Life”, just dabbling really, but looking back it was part of discovering where food came from and it was good to know that we were eating something we had grown ourselves.

Move on thirty years and I am surprised occasionally at what my children say about the origins of certain things. Seasons have merged into one with pretty obscure fruits being imported by supermarkets nearly all year round and we have an abundance of choice( if not quality), so its easy to see why the garden of yesterday is the shop of today.

So to stop the odd strange comment about how thing’s grow or squeamishness of certain garden practices, this year we had a go at growing a few things in the garden. We had a success with tomato ( pot and beds ) which were much liked, so we did these, I fancied Garlic and Runner Beans, we also tried again at Carrots and another favourite of mine Rocket.

We had great success with the Garlic, with two bulbs growing into over 40 small to medium bulbs ( perhaps a little to closely planted together ), the Runner Beans again were a huge winner, but as no one other than me and my youngest liking them, we enjoyed a few raw each evening on my return from work. Some she liked eating, some she liked to dissect to find the shiny and very pink beans.

The tomato were okay, not a huge crop, but enough to stop us needing to buy many and the ones we had were wonderful roasted, so sweet. Just a little explosive when cut or chewed!

Rocket I guess is an adult taste possibly, maybe a little peppery for the children, but fresh from the garden with some sweet tomatoes and balsamic vinegar they were great and every mouthful took me back to Italy!

Carrots were not so good, with only a very few actually making it out of the seedling stage, and those that did were very small. Tasty, just too few of them.

We scrumped ( with permission ) the apples and plumbs from the trees that reach over our hedge and went out a few times to pick blackberries. As children we did this lots in September time, and in some Northern European countries, children are still given the day off school to collect berries to store up for use through the Winter, and had some great apple and blackberry crumbles, wonderful plum tarts and a whole lot of fun, well at least until someone discovered the maggots (extra goodness ? ).

So what else did we get out of the experience, it was great seeing the runner beans grow larger by the day, especially when they got bigger than us. The garlic has saved a few pounds certainly and should see us through till spring and the tomato and beans became the garden sweet shop when Mum wasn’t around to tell us off.

Do we eat more vegetables? Not really, the salad adverse members of the family although vaguely interested, still think lettuce is a garnish and something to leave to one side, but even they gained some thing from it and a little knowledge about where foods come from was gained.

So next year we shall be doing it again, hopefully with some more help from the smaller of us. Garlic, beans, tomato at the very least and hopefully over winter the gardening seed websites and the “Grow Your Own Vegetables” book by Joy Larkcom will also prompt some more ideas.

I quite fancy having a go at Sloe Gin, so its off out soon I think…