Time for the first salad from my own garden - Der erste Salat aus dem Garten

Finally ... the first salad from our garden. Made from onion greens, salad leaves and pea greens. This year the temperatures were so low that not even the peashoots wanted to grow ... I only have some from the balcony up to now, where it is definitely warmer than in the garden.

Flashback - My garden on May 20, 2015

When plants protect one another - Magenta Spreen

Magenta spreen ... my husband hates it, because it literally invades every small angle in the garden and it is loads of work to clean up. On the other hand I love it, because it protects little seedlings from cold weather and is one of the first crops one can harvest in bulk.

Hablitzia tamnoides - Caucasian Trailing Spinach

Picture by user Daderot on Wikimedia Commons
License CC-0

Today I received a seed package with a special plant: Hablitzia. It is a trailing plant, the leaves of which can be prepared just like spinach.
There was no way to find out if it is hardy enough for our climate. It is sold as a perennial here in Germany, so it should resist some frost. While here it is sold as an ornamental plant, it is a food plant in the region it comes from, the Caucasus, and therefore I will use it as such. The seeds will go into the soil the coming week-end. Having 10 of it, I will put them in three small pots and then we will see ...

Gardening and Using Less Plastic

Lollo Rosso and some pea shoots I also use
for salad in this case on my balcony.

Like all so often I am connecting various themes: in this case gardening and using less plastic. We are living in a time of rising prices because of different reasons: drought, ecotax (that is eventually going to come), floods in some places, late frosts or whatever else. For many people around the world this means that they cannot afford to buy organic and “nude” vegetables and fruit anymore, since they have to choose the cheaper food. One consequence is that again more food with plastic packaging gets into the shopping cart.

Well, we can do something that

    • provides us with natural and healthy food,
    • makes us carry less stuff home,
    • lets us save money which in turn we may spend for better choices.

Gardening - and up to a certain extent, one can do this also inside - even in the smallest apartment.

To start off, you need just a container with holes in the bottom, some soil, some seeds and water. I would suggest to start off with radishes and salad. When I started many years ago, I buyed some seedlings of salad and grew them on my balcony. I still do this today, even though I do have a small garden - sometimes I buy seedlings, sometimes I use own seeds. If you wish to start with seeds, I suggest to start with radishes, because they sprout fast, which is more satisfying for a beginner.

I nowadays mainly get presents that deal with gardening, so this can be a suggestions for your family, but make sure to exactly tell them, what you are searching for. The best way is a “to-buy-list” on the fridge or somewhere everyone can have a glance :-)

But now let’s take a look at where you avoid plastics:
Salad in 99% of the cases is sold in plastic bags. Rucola and similar small leaves are sold in trays or bags (of plastic). By growing your own salad (I will post articles about single types), let’s suppose you need salad for one meal a week, just to have any number, you will avoid 52 bags plus having a higher amount of nutrients in your food, because you harvest when you eat.

Many other examples of food that is easy to grow is to come … start one step at a time and you will love what you eat and feel good, because you definitely “ARE PART OF THE CHANGE”.

The German version of this blog has been posted on Plastik sparen. License: CC-BY-NC-ND

Magenta Spreen - Tree Spinach - Chenopodium Giganteum

Magenta spreeen, though it is an annual, I do count it among my perennials: seed once, let it grow and go to seed and you will have more than you can eat.

The seeds of this so called tree spinach distribute all over the place. When the plants start to grow I thin them out and, depending from what I am cooking, I use the little plants in salad, stews, soups and when I don't use them right away, I dehydrate them and afterwards put them in my blender to cut them into small pieces. Once done I mainly use the dried parts together with other dehydrated greens in soups or stews.

When I pick them, I choose those that are a bit bigger and I go through my garden beds once a week to harvest.

Lamb's quarters is a close relative to magenta spreen.

Time ago I found a video where someone was substituting part of the wheat flour with magenta spreen flour and made bread ... not sure if I like this, because the green bred looked a bit weird.

Be aware: once you have it in your garden and let it go to seeds, you won't be able to get rid of it again. The seeds survive in the soil more than one year and come up spontaneously, when they feel like doing it.

Sharing seeds with people in need

In a group on one of the social media platforms I am a member of there was a question about "where to buy seeds for small money". This question brought me back to thoughts I already had a couple of years ago.
Many of us preserve seeds and we always preserve too much. Other people need them due to various reasons, may it be that they are starting their garden, may it be that they were flooded or whatever situation came along.
Up to now I also buy part of my seeds, because I am still building up my garden, now I am going to get 5 varieties of pole beans and 5 of bush beans that were grown in over 700 m and therefore support some more cold weather than the usual beans.
Wouldn't it make sense to have seed banks maintained in many places all over the world where one can apply to receive seeds just paying the postage or even receiving them for free, when there is someone who would pay for the postage? Wouldn't this be a way where people simply start to co-operate and create real-life networks? Wouldn't this be a further step for many to assure self-sufficiency?
One of the big examples for me is Navdanya by Vandada Shiva. She has done great work so far. The only thing I would change is: I would not collect seeds in a central place, because central places generally are more vulnerable. It's like with distributed computing: storing in many places is safer and much cheaper.

Photo from pixabay.