To celebrate the launch of Michael Kelly’s new book, The GIY Diaries, we’re giving you a peak inside the cover of this beautifully illustrated book by sharing a few diary entries from the October chapter, along with one of the featured seasonal recipes from GROW HQ Head Chef, JB Dubois.
october
The days get shorter and darker, and the growth is gone from the year. But the veg patch is still heaving with produce and every hour spent there is matched with one in the kitchen to make the most of the lovely homegrown fruit and veg.
This month we’re loving … beetroot – a July-sown crop is harvested now and stored in a box of sand for the winter. Delicious and easy to raise, it’s one of our favourite things to grow.
3 october: storing beetroot
I love beetroot – actually, I don’t think there’s much you can say against it. You can grow large quantities in a small space, it’s easy to grow and relatively trouble-free, stores exceptionally well and is incredibly good for you. So what’s not to love? From three timely sowings a year, we have our own supply of beetroot almost all year around. We had our first fresh beetroot of the year from the polytunnel in mid-May this year; more from the veg patch outside about a month later; and the winter storage crop will last right up until next April if we’re lucky.
Unlike hardier roots like parsnips, I don’t leave my beetroot in the soil for the winter – today I lifted the whole lot of them for storage in a box of sand. I harvested sixty or so in all, which were from the third sowing I did, in July. Before putting the roots into sand, they need a little cleaning up. Having twisted off the foliage on the beetroot (leaving a 5cm (2-inch) crown of stalks), I give the roots a good rub to remove most of the dirt. It’s not a good plan to wash them as they might go soft. Then I grade them. Only the best ones should be stored, so any that have holes in them go straight to the kitchen to be used now.
I use horticultural sand, which you can buy (cheaply) in garden centres, but be mindful that you may need to dry it out before use (particularly if it has been stored outside). Mine felt wet when I got it home, so I simply emptied the bags out on the bench in the potting shed to let it dry out for a few days. When it’s ready, place the roots between layers of sand in a box, making sure they are not touching each other. Store the box in a dark, frost-free shed. If we use three roots a week, this stash should last us about five months.
19 october: soil
Soil. Well, it’s just dirt really, isn’t it? It’s something to be cleaned off our boots and scrubbed off our hands, right? When I started growing my own food, I didn’t have any respect for the soil that the veg was growing in. My focus was on the seed, the plants, the vegetables. In fact, the soil was a source of annoyance to me – it had to be dug, raked, hoed, rotavated, coaxed and cajoled. It had to be bent to my will.
If we brought in a big digger and scraped the thin layer (about 15–20cm, or 6–8 inches) of rich topsoil off the surface of our planet, all life as we know it would cease to exist. Plant matter would not grow, and without plant matter there would be no animals (including humans). Given its importance to our survival, it’s strange that we treat it with such contempt. Centuries of commercial agriculture has assumed that we can continue to rob the soil of its nutrients by growing intensively from it and that all we need to do is replace the three core nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (the key ingredients of commercial NPK fertiliser).
In fact, what soil needs to support life is far more complex than that. Composts and manures (which are the organic alternative to chemical fertilisers) also return dozens of trace minerals and other nutrients to the soil. As a result the vegetables that grow in this soil have more nutrients in them – and healthier veg leads to healthier people. Then, having served their purpose in the kitchen, the vegetable trimmings and waste are returned to the compost, releasing the nutrients that are left back to the compost heap and then eventually back to the soil. Even a cursory understanding of this never-ending cycle of growth–maturity–decay leads you to one conclusion: growing your own food is all about the soil.
From that perspective, my most significant achievement as a GIYer has been to learn how to make proper compost. Each winter I put wheelbarrow loads of the crumbly stuff on my vegetable beds. And each year my soil starts to look less like a potter’s clay, and becomes a little darker, a little crumblier and a lot more lovable. I’ve stopped treating my soil like dirt and learned to love it.
22 october: world food day
It was World Food Day today and, as I always do with these vast global events, I tried to think about it at the only level that makes any sense to me – my vegetable patch. One of my main motivations for growing my own food is that supermarkets just don’t provide any real variety when it comes to fruit and vegetables. I mean, on the face of it, they seem to be stacked high with produce, but when you really look at it, you realise that mostly they play it very, very safe. There is an assumption that because our world is so small now, we have access to a vast array of new and exotic vegetables from all over the globe. In fact, ever more powerful transnational supermarkets are forcing food producers into the straitjacket of monoculture – producing higher yields of ever-decreasing varieties of vegetables. Typically, these varieties are chosen not for their taste, but for their ability to survive very long journeys from farm to plate.
What does this really mean? Whereas a decade or two ago you could find 10–15 varieties of apples or tomatoes in a supermarket, now there are just a couple. And in all likelihood, they will be the same two or three varieties available in a supermarket in Spain or America or Asia. In fact, 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural diversity has been lost in the last century, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
This tragic blandness suits retailers (and producers to a certain extent) who are only interested in bulk selling, but it’s terrible for biodiversity, taste and variety. Given the vulnerability of monocrops to attack from pests and diseases it’s also downright dangerous from a food security perspective. And, of course, when farmers in the developing world are forced to grow crops for export to developed countries, it leaves local populations vulnerable to food poverty.
The beauty of the veg patch is the diversity it offers us. We have at our fingertips a smorgasbord of varieties of each veg that we can dip into each season. We can grow purple carrots or giant parsnips. We can grow vegetables that you rarely get at all in a supermarket, like kohlrabi, artichokes or Florence fennel. We can grow a variety of tomato that we know to be particularly tasty. We can save seed from varieties we like. In short, we are empowered.
27 october: love ‘em or loathe ‘em
Few vegetables divide opinions as much as Brussels sprouts. But, love ‘em or loathe ‘em, what is beyond doubt is that they can provide the GIYer with a very valuable crop in the winter months (usually September to February). They freeze well and are incredibly good for you – high in vitamins D and C and dietary fibre. There’s also an incredible amount of goodness packed into a neat little package – take a single sprout and remove all the leaves and spread them out on a chopping board and you will see what I am talking about.
At this time of the year, it’s important to earth up and stake the plants as they can blow over in heavy winds. Wind rock causes the roots of the plant to unsettle, which results in lower yields and causes the sprouts to open prematurely. If sprouts start to open up, give the plant a good nitrogen feed (like comfrey or nettle tea) and remove any open sprouts. A good mulch at this time of the year is always a good idea to feed the plants – they need lots of nitrogen to develop those leafy sprouts.
If you have an aversion to sprouts, which I did for years, know this: the key to a tasty dish is to lightly blanch and then fry them in some butter or oil and rock salt. I suspect that many an Irish mammy (though not mine, of course) unwittingly created a lifetime hatred of sprouts by putting them on to boil at the same time as the Christmas turkey went in the oven.
30 october: garlic sowing
Even though we’ve only used a small amount of this year’s garlic crop so far (with the rest hanging up in the corner of the kitchen), today it was time to plant next year’s crop. Though the tradition is that garlic is sown before the shortest day of the year in December (and harvested by the longest day in June), getting them in to the ground earlier than that gives them the best chance of getting the cold weather they need to thrive.
Though sowing garlic is easy, it generally necessitates some bed clearing and a bit of forward thinking about next year. More specifically, I have to consult my gardening diary to see where the crop rotation that I follow is dictating things are to be grown next year. So next year, the onion family (garlic, leeks, onions) will be going where the brassicas are this year, alongside the small tunnel at the back of the veg patch.
Once the bed was cleared, sowing the garlic only takes a few minutes, with Eldest Child tasked with measuring out the rows and placing the cloves on the ground. I sowed around a hundred cloves in total, which is probably way too many, but I am allowing for some of them not to grow, and others to be on the small side. Around 50–60 decent bulbs would be a great result, and the balance could be eaten green about a month before the rest.
october recipe
roast squash with caramelised red onions, cashel blue and hazelnuts
It’s squash season and this roast squash recipe from JB will create a great centrepiece for a mezze platter.
ingredients:
- 1 whole squash (butternut or Crown Prince)
- 1 tsp sea salt
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 2 large red onions
- 1 tbsp organic golden granulated sugar
- 100g Cashel Blue cheese
- 100g crushed hazelnuts
directions:
- Preheat the oven to 150°C.
- Halve and deseed the squash (keep the skin on). Place the squash, skin down, on a roasting tray. Sprinkle with a little sea salt and drizzle with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Cover with tinfoil and bake for 30 minutes to 1 hour. Use the point of a knife to check that the squash is completely cooked.
- Peel and chop the onions. Fry them for a few minutes on a high heat with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and add the sugar. Allow the onions to caramelise for few minutes and then take off the heat.
- Take the tinfoil off the roast squash and cover the squash with the caramelised onions. Crumble the cheese over the onions and sprinkle over the crushed hazelnuts. Turn up the oven to 180°C and bake for a further 15–20 minutes.
buy the giy diaries
Head to our online store to buy The GIY Diaries by Michael Kelly – a beautifully illustrated diary of a year in his vegetable patch. Month by month you will learn how to create a space that gives you fresh, wholesome fruit and veg that tastes far better than anything you can find in the shops.
