Feeding Through The Hungry Gap

Even in the "hungry gap" you can make nutritious meals for less than $2 by growing your own.

In the past I have been a bit anti home growing carrots; they're fiddly and slow and finnicky and lets face it, cheap to buy anyway right.

Craig persevered.

We have tended to take the advice of our Italian friend Lisa who simply sows them in lines and harvests them in lines as she needs them. 

Her words,

 "you take them as they come, as they grow, some are straight, some are small and sometimes they are big, wassamatta? They are all carrots"

freed us from the commercial expectations we had been placing on our crop.

We had been conditioned to think carrots were straight, one colour and one size and we were failures if we didn't produce like that.

You do need to ensure that the seed is kept moist till germination and that the weeds are not too vigorous among them. A good tilth to the soil is helpful but if you are using your compost like you should for all your vegetables your soil will be great anyway. A steady supply of water during their growing is also important, like any vegetable you don't want them to go for days on end without water, it will tell in the taste and texture.

Think about that carrot...

it is essentially a root taking up from the soil and creating it's goodness.

I know farmers who will not eat bought mono-cropped sprayed carrots for that very reason.

Another incentive to grow your own.

One of the best reasons of all I have discovered is it's slowness as it turns out. The late sowing in summer has been steadily feeding us for months and what's more I haven't had to preserve them or store them, they have done just fine in the cool ground. I literally pick them as I need them. Within minutes of them being in the ground we are eating them.

Fresh, chemical free, cheap and versatile.

This week for dinner I slow cooked a whole chicken, one of the roosters we culled a couple of months ago. I based it around the Chicken Soup recipe in Anneke Manning's seasonal cook book.

I used a huge bunch of parsley. I mean a huge bunch like a vegetable quantity rather than a herb flavour quantity as it is about to go to seed and I am using as much as I can of it's lushness. I added a bottle of last seasons' tomatoes from the cupboard and juice from a lemon from the front yard. Next some dried beans (4 different types)  from last years harvest that I had soaked for 24 hrs and of course lovely carrot straight from the patch and some garlic still feeding us from last years crop.

The next night I took those leftovers from the slow cook and strained the liquid from the meat and veg. I added some mashed potato to the solids and baked the mix in a pie for dinner the next night. 

Craig took leftover pie for lunch the next day and I took the leftover "soup" for my lunch.

The chick cost us $5 and the cost of feeding it till dispatch is more than covered by the eggs from the pullets.

All the veg was produced from our own saved seed.

I won't get into a breakdown of energy costs to produce the meals suffice to say the initial cost of the slow cook....around $5 plus electricity

The pie say $1.60 for the butter and flour in the pastry and the potatoes (we've run out)

For a total of $6.60 plus whatever for electricity for cooking I made three meals for us.

It's the end of winter (spring doesn't really start here properly for another month yet) and we are in the "hungry gap" of the garden. We still have perpetual spinach and lettuce, carrots and parsley growing. Lemons are in glut and the chooks are laying. We are on our second last pumpkin and though the Turks Turbans are shocking hard to cut my word they store well!

 We are still using garlic and there is also Tas pepperberry leaves, bay leaves and hardy herbs still for the picking. We are down to our last dozen of bottled tomatoes and haven't run out of paste, sauce or condiments. The dried beans are something else. They are a meal in themselves and a little handful goes a long way. We have just finished the frozen peas and broad beans and green beans. 

Though I am starting to crave fresh fruit (we still have bottled cherries, pears, apple and plums) there is no way we would ever go hungry.

All from a suburban backyard.

I cannot urge you enough, just grow two things.

Next year grow four

Next year you'll never look back again.

In the southern hemisphere sow a couple of rows of carrots and keep sowing a row every month till autumn and you'll be feeding yourselves the whole year through. It is surprising how much you will harvest from a short row so gauge it by your family size.