Opinion - Page 106 - Wicked Leeks

Food, Farming, Fairness.

Opinion

Guy's news: worm love

It’s always good to start a new season and while we have respectable crops that will taste good, the plants are generally late, smaller and lack the vigour we expect at this time of year. As I walk the fields I’m not despondent but the grower in me is constantly asking, “why?”. The slow growth could be caused by low temperatures but I’m attributing the general lack of vigour to an ailing soil.

News from the farm

Opinion

Guy's news: accounting & organic disorder

News from the farm

Opinion

Guy's news: plants, pests & the search for balance

News from the farm

Opinion

Guy's news: feeling mixed up about being mixed up

It always annoys me when we have to buy stuff in. In a childish, probably very egotistical way, I want us to grow it all ourselves. I would even love to brew our own beer, bake bread, run a cookery school, make sunflower oil on the farm in France and more besides. What’s my problem with specialisation, trade and scale? Maybe it’s time for me to get over it and accept that the economist/moral philosopher Adam Smith and his mates had a point; it is stupid to try and do everything yourself.

News from the farm

Opinion

Guy's news: the vegetable new year

Early summer is the vegetable new year: out with the old crops and in with the new. The ‘hungry gap’, when very little UK veg is ready for harvesting, is finally over and the new season is a wonderful time for vegboxes. Even after more than 25 years of growing vegetables, I am still excited by the first broad beans, courgettes, salads and homegrown fruit, including the very welcome arrival of gooseberries this week.

Opinion

Guy's news: unseasonal swedes

While most of you are probably enjoying lighter meals in this warm weather, we are thinking of stews and roasts as we begin sowing our winter crops. Devon is the traditional home of the swede and my father would sow the crop speculatively, in the knowledge that if they did not grow well or his sons were too idle to pick them, they would be welcomed by hungry cattle in the winter.

Opinion

Guy's news: good change & veg that bites back

April to June had me feasting on asparagus and wild garlic to the end. I will now happily forgo them until next spring as my attention moves to broad beans, artichokes, new potatoes, sugar snaps and marsh samphire. Five-a-day is easy with such a succession of delights, and I have quite lost interest in meat, cream and butter. Alcohol consumption may even have dropped a tad too. This is the time to avoid sauces, keep cooking to a minimum, cut back on the seasoning and let the vegetables do the talking; it is the time to celebrate what is in natural abundance.