About Blagger
What is Blagger?
Blagger is a self-sufficiency blog.
It’s all about growing your own food, making as much as you can of whatever you eat, and providing your own transport wherever possible.
What’s it’s not all about is saving money. Well, not entirely. That comes into it now and then, but sometimes you have to spend to save, and this is about moving towards a point where you have to rely less on big business and the outside world, and more on your own labours and land.
And if you’re thinking that self-sufficiency is only for those who live in a shack in the middle of nowhere, and have acres of land on which to graze their own sheep and grow their own crops, bear in mind that Blagger is written in a suburban UK town half an hour from London. Blagger HQ is a regular three-bedroom semi-detached house with a small back garden, half of which is given over to growing fruit and veg in a basic plot and greenhouse, and the other half of which is laid to patio and lawn.
Neither is it a full-time occupation.
Who is behind Blagger
Blagger is written predominantly by Nik Rawlinson, a magazine editor and occasional radio presenter. Much of the hard work of sowing, caring for, harvesting and eating the crops is shared with Rich Gooding.
What does Blagger mean?
Blagging is a colloquial term with many meanings, one of which is to get something for free. Rather like all the tomatoes you get for free from that tomato plant you carefully tended, or the eggs you get from the chickens you raised. A blagger is therefore someone who takes advantage of these free things.
Are you really growing all your own food?
No, not all of it. We’re concentrating on vegetables and it’s very seasonable, so while we have a bit of a glut in the summer there’s not all that much in the winter, but you can see how we’re doing on the Harvest page.
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Our various salad crops are approaching readiness, and with 23 tomato plants of four different varieties to choose from we’re hoping for plenty to eat, and even more left over for another batch of chutney to see us through the winter.
An early morning picking session bagged us a bumper crop of beans, taking our total for the year so far well beyond what we produced in the whole of last summer, and it appears there are still more to come.
This is what the 15 jars of our finished apple jelly looked like. They’re much darker than crab apple jelly, which is a light pink. The rich red brown of this batch is most likely down to the variety of apple we picked.
Self sufficiency doesn’t all have to be about growing your own vegetables, keeping chickens in the garden or screwing a solar panel to your roof. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that make the biggest difference.
We had our first proper harvest at the weekend. Three types of beans: French, runner and broad. Not a huge amount of any variety, but enough to cook ourselves a three-bean risotto for dinner.
The elderflower champagne is too dangerous to keep in a cupboard. So far we’ve had 18 explosions, which come with such force that they are shredding the seals on our bottles. As such we’ve come to the conclusion - reluctantly - that it’s time to start again, from scratch.