What food is in season in March?
It may feel spring-like, but we’re still in the closing days of winter, and our diets should reflect that. Root vegetables are still ripe for harvesting, and we haven’t yet moved into spring or summer when we can start working with salad varieties.
However, there is still plenty of choice, and even if you’re buying your vegetables rather than picking your own, the following guide should help you to eat in season, and in doing so reduce your food miles and be kind to the environment.
Carrots are still at their height in the shops, but if you have any left in your plot you should be taking them out by now or they will soon start to rot in the ground. They may also be eaten as slugs and snails start to reappear after the winter.
Other traditional winter vegetables that are in season include broccoli and leeks. While you may still have some leeks in your plot, you will probably have finished your broccoli in autumn, and unless you blanched and stored some you’ll be into buying it from the market by now.
The earliest fruits of spring, ready to be picked and eaten, are radishes and spring onions (they didn’t get that name for nothing), both of which can be cut into salads.
In terms of fruit, you should still be using up any apples you picked in the autumn and put into cold storage, and blackberries you took from the hedgerows to freeze. Rhubarb will now be ready for picking which, despite being great in crumbles, won’t be appearing in the Blagger plot. Why? Because once it’s in there, it’s pretty much there for good, and we simply can’t justify the space its lazy large leaves take up.
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First Harvest on May 15th, 2007
A very late harvest on February 25th, 2008
End of the beans on August 13th, 2007
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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.