End Of Season Or Is It?

Just because we are nearing the end of the traditional growing season it doesn’t mean any let up in the work required to see us through the winter, or that we have to stop growing crops as we merely change to winter and colder weather crops which grow slower and tend to give smaller yields, but as always, every little helps. We have full freezers and lots of dried, bottled, and canned foods from our gardens and made lots of wine and begun on the cider, we can eat and be merry and still have some home grown winter foods; and due to the new summer project we have more free electricity and another means to distribute it.

Throughout the summer we have made tonnes of compressed paper logs by mulching paper in water to form a pulp and compressing this into briquettes and storing the freshly compressed items on slabs in the hot greenhouses, under the benches where the heat is important but not the light; here they dry for several weeks during the hottest part of the summer, under glass, and from here we have a heated store to keep them until they are needed where they are distributed to the people who may need them in the village, for their fires.
During the school holidays many of the children take out the smaller branches from out large wood store and leave the rest of the thicker branches and tree trunks and they cut them into logs and split a quantity of them for peoples log stores, all by hand, and they fill the smaller logs requirements for some villagers log burners. Meanwhile many of us collect the larger timber and spend a day cutting it up with chainsaws and splitting them into logs with the splitter I made for the back of the tractor and the split logs are distributed throughout the village and this is repeated until everyone has a full log store, in readiness for a cold winter. This gives us a mix of wooden logs and briquettes to everyone will have sufficient timber to heat their homes in the event of a gas shortage again. Surplus split logs are put back into the seasoning store until they are needed.

Every summer holidays sees two lads go to every house in the village and clean their chimneys and once cleaned they light the fire and thoroughly test it to ensure it burns properly and the chimneys and flues have no leaks and they repair any leaks they find, they also assist in stocking wood stores and ensuring everyone has kindling dried and ready to go. This year they have apprentices and two of the younger lads went with them and are being trained to do this job as every house in the village has a spare log burner for any emergency so they have heat and the capability to do basic cooking and warming foods such as soups through and cooking a basic stir fry.
Some villagers have gone further and got a Dutch oven which is a large cast iron pot which goes in the fire and sits on the embers and has some thrown over it and you can cook everything from joints of meat to bake bread and they load it and put it into their log burner.

Most villagers have upgraded their 12 volt DC systems due to a neighbour changing jobs and he now works for a storage battery manufacturer and provider and in their large commercial installations if they get one duff battery they replace the lot and in a 10 battery system this means 9 good batteries made better by the fact they are FREE and we like free. Many people have upgraded their 12 volt systems by adding huge battery capacity and splitting this so some powers invertors which provide mains electricity for their essential freezer so in the event of a power cut they won’t lose their frozen food and in many cases they can use their microwave in short bursts. Their standard 12 volt system will power lights and laptop/phone chargers for several days if necessary so they can stay connected and some have small solar panels to help keep their batteries topped up.

My main summer project was to install another water turbine which is a 7.5Kw unit and is about a year old and replaced at a farm as the farmer installed this unit to power several systems and this unit paid for itself in under a year so he has upgraded from a 7.5Kw unit to a 15Kw unit and to quote him “50% more cost for twice as much electricity, no brainer as the water is free” and I have another free water turbine. This is connected to a huge battery charging station and due to having a Craig we now have off grid battery charging and if a villagers battery is getting low they can switch to another battery and bring the flat one and charge it up, Craig designs electricity grids and he also goes “hands on” and builds them and their systems, hence free battery charging and seemingly infinite power. In the event of a power outage we have virtually infinite electricity through several properties connected to my water turbines and additional battery power with the capability to recharge them for free as all properties have more than one storage battery connected to an inverter.

Growing has been slightly challenging this year due to the weather and while beetroot is rubbish as I have had none; the flip side is that we have had bumper rhubarb crops and are still picking it as instead of just picking it we simply thin it out and it produces more and more and this means lots of frozen rhubarb and plenty of rhubarb wine.
Normally we make stew packs up which are packs of vegetables we harvest and freeze, these are split into several bags and as a crop is harvested it is frozen and split between the stew pack bags so we just add meat and gravy to the vegetables and either make dumplings or cheese scones or sometimes both to make a nutritious and tasty meal with our produce. We have taken this a step further and added frozen stir fry packs and while most of the produce contained within them is from our gardens, some is actually bought in to give a specific slant and an example would be a Chinese variant may have water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, and beansprouts in it which would be bought in as a bulk quantity which would be shared, other things such as mushrooms would also be bought in. Such meals can be stored in individual, twin, or family portions and can have meat or fish added to give a filling and nutritious meal which is also tasty and utilises some unusual ingredients such as our cabbage stalks which are not only tasty but normally thrown away and have proven an excellent ingredient.

On the growing front we have given away a record number of salad bars made from recycled timber and with so many being used, no doubt by many needing financial help, that we have taught then NOT to pick things such as lettuce and mixed leaf and just pick the leaves off as they need them and a few plants will last them all season, and this has paid dividends. To extend the growing season we have suggested they bend some wire into hoops and push them into their salad bars and cover with cling film to make it into a small greenhouse and many are doing this and some are preparing to insulate the bottom of their salad bars using material filled with the polystyrene found in packaging to help keep it warm and growing for longer.
Salad crops still grow as the temperature drops but they grow slowly and if you cover them to absorb the suns heat as much as possible and insulate the bottoms and water sparingly you can grow salad items up to Christmas and often beyond by utilising what you already have. One elderly couple on a basic pension said using this method meant they have been in lettuce and mixed leaves from spring to autumn and they bought the seeds with both packs costing £1 so kept in salad crops all season for £1 and still growing strongly and producing.

This season has seen the cookery classes take off as usual and there have been some excellent learning curves and many people have actually learned to cook real food instead of living on take away’s as the dangers to people’s health from many processed foods have been in the mainstream media for years and we reinforce this message. In fact we only use unprocessed or very lightly processed foods and we never add some of the troublesome ingredients to our fresh foods; one new recipe was red cabbage and apple as this uses both our red cabbage and apples and to sweeten it we add fresh honey and it is delicious and really taken off locally.

One of the year’s greatest achievements is to get a lot of people off highly processed foods and onto fresh foods and teaching people how to cook fresh food has been excellent in converting them and local food banks have had lots of our spare freshly grown capacity to put in their food bank. To date we have cured 27 people with diabetes, or should that be they have cured themselves solely by cutting out highly processed foods and replacing them with fresh foods and cut their levels to well below pre-diabetic levels and back into the normal healthy ranges and they don’t have doctors pressuring them to take Metformin with its numerous side effects. Many have also lowered their blood pressure simply by changing their dietary requirements and eating more fresh foods and cutting out many highly processed foods and a local Doctor from a local GP surgery has noticed this and asked how it has been done as she is genuinely interested and taken up a spare allotment by sharing it with another allotment holder. Finances are a major factor with diet as many people cannot afford fresh food, or so they think, by growing it themselves they are not only not buying it they are cutting everything down associated with it such as the child and forced labour often used to grow it, the huge cocktails of chemicals used to produce it and the huge transport infrastructure used to transport it around the world and all these associated costs which have to be paid for.

Our Doctor has taken this a step further and obtained a grant to work on the effects to people’s health and this is because she wants to run a trial to see and measure the health benefits to people and their health from cutting down on processed foods and switching to fresh foods. She is also very aware of the fact many alleged fresh and healthy foods contain a cocktail of chemicals to grow them and many are washed in toxic compounds to clean them and kill insects and many of these allegedly healthy foods are not actually healthy.