Gardenig in France. Tips & Guides

The focus on food waste tends to be on the fresh items we don’t manage to eat before they go past their sell-by date, but in our house there are plenty of pantry items that are hidden from view and remain unused, and my Inner Womble has been inventing ways to make use of them. Now that I’m at home for lunch, making fresh soup and bread is a good way of dealing with both of them – a blended soup can hide a multitude of less-than-perfect food items, and an inventive bread recipe can make use of some as well.

Header image: Suited up to simulate the conditions of working outside on Mars. Jonathan Clarke (the author, left) with visiting engineer Michael Curtis-Rouse, from UK Space Agency (right). Jonathan Clarke personal collection, Author provided.

Last month, writing on the topic of blackberries for Lubera, I made the observation that the British don’t have a tradition of foraging. It made me wonder again when and why we lost it (which I started wondering when I was writing about Sea buckthorn on FB for Lubera). So far I haven’t found a definitive answer – ethnobotanists spend a lot of time exploring the reasons for loss of traditional/indigenous knowledge about plant use, but generally focus on societies where it is being lost now, and where there is hope of conserving it.

Alison Tindale tells explains everything you need to know about Chinese artichokes!

Now that the arbor is up, I need to think about surrounding it with plants. I have climbing achocha and mashua which might (hopefully) provide some shade. Once you’ve eliminated the possibility of heat stroke, you’re left with that other perennial summer problem – pests. How do you stop bugs great and small from bugging you, or committing suicide in the jug of Pimms?

From the moment humans started to reach for the skies, we have used other species from Earth to test what’s safe and what happens to life away from its natural habitat on the planet’s surface. 

News that Tesco now sells frozen avocados provoked a mixed reaction amongst the people I know, but it’s true that avocados are pesky things when it comes to food waste. Unripe one second, practically past it the next, it’s hard to time their consumption correctly to get them at their best.

Throughout history, herbs and spices have been extremely popular, used as medicines and aphrodisiacs as well as making their way into dinner. A plant that the Romans (and ancient Greeks and Egyptians) would have been familiar with was Silphium. They thought it was the finest of all seasonings, as well as a top notch medicinal plant. The Romans got a taste for meat from animals fed on Silphium, and it seems that the herb may well then have been grazed into extinction. It never seemed to make it into cultivation. Another possible explanation of Silphium’s disappearance is that a change in the Mediterranean climate meant it could no longer thrive, and died out naturally. According to Pliny, the last known Silphium plant was given to Emperor Nero as a gift.

Header image: Chimpanzee Ham with Trainers. Image credit: NASA

A reliable French-style bread machine recipe, from the Logik Stainless Steel Bread Maker instruction booklet.

In a typical year, I do my garden planning before Christmas. But last year wasn’t normal, and normality (whatever that means) has yet to return. I thought I’d thought about it, but it turns out – not so much.

Header image: Brooke Lark/Unsplash

Growing lettuce on the Moon is a step closer, as a French start-up has successfully grown lettuce in simulated lunar soil.

One of the stories that I read as a child that has stayed with me is The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. For a long time I had a copy on my bookshelf, but when I had the urge to read it last week I discovered that was no longer the case. Fortunately it’s easy enough to find a free copy, particularly as it’s part of the new range of free Amazon Kindle Classics, which you can read via the free Amazon Kindle app – you don’t need an actual Kindle.

We’ve got a while yet before we get to the eagerly awaited and short-lived British asparagus season. This year it falls after the equally eagerly awaited and short-lived, but far less healthy, Easter Egg season. You can expect British asparagus to be in season from the end of April through until June. I planted some wild asparagus from crowns three years ago, and cultivated asparagus plants two ago, and so this year I’m hoping we can harvest our first home-grown spears!

Last year I thought I’d planted climbing French beans in the garden, and was later disappointed to find out that I’d sown a dwarf variety! This year I rectified that issue and sowed two different climbing beans – Blauhilde and Helda at the beginning of June. I sowed some indoors and some directly into one of the raised beds, where my intention was that they would climb the sweetcorn (and be 2 of the 3 Sisters). That hasn’t worked out – for some reason the sweetcorn has been a complete failure, with most stems barely reach two feet tall. In the end I put up tripods for the beans instead, and they’re really getting going now.

In 2004, ESA challenged French chefs to come up with gourmet recipes for space travellers on Mars and other planets. They were limited by what could feasibly be grown on Mars, with extra ingredients (such as extra vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, seasonings and sugar) shipped from Earth.

2017 is the 100th anniversary of the start of the Cottingley fairies story, a hoax which entrances the UK to this day. Cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright faked photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden, intended to be a practical joke on their grown-ups. When Elsie’s mother showed the photos to the local Theosophical Society, she set in motion a chain of events that led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to declare the photographs to be authentic. He wrote an article on fairy life for The Strand magazine in November 1920, and fairy fever gripped the nation. Conan Doyle later wrote a book on the subject, The Coming of the Fairies – The Cottingley Incident.

Header image: One of the Vanguard satellites being checked out at Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1958. NASA

I was out in the potting shed yesterday morning and sowed the first seeds of my 2019 gardening season – sweet peppers, leeks, purple sprouting broccoli and some salads. They’ll all be inside for the next few weeks, as although the weather is unseasonably warm, it cannot be relied upon.

If you’re keeping track of the news to see how Brexit is progressing, then the only possible answer (whatever your political persuasion) is… not well. MPs have vetoed the PM’s deal (again), the Speaker has vetoed her plan to make them vote on it again, the PM has been forced to ask the EU for an extension, and the French PM has said he won’t agree to one. With 9 days to go, we still don’t know what’s happening, and whether we will crash out of the EU without a deal (even though Parliament voted that wasn’t what they wanted).

When someone says orchid, what springs to mind? Probably the beautiful and showy hybrid orchids you can buy in the garden centre, or possibly the tropical orchids Kew does such magnificent displays with during its annual orchid festival. The cultivation of tropical orchids became popular in Britain in the seventeenth century. At the time, no one knew how to propagate orchids from seed, and wild plants were dug up and imported en masse, devastating their native habitats. By the nineteenth century, people had realised that the common British wildflowers they had been overlooking were also orchids. They too became popular with collectors, with some species being driven to the brink of extinction by over-collection and the intensification of agriculture.

It’s hot, it’s humid, and I am longing for the shorter, cooler and damper days of autumn. My forays into the garden are brief; I am grateful that it has rained enough recently for me to avoid having to water. I am still waiting for the courgettes to produce edible fruit, but the climbing French beans (‘Helda’) are producing a handful every few days, and they are delicious.

What kind of traveller are you? Do you prefer to lie in a hammock slung between two palm trees, reading the latest blockbuster novel? Or would I find you soaking up the local culture along with the sun? I’m more of the latter, and it helps to know a smattering of the local language if you go off the beaten track!

This is one of a series of posts looking at what we might eat on Mars, where most food would have to be shelf-stable, tinned or freeze-dried. You can find other posts on this topic under the Martian Meals tag.

In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks to Mission Specialist Susan Young. Susan’s new book, “Growing Beans: A Diet for Healthy People and Planet” aims to get us to look beyond green beans, as growing and eating shelled beans – fresh and dried – has numerous benefits for us and our home planet. 

On Saturday, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer shared a taste of home with the rest of the crew of the International Space Station (ISS). Maurer is from Saarland, a forested, southwestern German state. Saarland is named after the Saar River, a tributary of the Moselle, and Saarland is considered part of the greater Moselle wine region.

On 31 January 1971, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa launched on their Apollo 14 mission to the Moon. While Shepard and Mitchell walked on the Moon, Roosa stayed in orbit, taking photographs and performing experiments. Tucked away in his personal belongings were 500 tree seeds, which orbited the Moon 34 times.

Thomas Pesquet’s Alpha mission is about to bloom! The ESA astronaut will soon be growing flowers on the International Space Station, in an experiment called “Graines d’Eklo”.

One of the things that fascinate me is how astronauts from different cultures take different foods into space. When French astronaut Thomas Pesquet blasts off to the ISS later this month, for example, he’s taking four French meals specially created by a Michelin-starred chef. (Including a truffled pie of potatoes and onions from Roscoff, slow-cooked beef with mushroom sauce, almond tart with caramelised pears, and a freeze-dried cherry tomato dish. Heston Blumenthal created the first space bacon sandwich for Tim Peake.)

In August this year, I talked about a new experiment that ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet was about to start on International Space Station (ISS). “Graines d’Eklo” involved a specially-designed growing capsule, containing its own light source and a growing medium made of coir (coconut fibre) and vermiculite with a slow-release fertiliser.

Chris D Thomas, University of York; Jack Hatfield, University of York, and Katie Noble, University of York

Header image: Rimma Bondarenko/Shutterstock

Q: I’m thinking of buying a polytunnel to extend the growing season, but while many of my gardening friends think it’s a great idea, others have warned me off it, saying that they’re a lot of work to look after. Any advice would be welcome. PK, Co Kildare

French toast is a classic breakfast dish and for good reason. It's made by soaking stale bread in a mix of milk, beaten eggs, cinnamon, and sugar and then cooking it in a skillet until it's golden-brown. The results are crispy on the outside and custard-like on the inside. It's even better with a pat of butter and maple syrup on top. It's a nostalgic breakfast that many of us grew up with. The basic recipe has been unchanged for years until our Test Kitchen stumbled across a new TikTok hack.

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