Growing My Own Food Changed How I See Everything - Slow Countryside Living

There's something about these last mornings of August that feels completely different to the beginning of summer time. The light seems so much softer and more golden. There is usually a bit more dew on the ground and even on a warm day the mornings carry the tiniest hint of what is coming next and it has certainly been raining enough again to carry across the hint of things to come. But out here at the allotment summer hasn't quite finished yet. In fact this might be one of the most abundant times of the year. All of those tiny seeds, seedlings and slightly chaotic gardening jobs from earlier in the year have somehow turned into this amazing harvest. The beans hanging heavily from their vines, courgettes hiding under enormous leaves, the squash and the pumpkins are slowly ripening, the potatoes are ready to be harvested and cabbages that against quite a few odds and butterflies have actually started to look like cabbages. And I find that really incredible. I've had this allotment for around nine months now and when I think back to what it looked like when I first took it on I think I imagined by now that everything would be finished. There are still weeds, there are still so many things to do but I am really pleased with how much things have come along. So in today's video, as you will have seen, we have just been to the allotment and harvested so much goodness, so much lovely, lovely food. And some of this is from this week and some of it is from last week's harvest as well. We absolutely have a glut of food. We have so much produce right now. It is the end of August, it is the end of growing season so naturally we have a lot of food that we need to get through. So what I'm thinking for today's video is we just have a bit of a cook-off from the harvest of all the food from the allotment. So the first thing I think I'm gonna do, a few days ago we made some pickled beetroot that has been in some vinegar and we're gonna can it. So we're gonna pop it in the pressure cooker behind me, give it a good cook and then hopefully, the theory is that that should then be preserved and we should be good to go. Can you see Willow? Little head. The next thing that we're gonna do is hopefully make some kimchi. I've never made kimchi before. I love kimchi, I love the taste, I love how good it is for you. Willow. I love the spiciness of it. So we're gonna do that first and we've got obviously a lot of cabbages, a lot of carrots, some chillies. We've got all the ingredients for that to just use it up. I quite like making my fermented foods, I like making my milk fear, I like making my kombucha and I'm never giving kimchi a go. So this will be purely experimental. I will do the experimenting for you guys so you know, you will be able to learn from my mistakes. And then I thought we could finish the video with making the season's first cosy roast dinner because we have not had roast dinner honestly since about the spring time because it's just been so hot. But now the weather is cooling down, it was actually quite chilly this morning, there's a lot of rain back and it's just feeling, yeah, very very cosy and I really just want to curl up with a nice roast dinner this evening. So that's what we're gonna do last. So without further ado, I think we're gonna pop the beetroot in the pressure cooker, just get that going, get that cooking in the background and then we can start work on the kimchi. I've never pressure cooked before, this season is definitely a massive learning curve for me. We do have this appliance, we've had it for years, like young, so it does have a pressure cooking function which I have never used before so this will be interesting. But what I'm going to do is just put the jars in, I think you fill it partially with water so let's do that now. I don't know why but the thought of pressure cooking something really slightly scares me. I don't know if it's because something gets really really hot and I'm like it's gonna explode. It's like an intrusive thought there. I'm gonna do it for 10 minutes and see what happens. I'm not following a recipe, I'm completely winging it, pure experimentation so let's just let's just Obviously get slicing with all of this cabbage and carrots and onions so let's give it all a good clean, well it has already been cleaned to be fair, it's come from the oven and it has been cleaned so yeah we're just going to get slicing with it really. So now we have all of our cabbage, I'm going to salt it. I know that you need quite a lot of salt and you just need to keep turning it over and you need to leave it for a few hours. I've heard the recipe says a few hours and during that time the cabbage should release a lot of liquid which is what we want so whilst this is gonna sit and do its thing, which is the thing I'm looking forward to the most. Of course having the allotment and growing a lot of fruit and veg means that bringing all of this home creates another kind of problem. You actually have to do something with it and at this time I'm yeah there has definitely been a glut of a lot of food that is ready all at once and it all needs preserving and growing my own food has definitely given me such a new appreciation for just how convenient modern food shopping really is because when you buy a jar of pickles from the supermarket you don't think about everything that happened before that jar reached the shelf. Someone grew it, someone harvested it, washed it, prepared it, preserved it, packed it and then transported it. Growing enough food to actually sustain yourself would require an extraordinary amount of time, knowledge and work and I think sometimes slow living can get romanticised into this idea that we should all be making everything ourselves but perhaps it doesn't have to be quite so extreme. Maybe it's enough to just understand the work behind the things we consume and appreciate the convenience when we do choose an easier option and that is totally okay. Later this week summer decided to disappear almost completely and the heavens absolutely opened. The skies turned grey and the rain arrived and suddenly everything felt so so different to that golden morning at the allotment. I headed into town hoping to have a little look around charity shops while they were nice and quiet but strangely I didn't really find anything. I always feel like this time of year is a little bit awkward in between time for shopping. The last pieces of summer are still hanging around while autumn definitely hasn't properly arrived yet. It is much too warm for boots and jumpers and although I love finding something secondhand to bring home I'm trying to get much better at leaving empty-handed when there isn't anything I genuinely want or need. Not every trip needs to result in buying something, sometimes you can just go for a wander, look in the windows, go for a walk through the rain and go home again. There will always be another charity shop, there will always be another time and I think it's nice to reserve spaces in our home for things that we really really like and want and need rather than just going out and getting something for the sake of it. The weather had absolutely made one thing feel very appropriate and that was a roast dinner. We haven't had one all summer. If you're not from the UK it's just a classic, you just have to have a roast dinner on a Sunday. We haven't had one during the summer because it's just been too warm and to me this is pure comfort food. I remember as a little girl growing up we would always have Sunday roast, pun unintended, religiously every Sunday. It was just the done thing but as you get older and you become more in control of your own food we only tend to have these in the winter because they are quite a lot of fat, they're a lot to me, but on this rainy August afternoon it suddenly felt absolutely perfect and this one felt particularly special because so much of what was going onto the plate had come to the allotment. The roast potatoes, the beans, the squash, the courgettes, food that had literally travelled a few minutes down the road rather than hundreds or sometimes even thousands of miles. There's something so deeply satisfying about cooking a meal you've watched grow from planting it and watering it on ridiculously hot evenings, whether something has eaten it or whether it's got some sort of disease and then all of a sudden you're chopping it up for your Sunday dinner and it just makes an ordinary meal feel slightly more special and although growing my own food hasn't necessarily been easy, cheaper or much more convenient than simply buying it, I'm realising that isn't really why I do it. I do it because I like knowing where some of my food has come from, I like being outside and I like learning something that generations before us would have considered completely ordinary. Thank you so much for watching this video, please don't forget to like and subscribe to my channel and I'll see you here next Sunday at 5pm. Have a lovely rest of your day, stay happy and blessed be.