Live Below The Line

I haven't posted on this blog for a VERY long while as we don't have the allotment anymore, and for the last nearly 2 years we haven't even had a bit of garden.

But we're planning on taking part in Live Below the Line this year and this seemed like the place to write about it, as it is all to do with food and eking out as much as you can from as little as possible.

https://www.livebelowtheline.com/uk

So that is £1 per person each day for 5 days, for all food and drink. We'll give the difference between that and our normal food budget to charity, and hopefully it'll focus our minds on food waste, and food poverty here in the UK and in other places too. Some kind people might also sponsor us!

At the moment we're plotting and planning to see if we can do it as a family, without the kids losing out too much. They are way too young to understand (not quite 3 years and 1.5 years) and don't really do lentils/split peas/beans/chick peas, so the options we would take just for ourselves are out of the window!

I'm not sure if it will really work if we're trying to cook like normal for them but on on £1 a day for ourselves, so that is our focus just now.

Our plan just now is to try and buy a whole chicken, rice, veg, split peas, oats, milk, sugar, flour, frozen sweetcorn, oil, (maybe yeast too) and a few spices with our budget to feed us all, and the spend the boys' £10 on fruit, cheese, macaroni, and yoghurt to top them up.

Today's experiment was trying to make biscuits. If I have biscuits for morning and afternoon snacks alongside a bit of cheese, then they probably won't even notice anything has changed!

My Live Below the Line experimental recipe is 2 glasses of oats, 2 glasses of milk (not quite as full), 1 apple, 1tbsp sugar, 1tbsp water, 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon.

I cooked the chopped apple in a pan with the sugar and water until soft. Then added the cinnamon.

In another bowl I mixed the oats and milk left them for a bit, then microwaved them to thicken them a bit.

Then I mixed them both together and split the mixture into 24 dollops onto oiled baking trays. 15mins in a 150C oven saw them brown nicely on top, and they are now cooling.

They look OK, but we'll have to wait for the taste test to be sure!

All Over

Well, we have given up the allotment, finally.

We had done almost nothing on it last year, and humphing a baby over there with all the associated accoutrements was meaning I ended up never going. A 10 minute job of watering things became too big a task, even though it is only a 15min walk away.

So we decided that if we weren't making good use of it, then someone else should have it and get enjoyment out of it.

We took out a few prized tools and locked up for the last time a fortnight ago.

We hope to find somewhere with a garden at some point, having all your plants growing outside your own door seems like a much easier option! Or maybe we will get an allotment again when the baby is a bit bigger.

Signed up for another year!

Well I went and signed my missives and handed over my association fees this Saturday just gone, so we are signed up for another year.

I didn't really do anything at the plot, apart from empty the green house of some mouldy dead plants, re-attach a downpipe on the shed guttering, and tie our shade fabric canopy back up.

Oh and brought home mouldy leather gloves to wash. It has been very cold in that shed, it is all going to need a really good clean now that it is warming back up again.

But the plot didn't look as disheartening as I expected. It is a big mess, but all that work in previous years to put some structure into it means I can still see hope under all the weeds!

It is do-able - one bed at a time.

2010

I see I only managed 1 blog post last year! Not very good.

I promise we did go to the allotment more then that, although not as much as we should have done in the second half of the year. However we did get lots and lots of soft fruit, some potatoes, various beans and peas and some salad from the plot, so it wasn't too bad. We also got lots of weeds!

This year we hope to do better. However we are also growing something else, a baby due in May, so best laid allotmenting plans may not come to fruition! And I'm going to try and photo and blog too.

I haven't been to the plot yet this year, it has only just emerged from the snow and ice really, but I am going to try and have a walk over there soon.

Happy New Year!

Back to the plot!

We have been very lax so far this year, having hardly been to the plot at all, but we both went down today.

While I went off to the committee meeting, MrUrban dug up our Jerusalem Artichokes, sorted out the bed they were in and then put some back for this year. So we have quite a big bucket of JAs to eat our way through.

After the meeting finished I got to work on some weeding and tidying and MrUrban sowed some pea and bean seeds in biodegradable pots. That worked quite well last year, so we decided to do it again. I think they are Borlotta, Pink Lady, Runner, Purple Dwarf, and Broad on the bean front and Starlight, Ambassador and Kelvedon Wonder for the peas, like last year.

I had a good wander round the plot too, to see how it was all doing. The strawberries look happy enough, and the runners we took off and potted up in the Leanhouse are doing well too - even a flower on one of them. The soft fruit bushes have lots of healthy looking leaves and shoots too.

The fig trees in the Leanhouse have tiny little fruits starting off which is cheering, I hope we will be able to look after them and get them to ripen. I'm not going to bring them out of the Leanhouse yet as I think there could still be frosts which would do for those fruit.

The only other thing growing is purple sprouting broccoli, but it is a bit small and sad looking. But between the 3 tiny plants we may manage one batch of Stilton and Broccoli soup eventually.