Dressing July

We’re at the height of our productivity at the moment, harvesting over 22kg of salad leaves each week. The variety of leaves is wonderful, really strong rocket, lots of spinachy orache and the leaf celery has started to make an appearance, which gives a good fresh taste to the salad. To complement the pickings this time of year, this week we had apprentice Sean pitted against old-hand grower Ru in our fifth dressing show down. If you’ve been reading the proceedings of these competitions, you’ll know that nobody’s won the title more than once – unless you count May’s tie. So it was with great trepidation that we handed round the two bowls of salad this week – would Ru become the champion?

Salads at the ready...

We had a good number of volunteers on hand to cast their vote, even my sister Janet was in town, all the way from Zimbabwe, for the occasion. And it was a seriously hard call so it was lucky there was an odd number of us. Both tasted so good!

But…Ru was not to walk away with the title this time…for the bowl of salad dressed by Sean won by just one vote. It was only after we heard the ingredients that we figured out why it was quite so hard – both featured tahini as their secret ingredient!

Sean’s dressing for you to try…
A small spoon of Tahini
Crushed garlic
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
A little bit of chilli
Salt
Pepper
Juice of a lime
London Honey – though I’m sure your local honey will do just as well…

Be sure not to miss my dressing feature next month, volunteer Martin is gearing up to bring in his ‘winning’ concoction.

Summer bounty

It’s been a seriously busy couple of months down on my Clissold site. The intermittent rain and sun, although frustrating for summer revelery, has meant there’s lots of lovely growth and I’ve really been battling to get everything done in the few hours a week that I have to spend there.

Part of the crazy-growing-ness is that I am harvesting more salad leaves than ever and this takes up most of my time. From a site that last year was providing a fairly low yield, we are now taking an average of 6 kilos of leaves a week. Feels record-breaking to me! In between the lovely flowers you see here…

…are beds of true bounty – rocket, catalogna lettuce, rainbow chard and, of course, the salsola I introduced you to a few weeks ago. Red orache is also doing particularly well. It seems to love this site more than any of the other Growing Community sites, with delightful self-seeded plants springing up along the pathways. We are letting a couple fully mature so we can collect the seeds later in the year.

In answer to my prayers for help, a couple of volunteers have been coming outside of the regular volunteer day (1st Tuesdays of the month) to give me a hand with the planting. And, of course, to deal with the weeds which all seem to be demanding their right to come forth in droves this time of year. For Becca and Ximena’s time, I am eternally grateful.