The healthy forager

Some people, at the start of the week, decide on all the meals they are going to have in that week. They then go shopping once to buy all the ingredients. In a different but similar way, this is what I am currently doing in my preparations for August, when I’ll be eating entirely wild and homegrown for a month. I know the kinds of things that will be growing around that time, so I need to think about what I can grow myself that will go well with that, to make a complete meal.

Chanterelles and porcini will be in their prime:

Working backwards, if I’d like to turn these tasty mushrooms into a stir-fry feast in August, it’s time to get the cucumber seeds into the ground in March! So that’s what I did at the beginning of this week. Within 6 days, they germinated, their fresh green cotyledons (seed leaves) breaking through the soil in quiet defiance of all the crap going on in the world. Small, but with a genetic code that dreams of bigger leaves to come. Tender, but growing stronger every day.

In 5 months’ time, this little seedling will have grown into a massive plant that is crawling all around my greenhouse, using every available space. Its large, dinner-plate sized leaves will provide shade to the cucumbers that will have developed below. I am imagining a warm sunny day when I come home with a basket full of mushrooms: then picking the largest cucumber, digging up the fattest looking onion, and slicing a porcini or two, panfrying them with some parsley and saying a heartfelt thankyou to each element in my meal.

When we plant seeds, we plant a little hope.