Hello and welcome back to Scrap Kitchen.

This is episode 6 and I think I'm gonna call it Snow Fall. Or maybe Slow Fall.

For those of you in the United Kingdom, a Happy Mother's Day (especially mine)! I'm about to go on a call with my mother so I have half an hour to type this s**t out and get it ready.

So I'm gonna do a short one this week mainly because it is our final week before the staff start a farm. This means we've been rushing around a lot, today and yesterday were our first two days of not doing farm tasks (apart from looking after seedlings) in weeks. So this is like the Final Rest™ we get before the season starts. Hence why I thought I'd make a quick update today.

The Week in 5 Photos

Here are five pictures that I wanted to talk a little bit about not too much hopefully but things from the last week or so

The first is beautiful, I think it's a print, I'm not exactly sure, it says ‘Community is the most effective form of rebellion’ and it's by Eileen Jimenes. They're on Instagram and I just took a screenshot of it because clearly, I needed a reminder.

The next is some kale. No! It's not. It's some chard! It's some chard that we picked today. This very morning. The chard has been growing all through the winter (in our high tunnel) and it got absolutely battered by frost. Freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing. This meant that the skin on the outside, like the flesh of the leaf, the bit that holds the leaf together, was peeling away. Underneath it was mealy and cottony. The chard picked today and it's finally not disgusting (or mealy/cottony and getting eaten by woodlice) so that's a big win. We can start selling it again.

The next picture is some Tatsoi that bolted.

Tatsoi is an Asian green, a brassica. You can tell it's a brassica because the flowers (before they turn a classic bright yellow) look like baby broccoli heads. Which, I think, is kind of cool.

Brassicas; broccoli, cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, are all the same species. Different elements of them were bred out. For example the leaves for kale, the flowers for broccoli and cauliflower etc. It was interesting to see.

The water broke several weeks ago (it works now thankfully) but in that time it was very very hot. It was very hot in February which is wonderful and not terrifying at all lol. Lack of water, combined with heat signals to the plant that it's time to seed and so they bolted. Bolting is when a plant gets very bitter and puts its energy into making flowers (and eventually seeds).

The next picture is of a lino cut that I made with some of the people who work on the farm. I am about to get Obsessive about linocut. I'm very very excited about it.

My partner and I are planning on making some stamps with vegetables on them. So that children can make little booklets and then when they pick a vegetable (at the U-Pick) they can stamp the pepper to say they picked a pepper. Similar to passport stamps.

Is this gamifying vegetables? Possibly. But its also fun and we get to do art.

The final picture is a picture of this little (I don't know what I think it was like a juice shot something?) bottle. A little plastic square milk bottle but tiny!

And filled with rose petals that I got from a bulk food shop down the road for a dollar! I love bulk food shops. I love reusing little packages that look super cute. I love the cardamom and rose syrup I made with them to put in my coffee. It’s all making me very excited for sunshine (it's not sunny anymore but it's gonna come back).

So that's where we're at right now.

In terms of longer-term goals, we are focusing on the present farm right now. Once we get a little bit more settled into the rhythm I think we're gonna have like a day a week to focus on the future farm. No big updates. Just little updates and pictures.

I hope you're all doing well.

See you next week.

M

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