Preparedness for when

nuatha

mardatha wrote: »

Catching up after 4 pages - I don't understand how you dont have rocks GQ, what have you got instead? Just dirt? And I don't understand what Nuatha says about beaches without sand - what the hell have you got instead?

Growing up, I'd travelled around the North of England and parts of Scotland and my memories of seeing beaches in both real life and from film and TV always involved sand. As a young adult business took me to Eastbourne, where the have nothing but pebbles and cobbles. I walked along the coast to Brighton, to find the famous Brighton Beach was exactly the same.

I have spent a chunk of time in what was the Fens (ie the drained bits) excellent growing soil and rocks seem to be far rarer than at home, but they still turn up, the the soil is perfect for growing just about anything (and not enough stones in a field to get a handful of wonky carrots) but I don't understand living on chalk
As I understand it you've loam on top of the the chalk, but I look forward to being edumacated.

greenbee

I live on chalk too, and grew up on top of a chalk hill in roughly the same part of the world as GQ...

My current chalk has been 'improved' by spoil from the sites of 4 other houses built before this one. Something had to be used to fill in the watercress beds before they stuck a house on top! This means I have a complete mix of soil, gravel, flint, chalk and the odd 500-year-old bone from the civil war battlefield that was here before the watercress beds.

Where I grew up we had a few mm of rock dust on top of chalk. Gardening was done with a pickaxe except where the soil had been improved enough (homemade compost with plenty of woodash, chicken bedding, manure of various kinds from local farms, mushroom compost) over the nearly 40 years that we lived there to allow a hole to be dug with a spade. Carrots were short... We did have stones, but very, very small ones - as kids we were sent into the vegetable garden every spring to sieve the soil. My dad reckoned that after 40 years there should be fewer stones, but they seemed to keep on appearing!

NewShadow

Anyone know what this is?

And how to eat it?

It's similar to baby broccoli, but purple.

Was a pound a bag at the market and I've yet to find anything vegi (Or most fruit for that matter) that can't be stirfried, so figured it worth the punt.



Thankies all

(just noticed the creepy angry clown face in the reflections...slightly more concerned about munching on it semi-raw now:()

Cappella

It looks like purple sprouting broccoli you can use it as you would tenderstem broccoli or calabrese, steam it or stir fry it. We only like it lightly cooked but it's quite strong this time of year so you might like to cook it a little longer. I've just hoiked our last plants out this morning, but £1 a bag is really cheap for it.
It's lovely cooked like this

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1283/purple-sprouting-broccoli-with-garlic-and-sesame

That's a creepy reflection though . . .

GreyQueen

Looks like purple sprouting broccoli to me, too. It's the rolls royce of the brassica family but not often sold (doesn't stay as fresh as other kinds) but the flavour is superior. It's going over now so expect the stems to be a bit woody.

Mardatha, we have soil of various types, depending on the history of that particular spot. Swampy bit of low-lying ground by the river? That'll be peaty. Shoebox Towers sits alongside the river on gravel. Well, on thousands of piles embedded into the gravel.

Under the topsoil, the subsoil varies. About 2 ft down on the allotments, it's dark yellow sand, looks like something you'd get from the builder's merchants in bags. That's because in geological time what is now the top of a gentle slope above the river was the river bed. I went down into the subsoil after bramble roots with my trusty mattock, garnering lots of passing comments from the old boys about digging to Australia.

In the soil there are flints. Some are small, and round and the exact colour and size of new potatoes - this can make harvesting your new potatoes interesting at times. Others are bigger, some about the size of a Bramley apple or a baking potato. Most of them are fragments and quite a lot of them show flaking from when they were knapped, back in the day.

I've found so many bits and bobs of knapped flint that I cease being excited by it.

Other than flintstones, the soil contains little pebbles of chalk. You can draw on the pavements with it, as local children used to do, for hop-scotch and making rude pictures to upset the ancientry.

But rocks, we have no rocks at all.

mardatha

Tomorrow I'm going out to collect all the hundreds of damn rocks in my garden and am putting them on ebay! This house was built in the 30s and the first tenant took a lot of time and care to line the front path with huge rocks, all laid in straight lines and very neat. I think he must have been a drystane dyker.

[Deleted User]

We don't have rocks, we don't have chalk, we don't have pebbles sniffffff! what we DO have however is more gravel than we want which makes digging the garden and allotment and holes for planting very difficult indeed! anyone want gravel??? He Who Knows has sifted out literally 'TONS' of gravel in the years we've lived here and you know what happens then? more of the perishing stiff works its way up to the surface, SWIZZ!!!

GreyQueen

The Polish lass on the plot beside mine spent ages when she first took on the plot sifting buckets of flintstones out of her edged beds. And more kept on coming to the surface and now she just muddles along with the rest of us. The old country folk used to reckon stones grew. Root veg come is interesting shapes here; the kim kardashian parsnip was particularly amusing, as were the helter-skelter shaped carrots.

Soil is funny old stuff. I'm in the 9th year with this particular plot and some areas of it get cultivated multiple times each season, with foriegn materials like pottery, glass and nails diligently removed each time.

So why, after 8 years, did little bits of broken bricks never before seen start to surface everywhere? Today, I weeded one of the teenage strawberry beds and came up with two horseshoe nails and 4 pieces of glass.

Still haven't found buried treasure. 1950s lino, felt off sheds, carpet underlay, nails, bits off a tractor (probably) and more random carp than I can mention on a good day.

mardatha

How do lie on a beach of pebbles?? OWW lol. I've been on beaches with golden sand and beaches with white sand but never pebbles..

GreyQueen

Pebbles can be surprisingly comfortable. They're smoothed by the sea, of course, and often bluey-grey and heat up nicely in the sun, and you can make little dips in them, cover them in a towel and rest quite comfortably. They're beggars to walk on, though, very heavy going.

I don't lie around on beaches due to being a lily-white burning type, but I love walking along the shoreline picking up interesting bits of driftwood and smoothed glass.