Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

First things first: no news from Onion. In fact she looks less and less like she is about to give birth, other than her enormous size that is. Today at one point, she was merrily playing a good head-butting game with Pepper and all we thought was 'poor kids inside her...'.
And so to other things: we ate our first asparagus spears two nights ago! The first photo shows them in the colander along with yet more purple-sprouting broccoli which we are STILL harvesting and eating. The asparagus was totally delicious and all eaten within just an hour of being picked. All it needed was three minutes in our steamer!! The most slender shoots are the tastiest so it does not pay to wait till they are a bit thicker as they really can get quite tough. As with most fruit and vegetables, the asparagus is at its best when freshly cut because at the point of being picked, it begins to lose its nutritional value. Have you ever tried eating an apple or pear when it is has been sitting in your fruit basket for a week or two? You probably found it was quite dry and that is because it will have lost a lot of water. Unfortunately at the same time it will also have lost a lot of the vitamins and minerals (and these of course are what make fruit and veg so good for us). Furthermore, when vegetables are cooked in water, a few more of these vitamins and minerals 'break out' and so are lost as well. A lot of the time it really is best therefore to pick your fruit and veg and then eat them there and then, raw!! This works fine for apples, carrots, strawberries, lettuce... Raw asparagus is not however something we would fancy without 'some' cooking: hence steaming not boiling our spears!!
The second photo shows our 'greens'. These have now 'gone to seed' (bolted) and are not really edible any more. A lot of plants end up 'going to seed' like this which means that they stop putting their energies onto growing more of the actual plant and instead produce flowers and then seeds in order to produce new plants. In vegetables this usually means the taste changes as well and not for the better. The leaves on these greens will now taste very bitter and human taste buds won't enjoy them as much. We do however know of a goat or two who will be MORE than happy to finish these off for us...