Vegetables

Our Western Diet is very meat protein heavy. We don't need to eat meat daily, infact to reduce our calorie and saturated fat intake we should eat mainly vegetables and starchy food such as potatoes, rice and pasta. As I mentioned in Waste we spent two and a half months at the end 2009 living solely off the garden other than wheat and dairy products and  fruit as we didn't have the time, space or climate to produce sufficient. One thing this did was made vegetables the predomniant part of our diet. It was great fun going out each day and gathering what was ready for picking and cooking it. For this you need a selection of quick flexible recipes, my main reference text being Sarah Ravens' Garden Cookbook. I also have put on a Notebook computer my own collection of favourite recipes, this means I can search for all recipes with say eggs in them and I get a list of options.
As we move through the weeks, months and seasons I will let you know what we are sowing and  harvesting and some recipies for the produce.

Mushrooms

Hmmm. I've not had much luck over the years with growing mushrooms. In fact I had never successfully grown a mushroom until 2010. This year I got hold of two 'Ready-to-pop' mushroom boxes to be grown indoors. The seller told me they were guaranteed so I tried Lion's Mane and Oyster mushrooms.
They were really easy to set up, both need placed on a tray in a cardboard box, with the plastic bag they are in either punctured or the top removed. Then cover the whole thing in plastic film and leave in a room between 18 and 22C. Wait 3-5 days.
We did and look what we grew! These came from www.ardnamushrooms.co.uk and they worked!

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