Hunt for the green pint

Hurry, hurry, before they make you pay for it!  Further to my piece on water-intensity, interesting story in the Sunday Times on reducing water usage and emissions in the beer industry, especially in Africa.

Good to see CSR applied to something really important!

In the graphics that accompanied the paper story, it said that it takes 4.5 pints of water to make every pint of beer - down from 9 pints in the 1970s, and considerably better than my homebrewing ratio ...

Dr Venter and the Mustard Seed

Venter is a splendidly Dickensian name:  a character that would be full self-important, hyperbolistic and probably ill-tempered  gushings and geyserings and, well, ventings.  (Hard to believe that there isn't one, in fact, but that's what a quick Google seems to confirm.)

So Dr Craig Venter of "Synthia" fame, was rather a disappointment, I thought,  in the TV "flesh", seeming to be a mild-mannered and softly-spoken sort of fellow. But he certainly does the hyperbole well, while journalists who have met him report a lot going on in the eyes...

It didn't take long to see through the overstatements in his claims to have created a new life-form.  The best summation came from Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, reported in the Observer:

"The idea that this is 'playing God' is just daft. What he has done in genetic terms would be analogous to taking an Apple Mac programme and making it work on a PC – and then saying you have created a computer. It's not trivial, but it is utterly absurd the claims that are being made about it."

(Jones does, however, credit Venter with recognising that "[sequencing] the genome was not a problem of chemistry but a problem of computer power.")

Professor John Sulston, who has clashed wih Venter before over the intellectual property issues involved in this kind of work, revealed the business reasons for the hyperbolic claims -  a raid on patents which, because they are so widely drawn, Sulston says, would effectively give Venter a monopoly of entire branches of genetics.



The whole thing was brought into perspective for me when I was seeding a little batch of mustard cress over the weekend.  For each of these tiny, almost particulate-sized, seeds really is a miracle - containing not just the instructions for making an organism  millions of times more complex than the single-celled microbe whose DNA Dr Venter replaced, but also the delivery mechanism to bring it to life, which of course Venter entirely lacks.

This in turn reminded me of Jesus' parable of the mustard seed - the tiny speck which grows into a tree where "the birds of the air" can come to rest.  This parable is usually said to be about the all-inclusive nature of the kingdom of heaven, but it's always seemed a bit of a strange one to me, since mustard doesn't grow into a tree, but rather a spindly kind of bush, with a very dubious capacity for supporting birdlife.  Maybe it's a mistranslation of some Hebrew or Greek along the way.

The story is, however, a wonderful reminder of the (humanly) inconceivable complexity that even the tiniest of seeds represents, and the arrogance of our meddling with something we don't really remotely understand via genetic modification - see my earlier post/rant on this subject.

The really worrying thing about Dr Venter is that his research is funded by, inter alia, BP.  Now there's a company that obviously knows how to contain the fallout from cutting-edge technology when it all goes belly - or in this case, barrels - up!

Rivers which flow straight into your heart

This is an absolutely magical piece of writing by Michael McCarthy in The Independent.  It's on critical contribution of calcium carbonate to biodiversity, and in particular on the chalk streams of England, one of which is the inspiration for the title of this blog.

Here's the bit on chalk streams:

"But the rivers of the chalk are what I love best. The chalk streams, as anglers have named them, one word instead of two, are the most beautiful rivers anywhere on the planet. There are about 60 of them, from small rivulets to the queen of them all, the River Test in Hampshire, and they are characterised by the clearest and purest water in the natural environment, often referred to as "gin-clear". (The chalk filters it, and water companies are desperate to get their hands on it).

The chalk streams are immediately arresting. Their flow is stately, never sluggish, never torrential (the Test is like the Loire in miniature) and they are filled with a profusion of fish, of aquatic wild flowers like the ranunculus, the white water buttercup, and of aquatic insects of which the most magnificent is the mayfly, which is emerging just about now. Over the next month there will be clouds of mayflies over the chalk streams, the males dancing to attract females in one of Britain's most stunning wildlife spectacles, before mating and falling back to the water surface where trout will greedily gobble them.

Even a glance at a chalk stream lifts my spirits, and every time I catch sight of one I feel like offering up a prayer in praise of calcium carbonate. To some people it might be merely the stuff they use to powder the lines on tennis courts, but it also gives us the gentleness of the English landscape, the pyramidal orchid, the Adonis blue, and rivers which flow straight into your heart."

Vegetable Audit, mid-May

• Purple sprouting broccoli: just dug up.  Late to start but fantastic to eat this year, both because of the freezing weather.  What doesn't kill you makes you tastier!
• Peas:  slow to get going, because of the arctic May
• Runner beans: ditto, plus some frost damage last week when a ridiculously deep frost hit on Weds
• Pak choi:  doing well, if a bit pigeon-pecked
• Swiss chard and spring onions:  there, but struggling so far in the cold - even tho they are in the most sheltered spot in the garden
• Potatoes:  all showing.  Is this the best use of the veg patch these days, though?  May cut down to just a few unusual varieties next year
• First radishes should be ready in a few days, but last year's seed has had it, v slow and patchy germination.  Fab-looking purple variety just starting to show, wonder if it will taste as good as it looks?
• Spinach:  coming along nicely.  Supposed to be a non-bolting variety but we shall see...
• Red Drumhead cabbage looking a bit spindly.  Dry area of patch so must keep watered
• Calabrese:  lost a few to something or other, but 12 surviving so that should produce enough if even half make it through
• Several strips of rocket.  Thinnings will be great in salads
• Tomatoes.  30 or so planted.  Experience says maybe 5 might survive ...
• About 20 each of celery and celeriac planted.  Never tried either before
• Sorrel:  rampant.  What to do with this almost over-pungent herb??
• Over-wintered onions bulking up nicely.  Two recent prolonged downpours will help them really put on weight.   Amazing that these tiny bulbs, sitting on the surface, survive the frosts and snows!
• Broad beans:  doing brilliantly as ever.  First pods in maybe 3-4 weeks
• Asaparagus in full swing, eating daily
• Artichokes:  five of the plants grown from seed last year survived the winter.  Can take cutting from the most productive ones this year
• Sweetcorn doing well (among the onions that will be harvested before the corn gets anywhere near the elephant's eye)
• Horseradish:  looks like I dug out just enough in the autumn, with manageable amounts starting to reappear.  Great that to keep this invader under control you have a winter's supply of fresh horseradish roots in store!  They have kept really well buried in compost
• Lettuces / leaves:  growing all these now in reused punnets.  Better control of conditions and quantities.  Also coriander and basil
• All the other perennial herbs looking great after the cold winter.  15 parsley in the same bed as the toms so that should keep us well supplied
• Strawberries:  plants are in their final year.  Should probably have grubbed them up last year
• Raspberries rampant as ever
• Redcurrants:  first real cop this year
• Gooseberry:  much abused after two site moves, but maybe will get going this year?
• Apples:   Cox's has plenty of blossom, the cooker less so.  Might have over-pruned it last time?

The Green Coalition??

Who needs an exotic spice market when you've got the British countryside?

In celebration of the yellow Liberals joining the blue Tories in our new coalition (May Blessings Be Upon It) here are the raw materials - dandelion petals - for a batch of cordial and wine which surely rival anything in the bazaars of Bangalore or Fez.  Even in its cloudy early state the wine looks like liquid sunshine.

Let's hope the sun does indeed shine on the new setup.  But for those of us who are Green sympathizers, the prospects in that particular department don't look too bright, I'm afraid. How green will this coalition really be? Well, here's a visual aid:

This text is roughly the colour of green you get if you mix the RGB settings of official Liberal Yellow with a middling Tory blue of the hue they seem to favour on their website, in the proportions (40/60) of the votes that form the coalition.  

Not very deep or striking is it?

Let Her Paint an Inch Thick ...

An even finer example than marriage of the triumph of hope of experience is the planting of outdoor tomatoes in England.  Every year I do this, and every year I end up with dozens of dead plants and, at best, a couple of green golf balls with skins thicker than a Wall Street bank chairman's and an aversion to ripening even stronger than Gordon Brown's to leaving office.

Tomatoes are the prima donnas of the vegetable world - prone, as far as I can see, to every pest, disease, and blight known to botanical science and with the resistance and fortitude of wet cardboard. They parch instantly if the weather is dry and they rot it it's even the slightest bit damp. And if they do, by some miraculous combination of weather and absence of malicious wildlife, manage to reach something like maturity, they then need constant attention to a feeding regime so complicated that even a faddish New York diet-queen would blanch.

Probably it's something to do with being Italian and pining for the slopes of Vesuvius where they really belong; or perhaps it's some psychosomatic trauma to do with being taken for a vegtable when you're really a fruit.  Anyway, the whole business is like Hamlet talking to Yorick's skull -  "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her,  let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come": you know it will end badly but you've got to go through with it all the same.

Anyway, here are some of this year's victims, and at least they're environmentally sound.

The square pots are cut-down juice cartons - stab a few holes in the bottom to let them drain.  The variety is San Marzano, the classic Italian plum tomato, which I have never tried before; but I still know, I'm afraid, to what favour they will come...

Leveraging the Mung

There's always something sprouting about the place (though sadly for many years now it hasn't been my hair).  As well as the old standbys mustard and cress, there’s a whole range of more exotic sprouters available these days:  if you can't find them at the garden centre, try an online merchant like Thompson-Morgan. A couple of favourites are fenugreek - the heady scent when you start the seeds off is a delight in itself - or red cabbage with its dramatic colour. You can grow them in a warm place any time of year, and I use a bit of potting compost rather than kitchen paper:  a great way to use up things like those little plastic hummous cartons and similar bits of packaging.  They make great "live" presents too, at minimal cost.

Moving up the size spectrum, and my absolute favourite, is the humble mung bean. You can buy them at any decent supermarket, growing them is (or literally could be) child’s play, the taste is far more electric than any plastic-wrapped version, and there’s a rather elemental quality to eating something that’s actually alive as you pop it in your mouth – a kind of vegan version of swallowing a still-throbbing scallop.

First you need to assemble your sprouting kit - you can buy commercial sprouters but you wouldn’t want to of course, when you can use recyclings.

Here’s my highly sophisticated kit:

The components are:

• Two punnets, approximately 18x13x5 cm, one with holes punched at 1cm intervals (the sieve-punnet)
• Something a little bigger for the base
• An old linen napkin, or a piece of muslin (something that wont shed lint anyway)
• Some stones

Why the stones? Well, for some reason the beans sprout better if they are weighted down:  they're literally lifting weights down there in the sprouty gym, and they come up all the more muscular for it. You could use any other kind of weight, but you need about a half a kilo, equally distributed across the bottom of the punnet.

Here’s what you do:

• First, tip some beans into to the sieve-punnet so that they just cover the base in a single layer. For this size of punnet around 50g should be about right
• Rinse the beans and then leave them overnight in a bowl of water
• The next day, tip the soaked beans into the sieve-punnet and rinse them again. Soak your napkin or muslin and wring it out lightly (so it's still pretty wet), then fold so that it neatly covers the beans. Now place your weighted punnet on top of the cloth – it should fit nicely into the sieve-punnet. Put the whole assembly on to the base, to catch the water that will drip through
• Put the kit into an airing cupboard or similarly warm, dark place and leave overnight
• The next morning, rinse the beans in the sieve-punnet, rinse the cloth and again wring lightly, reassemble everything and put it back in the airing cupboard
• Repeat the above until the beans have sprouted to about 5-6cm (2”). This normally takes 3-4 days 

Here's your glorious harvest, fabulous for salads and stir fries, or just to eat by the handful as a snack:

 As an unreconstructed banker, I can’t help thinking of the amazing environmental and financial "leverage" you achieve by sprouting your own beans - leverage of the right kind, not the variety that brought the global financial system crashing.


Leaving aside the wonderful taste and health-giving properties of your completely fresh sprouts, here’s a calculation of that leverage for a 500g bag of mung beans:

• First, a mouthwatering financial return of 400% in a few days - each 50g of beans will have become 300g of sprouts. A 500g bag costs £ 1.20, but the equivalent in sprouts would have cost £4.80. You've used heat from your airing cupboard, so there are no additional costs except some water.  Your own time will have totalled 5 or 6 minutes.  Even the most aggressive denizen of Wall St doesn't make those kinds of returns any more!
• Second, you’ve saved the heating, plastic packaging, and transport costs on 10 packets of supermarket beansprouts
• Not to mention the scarce water if they were grown outside the UK
• And finally, your sprouting kit has not had to go anywhere to be recycled (another use for those pesky punnets that supermarkets are so obsessed with)

But there’s an even more philosophical fancy I have as I sprout my mung. For as they push up in the darkness under their heavy weight, they seem to somehow symbolize the oppressed of all ages - with every condition ranged against them, yet still irrepressibly alive and bursting out of their bonds, each a sturdy little soldier in the struggle against tyranny and injustice.

(And then, of course, I go and eat them.)