The Thing: Basket Weaving

The Lost Trades Fair set me all-a-buzz with the need to weave a cane basket. I had purchased a sweet little kit to make my 'Your First Basket' from And Woven Cane, with the ill-thought-out brainwave to head to the nearest craft supply shop to buy a second lot of all the materials so Jess and I could make one each. I went to said nearest craft shop: no cane. I went to the second and third nearest craft shops and they didn't have any either. Neither did any of the hardware shops. At this point I risked a massive over-investment of time in this project. Decisive action: our 'Your First Basket' would be a collaborative thing.

Basket Weaving Lesson #1: Purchase basket weaving supplies from the interwebs.  Wicker-Works Cane Specialists seems a good place to start, although their little catch phrase asks, "need a good caning?" An attempt at humour? Dubious, at best.

We set aside a morning for this little project, which was perfect. From start to finish it took us about 3 hours; this included a couple of pots of tea, innumerable interruptions from the little ones and a break for honey sandwiches. Remove those things, as well as the hundred times we stopped weaving to marvel at just how badly our little basket was progressing, and we could probably get it down to an hour and a half. Although why we would want to do this is beyond me. The interruptions just add to the fun.

While the weaving techniques for this basket were as simple as it gets, there were still a multitude of ways to make mistakes. Pull too tight and your basket tapers in, too loose and it gets flimsy. Bend the cane too sharply and it breaks. Don't push each row down firmly enough (and firmly means REALLY FIRMLY. Like lumberjack-hands firmly) and your basket is gappy and uneven. Ignore how many rows of seagrass they suggest in the instructions and your basket turns out much taller than the one in the picture...

Weaving with cane is no delicate pastime. It's hard on your fingers and, while you have to be deft and gentle, you also have to be strong and decisive with your movements. The cane isn't nearly as maleable as it appears when you watch a skilled craftsperson working. 

Our basket turned out to be, well...quite quaint. There is no better word for it. We gazed, awestruck, for a while at our finished product and wondered why we made it in the first place, given that we had no real purpose for it. If it had a handle it might be good for collecting things in. If it was prettier it might serve as something ornamental or make for a sweet little gift. We popped a few different things in it (the elderflower looks great in it, but it serves no practical purpose whatsoever) and decided that it is perfect for holding walnuts. That's right guys. We made a walnut basket.  

So here are some questions:

• Can we make a basket that's lovely and practical enough to proudly give as a gift? So, you know, one that's lovelier and more practical that this one.
• If I needed a basket, would I be more likely to make one than buy one pre-made?
• Are there more readily available alternatives to cane that we can use in our future baskets?
• Aside from the Lost Trades Fair, where to basket weavers hang out?

And a broader question for the philosophers out there:

• Can we justify spending time on craft when there is no real purpose for the product?

Which inevitably leads to:

• What is the meaning of life?

I think it's clear where this Thing is heading: We'll get busy addressing these questions, and then the challenge is to make a basket from readily available materials that's attractive and useful enough to give proudly as a gift. We have a bit of work to do, to be completely honest.

Day One of Womankind's Combat Global Warming Challenge: Leanne

Global Warming: A lecture to myself

What are you doing about it? I mean, really. You like to believe that you're committed to The Cause, but what does that actually look like?

Sure, you live a pretty modest lifestyle. A tiny house, few electrical appliances, bike riding, public transport, avoiding single-use plastics, recycling, upcycling, uncycling (oh, wait...that's not one of them), washing in cold water, weather strips on my doors, never buying bottled water (with the exception of one single time recently, for which there was a compelling justification: follow me on Instagram @lgcjames if you care to know more). Good for you. But just because you're somewhat less climactically destructive than many (most? some?) doesn't mean you deserve to class yourself as some kind of eco-warrior.

Where is your outrage? Where is your activism? Where is your SPIRIT?

Oh, it's buried under your hopelessness, is it? I think I can see it deep down in there under your apathy and your need for convenience. I see.

I get it. It's hard to believe that anything you do in your tiny little life can effect any change at all. Especially when you read things like the Quarterly Update of Australia's National Greenhouse Gas Inventory . Seriously, where is your stats text book? Lost somewhere in 2003, most likely.

And then when everyone starts politicising the whole issue, that's when things get really impossible. How can you stay focused on finding solutions when there are debates like this going on? Is someone really trying to convince us that we are doing well because greenhouse gas emissions have decreased per capita, even though they have increased overall? Come ON guys.

So. What are you going to do about it? Beyond the comfortable, bare minimum that you maintain in order to be able to sleep at night, that is. Hopelessness and apathy are the enemies of anything that's good in the world.

1. Give up meat.
2. Sign this petition to stop the proposed Boikarabelo coal mine. It's a big deal, and it's pretty important. For, you know, the future of the planet.

source: econesting

The Thing: Passata

Right. Whittling is on the slow-burner at the moment. Just to give you an update, Jess and I have both invested in an appropriate knife, we've both managed a few little attempts at some objects of utility, and we've both concluded that there is no fast-track to whittling competence.

In the meantime though, we've got plenty of other Things keeping our minds occupied, our hands busy and our hearts full.

With late summer comes the season of plentiful tomatoes. And with an abundance of tomatoes comes the need to preserve their summer richness for the months ahead.

Remember Looking For Alibrandi? I first read it when I was in about year 8 or 9 I think, and I remember being struck by the whole italian-ness about it. The nonnas and the zias and tomato bottling day...I yearned for such traditions in my life.

Sure, my childhood had its rituals and celebrations. There was Easter spotlighting with my maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles. There was summer mulberry picking (which happened in the nude for the kids, if I remember correctly). And there were the more regular, less grand rituals of Saturday afternoon tennis that was followed by Saturday night BBQs or pub meals or card games where everyone would gather to re-live the highs and the lows of the day's tennis. The hot-headed smashes that hit the back fence, the unexpected sideliners, the floating lob you had to climb the back fence to return...

These were all cherished elements of the culture we had generated over the last few decades as a white (there, I said it) family living in rural Victoria, but when compared with the traditions steeped so deeply and firmly within the Italian Culture as portrayed in Looking for Alibrandi, it just all seemed so...pale in comparison. I so desperately wanted to get in on this whole tomato bottling thing so that I could feel like I was just a little bit Italian, and the feeling has never left me. So when Jess declared months ago that she was planning a bottling day at the end of January I was IN. I didn't pencil the date in my calendar. I didn't write it in permanent marker. I was so keen that I actually etched the date in the stone.

Jess was pretty clear about how things would go. The day would start at 8am (ambitious) and run through until dinner time. The toddlers would all play together harmoniously (very ambitious) from go to woe, and have a nap after lunch (blindly optimistic). We would wash, dice, mill, simmer, bottle and seal the tomatoes. The assigned leader was Jeremy (he's done lots of bottling in the past, it's his and Jess' house, he bought an industrial-scale mincer... excellent leadership qualities right there), and the very fact that there was a leader assigned meant that this was BIG. There will be no messing about here people; the bottling will be taken seriously.

As the day approached, I got increasingly excited. I was about to fulfil a dream I had held since High School. I was ready.

Here is what Passata Day 2017 looked like:

6.30am: Wake up. Passata Day starts at 8am SHARP. Plenty of time to get ready.
6.31: Plans to shower before The Toddler wakes are foiled by The Toddler waking. Make the mistake of saying, 'No, mum is having a shower on her own.' Take shower with The Toddler standing at the shower door pretend-crying and repeating '(Sh)Ower! Ower! Ower!' ad nauseum. Consider giving in and letting The Toddler into the shower. Wonder if this is one of those times when The Toddler is testing my resolve. Decide that every time is The Toddler testing my resolve. Refuse to back down. Finish showering with The Toddler continuing to fake-cry and shout at me.
6.45: Make toast and coffee.
7.00: Iron dress. Get dressed. Get The Toddler dressed. Ensure attire is appropriate for hot weather/tomato stains/largely unsupervised toddler-play.
7.15: Pour more coffee. Look on instagram. Check the weather. Wonder why it takes so long to get one adult and one toddler ready for the day.
7.30: Pack the car. Fowler's Vacola. Jars. Watermelon. Hat. Sunscreen. Nappies.
7.35: Brush own teeth. Attempt to brush The Toddler's teeth. The Toddler presents compelling case (read: shouting, fake-crying, general thrashing about) as to why brushing teeth is unnecessary.
7.36: Contemplate how fine the line is between 'firm restraint' and 'forceful man-handling'.
7.37: Forcefully man-handle firmly restrain The Toddler in order to assist with teeth brushing.
7.45: Walk out the door and lock it. Instruct The Toddler to feed the chook.
7.46: Unlock door and go back inside to get change of clothes for The Toddler and contributions for lunch and dinner.
7.47: Walk out the door and lock it.
7.48: Help The Toddler toss chook food over chook's fence.
7.51: Unlock door and go back inside. Get wallet, sunglasses, phone. Opt for bringing an actual handbag.
7.53: Walk out the door and lock it.
7.54: Instruct The Toddler to get in the car.
7.55: Present compelling case to The Toddler about why getting in the car is necessary.
7.56: Unlock door and go back inside. Check that iron is turned off. It is.
7.57: Walk out the door and lock it.
7.58: The Toddler is sitting quietly in the car seat! Have a small party about this gigantic win.
7.59: Reverse out the driveway. Resist urge to go and buy coffee in the name of arriving (pretty much) on time.
8.03: Arrive at Passata Day destination. Have another small party about another gigantic win. Only 3 minutes behind time, we got stuck straight in.

Jeremy had been to the market to pick up the tomatoes so we brought them in from the car. This alone was a workout; there was twice my bodyweight in ripe, red fruit. And we were intending to bottle ALL of it. The sheer scale of the undertaking started to sink in. It continued to sink in as we washed them and diced them and were still working our way through them at 11am. Just when I thought maybe there were actually infinity tomatoes, we looked around for another bucket-full to dice, but they were all done. Done! I surveyed my blistered thumb and undertook the one of the eleventy-hundred cleans ups we would do throughout the day.

While we were slicing and dicing there was a person on the milling machine pushing the tomatoes through to give a (surprisingly) pink, frothy tomato liquid that went into huge pots. After this, the pots went onto hotplates to simmer for as long as possible to reduce the tomatoes to a thick, rich red sauce.

By this time the sun was high and hot. Icy poles (a Jess Special: coconut water and fruit) for the toddlers. A beer for those adults who were inclined. And an interlude to prepare pizza for lunch.

Side Note: I'm the kind of person who looks ahead and sees that I have a big day coming up, so I rest in anticipation. Jess is the kind of person, on the other hand, who sees a big day coming up and thinks it's probably best to make pizza bases and pasta from scratch so there will be delightful food to eat. Amazing, if you ask me.

After lunch we got to sterilising our jars. We were not taking any risks so they went through the dishwasher, into the oven for half-a and a pot of boiling water for the lids.

It was at this point that energy waned a little. It was mid-afternoon, it had become clear that the toddlers were not going to nap, the jars that needed cleaning stretched to approximately eternity and it was really, really hot. And it was at this point I looked around and took the time to absorb my surroundings. A house and yard full of interesting, kind, funny people. Kids playing. Food being made and enjoyed. Traditions being solidified. Yep. My Looking For Alibrandi dream really was coming true.

Finally it was time to ladle the passata into the jars. After some citric acid and salt was measured into each jar, the tomatoes went in, followed by a few fresh basil leaves. Then on went the lids, and straight into the pots to be simmered in water for a while.

And then dinner. Fresh tomato passata went into the ragout to put atop Jess' fresh pasta. Another beer, a little wine and one final, satisfying clean up.

The total yield was about 80 litres of passata. By my precise calculations, that will get exactly heaps of people through the next year until we do it all again. Pasta sauces, pizza sauces, soups, dals, stews. Gazpacho, bloody marys, casserols. Bring it.

Like all of the Things Worth Doing, bottling tomatoes takes time. Energy. Dedication. Preparation. It's not all rainbows and unicorns. You get blisters from cutting the tomatoes. You get a bit bored with the repetitive nature of things. You stare down a mountain of tomatoes and jars and saucepans and you work your way through, bit by bit. But this is exactly where the magic happens. Shared tasks of this nature offer the time to really be with people. To talk. To not talk. To philosophise. To relax. To be productive.

The Thing: Whittling

Our next Thing Worth Doing takes a turn away from the kitchen this time. While the sponges and the flowers were new to us, the kitchen setting itself was pretty darn familiar. So it's time to step a little further outside our comfort zone, and a little further...well...outside.

Enter whittling.

We started out with exactly zero tools specific to the trade. At first I was distracted by the need to go out and buy a knife. A beautiful, expensive, hand-forged-with-the-steel-from-the-hooves-of-an-ancient-warrior's-mythical-beast kind of knife. It took a couple of days to realise that I really couldn't justify the financial outlay on such things, so instead, I found a small vegetable knife (Forever Sharp™ Surgical Stainless Steel - how could I go wrong?), used a hack saw to remove a slender branch from a tree in my yard and sat down to whittle.

As soon as I took my position on my porch with my knife and piece of wood I knew I was onto something. I bent forward and rested my elbows on my knees (this just felt like the correct pose for the job) and struck the first blow with the blade. At this precise moment I knew that whittling deserved its revered place in the history of humankind. Seriously. It felt real. It felt calm. It felt necessary.

I worked away with no purpose other than to shave away at this piece of wood. After the bark was removed I kept going until I had a pretty sharp and satisfying point on the end of my stick. With great satisfaction I swept the little wood chips into the garden and intended to get back to my day...but I couldn't. I looked at this smooth, pointy piece of wood and it called me back. I started up again and in the failing light I whittled the other end into a sort of a blade. Wonky and lopsided, but still sharp enough to...I don't know...cut cheese?

But this is where it gets tricky. After you whittle a pointy tip and a less-than-mediocre blade, which are straightforward enough, where to from there?

• How does one pick wood? 
• Where does one source this wood? 
• Can we make anything useful and/or beautiful with our limited (read: virtually non-existent) skills?
• How can we have a good go at this without a massive outlay for tools? 
• Can we expect to produce anything we will want to keep or give as a gift?
• Who can we find that's willing to help us along this journey?
• And do we need facial hair to fully enjoy this craft?

It's hard to research this craft without completely losing yourself in the deeply transfixing world of woodcraft. There are people out there with some seriously impressive skills. Check this, for example. It's the world's longest continuous wood carving and it's totally beyond me how any human being could do such a thing. Then there's this. I tell you, with a knife like this, this guy is NOT MESSING ABOUT. Check the tutorial and you'll feel like you've pretty much got the whittling of a fishing spear in the bag.

We'd love you to join us on our first Thing Worth Doing for 2017. We'd also love to hear from you if you are a whittler yourself, or if you know one we could hit up for a chat and a cuppa to help us on our way.

Floral Feasting!

At every wedding and every funeral I've ever been to I distinctly remember thinking/saying at some point, "Why don't we get together like this more often? Why do we wait until a wedding or a funeral?" And I guess the answer is pretty simple: people have their lives. Work needs going to, study needs to be done, chores need to be completed (or at least procrastinated about), kids need to be nurtured, relationships don't maintain themselves, clubs/sports/hobbies/church fit in any other spare gaps...we just get on with living our lives. Gathering a bunch of family and friends together for no real reason can drop off the end of the priority list.

...Unless you invent a reason, set a date and COMMIT. Stare down the fear of no one turning up. Welcome the opposite anxiety of a multitude of people coming into your house. Bathe in the terrifying potential that, if people do turn up, they may stand awkwardly about and pick their fingernails. Or worse, their noses.

Such were the feelings we embraced in the lead up to our Flower Feast Tea Party to celebrate our Edible Flower Thing. Not everything was going in our favour. The weather was quite cold, the puff pastry had been forgotten, our toddlers were fighting over Every. Single. Toy. In. The. House. But great tea parties don't happen to those who quit, so we battled through, and tossed together a seriously lovely spread of food that showcased our discoveries over the past few weeks.

The menu

Savoury things
Onion flower and parmesan buckwheat crackers with cheese and dried figs
Goats cheese rolled in violas
Caramelised red onion and garlic flower focaccia with nasturtium pesto

Sweet things
Rhubarb and rose petal jam in a sponge with vanilla cream
Lemon and lavender curd tarts
Citrus flower and white chocolate shortbread

To drink
Elderflower cordial with lemon and fancy flower ice cubes

For the little ones (to drip everywhere)
Elderflower cordial icy poles with all the edible flowers from Jess' garden suspended majestically within

We committed to creating things that really made use of what we had available in our gardens. Personally, everything that had been flowering so enthusiastically in my garden a few weeks ago was finished, aside from the garlic and onion flowers. I raided Mum and Dad's rose garden for the jam, bought a couple of punnets of edible garnish from Bendigo Wholefoods (who stock B&B Basil micro herbs and can order in the flowers if you ask them to), and for the curd I appropriated some lavender from a friend who may/may not have 'borrowed' it from a stranger's garden.

Jess has planted out her garden with gorgeous edible flowers though. She didn't have to beg, buy or steal her flowers. So she wins this round. (Jess here: YASSSSSSSS WINNER!!!)

Below is the recipe I created for my onion flower and parmesan crackers. I'm including it here because they were really, really good and I want everyone to eat them as often as possible. This recipe highlights my fairly approximate approach to some of my cooking.

♥♥♥

Onion flower and parmesan crackers

Ingredients
1 cup plain flour
1 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 cup (ish) onion flowers - snip the little flowers off the big flower head (a quick google search tells me this is called the 'infloresence')
1 cup finely grated parmesan (but serisouly, we all know that more cheese is rarely a mistake)
Enough milk to form a pliable dough
Olive oil for brushing
Salt for sprinkling

Method
Preheat oven to 160℃ and line two large oven trays with baking paper.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flours, parmesan and onion flowers. Gradually add enough milk to form a pliable dough. Avoid over-mixing as the dough will turn elastic and be hard to roll out.

Take about 1/4 of the dough at a time and roll it out on a floured board. You want to roll it as thinly as possible without it tearing for the best wafer-thin results. Transfer to the baking tray. Using a knife or a frilly pasta cutter, cut the dough into desired shapes. 4cmX4cm squares, 3cmX5cm rectangles, long skinny triangles. (I don't recommend using a cookie cutter. Who can be bothered gathering up and re-rolling the leftover bits?)

Brush tops with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.

Bake for as long as it takes for the crackers to turn golden brown and to be crisp all the way through (this will vary from oven to oven, and it will depend on how thinly you rolled your dough - it took mine about 30mins).

When cooked, cool on a wire rack. Store in an airtight container for...I don't know...a week? This is not my area of expertise.


                                                                             ♥♥♥

Over the course of this Thing, we have answered many of the questions we posed at the outset, but there are some that remain. We have also made some interesting observations:

• Using the flower of something that will eventually turn into something awesome feels indulgent and wasteful. And a little bit exploitative.
• Garlic and onion flowers are tops - the flavour is mild but distinct, you can use them independently of the garlic and onion themselves and they last quite a while.
• The flowering season of lots of plants is really short. You have to be ready to pounce to make the most of them (think kale, rocket, herb flowers).
• You can't use delicate flowers in situations where the temp gets too hot. They are destroyed.
• Quite hard to find edible flowers in nurseries, not really a section for the home enthusiast.
• Cannot buy in my local supermarket, making it hard to track them down if you don't grow them. 
• A wonderful way to add colour to your garden without feeling like you're wasting it on "just flowers" if you're afflicted with the it's-gotta-be-edible/useful illness.
• An interesting way to extend the use of plants like coriander/kale.
• Control potential abundance like citrus flowers. We will be looking for ways to utilise our plants fully. 
• Potential whole other field to explore in medicinal flowers. But, hey, googled backyard flowery remedies would make for a pretty odd tea party.
• We didn't even touch on foraging for native edibles. Next spring, maybe?

During the conversations over our tea party, we noted that lots of people associate the flavour of flowers (especially rose and lavender) with soap, and they would probably prefer that their food didn't resemble their bathroom. I get it. Luckily the lavender in the curd could be avoided by not chomping down on the little bits of flower, and the rose and rhubarb jam was more rhubarb than rose. And let's be honest, that jam was just an excuse to slap another sponge together. 

Without a doubt, the sheer beauty of the flowers added something to the feel of the gathering that would have otherwise been absent. They gave us many conversation points; their very presence seemed to rule out the possibility of awkward nail-picking silences.

Thanks to our people for their contributions of ideas, expertise, attendance at our tea party and for indulging our head-scratchingly philosophical discussions about edible flowers.

Our gardens: An inventory

When you take a turn about my garden you certainly wouldn't be speechless from the beauty of the flowers. You might wonder why I don't spend more time ridding it of that terrible sticky weed, or you might be curious about why I ignored all the advice and went ahead and planted mint in the garden, where it's free to plot how it will invade the whole darned property. Overwhelmed by the flowers though? No.

It was pretty surprising to me then to find that I had in excess of 15 varieties of flowers, and when we added what Jess' garden had on offer, we were looking at over 20 flowers that may or may not be edible. The very act of walking about the garden inspecting plants, collecting flowers and enjoying the weather was energising and relaxing.

After doing some (moderately) rigorous research on edible flowers, there were some resounding messages that we would be irresponsible not to mention.

Resounding Message 1: Do not eat any flowers without a positive identification using the plant's full scientific name. Seriously, don't mess around with this. Flowers can be brutal: breathing difficulties, vomiting, diarrhoea, burning mouth and tongue, mental confusion, convulsions, paralysis, death. Enough said. Here is a good resource for poisonous plants.

Resounding Message 2: Keep your flowers clean. No pesticides, no herbicides, no fertilisers. Don't use them if they look bug damaged or ill-formed. Only eat ones you've grown yourself or that are specifically labelled as edible.

Resounding Message 3: Once you've got a positive ID and you are confident the flower is safe to eat, consume only a little bit the first time you try it. Sensitivities and allergies vary from person to person, so even if it's safe to eat it still might not agree with you.

Resounding Message 4: Only eat flowers in small quantities. Just because a little bit of something is good, doesn't necessarily mean more is better.

Resounding Message 5: Practise extreme caution when eating edible flowers with young children around. They see you eat one flower and could well think that it's ok to eat all flowers.

After we collected one of every single flower in our gardens, we went through to check which ones we had a positive ID for. There were a few we had to discard because we weren't sure of what they were, but for the rest, we went ahead and checked our sources for their edibility. Finally, we did a taste-test. See table below for our results.

An inventory of all the flowers in Jess and Leanne’s gardens for which

 positive identifications were achieved

Flower	Edible?	Tasting notes	Other comments
Bottle brush	No
Cape weed	No		Unless you are a grazing animal.
Coriander flower	Yes	Everything you love/hate about coriander itself, but more intense.
Costal Rosemary	No
Dandelion flower	Yes	Leafy, salady.
Elderberry Flower	Yes	A bit floral. Underwhelming.	We were drinking elderberry syrup with sparkling wine while we were doing our taste test. Can highly recommend it for this purpose.
Fuchsia	Yes	Not that tasty, apart from the long dangly things that come out of the middle. They have a little bit of nectar at the end.	I think we call the long dangly things the stamens and the pistil.
Geranium	Yes	Nah, not very nice.
Kale flower	Yes	Yum! Like kale, only sweeter and easier to chew.	No need to worry too much if the kale bolts to flower this summer – it’s all good.
Lavender	Yes	Tastes like soap. Or maybe soap tastes like lavender. Either way…
Lemon/Lime/Orange blossom	Yes	Zesty and succulent.	We imagine it tossed around in a fruit salad with mint leaves.
Nasturtium	Yes	Inoffensive in the same way a salad leaf is. A lot more orange though.	This is the one the toddler tasted, and stated, ‘It tastes like purple.’ It was delivered with such conviction that we could hardly argue.
Onion flowers	Yes	Raw onion. Through and through.
Pansy	Yes	Faint salad leaf flavour.
Pea flower	Yes	Tastes like a sweet delicious pea. Which is what it would turn into if we gave it a chance.
Rose	Yes	There’s a bit of tannin, but the flavour is just a bit…unpleasant…	…Coat it in sugar or chocolate, on the other hand…!
Sage flower	Yes	Like sage. A bit sweeter maybe.	What would happen if you included the flowers in a burnt butter and sage sauce for some pumpkin gnocchi?
Strawberry flower	Yes	I forgot to take notes when I tasted it and I’m completely unwilling to pick another one and deny it the chance to turn into a strawberry.
Sweet pea	No		Don’t call it a pea if you can’t eat it. Seriously.
Viola	Yes	Pleasant. Pretty.

I guess now is a good time to mention the Deep Moral Dilemma that this Thing Worth Doing has raised for. Is it ethical to eat something that, given time, could offer far more as a food source than it does as a flower? Eating flowers that will turn into fruit, vegetables and legumes seems so devastatingly indulgent. When compared with what they offer when they are fully developed, these flowers offer little in terms of sustenance or nutrition. That being said, this peer-reviewed article is pushing for society to give a little more credit to flowers as a source of minerals in our diets.

Edible flowers in general (not just the ones that could go on to be fruits/veggies) might be seen to epitomise everything that's hedonistic and over-entitled about our society. How can we justify the use of agricultural land to grow flowers, instead of, say, actual food. Now, you may love your edible flowers and defend their right to be regarded as food, but you know what I mean. And when you start asking these questions, it naturally follows that you'll question the morality of growing all sorts of crops over others. Good luck with that. If this interests you, you could check out the Philosophy of Food Project by the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. We don't necessarily endorse the views put forward by these folks, but if you've got the time and the inclination you could be knee-deep in the ethics of food before you're half way through your cup of tea.

Alright. Where are we up to? We've checked out our gardens, we've tasted what they had to offer, we've done some reading and we've decided that edible flowers, whilst are pretty and lovely, raise some hefty ethical questions.

Our next stop is to check in with some experts. We will be visiting a commercial grower of edible flowers and a local restaurant that showcases edible flowers in many of their dishes. So much to look forward to!