Sunday, 5 October 2008

Embarrassment of abundance

This summer has been amazingly abundant in fruit and vegetables, to an economically embarrassing extent. There's so much around that supply has quite outstripped demand, causing prices to drop so low that farmers in many cases are not bothering to bring in their crop. Right: apples on ul. Kórnicka.

A common complaint among urban taxpayers regarding farmers is that they moan whatever happens; last year's late frosts decimated soft fruit production, so they moaned, this year's profusion of crops has depressed the market, so they moan, cap-in-hand to the Ministry of Agriculture, looking for 'emergency intervention'.

Below: Cabbage field between Zgorzała and Nowy Podolszyn. These fields are fast filling with development (see post above).

Below: Rose hips on ul. Kórnicka. The medicinal value of this plant is amazing! All that vitamin C plus antioxidants - I can see why the NHS was so keen to have British children drinking rose hip syrop in the 1960s!

Below: Pumpkins near Nowy Podolszyn. There seem to be more and more of these growing around here; other than a spicy pumpkin soup with coconut milk, I can't think of any appetising uses for these giant vegetables, nor do I see them in our shops. I guess they go to the food processing industry as filler for ready meals.

The weather today, as you can see, was beautiful, with a +14C maximum temperature.


This time last year:
Autumnal moods, happiness at 50

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What to do with pumpkins?? We Americans love pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread from now through Christmas....