Going Green

 

I married Green (Mike Green, that is), I live Green (as sustainably as possible) and eat Green (growing much of what we eat, organically!).  So it stands to reason, that we drink Green too!  I love to experiment.  In fact, I live my life totally experimentally, that is, I try things out.  I don’t follow recipes but I often look at a recipe as a rough outline to see what I can combine.

Yesterday I spent a good deal of the morning in our garden clearing a patch of overgrown vegetable garden bed.  As I pulled off the lower leaves of our large mammoth curly kale plants, I wondered why I didn’t do more liquid kale juices.  I saved some for the compost bin, some for a compost tea brew, and the nicer less bug-chewed leaves for a green juice.

At morning tea, I googled some green smoothie ideas and after looking at a couple, decided to experiment with my own version of a Green Smoothie.

It went a little like this:

Experimental Backyard GreeNZ Smoothie

3 small curly Kale leaves

4 soft lettuce leaves

1 small cucumber, skin removed (only as it was a tough skinned variety)

1 Tbspn honey

4 small Stevia leaves

2 figs (frozen)

1 frozen banana

4 small oranges, juiced

1/2 lemon, juiced

1 tspn ginger, finely chopped

1 small ripe pear

Everything in this blend, bar the honey and ginger, came from our own backyard.  Into the blender the ingredients all go and blitz away till you have a smooth consistency.  I have a Breville 2200W The Boss blender which was a third of the price of a Vitamix and does just as good a job of blending just about anything!  I simply choose the Green Smoothie option and away it goes.

Suffice it to say, this Green Smoothie was Fab!  Next time, I might explore a little more ginger, or even a small bit of lemon skin to give it a greater zing.  It was a great energy boost to go back out into the garden and proceed to finish weeding and making kale leaf compost tea.

 

To make Compost Tea

What you need:

An old 10L paint bucket with tightly fitting lid

Green leaves (usually I use comphrey leaves but this time I used Kale leaves)

old woven onion bag with drawstring to close

Method:

Tear leaves and pack them tightly into woven onion bag.  Place in old paint bucket and fill with water to the very top.  Seal bucket, with drawstring of onion bag hanging over the side of the bucket for easy handling.  I write the date of the brew on a flat piece of wood.  The brew will be ready to use in as little 5 weeks.

Note: The brewing bucket needs to close tightly with a lid, as this mixture tends to smell very, very bad while it brews!  In fact, one needs to close your nose when opening, and you will find within seconds of opening, all the blue flies within a 5 km radius will congregate at the site like a group of drunkards invited to a free-for-all drinking binge!  Dilute this to a consistency of a herbal tea, with water and then feed your vegetable and fruit trees with this highly nourishing vitamin/mineral blend and watch them grow!

The rest of the bug-bitten Kale leaves went to the compost bin, to make new life-giving compost.  The great cycle of Waste not, Want not!

Ciao!  

Jizzy Green