Kate Downham

I've never pressure cooked them, only pressure canned them.

This is how I do it:
1. Soak overnight the standard amount for beans to fill your jars (2.3kg (5 pounds) to fill 7 quart jars). With this amount I end up with slightly more than enough to fill the jars once they're cooked, but not less.

2. Drain, rinse, then put in a big pot with enough water to cover by an inch or two, bring to the boil.

3. Skim off the foamy stuff that comes to the top.

4. Keep it bubbling away for half an hour - not full rolling boil but not gentle simmer either.

5. Use a slotted spoon to put the chickpeas into jars, leaving an inch headspace.

6. Top with the chickpea cooking water so that the water is just covering the chickpeas.

7. Seal in the usual way.

8. Put into hot water in a pressure canner. Lid on, vent 10 mins, bring to 10psi or whatever your usual pressure is, keep it at that pressure 90 minutes for quarts or 75 minutes for pints.

9. Remove from heat. When the pressure is back to normal, remove the lid, take the jars out and rest them on a towel for 12 hours or so before testing seals and storing.

I find it easiest to convert recipes to sourdough when there is some water or milk in them, otherwise adding sourdough starter changes the texture too much.

My favourite gingerbread recipe is for pepparkakkor and contains a fair bit of milk, I might try converting that to sourdough and will see how it goes and post here! I think my children will be very happy if I have to test this one out!

I did see online once a sourdough gingerbread bread recipe, which was more like a normal loaf, but with spices and molasses added, it looked really good. I can't remember the source now.

Raw! I can eat so many blueberries raw with nothing else.

I like to make lots of blueberry sauce and preserve it for the winter months. It's really lovely on porridge, or for blueberry crumble.

Blueberry muffins are probably my favourite kind of muffin too.

Also I definitely second the comments on saag paneer, and using it anywhere spinach is called for!

And there's a lovely recipe in "River Cottage Veg" for spiced spinach and potatoes, I've used chard in this and it's excellent - I think the recipe was basically: pre-cook the potatoes and set aside, sauté some onions, add some Indian spices, then some milk or cream, stir through the cooked potatoes until heated through, and then add chard and stir until cooked.

Chard makes an excellent gratin.

Cut stems and leaves into small pieces but keep them separate. Sauté the stems with some garlic until tender. Add the leaves and stir until wilted.

Sprinkle through a dash of flour, and stir through enough milk or cream to coat it all. Optionally sprinkle some cheese over the top, or a sprinkle of nutmeg or smoked paprika.

Bake until the top is lightly browned.

I dry sour cherries (Kentish ones), and they end up tasting a bit like dried cranberries. Fiddly and slow to do, but definitely worth it!

I really love making cheesecake from it, my recipe has 3 ingredients - honey, eggs, and ricotta: https://thenourishinghearthfire.com/2024/03/17/simple-baked-cheesecake/

I also like to make a kind of veggie patty where I mix ricotta (or chèvre that's a bit past its best) with some eggs, and then mix in whatever grated vegetables need using up, like zucchini, turnip, or carrot, add a little flour to help firm it up and some salt and herbs, and then fry them up as patties.

Sometimes I've put some ricotta on pizza too.

And I also like to make pasties (savoury hand pies) with ricotta plus whatever veggies need using up: https://thenourishinghearthfire.com/2026/06/13/pasties-savoury-hand-pies/

This is something I’ve thought about a lot, and experimented with at times.

One way of applying permaculture thinking to annual plantings and crop rotations is to have guilds of rotations, where one plant in the guild is the focus on the rotation.

For example, I often plant leeks and vetch with my Red Russian kale. Leeks and kale are in the ground for around the same amount of time, and don’t seem to bother each other. The vetch acts as a living mulch in the early days of planting, and then can be slashed at flowering to provide the kale and leeks with more nitrogen. This whole planting gets treated as a brassica planting in my crop rotation.

Or I might have carrots interplanted with lettuce. The lettuce is harvested before the carrots get big, and this bed gets treated as a root bed in my rotation.

I think some brassicas are more susceptible to clubroot than others. Kale, turnips, and swedes are less sensitive than cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Brassicas that are in the ground for only a short time (e.g. arugula, asian greens, salad radish) are also less of a problem for clubroot.

Linda Woodrow plants her annuals in guild plantings, single plants (e.g. 1 cabbage or 1 broccoli or 1 tomato or 1 row of leeks) are surrounded by plants of different species. I think this can work in the place of crop rotation in some ways, because part of the reason we rotate crops is so that the soil is not getting depleted of the same minerals all the time, so because the soil is getting depleted in one small pocket and there are a bunch of living roots and soil life feeding the soil all around it as part of a larger system, it’s not the same as having the same big field planted to the same crop every year.

I think the amount of land you need for the good life depends on how many people you are feeding, what kind of animals you’ll be raising, whether you want to grow all your own hay and other animal feed, and whether you will want to keep a male of the species around.

Where I live, if you’re making all your own hay:
• You need around 5 acres per cow/calf pair, and then you’d want to keep quite a few cows to justify keeping a bull.

• For goats and sheep here, around 2 sheep/lamb or goat/kid pairs per acre seems about right. So to justify keeping a ram or buck, you’d probably want at least 3 acres.

In cooler or drier climates than mine you’ll probably need more land than that.

Without hay, you can keep double the amount of animals, but there are bad hay seasons, and relying on overpriced hay can be stressful.

For 3 acres and a cow, whatever calf the cow has would have to be butchered early, or you might have to buy in hay. 3 acres and goats could work.

Without hay, you can keep double the amount of animals, but there are bad hay seasons, and relying on overpriced hay can be stressful.

For any community venture, I think you’d need the right people, and it’s hard to know who the right people are until they’re put to the test. With dairy animals, some people might not understand how to fully strip the milk out (or might not think it’s important), which could lead to mastitis. Or that some people are good at picking up when something is wrong with the health of an animal and others aren’t. Different people have different priorities and different enthusiasm for things at different times and when animals are involved it’s important to know that they’ll be cared for at all times.

Also something to consider is what degree of self sufficiency you want to have, and what you personally find important to produce.

You can have a good life growing extra of the things that grow well for you and then using the barter/cash from that to buy in stuff that you don’t enjoy growing, then that can be a good part of a community food system, provided that there is a variety of stuff being produced in your local area and it’s not just 100 people growing excess bunches of kale to sell to other people with excess bunches of kale.

The best forks I have used are broadforks with full metal handles. Meadow Creature are very popular in the US, or in Australia, F D Ryan makes great ones.