Roadhouse Spring Garden vol. 3

The walkways in the Roadhouse Spring Garden are finished. They were done really efficiently, in a week or so which tells something really good about people working here. Anyway, below you can see two pictures about the finished walkways (or will see once I manage the put them here, right now it doesn't work). I think they fit there really well, it was a great idea to built them instead of just settling for the dirt paths. Now people can walk around the garden and see what we have there. In fact, ýesterday we had a major even in Roadhouse, The Roadhouse Grill, so it was really good we had the walkways finished. There were plenty of people walking around the garden, and they seemed rather interested when I told them details about the garden. It appeared also that the garden was a popular playing ground amongs the children, which made me, to be honest, a bit worried about the plantings - but everything went well. However, all fo the signs aren’t there yet which is something I am not proud off. Put before the event started, I went there to put most of the sings, the rest I explained to as many customers I could. I really try to get all the signs there as soon as possible with Li Haixin, hopefully we’ll get it done.

There are both good and bad news when it comes to the garden. Let’s start with the good ones. As told earlier, pink radish and spring onion has been growing really well and we have started to pick them up to be served in the restaurants. Spring onion, or scallion as it’s often called, is a species of onion which is less mature and less developed than “normal” onions we use - in fact they are very young onions, harvested before the bulb has had a chance to swell. They are not as strong as onions usually and thus are delicious raw and widely used in salads. When used with other vegetables or herbs, they do not overpower the dish as regular onion quite often tends to do. Both the green tops and the small white bulbs are edible, which makes spring onion more varied than regular more mature onions. Indeed, spring onions are really popular throughout Asia as a flavouring green, as a herb, as a garnish and as a vegetable itself. Spring onion is really popular in Chinese cuisine as a part of stir-fried dishes. In Roadhouse, the spring onion is pretty much ready and we have harvested in once already – we got 13 kg’s of it, from an area roughly 1/5 of the total spring onion plot. We are going to harvest it bit by bit, because it’s virtually impossible to preserve and lasts only about 5 days fresh. Our chef is going to use it as follows:

- The green tops served as complimentary appertizers in The Shcoolhouse, with tsatsiki and sesame paste.
- The green tops and the bulbs as part of various hot dishes in The Roadhouse and Xiaolumian

Radish, including the pink radish, is an edible root vegetable very common all around the Globe. It can be seen as an “ancient vegetable” as it was domesticated before the Roman times in Europe. Radish is an excellent plant to grow in gardens, as it is rather easy to grow and it grows fast. In fact, its original Greek name “raphanus” means something like “quickly appearing”. Anyway, pink radish is a significantly healthy root vegetable which is generally used as a garnish or salad ingredient – they are almost completely used only raw, and they have a rather strong peppery flavour. Radishes are a great source of, for example, vitamin C, sulphur, iron and iodine, which again is great when it comes the our aims of serving healthy food as a part of our sustainable foods program. Radishes stay fresh for about a week in a fridge – preferable in a plastic bag. To add a little bit crispiness, radishes are good to be soak in ice-water for an hour before serving. Here in garden, we have harvested already 3kgs of it (and the one time with no record, but that was not much). Radish also should be harvested bit by bit, due to the preservation problems. It’s been served as a part of complimentary vegetable plates in the Roadhouse and in Xiaolumian, as well as garnish in various dishes. It is also used constantly as part of the Schoolhouse Greens salad.

We have also planted eggplant and strawberries now. We finally have our strawberry way! Eggplants and strawberries were planted from small plants, not from seeds, which makes their survival highly likely. However, the strawberries doens't seem too well now, they seem too dry, which is one of the bad news. They are still alive though and hopefully will get better with plenty extra watering. Eggplants are are doing well and it won’t take too long until we are going to serve our own eggplants and, hopefully, strawberries in our restaurants. We use strawberries and eggplant as part of our dishes all the time, so once we can have it from our own garden, that obviously saves environment from our part and also saves us money, not to mention the fact that we’re able to serve completely fresh and organic produce. So, the whole areas designed to strawberries and eggplants has been planted – that was about 30 eggplants and enough strawberries to serve our needs. I am not sure yet when they are going to be ready for harvest, but I’ll let you know.

Then the bad news. The herbs in the garden don’t seem to grow well, they are not coming out. Herbs are known for being really hard to plant from the seed, and apparently they are worth their reputation. We did everything according to instructions, but something went wrong – or then it was just bad luck. But, we have not given up hope yet and try to get them to grow with more watering etc. At least Li Fengquan, our brilliant farmer, said it’s not yet too late. However, we acknowledge that their survival is unlikely, and thus we are, as soon as possible, going to buy young herb plants and plant them, that way they are almost surely going to grow. And who knows, maybe the seeds are starting to grow eventually, and maybe the plants are going to spread in time. Anyway, I am going with our chef Randhir really soon to purchase the young plants, and then, in a month or so, we should be able to serve our own herbs. The same goes with lettuce. Apparently it hasn’t been watered enough, or then it’s due to back luck, but it doesn’t seem to be growing – or, who knows, maybe it just takes time. Given all the things I’ve been reading from the internet, it’s getting too hot for the lettuce to grow in direct sunlight, so we’ve planned to built some kind of cover for them. Let's see if we actually make that happen - the gardeners didn't seem too eager to do that.

From bad news it is always good to go back to good news, so I must add that the cucumber seems to be a success and is coming out fast! They should be ready to harves in the early summer - the ones for pickling purposes should be harvested earlier as the ones used fresh. So rather soon we need to decide whether we are going to pickle it, in orded to get them out small enough. One more thing about the garden at this point - we started a sort of experiment. Although we decided not to plant tomatoes as they are really difficult to grow, we bought five young tomato plants and planted them in the corner of the lettuce triangle. We'll see whether we manage to grow them or not. If they come out good, we can start to grow them in larger quantities, as tomatoes is something we use a lot.

Okay, that's it for the garden, I'll keep you updated. Enjoy the last weeks of the spring!