Preserving in Action

Making apple and chilli jelly. I was supposed to include the core and the pips as well, but I didn't read the recipe properly. 

 I used an old pillow case to strain the jelly. Don't worry, I washed it on a hot wash first. If you want to avoid a cloudy jelly, you can't squeeze it at all, you have to let it drip overnight.

 This is the rhubarb and vanilla jam. You don't add any water to the rhubarb before you cook it, which seemed a bit scary to me.

 But it worked. This is it after about 10 minutes.

 Here are all the jars we've made so far. Let me know if you want some, Andrew and I can't eat it all. Actually we probably can but we shouldn't.

A Fruitful Fortnight

This last few weeks I have mainly been preserving. My parents have had bumper crops of plums and apples this year (4 plum trees, 2 apple trees). So they asked me to come and pick some of the fruit before it all fell to the floor in a rotting mess. The weekend before last I went back to Oxford with Charlotte and Jon and we set to work relieving the trees of their fruit.
Here's the view from under one of the plum trees:

These are Victoria plums. Delicious. 

Here was the bounty after thirty minutes or so of picking: 

Out of this, the apples and also some rhubarb from the allotment, I have made:

6 jars of Spiced Port and Plum Jam

4 jars of Plum and Lime Jam

4 jars of Plum, Anise and Vanilla Jam

2 jars of Rhubarb and Vanilla Jam

4 small jars of Apple and Chilli Jelly 

4 jars of Plum Chutney

4 jars of Apple and Raisin Chutney

A very productive way to spend the summer holidays, even if it has left me, and my house, smelling slightly of vinegar. I'll post a photo when I can figure out how to get pictures off Andrew's camera. 

Special thanks are due to my beloved father whose love of apricot jam made all this possible. And to my beloved mother for cleaning and saving all the jars.  Sadly Pops appears to have gone off apricot jam in the last few months, so I'm going to have to find a new source of jam jars...

Now to find a recipe for courgette jam...

August Update

Here are a few photos of what's growing.

Tomatoes: The tomatoes in June, not long after we got them. 

 Here are the tomatoes now. Haven't they grown?! You can't see any tomatoes growing on this photo, although there are a few in there. You can see a nice yellow flower though, that will hopefully soon be a tomato too. These plants smell amazing.

Courgettes: You can see quite a few lovely yellow courgettes growing here. We have four courgette plants. We've been dining very well on courgettes this summer. 

Marigolds: Aren't they pretty?

Runner Beans: With marigolds in front and fennel behind. This time last year we'd been feasting on runners for weeks, but they've yet to grow any beans this year. I think we planted them much later this year, and it's also been colder. And I haven't been watering them as much. Hopefully there'll be some beans in the Autumn. 

So, that's about it. We've also got a load of onions, lots of delicious potatoes, two very tiny aubergines and a random brassica which Andrew planted but I can't remember what it is. Only one survived. We'll find out what it is when it starts growing properly. We did also have some seedlings growing at home, pumpkins and squash and other Autumnal fare, but the b***** squirrels that live in our garden dug them all up. Will have to make more use of the greenhouse next year. 

New project?

This is brilliant. My two favourite things, gardening and knitting, all rolled into one. Who'd have thought it? 

I've been feeling fairly uninspired by knitting recently, but this has reignited my fire. New plan: bring the gardening inside in yarn form. I'm sure Andrew won't mind the odd woollen bee hive or pond around the place. 

http://gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/non-gardening-discussion/33970-bournemouth-knitted-garden.html

101 things to do with rhubarb

Someone should write that book. I couldn't. I only know 2 things to do with rhubarb. Crumble and cake.

We've got a lot of rhubarb. Andrew's mum Sue bought us a rhubarb plant last year and after a year's wait it is now serving us very well. It's very nice being able to take home a big bunch of rhubarb every time we visit the allotment. It just keeps growing. The only problem is I have such a small rhubarb repertoire. It needs expanding. Suggestions welcome please.

Here's the crumble I made this evening, and a few weeks ago too:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/rhubarbcrumble_11396

It was delicious. Both times.

A few weeks ago I made a rhubarb cake with a crumble topping. It was also quite tasty. Fruity and moist and not too sweet. Here's a recipe that might be the one I used but I can't remember. I certainly didn't use a loaf tin though.  http://www.rivercottage.net/recipes/rhubarb-cake/
I had all sorts of trouble finding a cake tin of the right size. I ended up having to transfer the mixture out of a too-small tin into a too-big tin because, despite owning more cake tins than is strictly necessary for a household of our size, we didn't have the right one. I thought bigger was better than smaller. The cake was wide and flat but at least it didn't spill all over the bottom of the oven.

If anyone's got any good gooseberry recipes, those will be gratefully received as well.

Back on track

After our lengthy absence, one or both of us has made it to the allotment four times, yes FOUR times, in the last week. We are very proud of ourselves. Especially today. Today we didn't just go to the allotment, we cycled to the allotment. All the way to North Finchley from Green Lanes. North Londoners will know this is a very long way (11 miles there and back) and also there are a lot of hills en route. It was great to be back on my beautiful bike. Although I did have to spend the first 30 minutes after we arrived recovering from all the exercise.

Anyway, back to the transformation of the allotment from weedy mess to not-so-weedy mess...
Last weekend, Andrew went to a family party at his aunt Jill's house. Jill and her husband Paul and their son William live the good life in Cambridgeshire and have been a wonderful source of gardening advice, inspiration and seeds. Last year they gave us a load of bean seeds which produced a most bounteous crop of runners and French beans. On Sunday, Andrew told them our terrible sob story of allotment woe and Jill very kindly gave us a whole host of useful things:
4 yellow courgette plants
2 aubergine plants
4 borage plants
8 marigolds
a hoe
a garden fork
a jar of Paul's famous homemade marmalade (not that useful for the allotment but delicious nonetheless).

After a long session of weeding, Jill and Paul's generous gifts have, in one fell swoop, transformed our failure into a functioning, purposeful, food-growing success. Hurrah for them.

As if this wasn't enough, I was also given three tomato plants by a lovely colleague at work, Sue. She was given a load by her dad and didn't have room for them all. They're now in our greenhouse, in a growbag, each surrounded by a very clever 'growpot' that my dad gave us a while ago which will keep them nice and moist. Our allotment would be a much sorrier place without all our lovely, generous friends and family.

Today we planted some runner beans, French beans and peas. A bit late, but better late than never. Here's what it looks like now:

Time to stop typing as Andrew has just brought me a  bowl of his delicious homemade raspberry ice cream, complete with a raspberry picked from the allotment today (yes just one, we ate the rest while we were gardening).

Two very repentant gardeners and one million rampant weeds

We finally made a long overdue trip to our allotment this week. Due to a combination of circumstances involving a key that doesn't fit the gate padlock, the lack of a car, trips to visit poorly parents, sibling's hen do, friends getting married abroad, 30 reports to write and moving house, Andrew and I have been to the allotment a total of 2 times in the last two months. Our fellow allotmenteers are so outraged by this blatant disregard for our plot that almost as soon as we arrived on Tuesday evening, one marched over to us and demanded to know where we'd been and why we had let our plot turn into such a jungle. And to be fair to her, it was looking like a jungle. We didn't have the heart to take a photo, but it looked something like this:

There were weeds as high as our waists, or even higher. According to this old lady, four days is the maximum amount of time it is acceptable for any decent allotment holder to be away from their plot. We've been four times since January. The weeds are everywhere. 

Feeling suitable admonished and assuring our neighbour that we would be much more dedicated now we have a car and a key to actually let us through the gate, we set to work. And it was a very depressing task. Most depressing of all were the strawberries. Our strawberry plants are wonderful. Fruitful, luscious, plentiful...we had such high hopes for a summer of jam, Victoria sponge cakes, strawberries and cream... but instead, due to our neglect we found literally punnets and punnets worth of strawberries...all rotten and mouldy on the plants. Only a handful of ripe strawberries remained. What an awful waste. We feel very bad indeed. 

However it's not all bad news. We do have three beetroots growing, and one Brussels sprout plant. It seems that it's not a good idea to ignore your allotment during the driest Spring on record. Our broad bean plants are growing but there's no sign of beans. Our peas never even made it to the surface. Our onions are growing though, we've got pears and apples on the trees, a bountiful gooseberry bush and the potatoes are doing well. Tonight we've just eaten some of our Charlottes. Delicious. 

Scary Scarecrows

Not sure about the crows, but these really scared us when we walked past them last time we went to the allotment. Where did they find all those heads?

Helpful Hands

Mum and Auntie Jill came over to the allotment last weekend and provided not only cheap labour, but also an amazing fount of knowledge on all things green. I'll try to jot down what they said just so I can remember their sage advice;

"What are you doing with that watering can?!"
 Water properly, don't use the rose to water all the soil around where your plants are - get close and direct the water at the plants.

"Water that poor pear!" 
Mulch trees and shrubs; not only does it keep weeds down, but if you build it up into a little dam around it (think of a volcano crater) then it holds moisture and directs it at the roots.

"Don't water every day, give them a good drenching once a week" 
OK, I knew this one already, but I hadn't appreciated what 'drenching'  really was! The pear wasn't drenched until it had almost two watering cans full. Apparently, watering once a week encourages the roots to go hunting nice and deep for water. This is good, as cant really get up there every day.

"If you get interesting looking weeds, keep them!"
I cant believe we haven't done this before. After a spot of weeding mum found what turned out to be fennel. Brilliant.Sure they're not in the right place for our crop rotation, but who cares! Jill says "stick a pole in so you know where they are and make sure you water them".
I instantly thought that this would maybe make a great companion plant but after a bit of hunting online, found that; "Fennel is an odd plant in that it pretty much is a poor companion for everything."
Haha. But it does say that it repels aphids, so that's good for where it is, right on the peas and beans patch :) 



"What are all these dandelions doing here?!?!"  [needs to be said with outrage as if someone has trampled over your prize blueberry bush] If you cant be bothered to dig them up, just pick off the flower heads. I was lazy, so just grabbed the flowers off, managed to get over 100.. dandelion tea perhaps?

"Your compost is rubbish, but you'll learn!"
To me it looked tons better than it did two weeks ago, but wasn't really going anywhere - no heat and quite broken down. so we decided that should start a new one and put the rest out on the plot. Top tips for compost success are layers of twigs and green and adding "recycled beer" and chicken poo. There was also much loling at the beetroot growing in the compost - if you chop them up, they don't keep growing. Who'd have thought? Also, roots the length of your arm are not a good idea either.

"We've had two loads of rhubarb already this year" 
Force your rhubarb and you'll get a super early crop




Plus they did LOADS of weeding :) cheers guys!


More photos on flickr 

Companion Planting

Saw this pretty infographic this morning showing some common companion planting combinations. I think that some of these are more often employed in annual crop  rotation instead of strictly companion planting (eg Beans & Brasicas), but still good stuff.

Compost

After reading Mark Diacono's excellent book Veg Patch fairly constantly since Christmas, it's become a bit of a crutch for me... rather than just hack away with a shovel, I'll now find myself reading up beforehand, nodding and then hacking away with a shovel. Whenever Harriet and I talk about the allotment, I seem to precede every sentence with: "Mark says..."


Its like I've turned into an adoring three year old. 

Anyway, Mark says that your soil is your most important bit of your plot. More important than the veg even (!). Well we gave ours a bit of a manure last year, but haven't really done anything since. Makes sense tho, if you're taking things out of the soil, you'll need to keep the nutrients all topped up if you want to keep doing it every year.


One way of getting nutrients back into the soil is by composting. We've got a compost bin, so last weekend I had a look at how it was doing.  Definably more like soil than the rotten cabbages and chard that it was made up of, but quite dry and not fully broken down. And not many worms. (Also think i saw a rat in there, but it could have been just been a potato.) 


As we've not been visiting enough to make regular additions of food waste, it looks a bit undernourished. But what was there was promising, and I dont think it will take much to turn it into the powerhouse of free goodness for our plot.


So things to do this year:

 - Fill it up; make sure we use it. All kitchen waste, cardboard and paper, laddered tights, whatever will rot down is going to fill up the bin.
- Get a balance; Ensure that there is both 'Green' (fleshy stuff, clippings & peelings) and 'brown' (twigy things, cardboard, straw) - think this might have been a problem last year - it was mostly just grass and weeds

 - Water it; Our bin is plastic so it isn't going to get any moisture from the rain, which apparently slows down composting.

Also saw that a lot of the perennial weeds (like dandilion) were actually doing just fine and starting to grow in there. Have put them in a plastic bag to decompose before for a few weeks to make sure theyre double dead before they go in with the rest of the stuff.


Anyway, the bin was emptied out, given a nice airing and a good 'watering'. Will have to see how it is in a few months time.

And 'sow' it begins...

Our weedy, untilled allotment has, in the week or so since we last visited, been transformed into a beautifully dug-over, weed-free plot. Not a miracle, just Peter from the allotment society and his rotovator. He did a brilliant job. He had to do it three times apparently. Our new aim for this year: improve the quality of our soil through adding as much organic matter as possible. We need to make another call to Phil the poo man.
So, into this newly rotovated soil, we planted the first of this year's crops. Potatoes. Three rows of Charlottes, and then a row each of Arran Pilot, Lady Christl and Vivaldi (the famous, 'slimming' potato - only half the calories of a normal potato! Amazing). We'll see which ones do best (and whether we get any less fat from eating them). We planted them in the corner of the plot that we never got around to touching last year.
We also planted a few rows of onions and half a row of beetroot. Don't worry, there will be more beetroot to follow. We just wanted to make sure we spread the beetroot love out throughout the summer and didn't end up with a glut. Although a glut of beetroot would be no bad thing, in my opinion.
We also planted some aubergines and leeks in modules. Our aubergines didn't do very well last year, as we left it too late before we planted them. We didn't want to repeat our mistake this year so they're already planted up and sitting in a nice warm spot on top of the washing machine,  ready to be planted out when it gets a bit warmer.
We got our potatoes and onions from the allotment trading hut. 40 or so potatoes and 50ish onions for about £4. It's good for the purse strings as well as the waistline.
We got most of our new seeds for this year from The Real Seed Company but we've also tried saving some seeds from last year's crops. We'll see how they do.
Here was the table on seed sorting day.

One thing we have learnt today: it is very difficult gardening with a hangover. We achieved probably 30% of what we would have on a normal day because we kept on having to have little sit downs.  Happy birthday to Andrew's brother Ben.  

It 'woodwork' better if it had a roof - the fruit cage post

This year we are determined to learn our lessons from last year. One major failing from last year: all our fruit got eaten by birds (or some other unidentified thief)

So yesterday we put Year Two: no-longer-newbies into action.

I got the bus up to the allotment while Andrew cycled to his parents' house to get the car. I felt like a true, die-hard gardener as I got to work in the greenhouse, listening to the radio, while the rain poured down outside. 

Andrew arrived soon after with a roof-rack full of wood, a saw, a spirit level and a hammer. Woodwork time.

We'd planned to build a walk-in fruit cage, but after chatting to Andrew's Uncle Paul at Christmas, we thought maybe a smaller, moveable one would be better. We had a look around at a few other fruit cages on other plots, and then set off for Homebase. The man at the checkout was slightly bemused by our purchases, and it took him a long time to find 'pond and fruit cage netting' on his till. He kept looking at the 'Chains' section until I told him it was a mesh, not a chain. Don't think he'd been working there long.

We came back to the allotment and Andrew got to to work with a saw, hammer and nails, while I did my best with the mesh and a staple gun. 

Then we put it all together to make this wonderful cage for our strawberries. Check out our awesome woodwork skills. We decided we'd make this cage just for the strawbs, and do something else for the raspberries and the gooseberry. I hope it works because last year we had a total of 1 raspberry and 0 gooseberries. Not a brilliant harvest. 

Yes we do realise it doesn't have a roof yet. We ran out of time and energy. Luckily there's no fruit for the birds to eat yet, so we've got a bit of time. 

Back in the growing game!

Last weekend we donned our wellies for the first time since the end of October and ventured back to The Allotment. We were both feeling a little apprehensive on the bus ride there... maybe others would look in disgust at our six month absence... maybe all the windows had been broken on the shed.. maybe our plot had been given away to some other happy newbies...

However all was well. Actually, it looked in a better condition that it was when we left it.  We spent the day clearing old produce that we'd left behind and moving big clods of grass from the area we never got around to using last year. We then took all the clods and used them to build up the path between our plot and Carol's plot next door. 

Here's what it looked like when we got there. Last year's canes and plenty of weeds. 

Here's what it looked like when we'd finished. Yes, we realise there aren't many differences to spot! 
We managed to secure the services of Peter, the Chairman of the Allotment Society, and his rotavator. So hopefully all the hard digging work will be done for us. Definitely worth £30. 
Here's some pictures of our first allotment lunch of the year, in our shed's little veranda. Sandwiches with chutney made from last year's produce. YUM.