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.