Harvesting in January

So I have a confession…

I have not worked in the vegetable garden at all this Christmas break.

I know, very bad. But I was juggling work, university work and working in the pig run to prevent it from resembling the battle of the Somme over winter. Those are my only excuses.

Despite my lack of care, the garden has looked after itself pretty well (the grass is thriving in all of the beds it should not be in…)

It has been so long since I worked over there regularly that I had actually forgotten what I still had planted and left to harvest. I had forgotten the kale, the rest of the sprouts and carrots, the tree cabbage… all I thought we had left were potatoes. So I made a big effort and harvested and prepared lots of our produce during the week.

Carrots: these are the last of the carrots sown this year. They were under horticultural fleece and managed to survive some of the freezing temperatures we had suddenly. Not one has rotted so thank goodness we are on sandy soil. They were delicious and not a lot of damage or forking going on. We even had one gorgeous proper sized carrot!

Think they are ‘Flyaway’ carrots.

Celeriac: first homegrown celeriac harvested from this crop. I know, lazy. But it was in really good condition, a good size, and tasted really good. I like to boil mine but roasting them makes an excellent replacement/accompaniment to roasted parsnips as they apparently taste the same. I have also eaten it raw, grated with apple, in a salad and that is surprisingly good too.

Brussel Sprouts – the left over small ones from Christmas finished up. They did really well and packed a punch to the taste-buds.

Kale – the kale is still alive and doing pretty well despite the various slug/pigeon/ cabbage white attacks it had this year. I do love kale boiled and it goes great in stews, on top of pizzas, in casseroles or stir fries. Kale is brilliant because it fills in the cold ‘hungry gap’ aka, winter, when most other things aren’t available.

Garlic – I sneak up a bulb every time I need it. Garlic is still prolific in our garden from years of growing it.

Potatoes – Too. Many. Luckily, they taste really good and are in pretty good condition.

All of this dinner was homegrown, except the lentils. Self-sufficient and proud of my little garden for doing so well all on its own.

Christmas from the garden

Christmas is one of the busiest times in the kitchen, but it doesn’t mean you can’t pop out to the garden too… especially to harvest things.

Christmas cooking can be like the climax of the harvested year. You can give your jams away as presents, eat redcurrant and cranberry jelly and sauce with your Christmas meal. Harvested chestnuts or other nuts can be used in desserts. Dried cranberries or raisins are great for puds. And of course, anything that is still green at this time of year can be added to your wreath or house for festive cheer.

Dried Cranberry Chocolate Cake anyone?

But you don’t have to stop there… what about the main Christmas meal?

What about growing and cooking your own Christmas dinner?

For future thinking, here are some traditional Christmas dinner things you could plan to grow for next Christmas:

• Potatoes – we always plant so many we still have plenty in the ground come Christmas day. As long as they are well buried and not planted in too damp a place, potato tubers will be fine against the frosts.
• Brussel Sprouts or Brukale (Brussel sprout crossed with kale).
• Kale
• Broccoli
• Carrots – yes, you can still be harvesting carrots from the ground at Christmas, if you cover them with fleece.
• Parsnips
• Cabbages
• Beetroot – why not add some to your roasted roots?
• Celeriac – ditto, or a celeriac mash? Or just boiled?
• Celery – homemade stuffing anyone? And in that case how about freezing some pears or storing some apple too?
• Onions
• Runner- beans or peas – store them in your freezers all year round from the first harvest onwards.
• Pumpkin or squash – usually USA’s Thanksgiving, I know, but how about roasting some and creating a vegetarian/vegan replacement for the usual meat?

Homegrown Brussels and Brukale

Christmas is a holiday, a time of celebration and of having fun with loved ones. To me, it is also a time to be creative and original, to do what I love by going back and cooking from scratch, a way of tying up my year of cooking and growing. This year we will be having our own cabbage, beans, pumpkin, celeriac, beetroot, carrots, potatoes and Brussel Sprouts, not to forget homegrown redcurrant jelly and homemade cranberry sauce… What a way to celebrate an end to 2018!

RIP David Austin Sr. 

What do you grow/dream of growing for Christmas time? Let us know.

For Christmas baking recipes, check out Beagle Baking (https://bellasbakingsite.wordpress.com/home/)

Just type ‘Christmas’ into the search bar and it will show you some festive treats.

And then, after all that food, just follow Rainbow’s advice:

Bed.

Summery of 2018 in the Veg Garden

It is time to do the annual check list of how this year when in the vegetable garden.

It was an unusually cold, uneventful spring this year – we basically skipped it and went straight from winter to summer. But boy, what a summer it was! Major heatwave and no rain for weeks on end. It was glorious, even if it did mean a lot of watering all day long…

But how did this all impact on the plants?

Lettuce – started off really good but struggled with the hot weather in the heatwave and bolted. We bought loose leaf lettuce plants from Sainsbury’s and planted them out and they did pretty well despite the weather. When they bolted, the ducks and chickens loved them.

Spinach – bad year for spinach, not a lot germinating, probably because my seeds were too old. I bought some new ones at the end of the season and got a few to grow, but it was too late by then. Oh well, next year!

Rocket – very good rocket growth this year. Planted some at the beginning of the season and at the end and both batches lasted ages – the last batch has only just gone thanks to Jack Frost.

Radishes – they love sun and were whopping sizes.

Carrots – started off very badly. I sowed them in early March and they did not germinate at all. Sowed some in June/July, thinking it wouldn’t work, and we got a beautiful crop. Some really big ones too!

Celery – I wasn’t going to grow celery this year but a neighbour gave us some spare plug-plants so I used them. They grew pretty well, but were not very tasty. I think they needed more watering a care.

Celeriac – again, wasn’t planning on growing more, but were given plug plants. They seem to be surviving, along with last years crop I never got out of the ground… at least the pigs will be happy…

Cauliflower – didn’t come to anything, as usual!

Peas – had some really good crops but the pea plants themselves died off really quickly. I think it was too dry and they needed more care and watering. Mixed bag with the germination rates.

Beetroot – did fantastically well. I only planted one batch and we still have three buried in the ground to get through. Bolthardy is amazing.

Cabbages – I was too late to sow brassicas so we bought some plug plants from the garden centre. The savoys and spring cabbages did not do very well and ended up going to the poultry, but the red cabbages… I am now converted. Beautiful, huge, delicious and a few more left to get through…

Brussel Sprouts – ran out of time to sow seeds but were given plug plants. They are huge and delicious. Producing really well despite my lack of feeding and weeding this year.

Sweetcorn -OMG. Best sweetcorn harvest ever. So big, yellow and yum. Really big cobs! So exciting.

Pumpkins – amazing crop, some big and small ones, each plant produced lots.

Courgettes – really good. Mixture of types of courgettes grown this year, including Defender, Golden Zucchini, Grisdella etc. All produced lots, really yummy. Cucurbits do love sun.

Cucumbers – didn’t do great, but did fine. Needed more watering and care. Only got a few Passandras and Femspot varieties, I think.

Tomatoes: did pretty well, but again needed more care. Got a few outdoors and indoors this year thanks to the sunshine.

Broccoli – ran out of time to sow so bought plug plants. Did pretty well – lots of small florets rather than big ones. Probably more water needed?

Aubergines – plug plant bought as my seeds did not germinate. I think harvested one? A few grew but did not develop into edible stage.

Sweet Pepper – plug plant as seeds did not germinate. Got quite a few small but delicious ones.

Runner-beans – very good harvest. So many grew after my fears none would germinate due to the hot weather. Roots left in ground from previous years grew again. Got an amazing supply and was still harvesting in November!

Chickpeas – only one plant survived out of the billions of seeds planted. Didn’t develop anything. Will have to try again another year.

Onions – did not do great. Not very big. Needed more water probably.

Garlic – as good as always!

Potatoes – amazing as always! Bought some early Charlottes and Red Duke of York and a main crop Kingsman. Planted some old ones we chitted out from previous batches. Lots of growth and some incredible sizes.

Parsley – good supply from previous year’s sowing.

Chervil – ”

Chicory – ”

Strawberries – great year. Lots of lovely delicious red gems. Made lots of strawberry jam.

Raspberries – very good year. There were some to be picked in late November still. Lots of raspberry jam.

Pears – didn’t get any because fox ate them all.

Grapes – only got one batch because birds ate them all.

Cherries – birds ate them all but the Morello was laden.

Damsons – good supply from one tree. Made one pot of damson jam which was delish.

Apples – very good harvest from all trees. First Bramley harvest, was yummy.

Quince – diseased so didn’t produce anything.

Mulberry – no produce.

Medlar – produced but did not develop and then eaten by birds.

Blueberries – good crop.

Redcurrants – very good crop.

Jostaberries – a lot stolen but birds but good crop.

Blackcurrants – ”

Gooseberries – no crop.

Chives – very good crop as always.

Parsnips – no actual parsnips but great flowers growing.

Plums – lots of Victorias and Green Gages. Made some good plum crumbles.

Sweet Potatoes – disaster. Didn’t cut off vines so no root growth.

I think that is all…. thanks for the year 2018. It was busy, juggling with university, heatwaves, water leak fears, drought fears, and now freezing weather, but what a lovely time we had! Looking forward to another summer of playing in the sun in the garden.

Merry Christmas everyone from the Kitchen Garden in advance. And just to finish it off, what a good year for space2grow – one year ago it was established and it has so far one 3 Bloom awards, has been given sponsorship and its volunteers and supporters are rocketing, including santa…

 

Pumpkin Risotto

We still have a few pumpkins waiting for attention. Roasting them and then adding to a dish is a perfect way of using them – see Pumpkin Coconut Curry, Pumpkin Soup, Pumpkin cake for more ideas…

Pumpkin Risotto

(Serves 4)

-1 small pumpkin -Olive oil, for  roasting -25g butter – 1 onion, sliced – 325g rice – Salt and pepper, for seasoning -750ml vegetable stock –More cooked vegetables, to serve (optional)

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Slice and clear the insides of a pumpkin. Cut into segments and place on a roasting tray, drizzled with olive oil. Roast for 45 minutes, or until golden brown.
2. Melt the butter in a large frying pan. Add the onion and fry gently over a medium heat for 2-3 minutes. Turn the heat down a little.
3. Add the rice and a grinding of salt and pepper. Stir to coat the rice with the butter.
4. Add the stock after frying the rice like a pilau for a couple of minutes, bring to the boil, stirring frequently.
5. Turn the heat down once the stock is bubbling and leave to simmer until almost all of the stock has been absorbed. Add the roasted pumpkin, cut up into squares, cover, and leave to simmer for 5-10 minutes.
6. Serve with cooked vegetables.

Red Apples

Feeling like Snow White when you eat a perfectly homegrown red apple from your tree…

Collected a whole bucket of apples from the garden the other day. This is a beautiful Braeburn.

Other than eating them as delicious snacks, what else can you do with apples? Well, here are some ideas…

Apple Cake

Apple and Blackberry Crumble

Apple jelly

Apple sauce

Apple juice

Dried apple pieces in a dehydrator

Straight apple and cheddar cheese is yummy. My brother melts cheese and then puts it over the top of sliced apple.

Apple pie

Stewed apple and chocolate ice cream – so good

Cut up apple and serve alongside a pudding

Add apple and cheese to a homemade loaf of bread

Apple and cinnamon ice cream (coming soon…)

Add apple to your coleslaw or Waldorf salad

Grate up and add to your River Cottage Carrot Walnut Cake adapted for moist yumminess.

Curing pumpkins

Curing pumpkins involves hardening the skins to protect the flesh inside from deterioration. Do it properly and you can expect fruits to stay in top form for at least 3 months, comfortably taking you to the first harvests of next spring.

The fruit is harvested when it is uniformly orange and the rind is hard. Harvest the fruit by cutting it off the vine with a sharp knife or a pair of looping shears, leaving 3-6 inches of the stem attached to the fruit. This makes the fruit less likely to be attacked by fruit rot pathogens at the point of stem attachment.

Remove the fruits to a greenhouse or as sunny a windowsill as you can find, after  brushing off any dirt or washing in soap and warm water, drying first. Allow your fruits to sunbathe and develop a tan. This should take about two weeks for the top of the fruit then, once carefully flipped over, another two weeks for the bottom.

Pumpkins and winter squash prefer a well-ventilated, dry place. Keep the fruits raised up off hard surfaces on racks or wire mesh with a thick layer of newspaper or straw. Keeping them off the ground will allow air to circulate around the fruits while the extra padding will prevent the skin softening and becoming vulnerable to infection.

Once cured, store the pumpkins in cool, dry storage.

Update: 1st September 2018 – Sweetcorn

Harvested our first sweetcorn of 2018 yesterday, and I think it is our best yet.

Fully grown, yellow kernels, picked just at the right time. Not tough and old, but completely tender and sweet.

We grew our usual Swift F1 seeds this year. We started them off in tall yoghurt pots of compost indoors in May. Once they were big enough to handle and the frosts were over, we planted them outdoors into fertilised earth in direct sunlight. With the glorious sun in June and July along with a vigorous watering schedule, the actual sweetcorn plants grew huge, are tallest yet, going past my 5’3 at least.

Sweetcorn are pollinated by wind rather than insects. You want to get the dust from the tops of the plant onto the tassels below that will become the sweetcorn if pollinated. I did a lot of hand pollinating this year, due to the lack of wind, and thank goodness it seemed to work!

To check if the sweetcorn is ready to harvest, you wait until the tassels have become dark brown instead of white, basically died back. You then gently peel apart the green skin of the corn and insert a finger nail into one of the kernels – if the liquid comes out milky white, it is ready. If not, leave it for a couple of days before checking again.

Now this is important: harvest your sweetcorn only the you are about to cook it. As soon as you take that cob off the plant, its sugar starch degenerates rapidly, straight away. This means the taste of the cob decreases in yumminess very, very quickly. You are advised to bring a large pan of water to the boil before you pick your cob!

Perfect cob! Cooked and put in the bowl in readiness for kernel removal…

To cook the cob, remove the green outer leaves and tassels. Plop the whole cob into the boiling water and leave to boil for a couple of minutes. Remove and put to one side to cool. You can either serve sweetcorn whole as corn on the cob with some butter, or, standing the corn in a large bowl, using a knife, cut down the sides of the cob, scraping the kernels off. You can then serve the sweetcorn kernels without the cob or you can freeze them like this in plastic bags, as they will take up less space in your fridge. Cooking and freezing locks in the sugar starch and preserves the taste and goodness of the sweetcorn.

Voila!

Sweetcorn kernels scraped off and served for lunch.

Does anyone else think of Pocahontas when they see sweetcorn with the green leaves still on?

‘Just around the river bend…’ 

That film’s got sot some cracking good songs.

Other fun news: made tomato passata last week and last night I used it to make homemade pizza.

That means that our dinner used homegrown onion, garlic, perpetual leaf spinach, oregano and tomatoes!

Shame the mozzarella and cheddar, olive oil and bread flour or yeast weren’t home produced… but at least the pizza base was homemade!

Recipe for pizza can be found here: Updated recipe: homemade pizza and information about growing sweetcorn can be found here: Sweetcorn

Ratatouille, new fiction book, and a blog post

Picked first green-gage plums yesterday and collected a fallen ‘Victoria’ plum off the ground too. Blackberries are ripening. Broccoli has been picked. Five pumpkins are growing. It is August now – so that basically means autumn in the UK, but there is talk of 30C at the end of the week…

 

Yesterday I harvested our first aubergine – eggplant – of the year and made Ratatouille. I have posted a recipe before, but I think this one was better, so I will re-write it in a moment.

One of the best things about this dinner is that everything (except for the olive oil for frying and the rice I ate with it) is homegrown.

Very exciting!

So here is the updated recipe:

Ratatouille  

 

(Serves 4)

-Olive oil, for frying in – 1 onion, sliced – 1 large aubergine (eggplant), sliced into small chunks – 2 medium sized courgettes (zucchini), sliced into discs – 1 red bell pepper, sliced into small chunks – 1 large garlic clove, diced – 250g fresh tomatoes, sliced in half – Salt and pepper, for seasoning

1. Heat the oil in a large pan. Fry the sliced onion and aubergine, turning it down to simmer.
2. Add the sliced courgette and pepper. Add the diced garlic and the tomatoes, stirring to combine.
3. Leave to simmer for at least 15 minutes – 30 minutes, the longer the better, stirring now and then.
4. Once the vegetables are tender and the tomatoes have broken down, releasing their juices to become a sauce, add salt and pepper for seasoning and remove from the heat and serve hot in dishes.

Option: serve with potato, sweet potato or rice, and any other vegetables for a hearty meal.

Other news: Firstly, my new fiction book, Crazy Killer Sister, is available now. If you fancy a summer read, please consider? I’m not one for advertising so apart from Facebook, this blog is the only way I promote it!

And finally, I was fortunate to be able to write a blog post for Angie Viet’s, an eating disorder recovery blog, on how gardening helped my own recovery.

Here is the link if anyone is interested:

https://www.angieviets.com/articles/6-ways-gardening-strengthened-my-recovery

 

Have a good week y’all!

Courgettes, courgettes… update

So it has FINALLY rained.

I don’t like rain, but I am actually happy it is here because it has been weeks without a drop and I am relieved to be given a night off from watering the parched plants.

So as you may have guessed from the title, we have a fridge full of courgettes (zucchini). They are going in everything I am cooking at the moment, such as my dinner from tonight, dahl. For the recipe, check out my Courgettes page, Carrot and Courgette Dahl.

Eaten with, of course, runner beans, and some kale. Using homegrown onion, garlic and mustard seeds as part of the spice base.

Runner beans: froze two bags today, cooked one container that I picked today for dinner tonight, and have another whole container to do tomorrow… before picking the next lot. Does anyone else feel like they have suddenly become blind while picking beans and always seem to miss some that turn into GIANT beans?

Bought a new bean slicer to replace the old one we broke which is making life a little simpler again. Anyone else tried standing there for over an hour slicing runner beans with a knife? I could not move my legs they got such bad cramp…

Pumpkins are beginning to grow – exciting!

Picked the few raspberries that are growing at the moment along with blueberries and wineberries today to eat with homemade cookies and cream ice cream for dessert (recipe on my other blog, here: https://bellasbakingsite.wordpress.com/2018/07/27/cookies-and-cream-ice-cream/ ).

And to top off the day, it was nice to see and get a photo of something other than squirrels at the bird feeders… A nice woodpecker instead.

 

A Jammy Week – update

It has been a week of making preserves here.

Mum made her jostaberry (gooseberry and blackcurrant cross) jam.

I’ve just made blackcurrant jam and more raspberry.

Recipe: Raspberry Jam      Recipe: Blackcurrant Jam

Not much has been going on in the veg patch as time has been taken up with watering and picking, again. The raspberries are nearly over, the strawberries have finished. Now we are onto harvesting potatoes, runner beans and courgette/ zucchini by the bucket-load.

Also picked this week beetroot, broadbeans, cucumber, lettuce, rocket, spinach, first tomatoes, blueberries, blackcurrants, loganberries, boysenberries, jostaberries, redcurrants, onion, garlic.

A much of ALL homegrown produce – cucumber, lettuce, rocket, spinach, potatoes, broadbeans and beetroot. Self-sufficient! 

Bad news is the birds are still being pesky. We have quite a few pairs of blackbirds taking up residence in the acre. They already stripped the morello cherry by sneaking under the netting and stripped a blackcurrant bush yesterday that got exposed. They are not very good at sharing…

Slugs and snails – touch wood – have not been trouble lately due to the hot dry weather but almost had a heart attack when I nearly stepped on a grass snake when I was locking up the other day.

And finally, celebrated my sister’s 20th with a homemade cake which I have to share because it has unicorns on it…

To get the recipe, check it out here — https://bellasbakingsite.wordpress.com/2018/07/18/sachertorte/

Have a good week, everyone!