Proper Gardening

That's what runner beans say to me at any rate. Along with spuds, they're what I really remember my dad growing when we were little. Their jaunty red flowers are a mainstay of allotments and vegetable patches - and they need to be eaten up when they start cropping before the dreaded stringiness sets in. It's the first year that we've tried to grow them and they're doing pretty well, snaking their way up the cane supports and producing plenty of flowers.

I'm convinced that the best argument for growing your own vegetables is having a crop of fresh tomatoes. It's always a great time of the year when the first tomato goes red:



It allows us to look forward to a big crop throughout the later days of summer and into autumn, if we get enough decent weather. And there's something really luxurious about a fresh tomato you've grown yourself, still warm from the greenhouse.

Elsewhere in the garden, the squash plants are amazingly vigorous and are showing their first fruits:



And we're well into the loganberry season now. They make a great smoothie, whizzed up with some yoghurt and a banana and they're probably even more delicious with a sprinkle of sugar and some double cream. It might even be time to start thinking about starting off a Rumtopf / officer's jam / Hodgkin, preserving the fruit we can't eat in brandy or rum. Fished out of the liqueur, the fruit makes the best Christmas trifle.



Another treat we've been enjoying is a wonderful gooseberry and elderflower jelly - I must chase up Ali at Craft Matters to post her recipe here.

Len Deighton on Seasonal Food

I was very pleased the other day to unearth 'my' two Len Deighton cookbooks. Not just because they were pretty much my introduction to cooking (my dad gave them to me when I left home for University), but also because the Action Cook Book has the best cover of any cookery book. I used to call it Cooking For Spies. Front:



and back:



The books were published in 1965 and, recipes aside, they are great examples of past attitudes to food and witness to the fact that we haven't really moved on in our national food debate since the 1960s. As well as this (hopefully outdated) warning about some people's attitude towards garlic -

Controversial as a flavouring element, although I can hardly imagine life without it. [...] Don't put pieces of garlic into a dish unless you either crush them thoroughly or fry the garlic in oil and then remove it. People who don't like garlic will go out of their minds if they get pieces in their mouths

- we have a foreshadowing of our current anxieties around chickens:

Each onslaught of mechanized farming and agriculture brings us a step nearer to being battery hens ourselves. Where is the restaurant that serves a fine free-range chicken full of its own flavour, with just a background of freshly picked herbs?

But most relevant to the blog here is a short passage on seasonality (just before a really helpful list of what's in season when - the list of game birds is super!), which again shows that there's nothing new in the current generation of celebrity cooks calling for us to eat more seasonally:

Every month the seasons disappear, for more and more foods are available permanently. I have therefore listed the seasons for the cook with a certain amount of trepidation. City-dwellers - never over-conscious of the natural cycle of the seasons - will soon lose their last point of reference: the food shop.

I'll be having a proper re-read of Où est le garlic and Action Cook Book soon. And I'll always be thankful to the books which explained to a complete novice how to chop onions and garlic, how to make a roux and loads of other basics.

A short break

We're just back from a camping trip to the Yorkshire Dales. We stayed at a fantastic site not far from Appletreewick called Howgill Lodge. The midges were a bit fierce, but they were the only downside. A couple of stormy downpours, but otherwise beautiful sunny weather. Close enough to Appletreewick that we could walk there along the lovely River Wharfe and enjoy a pint or two of Black Sheep in the excellent New Inn.

We were lucky to have someone who popped round to do some watering in the garden while we were away, as things are moving on apace. The first ripe loganberries are appearing:



- so it's great to think we'll be having some soft fruit soon. There's a great recipe for a soft-set loganberry jam which we used last year. We've had our first two (!) decent crops of broad beans too. There is nothing like really fresh broad beans. They go really well in salads with cheese (especially goats cheese), bacon, mint, just about anything really. It looks like blackfly is going to be a bit of a problem this summer, which could affect the later broad beans we planted. So next year we must do even more earlies.

The plum tree has needed a bit of work over the last couple of days too. June or early July is the best time to prune as it's less susceptible to silver leaf. Hopefully that went ok. And at the same time more thinning out of the fruitlets, otherwise the entire tree will collapse under the weight!

Oops - forgot one!

Meant to include these in the last post. I bought this gooseberry plant for Ali at Craft Matters for her birthday this year and really wasn't expecting any fruit from it until 2010. Should turn out to be enough for a crumble at least. :-) Unless the birds nab them all of course.

First fruits

Well, not really, as we've been making our way through the first salad crops for a good while now (and I've been pulling baby plums off the plum tree like nobody's business), but it's been good to see the first tomatoes appear over the last week or so:





Fingers crossed for a nice, mostly sunny summer to give us a big crop of nice ripe tomatoes.

And there are even some broad beans that will be ready soon. Our previous attempts at growing broad beans have been pretty dismal. In our garden in London we just about managed to grow enough for one meal; and last year the plants just gave up the ghost in our non-improved soil. But this year the abundant flowers have given way now to plenty of nice looking beans:



Fingers crossed that they keep going. Broad beans are one of the great treats of summer. Even closer to being eaten, our two containers of potatoes will be ready for harvesting very soon, and the first crop of beetroot should hopefully be ready as early as next week:



Boiled fresh beetroot, sliced and dressed in a little vinaigrette, is something that gives a lunchtime a real lift. Even better when it's from the garden.

Elderflowers

It's that elderflower cordial time of year again. Out for a walk in Hartshill Park, a little bit of semi-wilderness between the A52 & the D Road, we found some trees with a decent number of flowers for taking home and turning into cordial. This year we're using the recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Book, which makes a stronger cordial than our other recipes. Delicious with still or fizzy water - and even better with gin, mint leaves and fizzy water (a Devon Lemonade). Here is our first batch (today's pickings are the second) steeping, before being heated up with a load of sugar:



The weather's gone a bit dismal but at least the water butts are full up now - and things are continuing to go well. One job that needs doing from about this time of year is training the loganberry. It's going to be full of fruit this year:



A good way to grow a loganberry up the wall is to train all the fruiting growth in one direction and the new growth in another. This means when it comes to autumn and time to cut back all the fruited branches, you can just cut back one side rather than hunting for what's old and what's new growth. This year's new stuff will fruit next year. So here's the before and after: first the before with all the new stems growing in with the fruit:



And now the after, with the new growth trained to the left:



You can just about make out what I've done I think!

To finish this post, a couple of pics of some of our 'late' seedlings. First, for the person who described Seasonal Matters as my 'cabbage blog' :-), a tiny cabbage seedling:



And to finish, the very vigorous looking broccoli seedlings:



All this and we're going on holiday a week on Sunday. Ali at Craft Matters and I are slightly nervous about leaving the garden to fend for itself, even with friends to keep an eye on it - *and* we're only going away for 5 days or so..

Flaming June

What a glorious start to summer this has been. Blue skies again yesterday, hot in the sun and lovely in the shade. It hasn't quite got to the point where we're hoping for rain for the sake of the garden, although our water butts are now empty! I reckon we need at least another two. I'll be brewing again on Thursday - so my water cooling will produce plenty more to top up the butts, but we could do with a shower or two fairly soon.

The garden's really starting to get there. More on the veg lower down this post, but in addition to all that produce, it's so nice to see the flowers coming out into bloom. The sweet peas are starting to come out, it looks like the honeysuckle will be spectacular this year and the sweet rocket plant that we planted in the herb bed is looking wonderful:

It's good to see so much wildlife using the garden too. We've had fledgling blue tits and great tits fluttering around the place, taking (hopefully successful) first steps away from the nest. The goldfinches are still enjoying the nyjer seed:

and we've got stacks of bumble bees buzzing about the place, including this one enjoying our broad bean flowers:

These broad beans are looking strong and healthy and have put out loads of flowers. Fingers crossed that we get a good crop - we have never succeeded with broad beans before. We also have a very welcome glut of radishes:

They're just crying out for some bread, cheese and a very large wheat beer. All going well. And then, just as I was starting to worry about it being too hot to brew tomorrow, the weather's conveniently turned a little colder.

On the subject of beer, one cloud on the horizon which won't do anything for our water butts is the news that the nice people at The Beer Emporium are moving from Burslem to Sandbach. They won't be that far away, but it's a real shame for Burslem where they were one of only a very few decent shops in a pretty sad - but potentially lovely - part of town.