Autumn Transitions

It's an in-betweeny time at the moment: as much a time to look forward as it is to enjoy what's going on now. As everything starts to give up the ghost, we need to think about what comes next - what we'd like to have going through the winter; any winter green manures for improving the soil; things like fruit; and all the seeds for next year.

There's something particularly lovely about autumn when everything starts to fade, the light is especially beautiful and both of these seem to show the late flowers at their best. The picture at the top of this post is a flower of a bronze coloured sunflower we've grown this year. The radicchio which has seriously bolted we've left alone, not least because the little blue flowers are gorgeous:



And we have no idea what this is - we rather butchered it earlier in the season as it was taking over. And that seems to have prompted it to produce a great display of flowers:



There's also lots to enjoy still from this year's crops. The Indian Summer that we've been enjoying for most of September has meant that we've had lots more tomatoes ripening than we were expecting. Today we made a lovely soup for lunch with garlic, our fresh tomatoes, rosemary, ham stock and some brown Basmati rice. Just whip up a tomato sauce, water it down with stock (or water, I guess), add 1/2 to 2/3 of a cup of rice and cook for 40 mins or so. Lovely.



The blackberries just keep ripening up - we've had to start freezing them now, because we can't use them. The cucumbers are continuing to do well too. We should get another three large ones and another crop of gherkin sized cucumbers for pickling. And our huge squash is still going strong:



And yet another marrow!



We're also hopeful that we can coax our remaining chilli plants to come to fruition in the greenhouse. Particularly the fierce Scotch Bonnets:



Finally, one of our winter crops that's doing really well as long as we manage to keep the slugs off it. It's survived the cabbage whites' onslaught at least! Really, really hope that the cabbages grow ok as I for one cannot have too much cabbage:



It's nearly next month already.. Some good things about October - the new season of apples, especially if you can find any more unusual varieties. It's Apple Day on 21 October. I'm not sure there's anything happening near us, but we'll hopefully get some cider at least. October is CAMRA's cider and perry month, the month of the Stoke-on-Trent Beer Festival and, just next Friday, the Stone Food & Drink Festival just down the road from us.

Great time of year.

Leaf mould & compost

It's a good time of year to look for free stuff when you're out and about - the blackberries should still be going if you live far enough north, while purpley-black sloes will soon be around, asking to be turned into sloe gin, as are their various wild plum cousins. A good tip for locating sloes is to try to find an area that was enclosed in the 18th or 19th century - the blackthorn was often used as a hedging because of its vicious thorns.

There are elders - I noticed that the most exposed elder trees near to us were full of berries now, which are great turned into a spicy, wintry cordial, as per our instructions here. The tip with elders is to wait until the berries 'drop', and hang down in a shape a bit like an upside down umbrella.

Then, as autumn progresses there are leaves. Not just a nuisance needing to be swept up, if you have the patience they slowly rot down into a great mulch or addition to a compost heap (after a year), or a lovely conditioner to add directly to your soil (after two years).

You could do what we did and build a ramshackle store for them (see the picture at the top of this post), or you can store them in plastic bags. There are straightforward instructions here. The important tip is to keep them moist and give them plenty of time.

When the mould is a year old it can be added to the compost heap and is a great way of getting plenty of worms in to work. Compost might not be as glamorous a freebie as the sultry sloe, or as instantly gratifying as a blackberry, but if you can manage to get a good heap going, you save a fortune in bought compost. We use a bokashi system to compost all of our food waste to add to the heap - we're also lucky to have a chipper that can shred woody garden waste, and both of these really get the compost heap going. The left hand side is now pretty much ready to be used, probably in a new bed we're putting together:



The next batch is in the right hand container:



Finally, a reminder that brambles and blackberries haven't long to go. The brilliantly productive bush in our garden is now nearly done. Soon be time to cut back all the stems which have fruited this year, ready for it to spring back to life next year.

Stupendous bargains

Those lovely people at BIS have done it again. Not only did they box up Masaaki Suzuki & the Bach Collegium Japan's recordings of JS Bach's 'Sacred Masterworks' (John & Matthew Passions, B Minor Mass, Christmas, Easter & Ascension Oratorios), but now they've put out four incredible boxes of volumes 1 to 40 of their series of Bach's sacred cantatas.

They're basic but well put together, with a sturdy cardboard box enclosing 10 CDs in plain paper slipcases with the original CD booklets. This is particularly kind of BIS, because often you find with these big boxes that corners are cut when it comes to information.

More information is available on the BIS website, with details for each of the individual CDs, by BWV number.

If you feel like snapping one or more of these up, look no further than the equally lovely people at MDT, who are selling each 10 CD boxset for a paltry £28.63 apiece:

Volumes 1-10

Volumes 11-20

Volumes 21-30

Volumes 31-40

Limited quantities are available, and I believe this is a one off pressing. They're all CDs, rather than the SACDs volumes 28-40 were originally released as, but the sound is still wonderful and these are, in my opinion, amongst the best recordings of this great music. Heartfelt interpretations with a real grace and spirit to them.

Autumn fruits

For one reason or another, there's been a gap between this and my last post. One reason is that it's a busy time in the garden getting things in and working out what to do with them. When the weather has let us, that is. It seems that all we've done this summer is talk about the weather, which has been pretty filthy. And having pretty much saved our main crop of tomatoes from the dread blight, we could really do with it bringing some late summer or autumn sunshine just to bring the last ones along to ripeness.

Despite all the problems earlier on, the tomatoes have been a success again. Elsewhere, the runner beans have been really good. And possibly my favourite this year, the cucumbers. I'm probably alone in this, but it seems somehow vaguely glamorous to be growing cucumbers in our Staffordshire garden. There's something slightly frivolous about them which is quite appealing. I don't know if it's just because they remind me of summer salads - or Sunday night help-yourself tea - when I was growing up, but for whatever reason, it's been good to wander about the garden seeing the little blighters grow. And as you can see from the picture at the start of this post, the latest crop of them is pretty substantial.

Which brings us on to the main, if somewhat rambling, point of this post, which is the real challenge of this time of year. Just what do you do with the glut of food which your garden should hopefully be producing?

Tomatoes are easy - halved and roasted in the oven, turned into passata or used in a good arrabiata pasta sauce, they can be frozen and stashed away in the freezer to use later on. The runner beans can be eaten as and when they come or left to grow big, with the borlottis, to use the beans themselves rather than the pods. The potatoes never last long the number we get through. Same with beetroot.

Cucumbers? We're having a go at pickling them using some of the dill we've grown:



Plums? Good lord, the plum tree has been overloaded with fruit this year. We've given some away, turned some into spiced plum 'butter' and converted some more into several batches of jam and chutney, including this big pot of 'Dower House' chutney:



But it's nice to preserve some of them for just eating, maybe with a big dollop of yoghurt at breakfast. Last year, we stewed and froze a big batch, but this year we're having a go at bottling them. Here's one of the first jars, rather depleted after we felt we just had to check on how they were doing. Lovely:



It's not for the fainthearted, not least because there's a risk of cultivating botulism if the sealing doesn't go quite right. Yikes. The bit in the instructions where it says 'if you feel short of breath...' isn't exactly reassuring. But faint heart never won fair bottled plums and all that. By the way, if you squint at that picture, you should be able to make out some pinkish blobs on the tree in the background - plums that we've still got to pick or the ones we're sharing with the jaspers.

Finally, an old favourite. We stripped the most successful chilli plant of its fruit to make a fiery pickle with mustard seeds, oil and salt, left on the windowsill to ferment slightly and do its stuff as per Madhur Jaffrey's instructions (one adaptation here). Here it is, can't wait for this one to be ready: