Garden Labours

We decided not to grow much this year, because we're trying to change the garden round a bit, extending some patio and the vegetable patch, while trying to plant a new bit of lawn. There's a lot to do, especially as all the buildings that were here before our house was built are still mostly lurking beneath the surface. Coming across this kind of thing -



- can certainly slow you down a bit! And here's just one of the piles of bricks and assorted rubble we've dug out of the ground:



As well as trying to get the layout of the garden more how we'd like it to be, July has been a month in which things have started to happen. And finally we've had some wildlife coming back. Stacks of hoverflies this year, which is good and during July, we've seen some bumblebees back again, like this chap:



They love the white & pink oregano & marjoram we've got flowering at the moment. Not as many butterflies as last year, but we've seen a few speckled woods about the place:



There have also been a couple of spectacular peacocks that have resisted the camera's attentions, but hardly any commas or painted ladies that were pretty frequent visitors last summer. We did find this splendid caterpillar though:



Turns out it's the vapourer moth caterpillar - gaudy in its youth, more sober and brown when it grows up.

Plants too have been quite different to last year. Barely any plums at all - just 4 or 5 on the whole tree - when last summer we were worried that the crop was going to break the branches! The loganberry has been ok, but it's the blackberries that we're going to have a glut of:



With the very late cold weather we had, I think it's done for anything early and it's the late crops that will hopefully be ok. We're really hoping for a glut of tomatoes, to which we've dedicated the greenhouse. They started to go orange and red a couple of weeks back:



And there are plenty more potentially:



As I'm writing this, it's absolutely bucketing down outside, but the weather has been better so far for ripening toms - we're hoping for a sunny late summer and autumn so we can turn the tomatoes into sauce for freezing. The variety we went for this year is Amish Paste, a cooker rather than an eater - not much juice at all, mostly flesh and they have the most wonderful flavour when cooked. Very pleased with them.

As we are with our main bean variety this year, the wonderfully-named Cherokee Trail of Tears, which has been putting out lots of beans for the last few weeks:



Both of these come from the excellent Real Seed Catalogue people, who have a wonderful selection of interesting varieties on their website. Highly recommended. The variety of slow-bolting coriander we grew from them (Leaf Selection) has been really good too.

I must do our recipe for Chakchouka here soon, as it's a great way to use up seasonal vegetables. It's a tomato-y, harissa-y vegetable stew which you finish off by cooking eggs in it. We started with the recipe in Annie Bell's excellent Evergreen (abebooks link) and it's very adaptable: so far this summer we've used the beans in it, as well as our first turnips (Purple Top Milan). They are very lovely things:

When you're thinning things like turnips, you can use the leaves for greens, using them like spinach. Great wilted down with some garlic & olive oil. Our onions (Senshyu Yellow) and garlic (Lautrec Wight) too went into the last dish of Chakchouka:

First time we've grown these. The sight of onions sitting on the top of a bed is very satisfying.

Also this year we did our courgettes (Nero di Milano) a bit differently, turning over a whole raised bed to one plant, which is doing really well, far better than last year's, which had to share the space with salad leaves. We got the seeds for these from Wiggly Wigglers.



So, considering this was kind of a non-growing year, we've managed to get a few things on the go. The challenge now is to really push on with all the earth-shifting jobs so we can get planting in Spring next year. Along with everything else, like foraging for sloes for the Christmas sloe gin (great for a fizz or a martini), getting the 'Rumtopf' (using brandy) going with some seasonal fruit and maybe getting back to baking again soon as well!

It's cold outside

But the forced rhubarb is with us again. A really welcome splash of colour in the doldrums of the year. Those nice people at Northern Harvest brought us some today.

Baking

Happy new year! I think you can just about get away with saying that still in the first week of 2010. The plan for this year is to do more baking and blog a few tested recipes here. The aim is for one each week - we'll see how we do with that!

With this in mind, I'm attempting a festive Twelfth Night bread-cum-cake tomorrow, using an excellent dough recipe from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters (which we wrote about earlier a couple of times) as its base. The book's a great buy for anyone looking to get into all kinds of baking, by the way, highly recommended. Here's it's Amazon link.

Our cake-y bread-y thing is going to be a fruity and spicy number, to suit the season, so the first step for baking it tomorrow is going to be soaking the fruit, so that's about:

180g of mixed dried fruit

45g of brown sugar in a bowl

- soak overnight in about 240ml of tea with a cinnamon stick, 5 cloves & 4 allspice berries. Or any whole spices you fancy.

I think I'll use red bush tea, as that's been successful for us when making bara brith in the past.

The full recipe will appear tomorrow, once I've wrestled the thing into something edible for Twelfth Night, which depending on your preference is either the 5th or the 6th of January. Of course, you can always come up with your own excuse for baking and eating a lovely cake...

Winter

It can be a tough time of year in the garden. Too little time (especially as we keep the Christmas blog going), too much rain (our garden goes decidedly squidgy with its clay soil), and worthy but dull tasks like tidying up, sweeping up leaves, cutting old plants back, and thinking about big tasks like levelling the ground and laying paths. Oh, and fruit trees too - but they can wait until January I reckon.

Then there's keeping all the feeders filled in the garden as the visiting wildlife (I'm looking at you in particular, squirrels) become ever more ravenous. It's good to see such a variety of birds in the garden - and it's worth checking how much seed, suet-y things and other birdfeed you've got, to have enough to keep you (and them) going through the winter.

The weather did something alarming to the purple sprouting broccoli on Tuesday as December began with the first really frosty day:



You expect some wilting, but the poor thing did seem a little surprised by the drop in temperature. It was a relief to see no apparent ill effects the next day:



Nothing to worry about there, then. Looking forward to that being ready early on in the spring.

Right, now to make a list of all those things that need doing, to fit them round everything else.

Dark evenings, squash and lovage

Clocks put back an hour today, the year's turning to winter properly now. I've always liked these early dark evenings: we even had some cocoa late on this afternoon as it got dark. It's soup weather - so I've included our recipe for squash soup below.

Mostly I love winter better than summer, even though having summer crops has been so great this year. We can still pop out for some things to cook - the beans are having a last hurrah now - but it'll be the greenhouse that'll come into its own soon. We've already moved in some more tender herbs, like parsley, tarragon and some little thyme plants. We may end up moving the lovage plant in there too.



It's a pretty unprepossessing plant, just stalks and leaves, tattered and a bit faded, but it has the most wonderful flavour. A sharp, savoury, celery-like tang, it's particularly good when it comes to making soups and stews.

Which is what we've been doing. We had a nice-sized onion squash in our veg delivery last week, which we decided would be best turned into soup, with a little help from our much-reduced lovage plant.

Soup-making's really easy. The key to it is to sweat down the vegetables for long enough before you add the water or stock. Even better if you have some good, home-made chicken stock to go in it, but for the strong flavours of this soup, you're fine with a light vegetable stock, or even just water.

A quick note on ingredients first. You don't really need lovage - a stick of celery chopped into a small dice and added to the onion would also be fine. Similarly, the fresh parsley's good, but not essential. However, the fresh grated nutmeg is, we think. Nutmeg's one of those great traditional ingredients that seems especially good at lifting hearty, warming foods in autumn and winter.

Squash Soup

Ingredients (serves 4)

1 tpsp olive oil

butter

1 medium to large onion, chopped
1 onion squash (you could use other orange-y squashes), diced
1 clove garlic, chopped
a generous pinch of lovage, chopped (or a celery stick)
1 good sized cooking apple, peeled and sliced
1 bayleaf
1 litre water or a light stock
squeeze of Lemon juice
fresh nutmeg, grated
fresh parsley, chopped (optional)

Method

In a large casserole, sweat the chopped onions (and celery, if using) in some olive oil and butter for 5 to 10 minutes, until the onion is soft.

Add the diced squash, the garlic, apple, lovage (if using) and a bayleaf and sweat on a very low heat, with the lid on, for another 10 minutes. Stir occasionally to stop it sticking to the pan.

Add the water or stock, bring to the boil and cook on a low simmer for 15 minutes.

Liquidise or blend until smooth.

Add a squeeze of lemon juice, a grate of nutmeg and salt to taste.

Serve & garnish with the chopped parsley.

Extending the season

It's been a lovely autumn day here today, a chance to rake up some of the masses of leaves to make leaf mould and just to enjoy being outside. The beech tree we can see over the back of our garden looked especially lovely today. While clearing the leaves, we probably had our last little conker hunt of the year - and it was good fun comparing these 'tree seeds' with the exploding seed pods of the garlic chives:



Nothing if not educational, our garden. The borage is nodding its lovely, dreamlike blue flowers in the herb bed: there are plenty of flashes of colour still in the garden:



But everything's winding down there now, with the last of the cucumber, squash and marrow plants now uprooted and chucked on the compost heap. Next it'll be the turn of the beans. We're still getting plenty of runners, although we haven't done brilliantly this year. And the crop of borlotti beans hasn't been as generous as we'd hoped. Still, we'll be able to rustle up enough fresh to enliven some pasta and stews, even if we won't be looking at drying them for the winter.

Which brings us back to the title. One of the things people are most ingenious at is extending the fruits of summer and autumn into the winter. Sometimes this ingenuity is pretty crass and pointless, like the array of tasteless fruit on supermarket shelves all year round. But often it's brilliant, whether that's preserving fruit in alcohol, pickling, jam- and chutney-making, or taking advantage of polytunnels and greenhouses to extend the growing season where most appropriate. We're going for winter leaves this year:



The seedlings above include American Land Cress (a fab watercress alternative that doesn't require a babbling brook), a spicy mix and some Lambs Lettuce. They're doing well so, with a fair wind, we'll have some leaves to make wintry salads or to add to sandwiches. A little bit of summer through winter.

The cucumber pickles, preserving for the next few months one of our best crops this year, are nothing short of profoundly great:



When it comes to the beer, there's something about autumn and winter that demands something darker, I think, and something new, rather than the extension of summer's light, golden ales (although that's not a bad idea). My porter, to a recipe I cobbled together myself, is now two weeks or so in the keg and is doing very well. Another couple of weeks and this should be ready. Can't wait:

Thinking the Unthinkable

Or maybe posting the unpostable. Or something. It's not really as dramatic as it sounds, but is an acknowledgement that it's time to start seriously thinking about plans for Christmas. If you're the kind of person who enjoys rushing round at top speed through the shops on Xmas Eve, then it probably isn't. But if you want to have a more home-made time of things, you need to be more organised and start thinking about things early.

The most popular thing we've done over the past few years is to make a load of sloe gin, to bottle and give to friends as presents. And you really need to get your skates on with this now, unless you've already done so.

Sloes are easy to identify. Here's the patch we used to visit, by the River Cam in Cambridge:



The berries are blue-black, with a slight whitish bloom on them. They're hard, bitter and incredibly astringent - but they should have a bit of give to them at least when you pick them. Whatever part of the country you're in, they should be at their ripest now. The thorns are a bit evil, so take care. They have a terrible reputation amongst local farmers, apparently.

The recipe we use is pretty simple: 600ml of gin (pick a decent one, 40% or above, but nothing too fancy) to 450g (or a pound) or sloes and 450g of sugar. We prick the sloes with a skewer first, although you can stick them in the freezer to split the skins, or even bash them with a rolling pin apparently. Pricking them means less filtering later on, in our experience. Put the sloes in a big jar or crock, pour the sugar over the top and then the gin. Shake or stir it a few times a day until the sugar's dissolved and then give it the occasional shake or stir. Here's ours on the go:



If you start it off now, it should be drinking from some time in late January or early February. If you're bottling it for other people, put a 'best after' note on the label.

Another thing you can be getting on with is pickling. We've got a few jars of pickled onions on the go now, which are real favourites to go with all those lovely Christmassy cold cuts between Xmas Day and the New Year:



And then there are other things you can be getting on with, especially if you're going to be making crafty gifts. We'll be dusting off the Christmas Blog in the next couple of weeks to post a few hints, tips and ideas through October, November and then a lot more throughout December. Christmas is better if you plan it a bit, we think, so now's a good time of year to sit down with a drink and a list of people you want to give gifts to, and work out just what you need to do.

Ignore any misgivings about 'starting' Christmas early and see now as an opportunity to have a more enjoyable, and less stressful, time later on.

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.

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:

In many ways, the best time of the year

Because, despite all that pests (like the cursed blackfly who ransacked our second broad bean crop), and disease (like the dreaded blight that's done for many of our tomatoes), and the weather (that's stopped things from ripening quickly enough) have thrown at us, it's the time of year when you can just step out into the garden and pick things to have with lunch or dinner.

Possibly my favourite success story this year has been the cucumbers. Not only have we got some of the bigger varieties, but the smaller ones have come up trumps too. These ones will be for salads and sandwiches:



And there are still loads of tiny ones on the plants. We're really hoping to get a big number of these ready at once so we can have a go at pickling them. In the meantime, we'll enjoy the fresh ones as they ripen.

Runner beans are something I really remember from childhood, twining their way round towering cane structures. Then cooked lightly and enjoyed throughout the later bits of summer until they went a bit too stringy to eat. They're really coming into their own now and I picked a load today to go into dinner:



And some to spare too.

Then there's the fruit. The old faithful blackberry bush is producing loads of fruit and we picked enough over the last couple of days for Ali to make some soft blackberry conserve to have for breakfast, stirred into some yoghurt. The plum tree is covered in fruit and this evening was the time for the first batch of plum jam. First of a few, I reckon.

The most modest crop of fruit we've had has been from the alpine strawberry plants - mostly these have been ripening in ones or twos for a little treat while gardening. But this afternoon I found quite a few:



So tomorrow we'll have them with our yoghurt, and save the new blackberry conserve for another day.

Jaspers!

They're busy little blighters, aren't they. We're slightly concerned that they're stripping the bases of our sunflowers to make themselves a nest - hopefully it's far enough away not to be a problem. But it's fascinating to watch them work:



I'm not quite sure why today has produced so many blog posts, it's probably due to being able actually to do a few things after a bout of illness. And it's been a dry day too, apart from one very brief rogue shower, so we've been able to do enough to feel that we're back on top of things in the garden.

And inside too. I'm inordinately proud of my first attempt at making a pain de campagne (my secret's below). Ali at Craft Matters has been turning out brilliant loaves for ages now, but I've finally had a go myself. And it's turned out really well. Here it is fresh out of the oven:



And here it is at dinner time, when we had some to go with a lovely salad of sorrel, grilled courgettes, green beans, eggs and cheese:



It's been really satisfying - all down to following the painstaking step by step instructions of a book that (without being completely over the top) has rather changed our lives, Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley. Thoroughly and unreservedly recommended.