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!

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:

Despite the blight

We managed to get a good bowlful of ripe tomatoes from the greenhouse the other day. A really good way of preserving a large quantity like this for the winter is to half the fruits and roast, with olive oil, in a hot oven until there's a hint of blackening on the edges of a few. Whizz them up in the food processor (or keep them as they are) and stick them in the freezer. Makes a good thickener, or the base for a sauce for pasta. You can roast them with other flavourings too - like garlic cloves, rosemary, anything that you like really.

The anti-blight measures (along with a slight turn in the weather) seem to have proved effective. There are still some green tomatoes which will hopefully ripen -



- and which seem to have escaped the dread blight. And we've had a lot more of a crop than we were fearing a month or so back:



Whether it's been the dithane, or assiduously removing foliage with signs of blight, or the combination of the two, we're feeling a little more cheery than we were. Our second bag of spuds produced a nice crop too - thankfully unaffected after we'd cut the foliage back to just above the soil. There's nothing like home grown potatoes.

Blight Part 3

This is yet another blight post. There's something about blight - it might be that awful, apocalyptic name - that gets under your skin, and has you telling everyone about how it's getting to your garden produce. Maybe it's watching the fruit, that you've seen grow on your plants, wither and drop off that really gets to you. But anyway, hopefully this post is about more than doom and gloom.

Because we managed to get a nice big load of ripe tomatoes from our blighted greenhouse plants, as you can see from this pic:



We've not quite decided what we'll do with them yet. We had some with lunch, along with a delicious home made sourdough loaf and some fabulous Pecorino Dolce from the Chester cheese shop courtesy of Northern Harvest. And they were very good indeed. The rest I think should be turned into a tomato sauce for the freezer. Either some simple arrabiata sauce, or roasted in the oven with garlic, olive oil & rosemary and then blended and frozen. Decisions, decisions.

We've also decided to have a go at saving some of the very green fruit. Today I cut back all the most obviously blighted stems and foliage on the plants with the green plum tomatoes:



It's probably going to end up as more playing for time than anything else, but hopefully given the lovely sunny forecast for the weekend and the effects of the dithane spraying, we should get some ripe tomatoes before the blight spreads. The forecast isn't great for the cricket, obviously, but it should hopefully do the garden some good.

Blight Part Two

So our outside tomatoes in their grow bags are infected and past hope. This morning we've stripped the best of the green tomatoes for green tomato chutney and bagged up the foliage to go straight into the bin. After a quick check about what to do with the grow bag compost, I noticed some advice here to use it for top dressing beds, away from where we'll have tomatoes and potatoes next year. So that's what we'll do with it.

Sunny today! So hopefully that should do some good to the tomatoes we've got left.

Blight!

We're feeling a bit glum at the moment, as a couple of our outdoors tomato plants have succumbed to blight. This rather unappealing picture shows what it looks like as this fungus attacks the tomatoes while they're still green:



The main culprits for this endemic problem are climate change and the rotten July weather we've had this year. Progressively milder winters just don't have the oomph to kill the fungus and day after day of rain and warmth make just about an ideal breeding ground. So it's time to take the chemical route and apply the Dithane. If it ever stops raining.

You have to wait for a Smith period to use it on the plant leaves, as recommended here. And so once again we're praying for a warmer, drier period. If blight gets into the plant then, for tomatoes, it'll be time to strip the green fruit and make chutney or, for potatoes, it's advised to cut the foliage down to an inch above the soil and then harvest the crop soon after.

On a brighter note, we did harvest our first bag of potatoes and we got a pretty good crop from them:



They are great par-boiled for 5-7 mins and then roasted in a hot oven (220c) for 20-30 mins in extra virgin rapeseed oil. You can chuck in some whole garlic cloves or a sprig or two of fresh rosemary too if you feel like it.

It's easy to get disheartened when things don't go well in the garden - but the best thing to do is to keep going. We've picked up a packet of quick growing turnip seeds that should come in in the autumn. We also planted out our purple sprouting broccoli seedlings the other day, a crop that should be ready next spring:



We've given them a bit of protection from above as we tend to have fat woodpigeons clomping around the garden, sitting on things and pecking them. In fact it's been mostly big birds (the pigeons, scruffy magpies) and squirrels in the garden over the last month, adding to the general dreariness. Happily over the last couple of days we've seen some of the smaller birds come back. Dunnocks, blue tits, coal tits and goldfinches have been busying themselves about the place.

Finally, some more nice successes to round off this particular post. We've got an amazing cucumber growing on one of our plants:



And the marrows and courgettes are continuing to flourish. We've had to cut back the squash plant quite radically before it took over the entire garden - there are lots of fruits coming on it too:



The Met Office now seems to be forecasting a change in the weather some time over the next week or two. I do hope it's going to be sooner rather than later. This dull persistent rain is no good for our states of mind or for the garden!

Sunshine and showers

But mostly showers. In a brief sunny gap I nipped out to take some pics of what's going on in the garden at the moment. The herb bed is looking lovely now that the oregano is flowering



The bit of hedge you can see on the left is now (as of yesterday) gone - I've tried to transplant it elsewhere. The bees absolutely love the flowers. We've had so many bumblebees in the garden this year, it's been really nice to see them. If you want to encourage them in your garden you could do a lot worse than plant some oregano and let it flower:



Only do this if you've got plenty of space (or if you really like oregano), because it will rather take over!

Sadly it's not just welcome visitors that we're seeing at the moment. The blackfly are a bit of a problem - they pretty much did for our second crop of broad beans and now they're eyeing up our runners. Squishing them seems to be pretty effective, but the long term solution will be to encourage predators into the garden. We've had more ladybirds than last year but not many hoverflies. Here's one, having a rest on the lovely white scabious:



We're growing some fennel, which is apparently good for helping ladybirds to overwinter (they have a nap in the hollow stems, I think). And over the next few weeks we'll have a think about planning for next year.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are producing plenty of fruit:



This is that nice time of year when you can just go and pick what you need as and when. The ones outside are nearly ready now as well, despite the rubbish weather.

One really good thing to do with ripe fresh tomatoes is to make an arrabiata sauce for pasta. Put the kettle on to boil. Put three reasonably sized tomatoes in a bowl and then cover them with the boiling water. Meanwhile chop 2 cloves of garlic and 2 dried red chillies. Once the tomatoes have been in the water for a while you should be able to peel them easily - score them with a sharp knife and peel off the skin. Chop them roughly. Then heat up some olive oil in a pan add a pinch of salt, the garlic and the chilli. When the garlic gives off a nice aroma (if you overcook the garlic you need to start again) add the tomatoes. Cook until reduced.

Finally a little pic of our most advanced marrow:

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.

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.

Rain rain go to Spain

That's what Ant & Bee say and while I've nothing against the Spanish, I do wish the rain would go somewhere else. The weekend's been a washout and the choice for the boys yesterday was cabin fever or horizontal rain. We went for the second option, poor things. So maybe today they can stay in and read their - criminally now out of print - Ant and Bee books.

It's frustrating for grown-ups too, as it's difficult to do anything much in the garden at the moment. Everything is still doing well, but it would be nice to get some proper sunshine to go along with the moisture. We've been enjoying our first crops of salad leaves and radishes - a real sign that the year's progressing away from winter towards summer. Another sign is hopefully what will be another bumper crop of plums for us from our tree. It's hard to believe that these tiny green blighters will be our main fruit crop in late summer and early autum:



And despite the greyness of the day there's a welcome splash of colour from some azaleas that survived their transplant out of our herb bed to a more suitable location:



And I say the plums will be our main crop of fruit, but the tomatoes are going to run them pretty close for that award. We have a thriving colony of seedlings in the greenhouse at the moment, mostly tomatoes along with some squash and cucumbers:



Some of these are hardening off during the day for growing outside. Once the weather clears, we'll set up our mini greenhouse for them to get used to nights outside too (at the moment, we're shifting them back into the greenhouse at the end of the day). We have high hopes for the tomatoes, especially if we have the kind of baking summer the forecasters are predicting. Last year, the Bloody Butchers were probably the pick of the varieties we grew. They're easy to spot with their 'potato' style leaves and they're doing pretty well too:



So everything is still ticking along - here's hoping that better weather is on its way and we're not continually trying to send our rainy days to Spain.

Flowering

The mostly fine Spring weather has meant that everything seems to be going well in the garden. In some cases a little too well!

The tomato seedlings are straining at the sides of their pots and demanding to be planted out. We're intending to try to grow half the greenhouse tomatoes by the 'ring culture' method this year: this involves a bed of gravel or similar (in our case some of the rubbish we've dug out of the garden) and a circular bottomless pot. The only problem is that turning to the web for sources of information reveals a bewildering plethora of different methods and various bits of advice.

It'll be a case of testing it out this year - fingers crossed we choose a successful technique. We have plenty of plants which we will grow according to a few different methods (including grow bags), so if the summer's as good as it's predicted to be, we're looking forward to a good crop.

As we are with our various other little projects. There's nothing quite like fresh broad beans, especially in summer salads (they go really well with goats cheese and herbs like dill or mint). Last year was an unmitigated bean disaster; this year we're more hopeful, not least from the bean plants putting out the lovely little flowers in the picture at the top of this post.

These plants are growing in a raised bed, mostly filled with our own compost, so we shouldn't see the problem of poor soil quality that put a curse on our beans last year. The plants are looking good and healthy. We have a secondary crop in one of the other beds, but these are the first ones to be planted out:



The broad beans aren't the only flowering plants in the garden at the moment. The plum blossom may have passed, but next door's apple tree is still looking lovely with its pinkish white bloom. The tomatoes are starting to show their first flowers, still closed, but a reminder that we have to get a move on with the next phase:



We've even been enjoying the first produce from the garden (excepting the rhubarb, which has been going strong for a while). The salad leaves are ready to eat and make a lovely addition to a sandwich, while thinning out the radishes not only gives us a few small radishes as a little treat, but also gives us their tops, which make a great addition to something like our spiced kale. Here's the main salad bed, looking pretty good, with its rather makeshift twine as protection against birds digging around:



The bare bit of ground that we cleared for planting with grass has been modestly transformed now that the seeds are growing. It will no doubt need some more seed to fill in some of the gaps, but I'm really pleased with how well it's doing. It won't be long now before it gets its first cut with the mower:



Here's the 'before' picture:



And last of all (but not least), the latest beer is now ready and drinking really nicely. Here's the post from when it was brewed. It's a version of a recipe for Timothy Taylor's Landlord and has a very pleasing balance of sweetness and hop that isn't a million miles from the original:



Cheers!