Monday 13 July 2015

Harvest Monday - bring on the currants

Another quick harvest report this week...I've been away for a few days for my mum's 70th birthday, aah. (She had a great weekend including a lovely walk on the beach and family meal out). Amongst her pressies I bought her a signed first edition of my friend Tim Clare's first novel The Honours (a quick plug there!), which is excellent and some soap made from local goats milk. It doesn't actually smell too goaty.
I left Jan in charge of watering the toms etc occasionally as she wasn't well enough to travel....luckily it was quite overcast and didn't get too hot in the lean-to so not as much watering needed as usual. But she did a grand job anyway and we even have the first toms starting to ripen, ooh. I must do a greenhouse update post soon.
So on Thursday evening, I spent some time on the allotment picking things for Jan to eat in easy meals over the weekend, for the freezer, and to take to my folks.
Not bad for one evening's harvest! There were some saskatoons underneath the raspberries aswell. I was travelling Friday lunchtime, and went and picked two more tubs of redcurrants that morning (no pics), plus did some watering - despite a fair amount of rain over the week, the soil was bone dry and I didn't want my raspberries in particular to dry out over the weekend.
The fruit went down well with my folks, and my dad said the black currants and gooseberries reminded him of scrumping as a kid...naughty dad! It was my first picking of black currants this year, there's two more plants to harvest from (I have three). I was worried they might all ripen before I went away and they'd spoil over the weekend, but the other two plants still had some reddy fruits on, so they should be fine. Same for the gooseberries, only one lot were properly ripe (and very very plump and sweet, hmmm).
Earlier in the week I'd picked more rocket and basil from at home to make walnut pesto again.
We had it with courgette and scrambled eggs.
Mmm.
Jan had courgettes over the weekend, with leftover nut roast made and brought over by her mum on a recent visit.
And she picked a few sweet peas from the back garden , very pretty aren't they (well they were anyway, they've now all started to fall apart but there's plenty more where they came from)
I got back today and was planning on picking loads more fruit plus broads beans tonight, and getting home in time for Only Connect on TV. Well, that didn't happen, as soon as I got down there I found that the slugs (and a few snails) were having a massive party on my crops. So I spent over an hour dealing with all of them (well actually I gave up when it started to get dark).
But I did just get time to pick a large courgette (must have missed this one last week, I'd picked all but the very small ones on Thursday) and a few berries for snacks tomorrow

And for our dinner earlier I used up that chard I'd picked on Thursday, along with a small round variety of courgette (didn't get a pic) and some of my own garlic into a chickpea and butter bean curry with quinoa.

It was rather tasty, even if I do say so myself. Plus enough for leftovers tomorrow too.

That's it! Linking in with Harvest Monday on Daphne's Dandelions.

 

8 comments:

  1. What a beautiful harvest! My zucchini (courgette) are not doing well at all, so quite envious of your bounty on that front. And those sweet peas are striking in that vase with the white wall behind - just lovely!

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    1. Thanks Margaret, two of my courgette plants are doing better than the others, which might not last very long at all, I think their main stems got munched through partially when they were younger.
      Yes I was looking around wondering where that white wall was, we have a cluttered house! I think it was on the record player :)

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  2. That's a great haul! What a shame that currant-picking is such a labour-intensive job... Did you grow the Butter Beans yourself, or were they bought?

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    1. Thanks Mark, yes it does take quite a while, I'll hopefully get some more tomorrow, The redcurrants are starting to go over a bit but there's still quite a lot on the bush.
      The butter beans were just from a tin but I've picked the rest of my broad beans tonight, I feel another stew coming on! Ive heard of people growing their own chickpeas here, I might try that one time.

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  3. That is a haul of currants. And they really take time to pick. I wish their trusses were larger, like grapes so the picking would be faster.

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    1. Thanks Daphne, yeh when the currants are really big it feels much more satisfying. Luckily as there are so many on the bush I can be quite choosy and just pick the best trusses and ones which have the longest stems,to avoid squishing them too much. I tend to bend the branches overwith one hand so the trusses hang freely too.Then pick them off the trusses at home.

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  4. Your dad was a sophisticated scrumper, I associate scrumping with apples.

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    1. Ha ha, he scrumped apples too sue. Though I would be very upset if anyone scrumped my apples!

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