Harvest Monday - and a canoe trip

I've had a pleasantly surprising amount of harvests this week, considering the turn in weather (cold and rainy)....there's been another cucumber in the lean-to:

A few more tomatoes (also in the lean-to)...

Peppers from the lean-to and beans from the back garden (the purple French beans were a big surprise, hiding under some leaves)

A big bunch of chard from the allotment, with lots more to come

Some more summer squashes being slowly squeezed out, plus some beans

And a big bunch of Nero kale. Again there's still quite a bit more of this, which I should protect soon from the pigeons over winter (same for the chard).... Just need a dry day to do some more path cutting around them before I lay out the enviromesh.

I thought kale and butternut squash would go well together (using up my split butternut squash first) and found a nice looking stew recipe online.

The split hadn't affected the inside of the squash at all, hurrah

I would recommend the recipe, a delicious one-pot dish full of lovely spicy flavours (smoked paprika, chilli flakes, cumin, coriander). I added in turmeric as well.

A few toasted flaked almonds on top added some nice crunch.

I made another spiced apple cake this week too (using less than half the sugar, and room temp goats butter instead of oil).

I took half the cake round to a friend's house today, leaving us with the other half...it smells amazing..mmm

Canoe trip from Norwich

It was Jan's birthday recently and some of our friends kindly gave her a voucher for a two-person canoe trip (which meant I could enjoy it too, yes). There's a firm called Pub and Paddle....you collect the canoe from one pub and then paddle up and down the river (stopping off at other pubs if you wish). We had a four hour session booked, which ended up as about 3 hours of paddling and an hour at a pub for lunch.

Because we went out on a Friday and it was slightly off-season there wasn't much other river traffic around, phew. Especially as to begin with we weren't very good at paddling in a straight line, oops.

It was lovely though, seeing things from a different angle (Cow Tower in the pic below) and exploring parts of the close-by countryside from the water. We saw two kingfishers fly by aswell, brill. And didn't fall in the water, double-brill.

Once we'd returned the canoe we had a little walk by the river too, and made friends with some ruddy darter (I think) dragonflies, he hee. They liked the warmth of our skin.

So back to the veggies, in the next few days I'll be looking at what'll go where this coming year (crop rotation), particularly for the autumn sown broad beans and garlic that need to go in soon. I used to plant out autumn onion sets as well, but they don't do too well for me, so now I just plant out sets in the spring. Ooh, it almost feels like spring is on the way...just got autumn and winter first (hopefully with some more harvests throughout).

 

Thanks for reading this week, I'm linking in as usual with Harvest Monday, kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.

 

 

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Harvest Monday and a glean

We've had a lovely sunny autumn day today....hopefully this is a trend for the rest of October (bit of wishful thinking there but you never know). The evenings are chilly, but that's what I like about this time of year, it's nice to start wrapping up. I've actually got socks on for the first time in months, gasp.

 

I've had a steady trickle of harvests this week...the summer crops are hanging on in there. We were also lucky enough to be given 10 eggs from our friends who've recently got some new hens....they're good layers (the hens that is, not my friends).

Yesterday I spotted some quite long beans in the back garden

And got a decent harvest from a quick trip to the plot too

Plus some reasonable toms from the lean-to today. It was quite warm in there with the sun out.

I've made this spiced apple cake a couple of times this week, with apples from my allotment (and in the second cake I used the gifted eggs). The recipe uses two cups of sugar, but that's way too sweet, so I actually use just-under one cup. I also replace the oil with room temperature butter, which is soft enough to mix in ok.

I didn't have chance to take any nice pictures of it dished out, but got good reports from everybody who had a slice. I expect I'll be making more because lucky me, I got this huge bag of apples this afternoon after helping in a friend's garden...

I volunteered at another gleaning day this weekend, returning to the organic farm in west Norfolk. There were only seven of us but we harvested masses of food.

 

Broccoli / calabrese field

Big ol' field - looking back the other direction

You can see the stumps where the farm workers had already been through harvesting the main crop. We were getting the smaller heads that had been left behind, but still lovely veggies. It's quite fun spotting the heads, in a sea of leaves. There must've been about 30-40 trays worth that we found.

We also harvested about 70 trays of caulis...some were too small for the farmer to harvest, or they had a slight discoloration or a spot or two of black, but nothing that couldn't be easily cut out.

The morning was beautifully sunny but then rain set in, so the afternoon turned out rather soggy, harvesting trays of Savoy cabbage and onions. Still good fun though. Goodness knows how much we saved from being wasted but it was several van loads altogether over the course of the day....and once again we could've harvested more if there'd been more of us. But word is getting round, with new people taking part each time. Hopefully I can make the next one, in a couple of weeks. The gleaning days are organised by Feedback and the food is distributed by FareShare, do get involved if you can.

 

Thanks for reading this week. I'm linking in with Harvest Monday kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.

 

 

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Harvest Monday - spiced apple cake and sweet chestnuts

Well, this week has certainly been diverse. Mild, then cold, windy (very), calm, sunny, heavy rain and Saturday night....snow! I didn't get any photos but we had about an inch or so - I looked out the window Saturday night and was so surprised to see it - the west of the county was due some but I really didn't think we'd get any in the city. I had mixed feelings about it though - we were planning on going chestnut foraging the next day and a covering of snow would scupper that!

Sunday morning there was still a thin layer of snow but some rain cleared it all away ( phew? Also not great to be foraging in the rain.)

 

Anyway, earlier in the week it was my birthday and in keeping with office tradition, I made a cake for everyone. I wanted to include an element of 'homegrown' so made one with apples that I still have left from Jan's mum's garden. I found an easy recipe on the web (with the measurements in cups, so I used an old bread machine cup for this). The recipe is here - but I swapped the vegetable oil for room temperature goats butter and used a bit less sugar - it was still very sweet (but very tasty) so I reckon you could use a lot less (and I've just spotted in the recipe comments that lots of people have reduced the sugar quantity too). A really easy recipe though. I ended up baking it a bit longer than the stated 55 mins as our oven always seems to take longer than recipe times.

Yum! I cut it into 20 squares. The cake has cinnamon in too so it has an amazing aroma

It took four apples so I thought I may as well use the peels and cores to make another batch of cider vinegar. The recipe I've used is here - the comments thread is very thorough and worth a read too.

I managed to nip to the allotment from work one dry lunchtime to get some goodies - there is absolutely loads of lambs lettuce to keep picking - I'm harvesting plants whole by snipping them off just above soil level (it keeps the plants cleaner than if you try to pull the whole thing out of the soil, when generally a clump of soil comes with it too ). There was also a bit of kale and some chard, though these are growing very slowly now so I might not get much more from them until spring.

I made a red lentil soup with the kale

And salads like this with the lambs lettuce - still using some of my fermented gherkins from last year too.

We did get out chestnut foraging on Sunday, hooray. It was raining whilst we waited for the bus and during the journey there (a 20 min bus ride from the city) but when we hopped off the bus the rain stopped, yay. The rain had melted any remaining snow, so that wasn't a problem either.

We were a lot later than last year and most of the leaves had fallen off all the trees, so it was harder to look for the chestnuts on the ground, hidden amongst all the leaves. Plus I reckon the squirrels had already helped themselves quite a bit too. But we got a reasonable harvest and had a nice day out.

 

Next to a quiet country lane near the wood we spotted some windfall apples on the grass verge, so picked up a few of the best ones of those too - an unexpected bonus! We could easily have taken more (it didn't seem that anyone else had been collecting them) but they would've been too heavy to carry back.

We walked back to Norwich on the Marriott's Way - a dis-used railway which is now a walking, cycling and bridle route and found a couple of geocaches on the way, including this cute little hedgehog, hidden in a rotten stump, cool.

And finally, one of my exciting birthday presents from Jan - a Ghillie kettle! I'd been hinting about this recently, hehe.

The water is held round the outside and you heat it up from below by making a small fire in the bottom compartment.

I'd used one before but not for a long time (when I'd volunteered for a practical conservation organisation for a couple of years after leaving university).

Looking down the middle (Before lighting it of course!)

To put it to a proper test, I filled it right up (about 4 litres apparently) which did take a long time and a lot of sticks to keep the fire going before it got really really hot. But luckily I keep lots of sticks in the back garden, and we found that dried sweet pea stems worked well too. If you're just heating up a bit of water to make a couple of cups of tea etc it would be pretty quick I reckon. Plus it was fun! (And good back-up for power cuts etc, and when we build our own off-grid house (in our dream future!)).

 

Thanks for reading this week. Linking in with Harvest Monday hosted by Dave's Our Happy Acres

 

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