Harvest Monday -elderberry and apple jelly

We've had a few lovely sunny days recently, (chilly in the shade and at night though), which is keeping the harvests coming along, albeit a bit slower this week. I haven't got photos of everything but you get the idea -

Blackberries, chard and Dwarf beans and courgettes, all from the plot

Tomatoes from the lean-to at home. I picked a few more too,and took them round to our neighbour when we popped in to meet their 2 day old baby girl.....eep, so cute. I will be popping round a lot!

Runner beans in the back garden still coming,

A couple of different pickings

The bean plant that over-wintered in the soil hasn't produced any pickable beans yet but it has some teeny ones that might grow big enough (actually you can see some of the flowers from it in the bottom left of the pic above)

Meals have included, poached eggs and veggies on toast

Veggies with spicy bean pie (a quick meal last night after a day out at the beach with Jan's young nephews who were visiting with her sister)

This week I also decided to start sprouting beans again (after a break of several months....the seeds I had before were really old and lots of them didn't sprout and just went mushy). So, we bought a new pack of mixed beans for sprouting, which have sprouted really quickly, I've done two jars in a row in less than a week! Sprouted beans are meant to be good for helping with thyroid conditions too, so good for Jan.

Nice with noodles

And with quinoa. I also made a lovely salad for lunch today, with toms, dwarf beans, courgette etc) but no photo, just tasty memories ;)

So on to the jelly.....last week I picked elderberries and froze them for when I could get hold of some apples. Luckily for me, one the other allotment holders has a big apple tree in her garden nearby and has lots of spare windfalls, thank you Carly.

So I decided to make elderberry and apple jelly, using the hedgerow jelly recipe from The River Cottage Handbook 'Preserves' as a base.

The rough quantities are:

1kg crab apples or cooking apples (I used sharp eaters, which seemed to have ok pectin)

1kg berries (blackberries, elderberries, Rowan berries etc) I used mainly elderberries from the freezer plus a few blackberries I'd picked that day

Lots of granulated sugar (I use organic Demerara)

First of all, give the apples a wash and then chop them up, including all the cores etc (these contain the pectin) and add the berries (the elderberries are in the bottom of the pan under the apples). I also added some spices at this point (ginger and cinnamon)

Add 1.2 litres of water and then cook them all for a while until soft. I then mush them up with the back of a spoon to get more juice out.

Set yourself up some kind of contraption for straining out the juice (overnight if possible). I use an upturned stool - the jug needs to be quite close to the bottom of the bag so the liquid doesn't splash too much. Make sure you scold your straining bag first too, to kill any bacteria.

The morning after, lots of juice. I do then use a spoon to gently press down and get more juice out, as I'm not too worried about getting a cloudy jelly and want to maximise quantity! Straining straight into a jug means you can see straight away how much liquid you have - the next stage needs maths, yikes - for every 600ml of liquid you need 450g sugar

Add the liquid to a clean pan, bring slowly to the boil and then gradually add the sugar, stirring to dissolve the sugar. I also added a few cloves at this point (keep count of the cloves so you know how many to find. You could add them when cooking the fruit at the beginning instead, but I forgot)

The recipe says then rapid boil for 9 - 10 minutes, without stirring, until the setting point is reached (this always takes much longer for me though). I also have a tip at this point - do not get distracted and let your pan boil over...oops! For a start it wastes your precious liquid (and is also very messy). You can also scoop off any scum if you like (it's just aerated liquid)

Finally, pour your jelly into sterilised jars and seal up using your preferred method (I re-use lids if they are in good condition but otherwise use the selophane discs which shrink over the jar tops. Now, I must admit I did clean up a little bit before taking this photo, hehe. This is the point at which I scoop out any scum and the cloves, which float to the top of the jar.

So, 6 jars of yummy jelly. I will probably give these as Christmas presents.

This coming week I need to dig up my potatoes so that I can use the space for planting out garlic sets and my little brassica plants....we'll see if that actually happens!

Linking in with Harvest Monday on Daphne's Dandelions

 

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Harvest Monday - ooh!

Well, this Sunday was....sunny! In the morning at least. So I finally sowed my broad beans (scattered some chicken-poo pellets on the beds and covered with anti- kitty sticks. I'll probably add a bit of compost in spring too). I sowed about 80 seeds. I'll buy some seeds for spring sowing when I put in my seed order soon as well. In spring I'll also sow parsnips between the rows to make best use of the space. The parsnips don't need to get going too much until after the beans have been harvested.

I also cleared out my leaf mould piles (and bagged them up for using in the spring, lovely & crumbly) ready to receive this autumn's leaves. I'll probably head out at the weekend and collect up leaves from where they pile- up near-ish the allotment, hopefully before the council comes round and sweeps them all up.

And I made a start at weeding round my fruit trees and bushes, so the birdies can get at all the non- friendly bugs that might be hiding out in the soil there. I'll not do too much clearing in general though as our soil is v sandy and the nutrients will leach out with the winter rain if the soil is bare. Plus there's so much weeding to do I won't get through it all anyway!

And on to the harvests:

Tasty greens

Some little beet roots (that were where I needed to sow the beans) and a few onions from the shed

I used up a butternut squash (roasted, so tasty but only one left now)

 

And picked the rest of what was left in my lean-to greenhouse at home, as the cold weather would start to spoil them:

Some basil (and chilli peppers from the plant I brought into the house recently)

And some baby aubergines and sweet peppers! These all went into a ratatouille type thing (which was a tad hot due to the three chillis) with a couple of tins of tomatoes.

The photo is quite a small chopping board, so makes them look bigger than they really were!

And I made another batch of elderberry and apple jelly (8 jars) using the same method as last time except I also added some red currants for extra pectin. I still had to boil it for ages. Maybe the fruit is particularly watery and needed to boil-off a bit first.

So a much more productive week for me. I didn't get chance to dig up any parsnips as it started to rain (yawn, more rain) so maybe I'll get some this week.

Linking in with the good folk for Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions

 

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Harvest Monday - rain (and elderberry & apple jelly)

Continuing with the autumn theme this week, unfortunately we're not getting crisp November days but instead rather soggy ones. Still not had a frost though.

Thanks to the rain yesterday I didn't get down the plot to sow me broad beans as it started in the morning just as I was about to head out. So I spent some time in the back garden ( in the rain) clearing away the beans etc. Mainly because I wanted to pull the canes out so they didn't rot in the ground over winter.

I did find a few blauhilde beans that seem edible (still crisp when snapped) and also some nice runner beans for saving seed from. There was a gherkin too but I didn't want to risk it being bitter, so just composted it. I cut back a couple of rocket plants to hopefully re-grow in the spring.

Here's the beans with a chilli from the lean to. I've just brought this plant indoors, managed to squeeze it on the shelf with two sweet pepper plants.

This week I picked one of the sweet peppers too:

That's pretty much it in terms of harvests apart from some chard I didn't get a piccie of. I have a small container in my front yard that I put some old tomato compost in and put in three chard seedlings earlier in the year. The yard faces North so they're not going to grow any more this winter but it's handy having them where we can pick a few leaves when I haven't got down the plot.

Using up some stored veggies this week included a yummy curry with roast sqush ( the skin was rock- hard and difficult to cut though but the flesh was delicious), beans from the freezer and fruit from the freezer too.

I made an apple and almond cake (using Shaheen at 'allotment to kitchen's plum cake recipe (which I also made when I had some plums in late summer). It was really good. Didn't get any pics though.

And made elderberry and apple jelly. I had the berries in the freezer from earlier pickings around the neighbourhood. I used up about half of them (3.5 pounds), with the same amount of apples and 1.2 litres of water. I cooked them up one evening til they were soft (and squished them up a bit more too to get the juice out). With the apples you just chop them up to get pectin from the skin and core.

Then I set up my jelly strainer (upturned stool). This is in the morning after. I do squeeze mine to get all the juice ( and risk cloudy jelly).

Mm, juicy (Also bring back memories from the 80s by looking like a member of the red hand gang after squeezing out the juices)

Then heat up slowly to the boil and add lots of sugar (450 grams* to every 600ml liquid). I had 2000ml so used 1500 grams of sugar. (Think I got that right). Hmm, Looking at the photo again, I had about 2200ml so should have used a bit more sugar than that.

*corrected from 4.5 lbs! Thanks to Margaret for spotting my mistake. Not too much of a difference there then, oops.

Then stir the sugar in slowly until it's all dissolved and start bringing to a rapid boil for about 10mins ( or in my case, 40 mins or so! It just would not set so I kept adding lemon juice til I finally got a set)

Tah dah! But not as many jars as I was expecting because It boiled for so long and I lost a lot to evaporation. I've got the same amount of berries in the freezer so might make some more (and lots of apples still) and add some red currants for extra pectin.

As it's hard to get all the jelly out of the pan, I didn't want to waste it and so used the pan to make up a big batch of stewed fruit for the freezer. I also added some scum (bubbly aerated jelly juice) that I'd scooped off the top of the jars being sealing...no point in wasting it! (But it does make the jars a bit messy, really I should've scooped it off from the pan).

Linking in with the good folk for Harvest Monday hosted by Daphne's dandelions

 

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Return of the gherkins (and Elderberries)

A v. quick pre-work post from me. Last night I was going to make more gherkin pickles as there'd been another good crop come on since Friday......

Nonchalant gherkins

 

But after work yesterday I went foraging for elderberries....I found a small tree I hadn't noticed before and it had amazing berries, yippee! It was kind of growing behind and from the base of another tree so had been hidden. Anyway, picking what I could reach from this tree and a couple of others gave me a big bag-ful, which then took most of the evening to pick off the stems.

If you're making a jelly or whatever straight away I think you can just use the whole lot without picking off (as you'll be straining off the liquid anyway) but I'll be waiting for apples, so have frozen them ( made some space in the freezer by using up some quorn and frozen rasps and gooseberries last night....not together, that wouldn't be pleasant.

Into the freezer

Right, off to work, boo.

 

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Elderberry surprise

The surprise is they're early I think! Some are even starting to go over so I did a quick sweep of my neighbourhood checking out the situation. Seems to be quite a wide range of ripeness so still plenty of opportunities for collectng them (I'm planning on making elderberry and apple jelly after finding a couple of old jars in the fridge that are still really delicious).

Hard to get a photo with the light

So I picked a few bunches today after work to get started and will freeze them until I'm ready to use them.

You can't really tell from this picture but the stems are a beautiful red colour. I just pick the berries off lightly with my fingers. Some people use a fork but when I've done that before they've pinged off all over the place...then trodden or sat on them...and they stain. The picked stems look like little trees.

I also had some company whilst picking.....

Our little cat Minxie....she feigned interest for a short while before heading off.

 

So I'll probably do another sweep in a few days time, there were lots of berries nearly ready but not quite. Plus some amazingly huge, juicy- looking ripe ones (just out of reach of course).

 

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