Harvest Monday - late again

It's been a busy evening, I've made tomato and chilli sauce, cooked up a big pan of runner beans, blanched and frozen a big batch of beans and made two jars of gherkin pickles! Phew.

So it's a v quick round up from me, a good week again

Sorry, squished photo! Tuesday on the allot including most of my hazel nuts, a first for me this year. They came away lightly without needing to pull too much.

Mid week from the back garden, nice beans

Saturday from the garden, more beans n toms

 

Saturday from the plot, last of the plums and hazels. Can you spot the 3-eyed alien?

Today I've picked more from the plot but didn't get a photo, 3 courgettes, some chard, big bag of potatoes (still lots more to dig, realised the other day I hadn't been taking pics of them), a gherkin and cuke (possibly the last), a few rasps. Also another load of beans from the back garden. As we now have our new freezer (yes!) I took the opportunity to sort some beans to freeze as mentioned above.

I also intended to start sorting my potatoes into keepers and user-uppers but didn't get time so that will have to wait. They're in bags in a big cardboard box in a dark spot in the house, they'll go in the shed eventually.

Night night!

Linking to Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions.

 

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Harvest Monday - lotsa veg

Hey it's been good this week. The weather warmed up and we've had some rain too, to get things growing. It started a bit slow but here's most (but not all) of the harvests, in order through the week, starting on Tuesday....

Sleepy clown. The dwarf French beans are on their way out, this was the last of my pickings for the year.

Blackberries are running down. Eyebrows are hazel nut windfalls.

The gherkins have put on another spurt.

My first ever little calabrese harvest (two spears!). The little leaves are vine leaves for the gherkin pickle making. Also the first load of plums.

 

I've been foraging elderberries to make jelly

Back garden beans and parsley seeds

Hmm not sure what happened with this photo! Second big bowl of plums and a lonely bean.

Back garden harvest, beans and toms. Still lots of beans to come and we have a new fridge freezer arriving later this week so at last I can start preserving more! Our current freezer only has two drawers

Plum chutney being made...now only have to wait a few weeks for it to mature

I tried my third lot of pickled (fermented) gherkins...the upper gherkins in the jar had gone all soft, I'm not sure why, I think I made them in the same way. They didn't smell any different either....just hoping the rest of my million jars don't go the same way.

But to end on a positive, I made a plum cake (see previous post) that turned out well, yippee! Recipe from Shaheen at Allotment 2 Kitchen.

Linking in with Harvest Monday on Daphne's dandelions

 

 

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Plum and almond cake

Well, I was really popular today at work, thanks to Shaheen at Allotment to Kitchen's yummy plum cake recipe.

The plums into the allotment have all been ripening over the past week or so. It's my first year of getting plums so is quite exciting. I bought the tree from QD for about £6 about 3 years ago. It's tap root had been cut off to fit in the pot so I didn't expect that much from it but lo and behold it's been worth the wait. It's a variety called opal.

So looking for plum recipes I had a search of Shaheen's blog and this one caught my eye. Jan helped make it and we were also making plum chutney at the same time.

The recipe is nice and easy, just remember you need to allow time for your butter to have softened first. Here's the pre-baked mixture - you put in half, layer out half the plums, add the rest of the mixture then put the rest of the plums on.

And the finished result! The cake mixture rises up to cover the top plums. It took a little bit longer to bake than in the recipe but things seem to always do that with our oven. I might also put flaked almonds on another time (I love almonds).

The cake didn't last very long, my hungry colleagues devoured it in few minutes and people were rushing from all over the office to get a bit!

This recipe is definitely a keeper!

 

 

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Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes

So I thought today I'd focus on toms. It's been a good year for me, growing them in the lean-to at home. I have 21 plants squeezed in, 19 of them have done well. Here's part of the lean-to this morning before I picked the toms.
They look a bit like trees because I've cleared the lower leaves to let in more light and let air circulate.

I have red pear and super marinade:

Sweet cherry:

Money maker:

I also have Craig and ??? ( I forget)
There's stil lots of fruit to pick but lots of the leaves have started to show signs of mineral deficiency so I cleared even more leaves. It'll also give more light to the other plants in the lean-to. I won't bother to feed them again as don't expect there to really be any new toms growing as it's late season and the evenings (and sometimes days) are getting colder.

I grow basil in the same pots as some of the toms, they're meant to compliment each other and basil is supposed to keep flies away. I only grow it in the ones round the edge as otherwise can't very easily reach in and pick it. I also grow it in separate pots too. It's been a good year for this too! I have a later set of seedlings I've recently potted on, so should get a continuous crop for a little while. I put comfrey and alkanet leaves round the base of the tom plants every now and then, it feeds them and also protects the roots, which I find tend to get exposed after all the watering over the season.

Basil - not my best specimen! But you can see where I've pinched out the middle out to produce more side shoots (and hence more yummy leaves)

Also in the lean-to I have peppers (chilli and sweet) and aubergines (aubs have only just started producing flowers as I was a bit late with my seedlings so not sure if I'll get any fruit from them). I also had a bit of trouble with my pepper seedlings so bought a chilli plant (it wasn't named, just 'hot') and two sweet peppers (also un-named) for 70p each. They've actually done quite well and have the first red sweet pepper and a few chillies. I do have a couple of my own pepper plants that are starting to produce fruit too but are a bit behind.

Hot pepper

Sweet pepper up on the shelf

And here's the tomato harvest! Plus beans and a courgette from the back garden.

Quite a lot of the toms are splitting but as I'm just making soup and sauce it doesn't really matter. I should def keep an eye on them more though!

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Tonight I have mainly been...

Making a blackberry and banana bread recipe from here (replacing rasps with blackberries, as I'd picked a small crop today after work). Well, the blackberries sank so I wouldn't impress Mary Berry but we just had two slices each..it's tasty! We didn't let it cool either so it squashed a bit when cutting, oops...and used the wrong kind of knife...hey we were hungry ok! ( or maybe just impatient ).

Fail on the berries

And making yet more pickled gherkins. We tasted the first lot of vinegar gherkins (made with white wine vinegar) tonight and they were a tad sharp! So I've made another lot of naturally fermented ones, adding a dash of brine from my first batch (eaten a while back, very nice, but saved the brine in the fridge) to help the fermenting process.

And there's still another 8 gherkins waiting to be pickled, with more growing. I need more jars!

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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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Harvest Monday - a bit 'lite'

Ok, it's been raining all day today and I've been busy with guests over the weekend and haven't been down to the plot since Friday. I'm sure there's absolutely loads of lovely produce down there waiting for me ;)
So this is a bit of a 'lite' report on this weeks gatherings. Everything has definitely slowed-up a bit too, especially with the weather turning cold (apparently coldest august on record I thnk I heard?). These are all difffernt veg in each photo:

Thoughtful curcurbits

Sad beans (not as many as last week)

Happy harvest from the back garden when it was sunny featuring blauhilde purple beans and Lady Di runners. And looks a bit like Sideshow Bob?

I hadn't picked the beans in the back garden for a few days and found some really long ones growing over the fence. I usually pick them a lot smaller so will see how they compare with taste and texture. The longest (the nose) was over 40cm long ( I wrote it down somewhere but can't find the bit of paper). The little courgettes are green bush.
This week I also started picking elderberries from around the neighbourhood and will continue probably on weds. There's a big variety in ripeness depending on aspect etc so although some are already going over, there's still plenty waiting to ripen. This rain might swell them up a bit too, more juicy.
Oh, almost forgot a big bowl of tomatoes from the lean-to at home picked on Saturday.

A mixture of Sweet Cherry, Super Marmande, Money Maker and so e others that you can't see as they're underneath.

So I'm linking in late again to Harvest Monday on Daphne's Dandelions :)

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Chocolate raspberry brownies...

Courtesy of Shaheen at Allotment2Kitchen

This is recipe enticed me as firstly it looked yummy, secondly, we had guests coming round and thirdly, I have lots of raspberries. I didn't have a full bar of dark chocolate so used up some ends of different bars, 85%, 70% and dark chocolate with espresso that gave it an interesting extra twist.

Choc and frozen rasps

I did accidentally use the wrong sugar (granulated instead of caster) and also used frozen raspberries that I didn't have the patience to defrost properly. This meant that the top took longer to cook and so the bottom was a bit over cooked.

Before cooking

Seemed to go down well with our guests anyway and we had second helpings with ice cream (which was handy as I needed freezer space for homemade tomato sauce base).

After cooking! You can see the granules of sugar...this wouldn't have happened if I'd used caster

So maybe if I do it again I'll either defrost the rasps properly or mix them in throughout? I'm not very good at experimenting with sweets, better to follow the excellent recipe! Savoury food I'm a bit better at going off-piste. Anyway thank you Shaheen for a great recipe. We went out for a trip into the countryside today and the last couple of bits went down a treat.

Linking to August's bookmarked recipes at Tinned Tomatoes

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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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