Tonight's exploits....

It's amazing what you can achieve in an hour and a half....

Fruit mush for on our breakfast (blackberry and gooseberry with old fruit preserve added as a sweetener)

A quick curried squash (our first winter squash, picked young so has a thin skin):

Cooking up some beans:

Bottling up some gherkins and making a snack pot for tomorrow (home grown beans, toms, ridge cuke and crystal lemon cuke):

Oh and I made sandwiches with home grown toms, gherkin (the wild fermented batch that I'll report on another time) and basil, plus cheese (not homemade!) And here's a pic of today's curcurbit harvest...I've never had so many ( this is my first year for gherkins). There's also some vine leaves for adding to tomorrow's pickle:

Sorry about the shadows, our kitchen light is in the wrong place for taking photos on the worktop.

Right time for bed

 

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Gherkiny #2

Well I didn't get chance to take a pic of the next stage as it was late last night. I set out some more in salt last night too, to do a comparison, this time adding a vine leaf as this is meant to keep them crunchy. Here's a pic of the two jars, see the colour difference.... fresh green for the jar made tonight and loss of colour for yesterday's, with today's curcurbit harvest in front. So for both jars I rinsed the gherkins with clean water a couple of times, patted down with kitchen paper, and packed in to the jars, adding freshly picked dill and mustard seeds plus white wine vinegar. 

With today's harvest I'm trying natural fermentation, you use salted water instead of vinegar. This process is meant to produce healthy bacteria, which is inhibited by vinegar. Pics will follow.

Here's a pic of some of yesterday's harvest, more dwarf French beans and berries! Tonight after work I picked the last big batch of red gooseberries and gave them to a friend from work who's going to make wine :)

Photos!

Some photos from this week. Have spent the evening looking up runner bean and courgette chutney recipes. Glut here we come!

Sweetcorn under planted with dwarf french beans

Yumm!

This is my wigwam set-up with courgette, lettuce and beans

First pumpkin of the year - seems rather early - this is actually ripe now! (hollow sounding when tapped)


Part of our wildflower area


The compost bins with courgette and pumpkin plants are doing well :0)

Soooo...

....we have been allotmenting a fair bit the past couple of weeks (when the weather has allowed - generally it's either too rainy or too sunny...can't strike a happy medium!), again we've been grass cutting/weeding round the edges as well as harvesting quite a lot (dwarf beans-a-plenty, courgettes, a few carrots, lots of lettuce - JB particularly likes the little gem which I've grown us for the first time this year, and so on.

However, most excitingly......dah dah dah dah dah DAH (*drum roll*) we had our first tomatoes (cherries) and SWEETCORN!!! Yummy yum yum it was really good and the plants have done way better this year so quite a few more cobs to come. I think they have liked the manure plus being under-planted with dwarf french beans (not a weed in sight as the beans have shaded them all out).

I'm also quite proud of my wigwam set-ups, with a courgette planted in the middle, 4 poles (buddleia cut-offs) with runner and purple french beans winding their way up, and finally, to make best use of the space, rows of lettuce planted in a square at the base of the wig wam. Might be easier to see what i mean with a photo.

Hopefully if the weather's good we'll get down there after work tomorrow and will then report back with some pics. I have feeling we'll be needing to find some runner/french bean chutney recipes soon.

(PS This is Lou, I accidentally logged on as JB aka Ms Idler)

Harvest Time!

Yay we had a good afternoon down at the plot on Sunday and got stuck in to some serious weeding (though of course there's still lots more to do) and also....harvesting! The autumn onions were just about ready and had started going a little bit mouldy on their bums so Sunday was the day for them to come out. Same goes for the garlic. Plus we need the room to put other stuff in. Don't think either of them will keep very well but am drying them out as much as possible in the lean-to at home.

Here is our stash from Sunday. In the back garden we've also got some peas that are ready (sooooo tasty) and a few raspberries and wild strawberries, on top of masses of lettuce (not literally of course).
Potatoes, broad beans, onions, garlic, strawbs, beetroot, carrots and a couple of radishes. Oh and I nearly forgot we also picked over 5lbs of red currants, with loads more still to pick.

Our main onion crop (Jetset)

Our first teeny courgette (Nero) of the year (this is one of those I accidentally planted instead of a pumpkin. Seems to like it in the compost heap)

Rainbow chard!

Sweetcorn - varied success, some doing better than others. Undersown with dwarf french beans.


PS - whoop I have my own log in so now you know if it's me or JB (Ms Idler)