Harvest Monday - garlic and sssss.....strawberry

Ah yes, today I had a nice surprise on the plot but I'll come to that in a little while. The last two days have been windy and rainy, what a great start to the British Summer.

But here's some nice meals from this week's harvests, so despite the poor weather, you can still get a reasonable crop.

 

I've been picking rocket from the garden still, from the overwintered plants that are a couple of years old now

I've been potting on my toms and popping in one of my basils at the base of each. This is meant to help deter beasties from eating the tomatoes plus also saves space.

I pinched-out some of the basil tips to encourage them to bush out

And used them plus chard too with pasta

The rhubarb leaves were getting in my way so I decided to pick some and make the waitrose rhubarb cake Recipe again. A good thing to do on a rainy Sunday. Here's a few of the sticks, a nice bright colour.

As part of the recipe you leave them chopped up in sugar for a little while to draw out the liquid, That liquid is delicious, mmm

It looks a bit soggy in this photo but actually today it was moist but not soggy.

I made a sort of kidney bean hot pot aswell yesterday using my own mashed potatoes from the freezer (the last tub) and some chard from the plot.

Tonight I was a bit unsure what to cook, we were running low on things, so I used up some more chard

And some of my sweetcorn from the freezer

..with some fried onion, garlic and a tin of baked beans....it was surprisingly nice!

At the end of last week my garlics were looking a bit sickly even though it seemed a bit early for them to be getting ready to die back normally.

So I decided to lift a few to see what was hAppening. Unfortunately some had a white rot, which I meant to look up more info on. I lifted all of them and left the rotty ones in the shed at the plot to dry off separately, which I'll then use up soon. The rest I brought home to dry in the lean-to. Quite a few are just one giant clove but some seem to be bulbed-up.

At least I got some garlics anyway, the last time I grew any quantity was several years ago when most of them went manky, which put me off growing them for a while.

And last but definitely not least, I popped to the plot in my lunch break, (before the rain and wind) and found a couple of ripe strawberries! Whoop!

They were sooo good. I resisted the temptation to just eat them there and then and brought them home to share with Jan. These were from the bed with stones as a mulch so that probably speeded things up, as the stones will get quite warm :D There's more coming too.

Linking in with Harvest Monday on Daphne's Dandelions

 

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Harvest Monday - rhubarb cake

It's been a bank holiday today, which means no work and slightly confusing as it really doesn't seem like a Monday. But a nice extra day off. This morning I biked down to whitlingham country park which is only about 10 minutes from the city, to try and see and hear my first swift of the year.....success! A group of around 30 flew in briefly, screaming and feeding high over the water (there's a large lake), fuelling up on insects after a long migration. An added bonus was my first cuckoo of the year too, yippee!

This afternoon I headed to the plot to get a good few hours work in, in the sun, another bonus, with birds singing all around and butterflies and bees flying all over the place. Jobs included weeding the bed where I'm going to plant out the sweetcorn (lots of couch grass), and cutting the grass to use as mulch for my early potatoes - they'd been slightly scorched by frost.

I've had some pretty good harvests this week-

Still lots of over-wintered chard coming, here's some of it

It's gone into noodle soup, .....

...As a side dish with more spicy chick pea pies (I only discovered these last week and I think they will become a regular weekend meal!)

....and with poached eggs on sour dough bread

I also made another nettle soup, this time adding a few chard leaves as well for variety, and some melted blue cheese.

When weeding the bed for the sweetcorn, I found some potatoes I'd missed, how could I have missed these, they were quite big!

I also picked a big batch of perpetual spinach

.... That went into another cauli curry (I've made one every week recently!)

And I thought I'd jump on the rhubarb bandwagon this week too, I have some growing in a large pot in the back garden. I used to have it in the ground at the allotment where it was doing rather too well in the spot where I wanted my saskatoon to go, so brought it home instead

I picked the biggest stems and a few little ones as the leaves were getting in the way

And made a tasty rhubarb and almond cake to take round a friend's house, you can see the recipe here (I found it by googling rhubarb and almond cake and chose the easiest looking recipe, with the ingredients I already had). It had a really good flavour, the consistency was more like a pudding than a cake though, very moist

Well, it's all gone now, anyway!

Linking in with Harvest Monday in Daphne's Dandelions

 

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