Allotment 21/9/10

Does anyone one have any recipes to use up a lot of cherry tomatoes? It seems my experiment with a blight free tom has gone quite well. Seriously, I have fuck loads (I believe that is the expression I heard them use on Gardener's World.) and I made BBQ sauce and some tomato sauce for storing on Saturday but the BBQ one demanded skinning of the tomatoes which became very boring very quickly. It is very tasty though, do you want to recipe? Well here it is,

BARBECUE SAUCE

24 large ripe tomatoes, peeled, cored and chopped

2 cups chopped celery

2 cups chopped onions

1 ½ cups chopped sweet green or red peppers

2 hot red peppers

1 cup brown sugar

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 tablespoon dry mustard

1 tablespoon paprika

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon peppercorns

1 teaspoon tabasco sauce

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 cup vinegar

Combine the tomatoes, celery, onions and peppers in a large pot. Cook until the vegetables are soft, this will take about 30 minutes. Press through a food mill. Return to pot and continue cooking until mixture reduces by half, this step will take about 45 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and cook slowly until mixture is the consistency of catsup, about 1 ½ hours. As this thickens up, be sure to keep stirring frequently to keep the mixture from sticking. Pour into hot jars, straining out the peppercorns, leaving 1/4 inch. Process pints for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. This will make 4 to 5 pints of a very spicy barbecue sauce.

 As Autumn is sort of sneaking upon us, warmish days and cold nights, I decided that a bit of a harvest was needed so hence the large amount of tomatoes.

 I have had a good summer though, I hope you lot have too, and there was lots to pick. So there was the last of the melons, cucumber, beetroot, lettuce, carrots, runner beans, raspberries (a few anyway), cauliflower, sweet corn

and 8 apples from my tiny, tiny tree.

I am a happy man. Hurray for me.

 Hopefully it will stay warm for a while as I still have chilli plants in that are covered in fruit but they are taking ages to ripen, I now have a cloche on over them to try and encourage them to turn red.

 Over the winter I am hoping to move a number of the beds around in order to make better use of the space but I want to get it done pretty soon as I would also like to grow some green manure on the beds to improve my soil a little.

 I do think that we are going to have to invest in a small freezer to put in the basement though as our little one is stuffed full at the moment.

Allotment 9/8/10

I love this time of year. All the hard work that you have put in is literally bearing fruit (and veg). Just yesterday, for instance (and I use it as an example because it was a really good day) we bought home onions, peas, mange tout, 3 types of bean, radishes, lettuces, cucumber, courgette (anyone want a courgette by the way?) beetroot, carrots and my special prize, more on that later. Basically at this time of the year we can feed ourselves with vegetables. It is a joy to behold. Yes, you have to keep weeding and looking after things but it is so much more rewarding when come home with a bag full of things.

 And now back to my special prize. When I was looking on a seed selling website at the beginning of the year for tomatoes that don’t get blight (I bought a bush variety called Koralik and so far so good, fingers crossed though) I noticed some melon seeds that the website claimed would grow outside in the UK, I think I have mentioned this before. Anyway the seed were 99p so I thought I would loose less then £1 if they didn’t grow. I can confirm that my investment of 99p was well worth it,

To be honest I was a little inpatient. Some websites said that I would know when the fruit was ripe because it would smell of melon; well I think I may have detected the slight whiff of melon ness but that was probably wishful thinking. It has been looking the same for several weeks and I just wanted to pick it and see. Yes it is childish but I do have another 7 fruit to be more patient with if this one really isn’t ripe. We are giving a couple of days in the fruit bowl to see if we can make it smell melony. I tell you how it goes.

Allotment 4/6/10

I come before you to report a rare success today. I have been a little failure heavy recently but some things are going alright.

 I have finally managed to get some carrots seeds to germinate. I know that this is usually very easy for most people but I seem to have a problem with them and I don’t know why. Anyway this is my 3^rd lot of seeds and some of them have germinated, this makes me very happy. Look at their tiny little green leaves,

And then there are the chillies on my window sill,

How lovely is that?

The elderflower is finally out here so there is only one sensible thing to do, until my gooseberries are ripe and I can make gooseberry and elderflower preserve that is, and that is make cordial. It is the loveliest thing in the world and it is really easy,

Take 1kg of sugar and pour over 750ml of boiling water and dissolve the sugar, then add 10 heads of elderflower, they look like this, if you don’t know,

Add 5grams of citric acid and a sliced lemon, you can grate a bit of rind in if you like, give it a stir and leave it for 24 hours. Then strain it and put it on sterilised bottles. It can last for 6 months in the fridge but won’t because it’s lovely. You can also put it in plastic bottles and freeze it until you need it but remember to leave room in the bottle for expansion.

Allotment 8/3/10

The sun has remained visible so I have continued to get things into the ground. I’ve been removing stones from the soil and adding my own compost. It all looks lovely. The problem is you have nothing to show for all of your work except for some lovely bare soil.
Here for instance are my carrots,



And here are my parsnips,



And today I put my onions.



Yes that is just 3 pictures of soil but it is lovely soil.

The bare-for-a-long-time soil problem is the reason I advise people who are starting out to grow salad crops (Yes, I know that it’s odd that people ask me for advise as I know nothing but they do) because they grow really quickly. I planted my parsnip seeds last week and I will start digging them up some time in October but radishes only take about a month. You don’t get that nothing is happening feeling if you are picking some leaves after about 6 weeks.

There is some life on my patch, here, for instance, is my garlic bed,



I am pretty sure that onions are the easiest things in the world to grow; well they are if you use onions sets (little onions). If you grow your onions from seed then you are just showing off. And if you grow them from seed you saved yourself from last year then you about to be hit in the face with a shovel, smug git (I am aware that I am growing so stuff from seed that I saved last year but this is different. Why? Because I say so, alright.)

I do hope that this lovely weather continues.

Allotment 22/2/10

Just because it is cold and wet (really wet) doesn’t mean that nothing is happening at the allotment.
Well, when I say the allotment I really mean my kitchen and back garden. I was supposed to go and plant some seeds today but the rain was so hard that I decided against it. The plan involved early carrots and salad things (spring onions, radishes, salad leaves) under my ugly but useful plastic cloches but the weather put pay to that. It’s not that bad really because the ground is pretty much prepared; it just needs some seeds in it.
So a change of plan was called for and that’s how I ended up in my kitchen. I have decided to start that bit of the year that the non-allotmenter in your life dreads. It’s time to break out the seed trays. Soon the whole house and garden will be full of them (if you’re allowed to, I have an understanding Significant Other)
I have a nice collection of those seed trays with plastic tops on a bit like a mini greenhouse so that’s what I’m using.

Seeds out of my lovely seed box, compost from the worm filled bag and we are off. I have planted celery (never grows well), Swiss chard, autumn Cabbage (2 types) and autumn cauliflower.



As far as I can tell most seeds seem to do alright if you put them on the surface of the compost and then sprinkle a little more compost over the top. There are more scientific ways of going about this but I’m not one of those people. If it grows, it grows.



Don’t forget to label, nothing worse than not knowing what has germinated (I’m sure the people of Haiti may disagree but have they ever grown 2 types of beetroot and not known which is which?)



And then lid on and off to the shelf in my garden. Yes it is cold but they should be ok.
If I never mention them again you know they haven’t worked.