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 19/5/10

Beans are quite easy to grow. We all know this. You take a dried husk of a thing, put it in some compost and then about 2 weeks later up it comes, raring to grow.


This has always been my experience of them anyway up until this year. This year I have had no end of problem with mine and it is mostly my fault.

I am what could be described as an inpatient gardener. When March turns up I like to get pretty much everything going. Tougher seeds are planted at the allotment, parsnips and early carrots, and seed trays are planted up and placed on window sills. This is a fine plan as long as the weather agrees to it.

My first set of beans where planted into pots and put on my dining room window sill and came on very quickly, so quickly in fact that they were ready to plant out at the beginning of April and when they were far too big for the house they went in on the 19th. Unfortunately the weather disagreed that it was time and it got really cold again and they died. A small tear was shed.

I was not to be defeated though and a second load of beans were planted up (dwarf French, runner beans and climbing beans for those who are interested) and again placed in the dining room. The climbing beans were up first, the others took their time.

Up early one morning I couldn’t find one of our kittens and I assumed that she was having some sort of outside based fun until I went into the dining room. We had, accidently, shut her in there over night.

She shot out when I opened the door and headed straight for the litter tray as she had been sat there with her tiny kitteny legs crossed all night. Well that wasn’t all she had been doing. Spread across the dinning room carpet was the content of 2 of the pots containing my beans, bugger. For some reason she had left the ones that had sprouted alone.

So I scrapped the compost back into the pots assuming that the beans would be there and I could just pat the soil down and carry on. Oh no, my cat had eat the beans. All of them. Sigh.

So now I am on my 3rd attempt at growing beans for 2/3s of them, the climbing beans were planted out yesterday now the nights are warmer. Let’s hope they will be ok, I’m getting a bit bored of them.

Allotment 22/4/10

In my joy at the my first asparagus spear on Monday you may have missed that I planted out my peas and beans.
I thought that it was warm enough at night for my beans, even when I was questioned about it by my friend Liz I arrogantly stated that they would by fine. Oh how wrong I was.
I popped down today to water my seeds, no rain for at least a fortnight, and was greeted with this,





Dead beans. Probably frozen to death like Captain Scott's co-workers.
Oh well, a mistake was made and will learn from it, maybe. Have planted some more in pots though and hopefully they won't be too far behind.

Allotment 19/4/10

I could go on and on about what I’ve planted and what I’ve done at the allotment (peas and beans by the way) but that would be boring and not as important as this,



That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is my first ever spear of Asparagus. Oh yes, I planted the bed last year and now it is paying dividend. I am so very proud.
Let’s just look at that again,



When it is ready I am going to enjoy it soooooooo much.