Ooogosh again!*

*Or, Slightly overwhelmed by all the excitement!

Excitement? I hear you ask... What excitement?

Well, there's a much-looked-forward-to holiday fast approaching, with all the sorting, organising, planning and packing that involves when heading off to somewhere that's 32 degrees and has palm trees. And if that wasn't exciting enough, I took a look at Our Patch Of Earth to find...

...an award!Woo!

Thanks very much to Gary at Reads Allotment Retreat, it's very much appreciated! And also slightly strange to think there are People Out There reading and, I assume, returning time and time again to an insignificant blog that little ol' me wrote about chickens and vegetables! Funny old world...

And, here are the rules:
Post the award on your blog (including the above picture) along with the name of the person who passed it on to you and link to their blog. Choose 15 blogs which you have recently discovered and you think are great and pass it on to them. Don't forget to leave a comment on their blog to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

Now, at the risk of being a party-pooper, I'm gonna have to do my own set of nominations when I'm back from sunnier climes in a couple of weeks. I think it deserves a little more thought and attention than I have to spare right now this minute.

And in other news.

I often visit a great site at Fennel and Fern and, on a whim, I recently entered a Garlic Giveaway - a competition to win a Garlic Lover's Growing Pack from the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm, with nine (count them!) different types of garlic - that's enough cloves to make about 100 new plants.

And I WON!!! Yey!

So I think it's only fair to say a MASSIVE thankyou to Isabel at Fennel and Fern for running the competition, and to Darren at the Garlic Farm, who was kind enough to call me this morning to discuss the merits of garlic, top tips on growing conditions and when to deliver my prize (my Prize! Eeee!). I look forward to it!

And so to pack... Anon, chums...

Ooogosh!

I just wanted to share the wonder of raindrops on brassica leaves...



I won't take them for granted any more.

PS: I love my camera.

Disheartened

I have been remiss. Updates are not appearing on here as thick and fast as they should probably be. But there, look, I only posted once last October, so this is a vast improvement. And anyway, not much has been going on this month. Or at least, not much has been going on that I've been tempted to blog about.

We're onto chicken no. 5. A couple of weekends ago Lola had a cough on the Saturday, wheezed on the Sunday, and was dead on the Monday morning. Even as we were discussing the possibility of finding a chicken-certified local vet. And Lola! Good ol' faithful, had-since-the-beginning Lola! There were tears, as I wrapped her in newspaper...

I've put off blogging about it this long because our apparent lack of ability to keep chickens alive had me feeling somewhat ashamed, embarrassed, guilty, sad, angry... they were never supposed to be pets, exactly, but then they're not supposed to blimmin' well die so fast either. What are we doing wrong?!! Ah well. We discussed getting rid of Peggy Sue and becoming chickenless again (after all, where the run had been would make a fantastic veggie patch - all that poo!), but then a Saturday impulse led to us getting as-yet-unnamed-but-possibly-called-Alice.

I know. Don't say anything. I'm still not entirely convinced it was the right thing to do. At least they have a fairly pampered life with us while they plot their numerous escapes and pop out eggs every day before their untimely demise.

And I can keep working my way through the cupcake recipe book my sister got me for my birthday...

Harvest

We needed a wheelbarrow to take our tatties home today. Ok, not a massive wheelbarrow, but still, not bad for a couple of hours' work in the sunshine, and it feels like we've got all this food for free!

As Adam re-insulated the composte heaps with lots of dry grass, I picked the last of the tomatoes and the squash. Then we spent an hour or so digging up the last potato bed, and we ended up with half a barrowfull of Cara potatoes, as well as nearly a dozen winter and butternut squash, a bag of tomatoes and another big handful of dried borlotti beans.


I'm looking forward to eating these. They're not massive, but perfect for a meal for two, which is great as, well, we are two, and we eat meals. They should keep pretty well - especially if we can cure them a bit more in the sunshine - but that iddy biddy one on top isn't going to see the inside of a cupboard, as it's going to be roasted along with potatoes (ours), carrots, swedes and parsnips (all not ours, sadly) and a pheasant from the local market for our lunch. With lots of garlic and lemon. Yum.

And I wonder if I'll be able to resist making a Halloween lantern out of that orange one...


Update - ickle squash tasted goooood.

All autumnal

How time flies when you're having fun! Since my last post we've had more tomatoes, more beans, and more potatoes. Also my birthday, and, oh yes, a new camera. Woo! But the weather's definitely turning, the courgette and tomato plants are looking sorry for themselves and the sunflowers in the garden are getting a little bedraggled. But still beautiful, especially if you look close up.

One of the first real signs that autumn is well and truly here - the borlotti beans are drying nicely on the plant. We've got a couple of handfuls of the dried beans now which we can store and use in something hearty in midwinter. They're sitting in a kilner jar in the kitchen, look nice and rustic.


The winter squash are also ripening nicely. We'll just give them another week or so to get a bit more sun. We've also got three small butternut squash, which is very exciting stuff indeed as I love butternut squash.












No real success with the sweetcorn this year. We've had three, maybe four decent sized cobs and a couple of tiny ones. But boy, were they tasty! The cauliflowers, brussels sprouts, red cabbage and purple sprouting brocolli are all doing fine. The netting seems to have kept the pigeons off so far!

The allotment as a whole seems to be going from strength to strength. Apparently the council-owned allotments are full and they've started sending people our way. All the suitable plots are now let, so the ones near us which are mainly overgrown with brambles and grass are going to be professionally rotavated, so we should have some neighbours which will help keep the path clear and the weeds under control But they're going to leave the big giant blackberry bush untouched, so we'll keep a little privacy. And get the blackberries!

We helped to clear some of the long grass on one of the adjacent plots and found this little fellow hiding under a rotting piece of plywood...


Bless!

Cooking stuff

Yep, I know I said I was going to make tomato and onion chutney, but hey, it just didn't happen. Instead, I made a couple of pots of simple yellow tomato sauce (see pic - it's just loads of chopped toms, onion, salt and pepper and oregano, all cooked until it reduces into a big yellow mush) which we've frozen, and then a whole load of really, really, REALLY tasty spiced onion and apple chutney. Mmm.

My mum gave us a bag of apples from her tree, and though they weren't technically cooking apples, I thought I'd give them a go in chutney. Along with the big bag of onions from the local shop for one pound something, it was all a bit of a bargain.

I did a quick search online for Nigella's Spiced Apple Chutney - which my good friend Sian made and gave me a jar of at Christmas (and my, it is GOOD, more please!) but couldn't find the recipe, so I just got a bit of inspiration and then made some chutney with whatever I had in the kitchen cupboard. Couldn't be bothered to go out and search our local shops in the vague change they might possibly have a mouldering bottle of white wine vinegar tucked at the back next to the tins of ghee and henna, or a packet of golden caster sugar hidden behind the garam masala and methi leaves; so normal vinegar and normal sugar it is.

So for all you recipe fans (!) here's my Spiced Onion & Apple Chutney one.

Ingredients: - MAKES ENOUGH TO FILL 6 REGULAR JAM JARS.

(NB I have a habit of making things by just chucking in a bit of this and a handful of that, which makes it very hard to translate into actual measurements - this is my best guess...)

• good glug of olive oil
  
• approx 20 small onions, peeled & chopped
• 15 apples, peeled, cored & chopped
• 5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 250g raisins
• half tsp smoked paprika
• half tsp turmeric
• 1tsp ground cinnamon
  
• 1tbsp oregano
• generous sprinkling of salt & freshly ground pepper
• 3 bay leaves
• 600g sugar
• 4 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 100ml malt vinegar

Method:

Put olive oil in a BIG pan. Chuck in onions, apple, garlic and give them a good stir 'til they're well mingled and just warmed through. Chuck in everything else and stir and stir. You won't see much liquid at first but a lot comes out of the apples when they start to cook. I cooked mine on a low simmer for a couple of hours until it had reduced down a bit and was brown and glossy and sort of caramelised. It's spiced, but not spicy, but I guess just put in less paprika if you want to avoid any kind of warming tang.

Now it's in the cupboard for a few months to mature or, urr, do whatever it is that chutneys do when you're told to leave them for a few months.


It's the paler chutney at the front, by the way, the really dark stuff in the taller pale-blue-lidded jar, and the one to the right is good ol' onion chutney, made in February. (February! Gah! Better get eating!).

And yeah, I know, the pic isn't great - but have you ever tried taking pictures of jam jars in a dark store cupboard when you can't see what it is you're taking a picture of? But never fear, blog-readers! I'm getting a new camera for my birthday in, ooh, about a week! Woop woop!

Gardening guilt

I have a confession. We've cheated a bit. Ok, maybe not really, but I feel like we have.

We went to a garden centre yesterday morning, and I got distracted by the little trays of veg. Now, I've been thinking for a while that we should have sown our winter and spring veg back in May, or June, or July, but we just never got around to it. And while it's not like we'll starve without our own home-grown winter greens, it'd still be nice to have some that we'd grown ourselves.

We did sow some leeks a few months ago, alongside the swedes and carrots, but haven't ended up with half as many as we really wanted. So into our basket went a tray of little leeks. And as for red cabbage, well, that's a Christmas essential, so we obviously needed a tray of those too. And we had some purple sprouting broccoli last spring, but haven't sown any this year either, so a tray of those as well please... And what's this? A sign saying 4 for £10? Then we definitely needed to get a tray of cauliflower too, even though they weren't very successful last year, with all but one mouldering away on the plant. This year, they'll be fine, I can feel it.

So, £10 later and we were the proud owners of many, many baby leeks, 12 red cabbage, 14 PSBs and 12 cauliflower plants. Yey!

Down at the allotment in the afternoon Adam discovered that one of our compost heaps has produced some rather fine compost, (never thought compost would be so exciting, but it just kindof appears from nowhere!) so he hauled out a few bucketfuls while I attempted to transplant the little leeks into the seed bed for a bit of fattening up alongside their slightly larger brothers and sisters. Then Adam dug over a couple of empty beds which I'd - coincidentally, and handily - weeded last week (see - it must be fate!) and in all the brassicas went, with a good dollop of compost underneath. We also netted the tops of the beds so that the pigeons can't eat them and maybe it'll stop some snails too. I also relocated the little brussels sprouts plants to the same bed as the caulis, as they were in danger of being swamped by the artichokes.


We picked a courgette, more beans, dug up some more potatoes and have another big bag of yellow tomatoes. I'll definitely have to make something this weekend or they're in danger of going to waste. Maybe pasta sauce... Yum!