Drowning in courgettes, send help

I’m sorry for the quiet spell over here.  I have been on holidays to France and Cornwall (how could I desert the plot?  I know.  But don’t worry, it’s taking its revenge.) but we are back!

And confronted with an ocean of weeds.  And a good-sized puddle of courgettes.  And a hurricane of runner beans (whose idea was it to plant two 12′ rows)?  Ah, the overenthusiasm of spring and inevitable gluttony of summer.

We have eaten our way through courgette lasagne and courgette soup (with pecorino), courgette tart (marinate sliced courgettes in lemon juice, olive oil and tarragon/chives, then arrange on puff pastry, add crumbled feta, and bake until golden) and courgette smoothies.  Okay, I was lying about that last one.  But it doesn’t seem far off.

Tonight we will be testing out courgette carbonara (saw the idea somewhere on the interweb, and ordinary carbonara is a cinch) and chargrilled-veg focaccia on the side.  I have several of the blighters that have actually turned into marrows now.  I think I will keep a couple of these for stuffing tomorrow, as Good Food has a nice chilli-parmesan idea for them.

And I KNOW I’ve seen a recipe for marrow ‘mango’ chutney, but I can’t find it anywhere.  Send help.

No vampires here

This is our garlic harvest, which is currently drying out in a box on the sunny lawn.  It has been drying for a fortnight and the cloves are semi-papery now; impatiently, I have already used three whole heads.  Garlic-roasted potatoes, garlicky hummous, lamb roasted with garlic and rosemary, lemon and garlic mayonnaise.  (The mayo is good with paprika-roast squash chunks.)  At the moment, I have no idea where these heads are going after they depart the box.  Hmm.

Eating, this past week:
Broad beans (possibly for ever)
New potatoes
Beet greens
Peas
Strawberries
Salad
Summer carrots

Sowing, last and this week:
Autumn carrots
Parsnips (late, I know)
Swede
Spring onion
Radish
Mangetout

First peas with Beurre Blanc

We ate our first crop of peas (Meteor, planted in January) on Friday night, and I decided to do something special with them (instead of throwing them into a curry where they would be swamped).  I have been reading ‘Made in Italy’ by Giorgio Locatelli and he has a very complicated and delicious recipe for egg pasta with broad beans and potatoes.  He keeps some of the beans and potatoes whole, blends a few to make a puree/sauce, adds freshly-rolled egg pasta, and tosses the veg in butter sauce.  Sounded pretty hard, right?

So I decided to disregard most of it, and just make the Beurre Blanc.  This turned out to be a stroke of genius, although (if the wonder of this was anything to go by) I think it might be worth having a bash at the entire recipe one day.   Like, when I am reeeeeaaaaaally bored.

Here’s how I made it, and I hope you will enjoy it with your green peas (also some shelled broad beans) – pasta is really optional.  I think this would be even better just with green peas and bread on the side.  It’s horribly bad for you.  But it’s a nice Friday treat, if you have been super-good for the week.  And those peas really deserve a nice dressing.

2 spring onions (white parts), finely sliced
2 black peppercorns
100ml white wine
2tbsp double cream (plus more to loosen)
100g unsalted butter

Cut the butter into pieces, put one in a saucepan, and use it to soften the spring onions. Add the peppercorns (and I think a bay leaf or two would be nice) and soften very gently, not allowing anything to brown.  Add the wine and turn up the heat a little bit, to reduce it all by about half.  Add the cream and bubble for another minute.  Turn the heat to low and whisk in the butter, a little at a time, until it’s all incorporated.  Strain the sauce into a warm bowl (throw out the onion/peppercorns) until the peas/beans are ready, then return to the pan, and toss together gently.

Sorry there’s no picture, but we gobbled before we remembered.

The Good Life

Last night we went to visit a man who’d put an ad in the local paper. The deputy gardener was TERRIBLY excited about it.  He said, “there’s another man going at 9, so we have to arrive before that,” but unfortunately, we kept getting lost.  We had to telephone twice for directions and every time we took a wrong turn and had to do a U-bend, Deputy Gardener pointed at the car overtaking us and shouted: “that’s the other man who wants it!  Now he’ll get the best one!”.  I didn’t really understand why he was so excited until we arrived.

We arrived at the man’s house and were invited in; we walked through his garage, which was all kitted out like a mechanic’s den!, and then we went into his garden to look at his two petrol strimmers.  It took him a while to start-up the (more expensive) model that DG wanted (“I liked it because it was more shiny,”), which involved tweaking some dials and then ripping the rip-cord until it went VVVVRRRRRRRRRUUUUM!!!  VRUM!  VRUM! VRUM! VVVVRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

and lots of smoke billowed everywhere and I rubbed my eyes discreetly.  The man who was selling them makes a semi-retired-living from cleaning, fixing and selling old strimmers, rotavators and mowers.  He was very proud indeed when it went VVVVVRRRRUUUM judging by the number of times he had to show us the noisy smoky bit.  He also, of course, shows us how it cuts weeds/grass (“What’s the string for?” I asked and they laughed like mad.  Apparently, it CUTS the grass!  It’s genius.).

So we now have a petrol strimmer, just like Tom and Barbara.  I tried to convince DG to attach it to some sort of cart / pram with big wheels so it could drive us to Sainsburys and we could ditch the car.  But I don’t think he’s buying in to my whole self-sufficiency obsession just yet.  Give me time…

 

Ahem.

It’s been a while!  I’ve been put off posting because, while we’ve been taking lovely photographs of our hard work at the plot, I have no camera lead with which to upload them.

But that’s no excuse.  So here’s an update.  Lots to say, so little time…

Patience
Back in March we both had a big psychological set-back; unable to sow much yet, but finding it increasingly difficult to keep the weeds down, we harvested our first radishes – what was left after the slugs had feasted – and dug out our failed rhubarb crowns, which had simply sat and rotted away beneath the surface of our immaculately-prepared bed (see plan, below).  We came to the conclusion that patience is the allotmenteer’s most important asset.  And neither of us has much.  So, we sowed indoors, we carted bagfuls of manure and compost and sand up to the plot, and we tried to ready the remaining beds best we could.

Sowing…
We’ve also decided that we REALLY need a greenhouse.  The seed trays on our windowsills – every single one – aren’t enough.  Seed trays have spilled out onto the porch (where they seem happy) and then into the sheltered back garden as soon as I dared.  The difficulty is that we’ve added our vegetable seedlings to the already-dense line-up of plants that I usually grow for the garden; Cosmos, snapdragons, herbs and chillis.  And no matter how many it LOOKS like indoors, when we get them to the plot, they barely cover a sniff of gaping acreage.  Now we’re past the last frost for our area, and thanks to the recent 23 degree heatwave, the latest seedlings are germinating on the patio, and several more have been hardened off enough to sit in the garden.  Of course, now the second batch of sowing commences: brussels, broccoli, cabbage, squash and runners all to be started off under cover. Phew. 

Broad Beans
The trusty ole beans haven’t let us down.  They grew steadily over the winter and put on a glad rush of growth in spring; they’re now 1m+ and bowing with dozens and dozens of pods.  I think we have two 12′ rows, and next year I’m planning to have more.  Unless, of course, we’re still eating broad beans from the freezer.  Another difficulty in being an allotment novice is that we haven’t a clue how much to expect from each crop; how many courgette plants should we have; how much sweetcorn will we eat from six stems?  So we could be swamped with broad beans; or we could eat them in a week.  I haven’t the faintest idea.  This is one of those things, I tell myself, that we must learn in this first year, improving our planning for next season.  We’d love to be able to grow all the veg to replace our weekly box (£650/year), but – as we eat a lot of veg every week – this is a LOT.  What we need is the star performers, no radishes allowed.

Potatoes
Speaking of star performers, our potatoes – Lady Christl, Cara and Pink Fir – are going barmy.  They have a very radiant lust for life, so – if blight spares them – should be a good crop, I think.  We planted oodles of seed potatoes using my ingenious Bulb Planter (buy one now!).  And what other crops have we planted that are worth mentioning?

Asparagus.
Bless its spidery little hearts: every crown has come up for spring, reaching for the skies (seriously. how big do these things get?) and blossoming into their full-grown ferny selves.  (I never knew what asparagus looked like when it grew up.)

Beetroot, carrots, kohl rabi
V-e-r-y painfully slow but finally in evidence.  I hope to harvest some of these in the summer and re-sow for maincrops (except kohl rabi).

Peas, onions and garlic
Onions failed miserably but the shallots are putting on a brave show and the garlic has looked ready to pull since November.  (I am relying on Carol for the fact that it wasn’t, and that it’s just been pretending all this time.)  the peas are beautiful – we realise we didn’t sow enough, going very strictly by the packet rules, and have now sown another thousand all over the place.  (I exaggerate.)  we saw peas growing at RHS Rosemoor a couple of weeks ago – they’d been broadcast-sown in a 60cm circle and surrounded neatly with twigs, which seemed a very efficient manner of doing it.  Ours are in lines – 10cm apart – and I think the sociable little things would have appreciated the support they receive from one another.

Salad, radish, rocket and swiss chard
All doing exceptionally well – the rocket beat everything; it’s in our back garden from last year (didn’t re-sow, no idea what happened) and I can never pick it fast enough.  Even when we’re eating it every day.  And we only have three plants.  The Oriental Saladini has done brilliantly, although I’m wishing that I kept up with the successional sowing, as we’d happily be eating this daily too.  Have bought more packs ready to sow as often as I can remember, all summer long.  The swiss chard is growing a little more slowly than the salad and rocket, but it’s very beautiful – the yellow-stemmed one went in first, and it’s a lovely sunny colour.  Half of the seed is in the salad bed (for small leaves) and half in another chard bed (for full plants).

Peas on Earth

 Terribly late, we put in the early peas on Saturday.  They are ‘Meteor’ and supposed to have gone in between Oct and November.  But we are hoping they might work out what they’re supposed to be doing, anyway.  While deputy gardener was mulching with shredded Christmas tree, I sowed sweet pea and snapdragon seeds for our windowsills.

And my little broad bean soldiers are doing excellently.  I’ve surrounded them with thick skirts of used coffee grinds, which is supposed to keep slugs off – we are not sure what is finding the b.b. leaves so tasty, so we tried the only thing we thought of.

Finally, we have also sowed a line of Radish ‘Rudi’ under old glass windows in the long salad bed.  I think this is supposed to be a quick cropper so we are really hoping we see some results by early spring. 

Grand Ambition

Here, finally, and by unpopular demand, is the plan for 2008.  I even found time to do a bit of colouring.  (I was inspired by the lovely plans over at My Tiny Plot.) Now all we have to do is dig, weed, sow and plant.  Maybe, one day, we’ll even eat…

Oh, yes.  This depicts most of our triangular-shaped plot, but the tip is missing.  That’s ‘cos this will be my Cutting Flower patch, with three beds filled with whatever I find/grow.  We spent New Year’s Eve digging over a third of it, and plopping in a couple of hundred bulbs.  Angelique Tulips (lovely peachy-pink), giant and small Alliums, and long-stemmed Anemones.  Unlike the bulbs which flower and die in our garden, these will all be snatched from the earth the very moment they begin to flower, ready to dress the house.  Bliss!

Nothing to show yet, though.  Which is good, because there are also no photos yet.  No camera lead yet.  Best not to mention this to Deputy Gardener.

Very short update

I am not short, but I am busy. The deputy gardener spent some time at the plot on the weekend:
- Planting raspberry canes (Autumn Bliss and Glen Moy)
- Covering the dug beds with cardboard boxes, weighed down with bricks.

Meanwhile, I tried to find the camera-PC lead. No luck.

In the garden, the dahlias are very sad and brown (and waiting to be cut and covered), although one sweetpea is still struggling to bloom, and the rudbeckias show no signs of wilting. yet. But winter is mere days away…

Hello again!

We planted some rhubarb crowns last Saturday, in a new bed. Dug it over (him) and weeded (me), then fed in lots of manure and plunged the soggy-looking crowns into the ground. I couldn’t quite work out which end was up, so I am hoping they will do the thinking for me. I am very much looking forward to oodles of rhubarb, although we are not supposed to pick it during the first year. (I bet we do. Just to taste.) It was Timperley Early and it came from Marshalls.

The broad beans have appeared and are unfolding – it always amazes me how much can burst out of a teeny little bean! There is plenty to come, you can tell. And apart from that, I’m afraid there isn’t much action down on the plot. We are expecting fruit bushes and trees any day now, so they’ll go in soon. And the next big job is covering as much as we can with cardboard, having decided that weeding every week in the cold isn’t much fun. And not very rewarding either when the soil is empty.

In the garden, I am trialling some lettuce – Arctic King. I planted this two weeks ago and it is growing v-e-r-y slowly. They’re growing in a big trough which is nestled in to the back of the house, and I covered the surface of the soil with ground coffee, which is working so far against you-know-whos.

I did take some pictures, but I have lost the camera lead. The garden is still looking very beautiful – the dahlias only finished this week, and the rudbeckias are blooming cheerily. My last sweetpea didn’t even finish until last weekend, which I was pleased about – I will be sowing some late next spring for an extended season.

And… well that’s about it for now. Autumn is growing tired, the golden leaves have turned to dusty brown, and the chestnuts are shrivelled inside their once-glossy little shells. It will soon be dropping its head for winter’s watch, I think. For holly and mistletoe and frost sweeping over the hills! Hurray for the seasons. Whichever one we’re in is usually my favourite – apart from a rainy winter day, which is nobody’s favourite.

I have words to write and chestnuts to peel… so I’m taking leave now!