Just a Few Things.

Sorry for not posting before but spent the most of last week getting ready for the start of the new school year and the early part of this week getting back into the school run routine.

So not much gardening or even venturing into the garden done except to harvest. So I’ll show you all those pictures first:

Tue 01/09/09

Wed 03/09/09

Sun 06/09/09

As you can see in the picture I also harvested my first lot of sweet corn. Although the tassels were brown and the actual cobs were falling away from the main stem only three cobs out of the seven where properly ripe and even those might have benefited from a few more days (I‘m also please to see full cob pollination of the kernels, as I have never achieved this before). Everyone enjoyed them though and we all look forward to trying some more this weekend (this time I’ll do the press the thumb into the kernel test).

Mon 07/09/09, decided to remove all the dry pods of the dwarf bean ‘Ying Yang’, although they have kept relatively dry under the outdoor tomato shelter I didn’t want to temp fate. All the plants though seem to have gone into over drive with the starting of a few new flowers and growth of new beans in evidence.

In the dry beans picture you can see to your right a very speckled bean pod that belongs to the borlotto plants and this lone one was dry and rattled. Though the plants were slow to produce flowers, it is sure making up for it now.

Today Tue 08/09/09, there is a monster runner bean that obviously got missed at the last picking (its as long as my four year old arm and she’s big for her age) and my largest beefsteak tomato this year is this ‘Vintage Wine’. I grew this variety last year and enjoyed it a lot so grew it again this year and though this year the plants where not as robust in growth, taste wise they beat another I was trying this year ‘Costoluto Florentin I I ’ which was more prolific but I grow for taste.

Ok so as of Wednesday of last week the tomatoes have hit a three bowls (this picture was taken today) on the window sill proportions, not that I’m complaining but must admit to be feeling slightly panicky. I do plan to use the cooking tomatoes for making chunky sauces which I will bottle as I don’t have the freezer space. So far no one is complaining but we are seriously eating a lot of tomatoes both cooked and raw. They do need harvesting about every other day but over the last week I have tried to stretch this out a bit more.

Here are a few pictures of different crop progresses:

As if the out door tomatoes aren’t bad enough but the first ripe greenhouse tomato ('Broad Ripple Yellow Current') grown from cuttings taken in June month was found on the 02/09/09 which after taking its photo I ate it.

The melon from the plant grown from seeds saved from a supermarket purchase has begun to ripen. It is a little bigger than a cricket ball.


The sunflowers are still giving new blooms almost on a daily basis but the local squirrels since their tasting a couple of weekends back have decided to maul a few of my unripe heads, I have taken to dusting them with cayenne pepper which helps but I fear I may loose this battle, all I can say is they better stay away from my sweet corn or there’ll be hell to pay.


I found this amaranth plant growing in the crack of a pavement on the route to my daughters brownie meeting place. I took these samples and emailed Real Seeds company for help in identifying it; here is my email to them;

“Hello I was hoping you could help me with either id-ing this amaranth or point me in the right direction of where I could get help id-ing it.
I'm in Kent and while walking home three days ago I found this amaranth growing on the side of the road out of a crack in the pavement. It was approx 2ft high, compact conical shape and very healthy the entire plant was green including the flowers as you can see in the attached pic. There was many flower heads but I took the apex on off the plant as I didn't have my camera on me at the time, the leaves were small with the biggest no bigger than 3", with the largest being near the bottom.
When I got it home though I thought the flower was not ripe I attempted to see if there were any ripen seeds and there was as you can see in the pictures attached. It was very easy to dust the seeds out.
They are very tiny, black and shiny, I was hoping they were edible or that the leaves are edible, but I must say there was such a lot of flower heads it did not come across as a leafy variety.
I am used to a wild variety that grows in the West Indies which also grows approx the same height and has red stems and is quick to bolt the very young 6" plants are what is normally picked but the cultivated leafy variety is green stemmed and green flowers an slower to bolt but I don't recall the colour of the seeds.
Thanks in advance for your assistance,”

and this is what they said…

“Sorry, can't give a definite ID - it looks like one of the weedy amaranths (collectively often known as pigweed - though other things also go under this name).

Black seeded amaranths don't have edible seeds - only the white seeds are good to eat. As far as I'm aware leaves of all varieties are fine to eat, but of course the small leaved varieties aren't really practical to eat in any quantity.

Hope that is of some help, best wishes Kate”

I plan to grow some for the hell of it next year, probably as an edging plant in the flower beds.

I have enjoyed cooking up a couple more mangocheek’s recipes she has posted in her blog Potato, rosemary and tomato bakeand Green Bean Salan I added patty pan squash to the beans to bulk it up as we had an unexpected but always welcome visit from my mum’s sis and her husband on Sunday.

Must close with a mention of the weather, the last week of the school holiday was not only somewhat gloomy but even a little chilly at times but of yesterday the weather has been really glorious. More cloudy weather was forecasted but we have woken to practically cloudless skies and pretty hot temperature. The wind in the shade is also very warming to the skin and you’ll get no complaints from me. Had to get the watering cans out again though.

Whoopsie Another Long One!!

Well it’s the last bank holiday of the year and there was a definite change in the temperature on the Saturday and Sunday , for the first time in months I felt cold. Thankfully today on the bank holiday the temps were back up and the sky was clear and blue without a cloud insight.

Saturday disaster almost struck, I fell off the garden bench not far a stumble really, my camera was in my hand and in use at the time and got damaged. I was able to fix it but the shutter that protects the lens when not in use won’t close so now I have to be extra careful so as to not scratch the lens when its off.

In the garden I have been busy weeding a couple of beds that were getting out of hand. Other jobs in the garden all concentrated on maintenance, such as; watering, tying in the tomatoes, pruning back plants off the footpath (my youngest keeps complaining that the plants are attacking her) and lets not forget harvesting.

Friday

Sunday

My onions I grew from seed should have been harvested about a month ago but excepting a few plants they weren’t bending over but Saturday I spied to flower buds so decided to get it done. There turned out to be three with buds only.

Another thing I see no need to waste my onion tops, so when I harvest I always cut off the tops leaving about 5” - 6” of stalk attached to the bulbs, I use them as you would spring onion.

My harvest of mainly tomatoes meant that I’m also cooking lots of new exciting dishes for the family. Sunday I recreated this very tasty baklava inspired dish posted by mangocheeks.

The only thing I did differently was to add salt to taste to the tomato sauce as I found it a little too sweet and I used vegan cheese instead of feta cheese. In the comments of mangocheeks posting, she advised to prepare the dish as individual ‘spring rolls’, to make the eating a little easier. I followed her advice but worrying the sauce would have soaked through I used five sheets which was too much and I think two/ three would do. I’m afraid it tasted so good I forgot to take a picture of the bitten package for you to see, I served it with couscous and garlicky perpetual spinach. The dish was a huge success and I hope to repeat it before the tomatoes are over.

Tonight I prepared another recipe from mangocheeks blog.

Differences I made was to replace the fresh chillies in the courgette mixture with a whole Hungarian red sweet pepper and because I didn’t have any chick peas flour I used Soya flour (big mistake, I’ll explain further down). The tomato sauce I chose to leave chunky and didn’t puree, I also decided to cook the sauce with a whole chilli in it rather than add chopped up ones (have to think of the little ones tongue, both dishes still had enough heat at the end).

Now it was silly of me to forget that the Soya flour doesn’t really bind, so when I dropped the first three into the hot oil, they quickly disintegrated. To remedy the situation I spread the courgette batter onto oiled baking paper, I also lightly oiled the top and popped the tray under the grill. When the top was golden and crispy I laid another sheet of baking paper onto the surface then upended another tray and flipped it so the top was now on the bottom and the bottom was now on top (I do hope I’m making sense). I then returned it to the grill till the new top turned golden and crispy. PS the three that fell apart in the oil was drained and spread on the surface before I placed it in the grill - waste not, want not.

I served the dishes with boiled potato, sweet potato and cassava with garlicky sautéed runner beans. Hats off to mangocheeks her creations are spot on with my family’s taste buds and the dish was another winner. The tomato sauce tasted like curried green mango a dish from my home island and the differing flavours of the courgette dish’s ingredients blended beautifully.

Now for some pictures:

Crop progress;

Friday saw me netting my largest melon to support its weight.

The borlotto beans pods are beginning to dry, you can hear the beans rattling in this one.

‘The Patch’ is beginning to die back, if you look closely you can see the gems that await me.

My sunflowers have done well this year and would have done even better if I got most of them planted out on time (ho hum maybe next year), most of them weren’t attacked by the local squirrels so I looked forward to harvesting the seed heads to use during the winter to feed the birds that visit my garden. Yesterday I found evidence of squirrel munching on the first ripe seed head. So I removed it and hung it in the shed to keep it safe.

Today I finally got round to gathering and properly storing some of the seeds in the garden. The pic depicts my seed saving staple; a stool to sit on, a notepad to make my seed packets out of, sellotape to secure the seed envelope and a pencil to write the name and year.

Now for some flowers:

More sunflowers.

The garlic chives are blooming.

Today I noticed the water aven plants which are in the boggy area and were in flower late spring are in flower again.

The garden’s wildlife.

The fox cubs that were around a lot till early July suddenly disappeared for most of the summer holiday they have made an reappearance over the last ten days or so, they both look rather worst for wear and I’m sure are very hungry as they are both quite skinny (wheelie bins don‘t offer much free meals).

I disturbed this ‘Silver Y’ moth while weeding.

This ladybug has been resting at the base of this sweet corn cob for days now.

I thought this was a spider but have been told differently that it is a female ‘Leiobunum rotundum’ of the Opilione family which are also arachnids.

Seen today for the first time a lacewing larva, it was busy eating a caterpillar (sorry Maureen).

Two different stages of ‘Mid Instar Nymphs’ of shield bugs.

Well that’s it for now, I do hope you all had a lovely bank holiday weekend, now lets all wish for a great Indian Summer.

PS I've updated my Supermarket Saving Post and boy what a saving August harvests have produced.