Seedlings Update

When I first started growing things, March was the month of frenzied seed-sowing, but now, having had a few years experience, I've chilled out a bit and a lot more happens in April. That way I don't have so much trouble looking after young plants and protecting them from frost, and plants don't get pot-bound and unhappy in their containers. So yes, with those digging and structural tasks out of the way, April has been largely about seed-sowing and caring for baby plants.

At home I have several trays of tomato, pepper, squash and cucumber plants to look after. They live outside on sunny days and all over the kitchen table and floor overnight. It's a bit of a chore but hardens the plants off thoroughly and allows them all the light they desire, and it's only for a few weeks.

The raised bed is looking great, full of salad veg seedlings including lettuce, mustard, spinach, watercress, komatsuna, kohlrabi, carrots, radish, turnips and spring onions - it'll be a salad bar all summer, and there'll be space for pepper plants here too. Despite my fears and the poor performance last year, I'm seeing no growth problems at all so far - hooray!

The plastic greenhouse is full of seedlings too; chard and perpetual spinach, kale and cauliflowers, dill, leaf celery, achillea, cerinthe, stock, snapdragons, cosmos and marigolds.

The cerinthe seedlings are so pretty!

On the plot, parsnips, beetroots and turnips have germinated and I gave them a good hoeing between the rows yesterday to keep the weeds down. Soon I'll sow swedes and calabrese in this bed too, and plant out young celeriac, leeks and cauliflowers.

The bindweed in this bed and our perennials bed is bad, but all I can do now is keep pulling it and hope it gives up eventually! You can see below there are a few gaps among the broad beans. Not sure why... But I think I'll resow them next time I'm down there - it's not too late! I'm a bit ashamed to say I forgot to put insect-proof mesh over my carrots again, having failed last year too. I couldn't bear to see the carrots split and deformed from carrot fly again, and carrot fly are no doubt laying eggs by now, especially thanks to this mild spell! So I've hoed out all the seedlings and will resow them in a new location at the weekend and put the mesh in place straight away!

We've sown the flower bed with hardy annuals now too (cornflowers, vipers bugloss, ammi majus, bupleurum), though loads of tiny weed seedlings are coming up too and it's going to be a job to know which seedlings to weed out and which to keep!

April has rushed by but I'm glad it's nearly May - the month of planting-out! By the end of May the house will be seedling-free again and I should be able to stop worrying about cold nights and spring hailstorms!

2014

It's easy to think that winter is a quiet time for gardeners, but there's plenty to be done. Between harvesting winter crops, checking fleeces and stakes, winter digging, construction projects and maintenance, nurturing overwintering plants and looking after little seedlings in the greenhouse, there's also plenty of planning to be done, and it inevitably involves a good look back over the past growing season to see what worked and what didn't.

2014 was a pretty bumper year for us, but there are always lessons to be learned. Our plot was under a couple of feet of floodwater for a week early on in the year, but thankfully it didn't do any real damage or set us back - we just had some extra clearing up to do, and to be patient in waiting for the soil to dry out again. We've settled on a new 'structure' for our plot, with three main beds in a rotation plus a number of perennial areas, and we made several new paths. We failed to cultivate the difficult far corner of the plot or our old strawberry bed, but we did clear them and cover them up to stifle the weeds and make the job easier later. We planted a new perennials bed with asparagus, artichokes, strawberries and herbs - hopefully some perennial kale will go in here too. We built new compost bins in a new area, and grew beans on the super-fertile patch where the old bins were. We also upped our growing game in the garden at home, converting a shrub bed to grow vegetables and adding three raised beds - more on all that in another post.

2013, compost bins. 2014, French beans. 2015 greenhouse!

We tried a new way of adding fertility to our plot; the 'Complete Organic Fertiliser' recommended by Steve Solomon for rebalancing soil nutrients for maximum plant health and nutrition. Though I can't quantify the results or compare to a 'control' area, I have to say everything on the plot just grew better than ever with virtually no problems, and I am quite sure the COF helped that happen. I will be going one step further this year: sending some soil samples off for laboratory analysis and creating a custom mix to balance it even better.

Another thing we trialled was 'Rootgrow' or mycorrhizal fungi, endorsed by the RHS; a mix of natural fungi that forms symbioses with plant roots and gives plants access to more nutrients and water. It's primary recommended use is in planting trees and shrubs, to help them establish quicker and more easily, but it is supposed to help any plant so I used it under every single crop to see what happened. In theory it should drought-proof plants and help fruits and roots to swell more steadily and evenly. In practice, though we had great growth almost everywhere and the new asparagus and artichokes established without a hitch, my container potatoes gave identical yields whether I used the Rootgrow or not, the newly-planted strawberries didn't establish well for some reason, squashes and swedes came in a huge mix of sizes, and my celeriac completely failed to swell, so I'm not entirely convinced...

Potatoes did wonderfully - we managed to grow a kilo for every week of the year. (If only I had somewhere better to store them - they are now sprouting and turning soft). Scab was very bad on our old favourite Kestrel, but we also tried Pentland Crown this year, which makes a much better baked jacket spud, seems to store slightly better, and doesn't suffer as much scab, so we will be growing more of these in 2015! On reflection I wondered if I should have left the lime out of the COF applied to this area, as it probably made it worse.

Carrots were our best ever, even though we couldn't find our enviromesh in time to protect our first sowing so we lost some to carrot fly - our later sowings did brilliantly and they even won a first placing in the allotment association show! We have only succeeded with carrots since we added lime to our soil - perhaps they need the extra calcium.

Pumpkins and squashes did brilliantly too; we brought home 18 lovely fruits and many are still sitting around happily on windowsills and doormats waiting to be eaten. Arguably we might have expected even more squashes from our eight plants - some plants only gave us one or two fruits - but they suffered from quite a lot of weed competition... Turns out it wasn't such a good idea to undersow them with clover; clover actually gets quite big and unruly when it wants to!

Leeks, parsnips, swedes, broad beans and beetroots all got along just fine. Beetroots really are just THE easiest vegetable to grow - nothing seems to stop them. I only wish Eddie liked them better as I'm eating them mostly by myself. The leeks are suffering from some allium leaf miner and I think we should cover them with mesh next year. We only grew one variety of French beans - a local heritage variety called Ryder's Blue Coco - and I sowed them rather late due to a lack of space earlier on. They were delightful - really tender - and we were eating them long after our neighbours' beans had finished, but we couldn't save any seeds from them because they didn't have time to mature before the first frost, which was a great shame. I do have just a few seeds left so I MUST do better at this next year!

Our chard and winter spinach, planted out in late summer, suffered a bit of neglect due to an extremely busy autumn, but though we lost a few to slugs and snails, they grew superbly and we really should have harvested more from them before the winter. We will still be able to pick from them when growth starts again in early spring though. Our first attempt at fennel suffered the same neglect but also grew very well indeed, and again we failed to harvest it in good time. It's certainly one to try again this year though. We also have a few spring cabbages nearly ready which have done really well - a nice compact variety called Pixie which, assuming it tastes good come spring, I will certainly grow again.

2014 was our first year growing both celery and celeriac. The celery did okay, though it was a bit thin and stringy (I don't usually eat it raw much anyway - just use it for soups, stocks and stews - so that doesn't really matter). The celeriac was a huge disappointment; no root to speak of at all, and I'm not sure why or what to do differently next year...

The importance of beneficial insects really, properly hit home to me last spring when scores of ladybirds descended on our blackfly-infested broad beans and cleared the whole lot up for us. I'm pretty sure there were more ladybirds around than before because I'd grown phacelia in the next bed over winter - ladybirds seem to be attracted by lacy foliage and as we cleared it up in the spring there were loads of them among it. I always grow a few flowers here and there, but now I will grow more!

In the home garden, our courgettes and tomatoes were just fabulous and kept me busy finding new ways to use them! The tomatoes succumbed to blight in the late summer, as they always do. We tried a local heritage variety of tomato - 'Ryder's Midday Sun' - but sadly didn't find them up to a good standard; the plants grew slowly, the tomatoes were watery and lacked flavour, and they were first to succumb to blight! Maybe they'd do better in a greenhouse... But while I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to try them, I'm not sure I have the space to persist with them. Cucumbers and salad greens in our new raised beds did not do well at all and I'm sure there was a problem with the soil - more on that in another post... Peppers did okay but gosh, they take so long to ripen! We were disappointed in a new variety we tried - 'Hebar' - which had very thin flesh and not much flavour at all. The seller described it as "particularly sweet and tasty" so I'd love to know what anyone else thinks of them! We have bought a plastic greenhouse to put on the allotment this summer, which should be just big enough to grow a few tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in. This way we hope to have blight free tomatoes and earlier peppers! We'll still grow some at home too though...

Kaibi Round, Ancho Grande, Hebar, Lipstick

The enviromesh over the kale bed got torn in high winds early in the year, and by late summer caterpillars had stripped the plants as I was too lazy to do anything about it... Thankfully some of the plants made a surprisingly good comeback though! Another mistake I will not repeat next year is planting French beans behind courgette plants. After the courgettes had been growing a month I couldn't reach the beans at all, and had to leave them all to pick for drying instead! The mangetout was great - we could hardly keep up with it - and we were really impressed by variety 'Carouby de Maussane' with giant pods! I have never grown ordinary peas, as frozen British peas are extremely good and convenient, and all the podding seemed like too much of a faff, but last year we did grow a multipurpose mangetout/podding pea - 'Ezeta's Krombek Blauwschokker' - and when they got too big to eat as mangetout I was forced to pod a few... They were so lovely that I might just add a few real podding peas to my garden this year...

Carouby de Maussane mangetout - still gorgeously sweet and tender at this size!

The 'perennial salad mix' from Suffolk Herbs turned out to be a mix of chicories and radicchios, which have grown well but... I just don't really like the taste. Admittedly I should have read the back of the pack more carefully, but this picture is a bit misleading I think!

All in all, we will do much the same this year as last, but here are the things we plan to do differently:

• Grow more flowers - to include a cutting-flower patch!
• Do even more to balance our soil nutrition according to Steve Solomon's great book 'The Intelligent Gardener'
• Add a plastic greenhouse to the allotment to grow a few summer veg under cover.
• Don't plant anything behind courgettes!
• Improve raised bed soil.
• Buy more enviromesh, to replace torn piece and cover leeks too.
• Keep squash bed weed-free - perhaps mulch beneath plants - and grow fewer plants so they don't get so tangled.
• Grow some proper peas, perhaps.
• Try harder with celeriac.
• Grow more Pentland Crown potatoes and less Kestrel - and try another new variety too.
• There are always new varieties to try; this year new ones for us include oyster leaf, beefsteak plant, pink banana squash, skykomish tomatoes (supposed to have some blight resistance), marconi rosso peppers, and we're going to attempt to grow cauliflowers for the first time, since we buy them quite a lot...
• We also plan to plant a new fruit patch on the long-neglected and difficult far corner of the allotment, and clear and replant our overgrown herb bed.

Frosty radicchio

Around a Squash in Eight Days

Last year's hot, sunny summer brought trouble and triumph to the plot - while our potatoes and salads struggled, our tomatoes and squashes had a glorious time and produced like crazy, and we're still eating some of those squashes now!

That's the biggest - a 'Musquee de Provence' squash, which is only just ripening (my fault, I think, for planting out rather late) and weighs a whopping 12kg! We're eating its smaller brother this week, and it's gorgeous - chestnutty brown on the outside, vivid orange on the inside, light and moist, and sweet with a slightly citrussy tang about it.

It's quite a challenge, getting through a whole squash that's more than a couple of kilos in weight, and once you've cut one open you know you have a limited time to finish it up! This is how we've been doing it so far:

Day 1 - Sunday: Sausage and Pumpkin Casserole - currently one of my favourite recipes ever, and previously featured on the blog here. It's packed with goodness and just tastes wonderful. If you haven't tried it, DO!

Day 2 - Monday: Vegetable Tagine and harissa couscous from an old blog post here.

Day 3 - Tuesday: Squash and Kale Tart, from this recipe in the Telegraph, as recommended by Jono from Real Men Sow a couple of weeks back. It's cheesy and aromatic and delicious, and I'll definitely be making it again. This first attempt was slightly on the soggy side - you need to drain the cooked vegetables very well before adding them to the tart!

 

Day 4 - Wednesday: Squash and Chorizo Pasta Bake, inspired by this recipe and then made up on the spot, by roasting chunks of squash, pan-frying chopped chorizo with red onion and lots of Swiss chard from the garden, seasoning with nutmeg, pepper and sage, then mixing it all up together with cooked pasta, a splash of milk and some grated cheese, and bunging it in the oven for a while. It was easy, very tasty and satisfying - though it took a while to make, what with having to roast the squash separately first.

Day 5 - Thursday: Squash and Stilton Pie, a lovely recipe which I adapted from a food magazine last year and will share with you now!

Squash and Stilton Pie
(serves 4 quite generously)

• Preheat the oven to 180°C.
• Sauté around 180g leeks and 180g cabbage in a little oil with a pinch of rosemary for 6-8 minutes, until soft.
• Add around 480g diced squash and cook for 2-3 minutes.
• Add 3 tbsps plain flour and stir in thoroughly, then add 400ml stock, stirring well, and simmer for another 10 minutes until the squash is cooked through. Remove from the heat.
• Meanwhile, butter a pie dish (20cm diameter and 4cm deep is a good size), roll out two thirds of a block of ready-made pastry and line the dish with it. Roll out the other third to fit the top.
• Into the vegetable mix, stir about 120g crumbled Stilton and another pinch of rosemary. Check seasoning, then spoon the filling carefully into the pie.
• Brush the edges of the pastry with water and lay the pastry top over the pie. Crimp the edges with your fingers and cut off the excess pastry. Then brush the top with milk or beaten egg to glaze, poke a hole in the centre to let hot air out, and place in the oven for 20-30 minutes, until golden brown.
• Serve with buttery mash and peas.

A photo of a wedge of pie is probably never gonna look that good, but here goes:

Day 6 - Friday: A couple of weeks ago we dined with some friends at Rabot 1745 in London - a new restaurant from Hotel Chocolat, featuring cacao as an ingredient in every dish! See the menu here - ooooh, it was good! Here is my cacao-marinated steak with root veg, white chocolate horseradish mash and red wine cacao jus...

Before our meal we each were served an amuse-bouche of delicious and sweet butternut squash soup, and though we could only guess what was in it, my friend Dave and I decided to try our hands at recreating it for lunch! We roasted chunks of squash, a wedge of red onion and two garlic cloves, infused some chicken stock with a star anise, then blended the roasted veg with the stock, grated in a little nutmeg, added some butter and melted in three squares of quality white chocolate! It was very nice - buttery and nutty with a hint of vanilla - and pretty close to the soup we were trying to imitate, though I'm planning on having another go at perfecting it... I always find squash soup recipes overdo the spices and don't truly make the most of the flavour of the squash - you'd think pumpkin actually tasted of nutmeg, ginger, allspice and cinnamon, the amount people add all the time! - so this is an approach I really liked to bring out the rich and sweet qualities of what should be the star of the dish!

Day 7 - Saturday: Well, I'd like to tell you I made something else new and exciting, but it was a long and tiring day and I really needed something easy to throw together... So we made another pasta bake (similar to Wednesday's) with frozen spinach, lots of sage, a handful of toasted pine nuts and oodles of melty cheese. Lovely jubbly.

Day 8 - A couple of days later I remembered I just had a few extra chunks of squash left from roasting the last wedge on Sunday, so I mashed it up and whipped up these cheesy squash fritters for lunch. They were yummy, but I'd use just a little less salt next time. And I should probably have served them with a salad instead of munching them down just on their own...

So there you go - that's how we get through a great big squash without boring everyone silly. When it's time to eat the 12kg one, though, I'll have to give some away - or have a big dinner party! (I make that enough squash for about 24 meals for four!)

We'll definitely be growing Musquee de Provence again this year, along with our reliable favourite Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato squash (still got one of those waiting to be eaten too), some Crown Prince (another new one on us last year and it really is as good as they say - such rich, sweet flesh!), Uchiki Kuri (which we've never succeeded with yet but I'm determined!), the rare Blue Banana, and whatever pumpkin seeds I've got left over from last year. With their versatility, variety, low maintenance plants and great storing ability, I just love winter squashes!

Autumn Vegetable Tagine

While I don't really want this to turn into a food blog, there's nothing like a great recipe to pull me out of blogging apathy and get me posting again, and this one, which began as a half-hearted attempt to use up some aging veg from the fridge while Eddie was working late last night and ended up one of the tastiest dishes I've cooked all year, is a cracker.

The onions and garlic are in and drying, the courgette plants are fruiting their last, and, even though my own crop failed completely, the shops are full of gorgeous pumpkins. (I find it so strange how they sell 'carving pumpkins' cheaper than the pumpkins in the vegetable aisle, don't you? They're just as good to eat! I love how you can get so many meals out of a £1.50 pumpkin!) With all these plus sweet potatoes and dried fruit, this Moroccan-influenced dish is absolutely seasonal, it's awesomely healthy, it's quick and easy to make, and the flavours... the flavours are aromatic, sweet and wonderful. Enjoy as a midweek family supper or posh it up for something more special. If you don't have harissa paste, flavour the couscous simply with lemon juice and seasoning, or add cumin, garlic, paprika and chilli to taste as a substitute.

Autumn Vegetable Tagine with harissa couscous
(serves four)

• Fry one large chopped onion in a little oil until soft. Add 2-3 cloves chopped garlic and a tablespoon grated ginger, and soften for a minute or two.
• Add a teaspoon each of cumin, ground coriander and cinnamon, then stir in two sweet potatoes, diced (approx 300g), and around 300g pumpkin or winter squash, diced.
• Add four chopped tomatoes, a handful of sultanas (chopped dried apricots would also work nicely) and just enough vegetable stock to cover, and simmer around five minutes.
• Add a courgette, diced, and simmer another ten minutes or so until all the veg are soft.
• Meanwhile, put 200g couscous in a heatproof bowl. Mix a heaped tablespoon harissa paste with 400ml hot water, pour it over the couscous, and cover.
• Toast a handful of flaked almonds in a dry frying pan until they're just turning golden brown here and there. Set aside.
• Add a can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained, to the veg. Cook another couple of minutes to heat through. Check seasoning.
• Sprinkle some lemon juice over the couscous and fluff up with a fork.
• Serve the tagine with the harissa couscous, and topped with the almonds and some chopped parsley.

Allotment update. Gah!

I'm finally starting to face up to the fact this is a bad, bad year for growing. Between torrential rain and scorching sun, and thanks to weeds thriving through the mild winter, we still haven't cleared enough earth to plant out our sweetcorn, beans, sunflowers and squashes, and they're languishing and potbound at home. Grass is taking over everything and slugs are eating everything else. We've had the worst asparagus crop ever, and the spring hail that blasted blossoms off fruit trees and bushes is going to mean a pretty poor fruit crop too. All my cucumbers and gherkins (at home) yellowed and died for reasons unknown - I suspect they just couldn't take the prolonged cold, wet, dull weather - cutworms (or something) mowed down 90% of my broad beans, and my shallots have inexplicably gone straight to flower without swelling to any kind of decent size.

At least the potatoes are doing okay.

The garlic is looking good and the onions are doing all right, albeit with rather liberal applications of (organic) slug pellets to try to keep it that way.

And despite a lot of slug damage and a few weeds as always, we're picking plenty of strawberries, which are always a joy.

We've achieved one of our allotment goals at least - we've finally planted up the corner patch we hardly ever use (hard, root-filled soil) with some artichokes, perennial cauliflowers and heritage kales - all planted through weedproof fabric to try to keep things under control...

I'm gradually covering it with stones to protect the fabric (it's gonna take a while!), and plan to plant some sage between the brassicas to try to keep caterpillars at bay - apparently cabbage whites hate the smell. I'll believe it when I see it...

At home, our tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, herbs, mangetout, chard and French beans are doing all right, I've resown a couple of cucumbers, and I might actually manage to grow some aubergines this year - they're loving the extra warmth of the plastic greenhouse - so all is not lost.

But I'm gonna have to accept we're just not going to get everything done on the plot this year. Sigh.

Born Blind

I recently noticed my Uchiki Kuri squash seedlings were not progressing equally; while one has dutifully produced a healthy first leaf and is making a start on its second and third, the other has no growing tip.

This is called a 'blind' seedling, and occurs from time to time (especially in curcubits, in my experience, but also in tomatoes, peppers, brassicas and virtually any other kind of plant), seemingly at random and for reasons unknown. It's a disorder or defect, rather than a disease. This blind seedling has no true leaves at all, but sometimes a seedling may develop just one true leaf and be left with no growing point, like the tomato seedling below, or even grow a full pair and then stop.

Sometimes, if you keep it going long enough, the blind seedling may sprout a growing tip after all, but it's much quicker and easier just to compost the plant and resow. And that is what I have done.

Chestnut Ravioli

For years I've been a bit put off by chestnuts - when I was a kid and Dad roasted them in the fire at Christmas time, I always thought they smelled weirdly of methylated spirits. (Maybe Dad just wasn't telling us something about how he got the fire going...) But yet, Mum makes a wicked chestnut stuffing every Christmas, while my mother-in-law serves them roasted with sprouts and shallots - lovely. And they add a gorgeous richness to cakes and desserts too - the chestnut chocolate torte we sampled last Wild Food Night was awesome. Chestnuts are a huge British winter tradition, and quite rightly so - they're indigenous, freely and widely available, tasty, and their high starch content (twice that of potatoes!) makes them massively versatile - in fact, (though they taste great in themselves) they'll happily soak up other flavours and you can use them in many ways you'd use potatoes; adding them to stews and soups, using them as a flour, as a puree, as a side dish... They're low fat and high fibre, and full of complex carbs and high quality proteins, with as much vitamin C as lemons by weight, and lots of vitamins E and B6, thiamin, potassium, folate and magnesium. So I've made it my aim - nay, my duty - this year, to use them in my own cooking...

Sadly, my attempts at foraging for chestnuts have so far all failed - it turns out they drop around here much earlier than all the books say - so all the chestnuts you'll be seeing here are bought from markets or supermarkets (probably ready-roasted and vacuum-packed). But it's not going to stop me making the best of this great British ingredient.

The first thing that sprang to mind, especially when I was given a large patty-pan-type squash last week and asked to do something fun with it, was Monica Shaw's mouthwatering picture of chestnut pasta ravioli which I'd seen on Twitter a few weeks back, and she kindly linked me to the chestnut pasta recipe here and the pumpkin ravioli recipe here. Granted, I've never tried my hand at any kind of pasta before, but I'm not one to be put off by mere cluelessness...

Actually, I've made this twice in the last few days. The first attempt, while perfectly edible, was not really what I aspired to...

 ...but I learnt a lot of lessons from the process:

Lesson No. 1: Chestnut flour (required for the pasta dough) is not widely available. I've checked all my local supermarkets and health food shops and there's none of this stuff in the whole city. But a couple of websites said I could make my own by milling roasted chestnuts, so that's what I did. It's moister than flour should be (though it could - and probably should - be dried out in a low oven or dehydrator) and gives a more wholemealy look and texture. (Lesson No. 1a: Use less egg in the dough to make up for this extra moisture!)

Lesson No. 2: Lock the cat out when chestnuts are around. From the moment I opened the packet he was miaowing round my feet and trying to get on the table. I couldn't understand it - you'd have thought we were making some kind of sushi-meets-catnip treat! Then he dived in the bin, dragged the chestnut packet out and started licking the crumbs out like a mad thing! Bad kitty! He doesn't normally go for non-meat/dairy foods - I wonder what on earth it is about chestnuts he likes so much! Does anyone else's cat go crazy for them?

Lesson No. 3: Rest the dough half an hour before rolling out. I realised we'd forgotten to do this the first time, and when I did it the second time it made the whole process much easier.

Lesson No. 4: The pasta must be THIN. Reeeeally thin. Like, nearly-see-through thin. Resting helps this, as the dough is much more willing to stretch, but it's a rather sticky dough and too often it stuck to the table or fell apart as I tried to roll it out as thin as I possibly could! It paid off in the end; my first batch of ravioli were way too thick, tricky to fill well, took ages to cook, and the pasta/filling ratio was all wrong. The second batch were much more delicate and allowed for more filling. Of course, none of this would have been an issue if I had a pasta machine...

Lesson No. 5: Patty-pan squash isn't the ideal squash for a recipe like this. Its flavour is very mild and sadly just got a bit lost. Pumpkin, butternut or onion squash are more robust flavourwise and far more suitable. (The other half of that patty-pan will go great in a stew or a curry later this week.)

I experimented a bit with fillings too on the first attempt, and made spiced squash (good, but could have done without the cream which diluted the flavour), squash with rosemary, cheese and tomato (good, but could have done with more cheese), squash with chopped chestnuts (good, but ground or pureed chestnuts would have been better), squash with truffle oil (good, but it's punchy stuff and I made it a touch too strong!) and mushroom, with shallot, fresh parsley and a splash of brandy (delicious! must make again!). The second time I kept it simple and used just roasted pumpkin with a knob of butter, seasoning and a touch of sage and nutmeg.

Here's my second attempt at ravioli:

 

Not too bad, huh? I suspect the pasta could still be thinner, but I'm pretty pleased. The chestnut adds a rich new dimension to the pasta, the pumpkin is fragrant and delicious, and the crispy shallot and sage butter topping (from the recipe above) is the perfect accompaniment (I replaced the pine nut garnish in the recipe with toasted almonds to keep in the spirit of all things local and homegrown).

I think, though, that my next chestnut recipe will have to be something a bit more simple. Ravioli takes aaaages!

EDIT: See Carl Legge's lovely chestnut pasta post and recipe here too!

Goodbye Summer...

With temperatures set to drop close to freezing later this week, and squash plants turning brown and straggly on the plot, we've had to bring in the last of our summer crops.

I am very disappointed with our pumpkin/squash harvest, which totals a measly 5.5kg. Most years we bring home whole pumpkins weighing that much! Here it is: two Baby Bear pumpkins, one stunted and underripe Atlantic 'Giant' (ha!), one miniature Sweet Dumpling, two smaller-than-usual Thelma Sanders and one very tiny and very unripe Butternut. Sigh.

I'm most disappointed with the Thelma Sanders - in all previous years they've reliably produced several big fruits per plant - this year just one small one each. What went wrong? Slugs were certainly a major problem this year, destroying two whole Crown Prince plants and eating the other Atlantic Giant pumpkin, which was looking really good early in the season. Perhaps they thrived in the cool and damp summer. Perhaps I should just be spending more money on pest control... I planted the seedlings out a bit late too, which meant they were a little pot-bound and took longer than usual to settle in. And the weed jungle which came up while we were on holiday couldn't have been timed much worse and gave the young plants a lot of competition. Hmmm. Must do better next year...

These will sit in the sun by our back door for a while now to finish ripening (hopefully) and for the skins to cure for storage (not that it'll take long to eat this little lot).

Still, it's not all bad news - we have dug up another 13kg potatoes, bringing our total to something around 30-35kg, and we even found a late handful of strawberries and raspberries!

In the garden, the tomatoes are still going - they've given us fruit since the beginning of July, sixteen weeks ago! Despite blight finally hitting the plants about a month ago, very few fruits have been affected and they're actually still producing! The plants look a total mess though... Today I will pick the rest of the ripe fruit, but I think I'll leave the green ones where they are just to see if they can continue to surprise me...

The courgettes and cucumbers have just about finished now, so I've picked the last fruits to keep in the fridge until I'm ready to use them, so that just leaves the peppers, and there are so many! I'm wondering whether to just haul the plants indoors on cold nights, rather than picking them all at once and trying to eat them all really fast! I think I'll overwinter a couple of plants anyway, but they're not small so it'll be interesting...

Pruning Tomatoes

Pruning tomatoes began as quite a mystery to me, but it's easy when you figure it out. Not all tomato varieties need pruning, of course; bush or tumbling types (determinate, producing their crop all at once) can be left to their own devices, but to keep cordon or vining types (indeterminate, producing throughout the season until first frosts) in check and to focus their energy on fruit production rather than leaf production, a little help is needed.

At each point where a leaf branch grows out from the main stem, another shoot will grow, usually at about a 45 degree angle. Like this:

If you let these extra shoots, or suckers, grow, you end up with a sprawling and unwieldy plant requiring elaborate staking (trust me, I know this from experience!), and far more leaf than the plant really needs. So just pinch each extra shoot off at the base, and you'll have a much tidier plant, not to mention more, bigger fruit!

Easy. In fact, you can make new tomato plants by replanting these! If you want to do this, let them grow a few inches long before removing them, cut them off carefully so as not to damage the hairs on the stem (which will turn into roots), plant them with their stems deep in good compost, and take good care of them for a few days while they get settled.

We had quite a wet bank holiday weekend here (hurrah!) but that didn't stop me pruning the tomatoes and getting down to the plot to plant out the sweetcorn and some squashes. In fact, drizzly weather's ideal for planting out, as the roots don't get dried out or exposed to sun and the young plants settle in quicker to damp soil.

I planted out fifteen sweetcorn plants (Double Standard Bicolour from Real Seeds) in a block of 3x5 to assist pollination, plus two Baby Bear pumpkins, two Astia F1 courgettes, two Crown Prince squash (highly recommended to me many times but this is the first time I've tried them), one F1 butternut, one Waltham butternut, one Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato squash and one Sweet Dumpling! Phew! As usual I've planted them closer together than I probably should have, so I'll have to be careful to keep the plants in check and give them plenty of food and water. Now there's just the Atlantic Giant pumpkin to go, when I manage to dig over that last patch... Oh, and the brassicas, late as usual...

Can you believe we've harvested very nearly 2kg of strawberries already, and it's only the first of June?! I wasn't too impressed with this one though.

Anyone know what these beasties are? They look like earthworms but since when did earthworms eat strawberries? They're eating their way in, not out, right? Right?? If I ever bit into a fresh juicy strawberry and found that I think I'd be put off for life!