God I love growing our own

[JamezF]

Had a bit of a clear out of the greenhouse this weekend, composting spare plants that I didn't have space to keep and getting pretty much everything else planted out. All I have now are some parsley, a few brassicas that aren't quite big enough to be planted out yet and some salad leaves that I've just sown, along with peppers that will stay in the greenhouse for the rest of the season. It's quite strange to see the place so empty

The carrots I've sown direct over the last few weeks are sprouting nicely. Now I just have to hope the slugs don't get to them. The wet weather hardly helps with that.

I have a small part of a bed alongside Frankenstein's Greenhouse that isn't currently in use, onto which I dumped some rotted horse manure a short while ago because I had nowhere else to keep it. After my wife brought some thyme and rosemary plants out to the greenhouse over the weekend I've decided to use the manure to extend the bed slightly and fill it with herbs. I did point out that if I got some seeds we could have parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme but the response was less than enthusiastic, let's say. I'm told that chives would be an acceptable substitute for the sage, but it just won't feel right to me.

As fate would have it, our sixteen year old fridge-freezer threw a fit on Sunday and whilst it displays a code so I know what the fault is, I can't get parts to fix it any more. As well as the code it also sounds an alarm that can't be turned off short of dismantling the entire machine and snipping the wires. A few hours of that is insanely irritating. We've therefore had to spend a fortune on a new one. I have no idea how insulated boxes with doors on the front can be so expensive. Describing it as a "silver lining" might be going a bit too far, but one of the benefits of this particular cloud is that when the replacement arrives tomorrow morning it will be accompanied by large amounts of cardboard that I can use when I make up the new herb bed.

The rather less metaphorical and rather too real clouds that have filled the sky for last couple of days have made it feel much more like late Autumn here than the middle of Summer so we had a full roast dinner yesterday, something we wouldn't usually do during the warmer half of the year. Aside from the pork and fennel it was roasted with, it gave me great pleasure that everything else on the plate came from the garden.

As of last Friday we're now composting absolutely all of our kitchen waste. Even the in-laws are joining in, which is nice as I wasn't sure they would. I suspect no longer needing to buy compostable bin liners might be what swung it. The little brown council food recycling caddy that used to sit outside the door has been replaced by two twenty litre plastic buckets. Kitchen waste goes into one and if there are any concerns about it getting a bit stinky then a generous scoop of sawdust (stored in the other) is dumped on top. As it gets near full I'll empty the whole lot into the compost bin.

James

 

[Erichalfbee]

Harvesting courgettes ( for some time now) aubergines onions garlic and tomatoes Just need the peppers to catch up.

 

[roche]

Are you up to one million things to do with courgettes?

 

[JamezF]

Are you up to one million things to do with courgettes?

Let some grow big and use them to make chile, ginger and marrow (courgette) chutney. Fantastic with curries.

James

 

[Erichalfbee]

Are you up to one million things to do with courgettes?

A few go in the compost bin

 

[Erichalfbee]

Let some grow big and use them to make chile, ginger and marrow (courgette) chutney. Fantastic with curries.

James

That sounds good.
I usually make Hugh FW’s Glutney then whizz it up so I have a finer chopped chutney. That uses up all sorts. I once even made my own dried grapes to add to it

 

[Erichalfbee]

Does anybody have a food dehydrator?

 

[Midget Gem]

Will be cooking aubergine, courgette and chickpea dhal for the freezer (plus any other veg that is around and feels appropriate). Once the tomatoes start to ripen, I will change to roast ratatouille - a taste of summer in the winter months.

 

[pargyle]

Does anybody have a food dehydrator?

Me ...

 

[roche]

Let some grow big and use them to make chile, ginger and marrow (courgette) chutney. Fantastic with curries.

James

Do you have a tried, tested and trusted recipe?

 

[Erichalfbee]

Me ...

Does it work well and how much does it cost to run?
At the moment I freeze most fruit that can’t be kept. I froze quite a bit of apple with cinnamon and honey once the stored apples started to go off. It’s great on porridge in the morning as well as with puddings if various sorts for the kids when they visit.

 

[Erichalfbee]

Do you have a tried, tested and trusted recipe?

This one looks good. I shall try it.
https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/marrow-and-ginger-chutney/

 

[JamezF]

Do you have a tried, tested and trusted recipe?

I'll ask my wife. She's the one who makes it.

James

 

[JamezF]

Did a fair bit of work in the polytunnel today, where it was sweltering despite the pouring rain outside. Tidied up the tomato plants, removing side-shoots and old leaves, tried to tidy up the cucumbers which are now producing fruit faster than we can eat them, did some weeding and removed some of the "pepper socks" that my daughter made for me to stop pepper flowers cross-pollinating, wrapping a bag tie around the stem of the fruit and moving the socks to other flowers that are about to open.

As far as I can ascertain all of the peppers that I'm growing this year, both chiles and sweet peppers, are (non-F1) open-pollinated varieties. Seed for some can still be quite expensive however and germination isn't always as reliable as I'd like (and in fact one variety I have this year -- allegedly the same as that used to make "Peppadew" pickled peppers commercially -- can sometimes be very hard to get seed for at all). Saving seed therefore seems like a good idea, but I'm told that peppers are "very promiscuous" and cross exceptionally easily with nearby plants despite being able to self-pollinate. So my daughter made up some little bags by cutting up old pairs of school tights that she'll never wear again and sewing up one end. Where there's an easily-accessible flower that is just about ready to open, I put it inside a bag and hold the bag closed around the stem with a miniature clothes peg to stop insects visiting the flower. Ten days to a couple of weeks later there's hopefully a self-pollinated fruit inside and the "sock" can be removed. The bag tie is to mark which fruits are definitely self-pollinated so I can make sure they're left to ripen fully before harvesting the seeds. I've never tried it before and I'm finding that perhaps one third of the flowers just dry up and drop off, but that may be down to my lack of practice in picking the right flowers. I'm quite excited about seeing how it all works out though.

What I didn't do today that really needed to be done was lowering some of the tomato strings. I've reached the point now where lowering some of the plants will mean that the lowest truss of fruit touches the ground and many of them still have unripe fruit. Not sure how to handle that at the moment, so I thought I'd leave it to think about overnight.

James

 

[JamezF]

I thought I'd kick off making some pickled red cabbage this evening, so when I went to shut the chickens in for the night I stopped off at the veggie plot, dithered a bit and selected a medium-size red cabbage:

I've never grown red cabbage for the Summer before, but they're one of my successes for this year. Absolutely enormous! I didn't use it all so I'll be lifting some carrots and grabbing a few onions to make some coleslaw tomorrow I think.

James

 

[Aneebe]

I thought I'd kick off making some pickled red cabbage this evening, so when I went to shut the chickens in for the night I stopped off at the veggie plot, dithered a bit and selected a medium-size red cabbage:

I've never grown red cabbage for the Summer before, but they're one of my successes for this year. Absolutely enormous! I didn't use it all so I'll be lifting some carrots and grabbing a few onions to make some coleslaw tomorrow I think.

James

James where on EARTH do you get your skills and energy from? If they were buyable I'd be ordering. I'm loving reading all your posts. Ingenuity to the nth!

 

[enrico]

Does anybody have a food dehydrator?

Yes I do

 

[enrico]

Does it work well and how much does it cost to run?
At the moment I freeze most fruit that can’t be kept. I froze quite a bit of apple with cinnamon and honey once the stored apples started to go off. It’s great on porridge in the morning as well as with puddings if various sorts for the kids when they visit.

I only switch it on when we have sun on the PV panels for a day
Ours is a Lakeland one and runs at 400 w continuously. It takes at least 24 hours to dry most foods although we tend to dry them as much as we can be bothered and then freeze them. Things like apples, pears, strawberries etc are nice taken out of the freezer and used as a healthy evening snack.
Would I buy another one? probably not as we don't use it that much but at least we do use it unlike some kitchen gadgets

 

[enrico]

I thought I'd kick off making some pickled red cabbage this evening, so when I went to shut the chickens in for the night I stopped off at the veggie plot, dithered a bit and selected a medium-size red cabbage:

I've never grown red cabbage for the Summer before, but they're one of my successes for this year. Absolutely enormous! I didn't use it all so I'll be lifting some carrots and grabbing a few onions to make some coleslaw tomorrow I think.

James

We planted red cabbage but they all came up green and useless. Reckon they sent the wrong seed

 

[JamezF]

We planted red cabbage but they all came up green and useless. Reckon they sent the wrong seed

Could be. I grew some romanesco cauliflowers a few years back and they all came up like calabrese. I had to assume they'd packaged the wrong seed somewhere along the line.

James