June's Harvest

Summer is finally here and our soft fruit are piling in! There are plenty of trays now freezing for consumption later in the summer. Shades of pink also seem to be the colour of the month!

Cherries! The very first harvest from our cherry tree - 'summer sun'

Our mystery berry. Longer than a raspberry and much darker. Growing on a thornless vine too.

The first of the raspberries.

It''s Wimbledon so strawberries are obligatory.

Broad beans. Not pink I hear you say...

Pink!

Not as pink as the packet but then I don't like them old and tough.

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Photo Friday

Our cabbages may be weedy this year but they can still make a reasonable photo.

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November in the Garden - Preparing for Winter

It is the time of year when, as a commuter, I need to get up 5 minutes earlier. Winter is firing its first warning shots and the car needs a light frost scraping before I can use it. We have only had a couple but its a cue to get the tender plants inside before a true frost arrives and prepare for the coming cold. We shut up our conservatory for the winter so it makes and excellent place to overwinter plants - too cold to enjoy dinner in but not sub zero. There is almost no harvest this month (just a few undersized beetroot) but here are a few photos to keep you updated with the garden:

One re-stacked wood pile, all ready for grabbing a quick bundle of logs in the cold and dark.

Our bay standard may have survived a mild winter but we would rather not risk it.

And keeping it company - one aloe...

... and a small fuschia

The cold isn't deterring the nasturtiums. 

This is how most of the vegetable garden looks now.

Baby beetroot. Hardly worth cooking some of them!

Have any of you tried growing beetroot with any success? I think mine may have been overcrowded a little by the cabbages this year.

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Fruit of the Garden - October's Harvest

This month we've been clearing down the garden ready for the winter. There are some plants still happily producing fruit and veg but some we've decided to just take what we can and leave it there.

We've dug up the last of our potatoes (the pink fir apples):

We've harvested the rest of the tomatoes - mostly ripe and a few green:

Joe cleaned up the shallots ready for moving into the kitchen.

We've harvested our sweetcorn. It's a little undersized, but we put these plants in quite late and are glad to get something from them.

The courgette plant is still going, producing marrows and courgettes depending on our vigilance.

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Fruit of the Garden - September's Harvest

Another month has passed and we're starting to notice that we planted all our veg to see us through summer months rather than planning food for different seasons. We've still working through our salad potatoes, and the tomatoes are slowly ripening, but this month has mostly been about our fruit trees. We have two really productive fruit trees in our garden - one apple, one pear - along with four young trees that are yet to mature enough for fruit - three apple, one cherry.

We have no idea on the varieties of the two old trees, the apple is a cooker and neither apple or pear seems to keep well. We've been processing and stewing all the fruit as it comes off the trees to stop it going to waste.

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One Potato, Two Potato....

On a completely unrelated topic, writer and blogger Chloe Banks has just launched a flash fiction series on her blog based on the signs of the zodiac. Joe and I have volunteered our somewhat dubious fiction writing skills to contribute Pisces and Capricorn to her collection. You'll find us hanging out over there on 15th October and 19th November, but I'm pretty sure the whole series is going to be amazing and would very much recommend you go and check it out! 

For the first time this year we've been growing our own spuds. We trundled off to our local garden centre back in February where they had a fair range of varieties on a "fill a bag for £3" offer - and we had a voucher for another pound off that - bargain! We decided to take advantage of not having to commit to a whole bag of one type, instead choosing four different varieties.

We always eat a lot of new potatoes over the summer so decided that rather than trying to store them we'd just eat them fresh. We've now completely consumed all our earlies and have made a start on the later ones - here are our thoughts on the different types (as much for our memory as your information!).

Arran Pilot

Arran Pilot is a first early, and was the first of our potatoes to mature. Despite description of a firm waxy texture we ended up with fairly floury bland potatoes - not very inspiring. Maybe we ended up with the wrong spud?! Instead of boiling the rest of the crop we used them for potato wedges and roasting which had much better results, but we probably wouldn't bother with these again.

Pentland Javelin

Another first early, Pentland Javelin was the next potato to be put to the test. We found it had a much better flavour and texture than the Arran and so we used these for new potatoes throughout the early summer.

Kestrel

Moving on a bit into the year and we started to dig up our kestrels. These are second earlies and we let them get a little larger making a good all round potato. We have enjoyed these boiled as new potatoes, but found that they went from nicely cooked to completely disintegrated fairly quickly leaving us with a sloppy mess on at least one occasion. We've also roasted these with success.

Pink Fir Apple

Lastly we moved onto the pink fir apples which are a main cropping salad potato. Distinctively knobbly, we've only tried these as new spuds but find they boil well and have got a good flavour. We've been eating them alongside the kestrels and find that the two pair up to make a good crop for all occasions.

Arran Pilot excepted, we've been pleased with all our potatoes this year and may choose similar varieties next year. Or we may decide to try four completely new ones...

Which potatoes have you grown? What are your favourites?

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Fruit of the Garden - August's Harvest

August has almost escaped us so it seems time to give you the summary for the month. We have had our first tomatoes and sampled our salad potatoes. I also lifted all our onions and garlic as some of them had completely died back.

Red Onions

White Onions

Garlic

Shallots

More Shallots

We didn't plant any carrots but this still turned up whilst weeding!

Salad Potatoes (Pink Fir Apple)

Courgettes

Our first tomatoes. Ever. Third year lucky (and first year with a conservatory)!

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Smoked Garlic

Part of our garlic crop had a bad year and was wilted and brown a month early. These garlic were all on the small side so I decided it was best to do something with them and process them as a batch. Having just completed a lot of work on the table I had a big bag of oak sawdust so decided to go and attempt some smoking. I have long admired the art of cold smoking so decided that a gentle smoke of the garlic before preserving may be fun. Being a sunny day helped!

I cobbled together a smoker from things we had around the house already. A storm kettle made the fire box and chimney to distance the food from the heat. For the smoking chamber I hijacked a terracotta pot, lining up the hole in its base with the chimney and covering the top with a convenient lump of firewood.

One ad-hoc smoker.

To support the garlic in the pot I simply used some wire mesh. I peeled the bulbs down to cloves so that the smoke could have the minimum layers of papery skin to get through.

The garlic balanced on some chicken wire to let the smoke get at it. This pot is only small - some of those cloves are tiny!

To generate the smoke I used a couple of lumps of lit charcoal buried in a mix of damp and dry oak shavings. Occasionally I added some sprigs of rosemary for extra aromatic scents. This fire needed to tick over very slowly and did require tending every 30 minutes or so.

Charcoal, sawdust and rosemary. Pungent.

I left the whole lot to smoke away slowly for around 5-6 hours. This wasn't a very long smoke as I didn't want to commit days to building up the cold smoke - manually checking the fire every half hour would have been very time consuming!

Smoke wafts out from under the lid.

Once done the garlic cloves smelt wonderful and were turning a golden colour. I peeled the cloves and minced them, preserving them in the freezer. Generally the gloves were still firm, indicating that I didn't get it too hot. With garlic (or so my reading informs me) if you hot smoke it they go to mush and become suitable for using as a dip but won't have the strength for use as proper garlic any more. The end result has certainly seemed tasty in several meals!

The finished product.

To preserve it I stuck the minced garlic in oil and froze it. It is a bit awkward to get out the jar but it's better than botulism!

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Fruit of the Garden - July's Harvest

July has come and almost gone so it feels like a good time to post an update on our harvest. It has been a month of many salads with the perfect weather to get us into the mood, strawberries to go with the Wimbledon final and the first of our potato harvest. We also had some stray garlic that had been flattened by something so I dug it up and tried smoking it, as it was all quite small. More on that to come later!

Arran Pilot

More Sweet Peas

Smoked Garlic

Pentland Javalin

Strawberries

Mixed Salad with Nasturtium Flowers

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Fruit of the Garden - June's Harvest

This is hopefully to be the first post of many. We decided that the best way of keeping up with the garden over the summer is to post pictures of our harvest. As we had a long winter this year (and didn't plant any spring crops in the autumn) the first produce is only just coming in, eggs aside. Our potatoes are almost ready and our salad crop is coming on nicely. The tomatoes (in the conservatory) are flowering and 4 feet tall and we have a few flowers blooming away quietly. I shall try and include some of the flowers in here too even if they are not part of the traditional harvest.

Thinning out the salad crop - it would be a shame not to eat it!

Our alliums have been with us all month, blossoming quietly outside the window.

The sweet peas have just opened this weekend.

We don't know what these are but they needed pruning and look pretty!

Linking in with The Impatient Gardener and Veg Plotting this week - everyone's enjoying their gardens it seems!

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