What a Very Productive couple of days

Sunday 11th February 2018
Looking after my body
I woke up aching. These old muscles need recuperation time from activities such as lugging sacks of potatoes about.

So I chose gentle jobs for the day. First up was creosoting all the wood in the polytunnel for I suspect that is where the red spider mites hide away to overwinter. The metal frame has already been nuked with disinfectant and blasted with water but a multifaceted chemical attack is clearly what is needed.

All I need to do now is to clean the polythene. Most of the algae is on the inside and the outside is just grimy. I have ordered a long handled squeegee / soft broom affair for the job. The reason it is not here yet is another story.
This is a great job to do, as the light floods in afterwards.

We are not exactly having many beautiful clear winter days at the moment, so again it was not a day for outdoor jobs.

Instead I potted up some of the tomato seedlings. I've started a few varieties off early this year just to see how they do compared to the others. My hope is that the conservatory proves to be the ultimate plant rearing facility and I can start everything off that bit earlier so that harvests come sooner. I don't normally rush things, but the sooner I get a harvest the more tomatoes I will get if blight strikes later on.
I have sown some lemongrass as well and it has already germinated as has my first sowing of coriander.
I potted up the chilli seedlings too. I am still waiting for a couple of varieties to come through, but old chilli seed often loses its viability.

Finally I sowed my leek seeds for the year. I have changed variety this year as last year's suffered terribly from rust and have not stood the frosts well. I just feel it is time for a swap, so I've gone for Porbella which claims to have good rust resistance. By the way, this is not the same rust that cars suffer from!

With the sowing of this year's leeks, I harvested the last of last year's for a leek and potato soup. I harvested the last of the carrots too. They should have been harvested before the winter to save them from the slugs, but we got plenty this year so I left some standing in the ground.
The last ones left were Autumn King and had grown to a good size.
There was a fair amount of slug damage and a few millipedes and woodlice had been munching too, but I still got a good bowl full even after sorting. The geese got the rest and spent the next few days doing orange poo!
As I harvested the carrots, the chickens pecked up the baby keel slugs which had moved in. One I'm particular waited for me to hold up each newly dug carrot. The fate of this carrot harvest was a carrot and ginger soup which came out very nicely. In addition, any spare carrots, leeks and a few other bits and bobs were used to make two big pans of stock to add depth of flavour to the soups.

The evening was spent cooking. I am still keeping to my New Year's resolution of cooking more with our produce. The two aforementioned soups plus a big pot of roast sweet potato and pumpkin soup.
These soups will feed the first meeting of the Fenland Smallholders Club committee that I am chairing this weekend.

Monday 12th February 2018
Cooking and Preserving

Beef Goulash with roast Salsify and Scorzonera.

Portuguese Corn bread and very British Lardy Cake.

What a very productive day. After three batches of soup yesterday evening, I took on a Beef Goulash with Roast Salsify and Scorzonera with Ginger, Lemon and Honey. Yummy!

Then onto bread making. with a Portuguese Corn Bread (thanks to finding somewhere to buy corn meal) and a soda Pumpkin Bread (courtesy of the buttermilk I found in the same shop)

While I was doing all this, Sue was processing a ton of blackcurrants from the freezer, juicing them ready to make a jelly. She mad 30 jars of delicious damson jam too.

Next up for me was Lardy Cake. I make this wicked favourite every year, using some of the very best lard we saved from Daisy when she went to the great pigsty in the sky. 

Then biscuits for the committee meeting. Orange Biscuits, Walnut and Chocolate Slices and Prune and Peel Rock Buns.

It's a good job I am trying to lose a bit of weight at the moment!

Spring... for one day only

Tuesday 30th January

Spring is here!

Today I heard a song thrush, a mistle thrush, great tits, robins, dunnocks, chaffinches, little owls (more of a duet than a song), skylarks and goldfinches all singing for joy. The sun beat down and cheered up the whole smallholding,

A farm record 22 Tree Sparrows were at the feeders. There were probably quite a few more as they were coming and going, their familiar chipping calls announcing their flights in and out.

I put up some very temporary stock fencing along the boundary where the geese kept going yesterday, but they just waddled further up the land, much further than they have ever been before, until they found the end of the fence.

This was solved with a few sheep hurdles. Why didn't I think of this earlier?

I got on with washing plant pots and cleaning plant labels - the best way to get the pencil off them from last year is to rub wet dirt on them.

I sowed 54 Mangetout seeds to grow in the polytunnel. This has worked brilliantly in previous years and the plants have cropped and are out before the space is needed.

This year I am trying some Sugarsnap peas too. The seeds are old but hopefully they will germinate successfully.

I can't grow peas outside - they need more water than I can provide, so this quick early crop in the polytunnel is perfect.

I sowed my chillies for the year too. Just four varieties and I will only grow one plant of each, for they are prolific.

The Piccolo tomatoes have germinated well already, as have the Black Russians and Gardener's Delight. They germinate on a heated propagator base. As soon as they come up, I open the vent on the plastic lid to allow air to circulate, otherwise they will just rot off.

In another couple of days they will come off heat and go into a mini greenhouse in the conservatory. At this early stage in their growth, light is essential so they don't get leggy.

Taking advantage of the glorious weather, I took Boris and Arthur out for a nice long walk along the river. Unfortunately the drainage board have felt it necessary to completely strip the banks, so no kingfishers, moorhens or reed buntings to be seen. The photo below shows the only small stretch where the vegetation has been left on one bank.

There was still time when I got back to plant up three small blueberry bushes which I purchased. I did have some of these in the soft fruit area, but the rabbits took a liking to them. Besides, they are better in pots which I can fill with ericaceous compost.

I will only need one decent harvest to repay the investment.

Wednesday 31st January 2018

SuperBlueBloodmoon!

Supermoons seem ten a penny these days. Hardly a full moon passes without making the grade. It is encouraging that people are finally noticing the natural wonders around them.

Tonight's supermoon was a blue moon too - that just means the second in a calendar month, so really it's just a coincidence of numbers. What I didn't know was that February will be a Black Moon month - no full moon.

The Blue Moon was also a Blood Moon, something to do with an eclipse earlier in the day and on another side of the world.

To be fair it was a nice moon that shone in through the skylight, though my camera totally failed to do it justice.

A bumper pepper harvest

Tuesday 24th October 2017
Still mowing
Crazy as it seems, I've been doing a lot of mowing this last week. The weather in our part of the world has been unbelievably mild and dry so the grass is still growing fast.

Wednesday 25th October 2017
A quick trip to the beach
A trip to the beach. With high tide falling mid morning, there was no avoiding it and the limited beach space made for perfect socialising conditions for the dogs. Boris really isn't that bothered. He is completely obsessed with the ball and rolling around in wet sand. Arthur on the other hand is desperate to meet every single dog he sees.
There were children everywhere too as it was half term. At least they are getting out in the fresh air, though we did hear one mother telling her child not to dig in the sand as it was wet and dirty! eh?
We didn't stay in Norfolk too long as it was absolutely packed. With the dogs tired out we returned to the smallholding and ventured into the polytunnel, which has all gone a bit overgrown.

Bumper pepper harvest
I would love to use the polytunnel to hold crops over the winter, but unfortunately I will soon need to clear everything out and thoroughly clean everything to keep the spider mite and blight down next year.
Today's task was to harvest and sort out the pepper plants. They were slow to get going this year and I forgot all about them. But peppers and chillis seem to thrive on neglect and Sue and I had soon collected a bumper crop.
Most notable were the lemon chillis - we will have enough for the next few years! The paprika chilli had done well, but the Jalapeno looked suspiciously like Cayenne - this often happens with chillis.
The sweet peppers had succumbed a little to the mice and slugs - in fact they are both partial to the hot ones too - but fortunately there was enough for everyone.
The Sweet Bananas were especially prolific this year and the long twisty Turkish Corbaci peppers made an attractive change from the more familiar bell peppers.

We cut the dried up angelica stalks too. They are hollow, so they have become the latest addition to the insect hotel, which is gradually getting filled with a rich choice of bug habitats.

The final polytunnel harvest (almost)

Cayenne chillis

Ideally I would grow crops in my polytunnel year round, but realistically the space is best used for the classic covered crops - tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and chillis. I do use it for a few early potatoes, which works well as they occupy the soil before anything else goes in. I also grow carrots in the polytunnel as it's the only way I have any success with them.
A few other more exotic crops have made it in too - melons, watermelon, tomatillos. They do okay but not amazingly. I've never had much luck with aubergines either.

The last of the tomatoes

One crop which does earn its place in the polytunnel, though it does its best to take over the whole place, is butternut squash. They produce well and love the conditions in there. I grow Butternut Waltham.

The last few butternut squashes

I have also been growing some climbing beans in the polytunnel, but have decided that on the whole they do just as well outside. The only exception to this are yardlong beans which need to be undercover.

However, my polytunnel honeymoon period is over now. Pests have found their way in, particularly red spider mite, which is living proof that if lots of individuals achieve a little then the sum of their actions achieves great things. Unfortunately, their efforts go into sucking the life out of my plants! They always take a hold on the beans first and for this reason I am going to give the polytunnel a break from beans. I think it's because the beans grow up above where the sprinklers reach and afford the mites a safe haven, for they like warm, dry conditions.


I did a pretty thorough job of cleaning the polytunnel last winter, but it obviously wasn't enough to prevent a few mites from overwintering. This year, if they come back, I'll have to use biological controls. I have no objections to using these, but they are expensive.

Jalapeno chillis and Paprika

Anyway, getting back to the point, the tunnel is more straightforward to manage if it goes through a period of being pretty much empty. This makes it far easier to conduct basic cleaning and maintenance during the winter. The only crops which will continue in there are celery and a little Swiss Chard. Protected, these crops will last long into the winter and even when they die down, they just sit dormant and spring back into growth in the spring, offering a very early crop before they go to seed in their second year.

Tomatillos

The classic polytunnel crops have completely run out of energy come late November. A few cold nights, dull days and moisture in the air cause everything to suddenly die down. So last week I took one final harvest - the chillis, any peppers left on the plants and a few tomatoes still clinging on.

Red, yellow, green and purple peppers

The tomatoes especially were on their way out, so I roasted them up before passing them through the mouli to make passata, which I then freeze to use in my winter dishes.

Passata in the making

The last job before the big clear out was to collect some fruits for next year's seed. This is not always as easy as just collecting a fruit and taking out the seeds, since many will cross-pollinate all too easily. For this reason, earlier in the year I had tried to isolate some of the chillis and peppers by tying a nylon bag over the flowers after they had set. This wasn't entirely successful - most of them dropped off the plant after about a week. But I did end up with a couple of 'pure' fruits from which to take seeds. 

Next year's seeds

The polytunnel is now pretty much cleared out. I'm careful to remove all old foliage and dying vegetation so that pests, fungi and viruses aren;t harboured in the tunnel.

This winter I'll be reorganising the beds again to make better use of the middle of the tunnel and to make the beds down the side easier to reach. It won't be too long until I'm setting up mini greenhouses ready to raise next year's seedlings in there.

Oooooooooh, Saucy!

 

Sue has been getting saucy. At the back, from left to right, we have Pontack Sauce, Sweet Chilli Sauce and home-made Brown Sauce. At the front is Spiced Plum and Port Jam, a revelation in taste!

 

I was chopping down an elder bush, which has been somewhat smothering a fig sapling, and it seemed a shame to let the bountiful bunches of deep purple berries go to waste. So they appeared in a basket on the kitchen bench.

 

Sue dug out a recipe for Pontack Sauce. I must admit to never having heard of this before. I've certainly never seen it on the shelf in Tesco. It is in fact a traditional English spicy elderberry sauce, served with duck, venison or game. It can also be used added into stews and supposedly gives them a wonderfully rich flavour. It was, however, invented by a Frenchman, Francois-Auguste de Pontac (1636-1694). In 1666 he came to London and opened what was to become a trendy society tavern frequented by the likes of Danuel Defoe and Swift.

Sue used Hugh F-W's recipe, but you can find plenty of recipes on the net. The kitchen filled with deliciously spicy and rich aromas as the sauce was boiling down. I would tell you that the sauce tasted delicious, but it needs to store for at least two months to develop its full taste. Apparently it will last for years and just keep getting better and better. A bit like Sue!

 

Not such a traditional recipe up next. We have plenty of chillis from the polytunnel this year, so Sue decided to turn some of them into chilli sauce. As the chillis, chopped onions, vinegar and sugar boiled up, this did not look too promising, though the vapours it was giving off certainly had a punch to them! However, once it was whisked up it began to look like the real deal and it tasted, well, like sweet chilli sauce. But there's something special when you make it yourself using ingredients you've grown.

 

Third up, and definitely available in Tesco, came brown sauce. I remember when, to enjoy brown sauce, you had to tip up the thick glass bottle and tap, tap, tap the bottom until out came a dollop of rich, spicy sauce. But something has happened to brown sauce. It now comes in an upside down squeezy plastic bottle from which squirts a slightly runny brown liquid. You would certainly be hard pushed to detect the main ingredients.

So Sue started off with a pile of apples and plums, malt vinegar, Worcester sauce and a handful of spices. The cauldron bubbled and spat and the kitchen filled with the smell of good old-fashioned brown sauce. That night I had sausages (our own) liberally dolloped with brown sauce. Perfect! And you know what, I had to tap, tap, tap the bottom of the bottle to get it out.

 

Lastly on Sue's list of alchemy came her Spicy Plum and Port Jam. All I can say is wonderful smell, wonderful colour, amazing taste. A wine connoisseur would really go to town on this one, for it has layer upon layer of tastes, ending with a rich, exotic hint of dates. Certainly one to make again.

 

Polytunnel Prolifica

Tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies, peppers and beans.
The polytunnel really adds an extra dimension to our food production.

I've got aubergines this year.
The Listada de Gandia are fruiting
much better than the more usual
Black Beauty.



Tigerella and Black Cherry.

Things have moved on quickly in the polytunnel in the last few weeks.
We can now rely on a handful of ripe, tangy tomatoes everyday, red ones, yellow ones, green ones, black(ish) ones, stripy ones, big ones, small ones, round ones, pear-shaped ones. Or, to put it another way... Moneymaker, Sunbaby, Green Zebra, Black Cherry, Black Russian, Tigerella, Marmande, Red Cherry, Gardeners Delight, Ildi, Roma. It's a tad more inspirational than the tomato section of the supermarket!

There's always a slightly longer wait than we'd like for tomatoes and there's a slow build up. The real flood will be another month or so yet, but Sue has already started cooking up sauces and passatas to go in the freezer.








The cucumbers are coming gradually, but are a bit disappointing given the number of plants that I have. Having said that, we're still getting a couple a week, which is plenty. Just not enough to be giving them away or selling them.

Onto more exotic produce and, now that I've stopped the overhead irrigation, the peppers are faring much better. This is very exciting as it's a crop I've never succeeded with before.


Peppers and chillies, mid-August

 

Then there's the chillies, in their numerous forms and levels of heat. These have all done very well this year, but have left Sue and I with a bit of a puzzle.


Peppers and Chillies, early September

Several years ago, we joined a truck tour of East Africa for the summer holidays. Every day we would call in at a local market to stock up on supplies. I well remember rather brashly volunteering to test a rather small, green chilli for heat. I hesitantly nibbled the end, expecting my head to go volcanic, my lips to swell, my brow to sweat and my tongue to go numb. But not a bit of it. These chillies just tasted like watery peppers. We purchased a small bag full and they were duly added to that evening's concoction... which blew everyone's head off! For those inoffensive chillies had suddenly changed their nature and were fiery as hell.

The point of this little tale is that the same has happened again. We nibbled a little of each and every chilli variety in the polytunnel and, without exception, they all just tasty like rather mild peppers. But the minute Sue chopped one up they completely changed, like Jekyll and Hyde. This was made worse by the fact that Sue carelessly rubbed her eye and got chilli in it.








The Borlottis have all been picked now.

I've picked most of the beans now and saved the seeds either for sowing next year or for winter cassoulets. The chickpea crop has been abandoned after our harvest of one chickpea!

But this has left more space for the Butternut Squash plants to ramble. Other squashes, pumpkins and courgettes have performed disappointingly in the polytunnel. I think they are much happier outside. But getting butternuts to ripen is never easy and they seem happier with the tropical conditions in the tunnel.
It looks as if we'll get at least half a dozen fine specimens and the first is well on its way to being ripe.
I've got my eyes on the Fenland Smallholders produce show for a couple of these.

Butternut Squash coming along nicely.