The Very Best of Fenland Smallholders Club

My weekend was devoted to Fenland Smallholders Club.

Saturday 17th November 2018
Our first Beginners Grow Your Own Group
Once a month for the next ten months I am leading a Beginners' Grow Your Own Group. Today was our first meeting.
Before we got started on my tour of the veg plot, the orchard, the soft-fruit area and the nuttery, I had a plan to get our caravan moved. We had parked it up on the gravel driveway and Sue and I just couldn't get it moved on our own. Many hands made light work.
We hope to use this caravan to house volunteers if we can attract them to spend time here on the smallholding with us.

I am initially running the BGYO group as a ten session course and hope to give people all the skills they need to become pretty much self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables (unless they fancy the odd banana and orange!)
There are a range of participants, all smallholders, ranging from complete novices who are about to embark on setting up for growing food to others who have been doing it for years but want to extend their activities.

For this first session I tried to focus on the big picture such as choosing a site, deciding how to arrange beds and where to place perennial and annual beds. We looked at issues such as water supply, placing sheds, climate and microclimate and options for indoor growing.

Time flew past. I fed everybody with a couple of soups I had knocked up using one of my many pumpkins and bade farewell.

I still had some of the afternoon and evening to embark on my first ever basket-making without a tutor to guide me. I started with a basic basket which I had made before on courses. I made a couple of beginner mistakes, but overall the techniques came back to me. In fact, without a tutor to rely on I learned a lot more when I had to figure things out for myself.

It's all coming back to me now

I would dearly love to have another go straight away, but unfortunately the willow needs soaking for several days.

Sunday 18th November 2018
Preserving Day




Sunday was the main Smallholders Club meeting, for which Sue had done most of the organisation. We set off early and managed to get into the village hall in good time to set everything up. The day started with a talk by Sue on using a dehydrator. Her notes for the talk were on the equivalent of an old-fashioned fag packet, much to the amusement of others. Sometimes our teaching skills come in very useful.

After the talk there were about ten tables covering all aspects of preserving which club members kindly ran. There was onion stringing, eco-wraps, fermenting, jam and chutney, freezing, vinegars and cordials, bottling, sausage-making... everything you could want to know. We also had a jam-swap, which with hindsight I should have named the Jam-boree. This worked really well and will become an annual occurrence.

Lastly the pumpkin soup left from yesterday made a very popular appearance on the refreshments stand, alongside cakes, pizza and cheese scones which others had brought along. That one Crown Prince squash, with just a few onions and leeks and a small packet of sweet potato, had made three large pans of soup and provided about twenty five warming lunches. It had made a fair bit of money for the club too. 

One particular nice moment was to see Steve, a professional gardener, mentoring one of our younger members in the art of onion stringing. A bonus for Sue and I too as we got all our onions strung and all our garlic plaited. And that was that. 


A very busy weekend which hopefully lots of people learned a lot from and enjoyed.

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!

D-Day looming

Sue's checking out the bees so I've decided it will be safest to stay inside for  a couple of hours and update the blog.

17th June
The school fayre
The school summer fayre and a good chance to sell some jams and honey. I got stuck sitting on the stall as Sue was bravely singing in her band, which I'm sure will have impressed all the children and parents in her school. Anyway, all the honey went. I could have sold more but the weather this last week was too wet for Sue to rob the hives again.
Sue's onion marmalade always sells well too - it's the main reason I grow so many onions.

D-Day
I returned home to the realisation that today was D-Day. I've not mentioned this before but I've known for a while that our wonderful neighbours Don and Maureen are moving. They will be a great loss. We will both miss our chats over the fence and Don was always there looking out for us and ready to help when we needed it. We will still see them as they've not moved too far away. In fact they've moved very close to our dentists so we can pop in every time we've got a toothache.
In one of our last conversations, Don told us about his long-time dentist and how he used to greet him with the phrase "Neither of us is going to get hurt today, are we?" He followed this with a raucous bout of laughter. That's how I'll remember Don.

So I returned home to see a different car in next door's driveway. That's when it all became very real. Later in the evening our new neighbours knocked at the door and we invited them in for a chat. They seem decent enough people but they're not Don :-(

Elvis ducks set free
I let Elvis's ducklings out tonight too. They've grown pretty big now, big enough to make a terrible mess of their small pen. When you first let a hen and her family out, the trouble comes with the hen being too defensive and fighting with the other hens. To ameliorate this I now try to let the hen out on her own a couple of days before letting the whole family out. This seems to avoid most of the trouble.
The ducklings clearly enjoyed their new diet of plantain leaves and whatever bugs, grubs and slimies were unfortunate enough to be in their path.

18th June
With the weather dry and us at home to keep an eye on them, we decided we would have another go at letting the turkey family out. Mum has been hopping the stable wall into the goose stable and then spending the day outside, but we have kept the poults inside following the terrible events of a while ago when we let them out too early and in bad weather only to lose four poults over the next two days.


Today's release went well and the turkey family spent most of the day around the stables. They seem to be very keen on the herb patch.

There are raspberries in here somewhere
Meanwhile, I tackled the raspberry patch. The raspberries, under a strict regime of neglect, seem to be doing very well indeed this year. However, they are impossible to get to. Long grass, nettles, tansy, docks and sow thistles have been thriving. I spent the whole day just pulling weeds to restore the paths to their former state. Mowing them used to be a real pain so instead I decided to rotavate them and keep them bare. But with the soil wet the weeds took full advantage. I'm now opting for the cardboard mulch route. This should starve the weeds of light. At the same time, hopefully the weed seeds will germinate and rot off.

19th June
Peg looming
I am really aching from yesterday's mammoth weed pulling session, so I'll spend the morning pottering in the polytunnel. I've a few late brassicas to sow and there's kohl rabi to be picked.

Later on Sue and I are off to a fellow smallholder's to learn how to do peg looming. I'll post up some pictures when I get back.

... back from the peg looming and we have bought a peg loom!
James keeps Leicester Longwools specifically for their dreadlocks which produce long strands of wool for peg looming. But I don't intend changing all our sheep just so we can use the fleeces to weave, so I took along the fleece we got from Rambo this year. To my delight it was easy to pull off and stretch out the fleece to almost a yard long with no great skill required.
Peg looming is the oldest form of weaving and is pretty easy to do, if a slow process - the perfect way to spend long, dark winter evenings. Admittedly these are far from my thoughts with the summer solstice looming.

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.

 

Dealing with a Glut of Green Tomatoes

What to do with these?

Well! I have hit the jackpot!

Throughout the year I eagerly await the first of this crop or that, only to be fed up to the back teeth with it within a couple of weeks, when it's flowing out of my ears.

I can't say the same for green tomatoes though, since I don't really like them at all. They are just packages of unfulfilled potential.

In the past I've tried fried green tomatoes and decided they can stay in the Whistle Stop Café. So instead I glibly hand them over to Sue for chutney. But I can take or leave chutney, and green tomato wouldn't be my favourite anyway.
 
The tomatoes in the polytunnel just kept on going this year and I only stopped harvesting them at the end of November. But then the nights turned cold and the unripened green tomatoes started dropping all over the floor. Those that hung on started to rapidly turn, as if touched by the cold finger of death. It was time to clear the polytunnel in readiness for winter.

Polytunnel clearance underway.

I hate waste and it seems such a shame to just throw fruits onto the compost heap or in to Daisy.
Last year Sue discovered a recipe for green tomato and lemon marmalade. I think it was one of Hugh F-W's, but there are plenty around on the internet. I have to say it really was very nice and actually gave me a reason to look forward to green tomatoes.

But this post is about something altogether a lot better. First I uncovered a recipe for green tomato soup. It was an unconvincing recipe, to say the least, but I went for it and I am so pleased that I did.
But better was still to come in the form of ...
GREEN TOMATO CAKE.

I know. It sounds vile. I thought so too, but the reviews said otherwise. There wasn't much to lose so I started dicing piles of small green tomatoes.

 

 

 
 


The star of the show - green tomato cake.

The recipe for this wonderful cake can be found here.

 

And if you've still got any green tomatoes left, I'll return to that green tomato soup.

I made a couple of very minor alterations to the recipe - mainly that I left the borlotti beans whole, adding them and a little cooked rice after whizzing the soup. This gave the soup a great, hearty texture. The earthiness of the rice and beans soaked up a little of the tartness of the tomatoes too. The finished result was really rather tasty. Another one for the favourites folder.

 

And if you think that adding a couple of tins of borlotti beans to the soup adds too much to the cost, just do what I did. Grow your own! These ones were my first taste of those I grew and dried earlier this year. Another success story and another foodplant which has most definitely earned its space on the plot.

 

The recipe for the soup is here.

 



Green tomato soup with borlotti beans.

 

Finally I tried green tomato jam, using some crab apples from the garden to make my own pectin (see this post for details).

 

The jam came out OK. I'll eat it, but I think I prefer the marmalade.

 

Anyway, it looks like we'll have to be very disciplined not to pick all the tomatoes next year before any of them ripen! Who'd have thought it?

 

 

Pectin

So pretty.



Crab apples boiling up.

This week I have been busy processing green tomatoes into soups, cake (yes, cake!), marmalade and jam.
It was while gathering the ingredients for the jam that I came across a problem. For jam needs pectin to set. Green tomatoes do not contain enough pectin to make this happen. So you have to use special jam-making sugar (over twice the price of normal sugar - and you use a lot in jam) or you buy pectin.

Sue told me it would be in a packet next to the sugar, but it wasn't. Maybe a bigger store in a bigger town may have had it, but all I could find was a small bottle of what looked like concentrated apple juice which cost a lot. In fact, it was looking as if the pectin was going to be a significant part of the cost of the jam.

Always looking to save a bob or two, I got to thinking. I knew that crab apples contain plenty of pectin so decided I would pick some off the tree in the garden and use those instead. But I could not just add them to the green tomato concoction as I would get the pips and all the nasty bits in my jam. And I wasn't about to stand peeling and coring crab apples!

Instead I found a recipe for making pectin. The actual recipe, here, uses normal apples, but I figured crab apples would be even better.
So I picked my crab apples, added a couple of lemons and some water and boiled the whole lot up until it was soft and mushy. Then into a muslin sieve to drain (best left overnight and not squeezed, to keep the juice clear. I was not this patient but it seemed to work out OK. I figured it wasn't too important for the pectin to be completely clear.)
Finally the juice went back into the saucepan to boil right down until it reached setting point. It was supposed to form a jelly when placed on a cold plate, but this never quite happened. Setting point with jams is never as straightforward as they make it sound in the books. Anyway, when I judged it was time I left it to cool before portioning out into freezer bags. Altogether I got six 8oz portions, each enough for a batch of jam.

All in a Jam

 

 

We've not had too many fruit and veg gluts this year, but courgettes certainly provided us with a challenging mountain, as did rhubarb and pumpkins. There's only a certain amount of any foodstuff you can eat within the space of a few weeks and competition for freezer space is always tight.

So we've found that we need to diversify, and one of the best ways for keeping fruit and vegetables is making preserves. Just about anything can be made into a jam, chutney or relish and there's plenty of scope for experimentation. The end product is usually delicious and totally incomparable to what's available in the shops.
I now have a range of luxury preserves to feast on during the year and there's plenty left over to sell.

We left London to avoid the jams!

And this is exactly what Sue was preparing for in the photo, for this weekend marked her school's Christmas Fayre, a great chance to sell some of the excess preserves we've made through the year.
Best seller last year was Sue's Red Onion Marmalade, but the onion harvest was disappointing this year so our eager punters will have to wait another year for more. But the Beetroot Relish and the Rhubarb Chutney sold very well and the children went for the Toffee Apple Spread.
Surprisingly the Pear Jam sold none. This means that I get to eat all of it, so good news in a way.

Having said that, we're only just getting to grips with the unpredictable nature of selling produce. Another time, quite the opposite could be true. We'd run out of the pear jam and have loads of beetroot relish left.

At the end of the day, it's just a way of funding a hobby. But hopefully it brings a little joy into the mouths of others. It is always delightful when somebody raves about the taste of one of our very own products.

Souper Mix - Now self-sufficient in veg stock cubes



The thrush invasion continues unabated, with hundreds coming in across the fields. In with them today I picked up the calls of six Bramblings (5 together) and, following on from the first ones last week, a Redpoll, which briefly landed in a young birch tree.

It was a lovely day, so I decided to witness this spectacle while working outside.

It's been such a disheartening year in the veg garden that some of the beds got abandoned until next year, but now it's time to start digging them over so that winter can do its work and break down the soil.
In amongst the encroaching couch grass I found the remnants of a harvest.

Just a few carrots, nibbled by slugs and a few onions which had got lost. A little garlic too, alongside some shallots which will do for next year's starter bulbs.

Monday 29th October 2012

The sheep have had the leaves off the celery and the celeriac, but this did not affect the harvest.
My parsnips have done really well and a couple of slight frosts meant I could justify taking my first harvest from them. One was a puny little thing, the other a giant which went down forever. Despite my best efforts I left the tail in the ground.. The leeks are coming along well too. A bit smaller than I'd like, but there'll be enough for the two of us.


So today I picked a bit of everything, along with cutting a mountain of herbs - thyme, sage, rosemary, hyssop, mint, coriander, pot marjoram and anything else I could find.

For there was a plan.

And the plan was Souper Mix, from The River Cottage Book of Preserves.
Simple really. All you do is whizz up about 1kg of mixed vegetables, blend in a whole load of herbs and then add salt to preserve. It then just goes into sterilised jars and hey presto - your very own vegetable stock. Just add 2 - 3 teaspoons to 500ml of water.

I'll let you know how it works, but if all goes well that's another supermarket product which we no longer need to buy.

Rosehippy Syrup

Rosehips

Wednesday 24th October 2012
Is there anything out there?

For all I know there could be a giant flying saucer parked half a mile away in the middle of a field. It could have been there for several days and nobody would know. For I am beginning to question the existence of the horizon, let alone the sun.

There really aren't many outside jobs which are satisfying in this weather. I did spend a morning extracting thistles from the meadow. A couple of skeins of geese flew low over, though I couldn't see them in the low mist.


No. This is the sort of weather to be staying inside doing homely things such as finding ways of preserving hedgerow fruits.

Sue picked a bowlful of rosehips over the weekend and had found a H F-W recipe for turning them into a syrup, reputedly good for coughs or as a drizzle for ice-cream.


















After de-stalking, the rosehips were whizzed in the food processor. The great thing about this recipe is that you don't have to spend hours on the fiddly task of extricating all the hairy insides (does anybody else remember using this stuff as itching powder, stuffing it down the backs of people's blazers at school?!).

Then they were scolded in water twice and drained through a muslin jelly bag overnight.

Into the resulting clarified juice was dissolved a good wodge of sugar and the whole was boiled up and jarred.

Delicious, perfumey aromas pervaded the whole house. It somehow smelled of an autumn evening.

The finished product. You won't find this in the shops.