Spring is sprouting everywhere!

I can't resist taking photographs in Spring! There are new shoots everywhere I look and the sunshine lately has made working in the Patch such a pleasure. Even the rosemary is covered in tiny blue flowers....

The blueberry bushes are in pots (they love an acid soil but seem to be thriving in pots of ericaceous compost in the Patch) and are so beautiful on a spring morning with the dew still clinging to them.

I have been enjoying the fresh green of baby sage seedlings (below) emerging in the greenhouse - I have sown green and purple sage, green and purple basil and Giant of Napoli parsley and loads of coriander this month. The main crop of basil I will sow in April to plant amongst the tomatoes and aubergines and peppers in the greenhouse. Oh the smell when you water on a warm day!

I am pleased with how much we are still eating as we come into the 'vegetable gap' months of April and May - the purple sprouting broccoli Red Arrow is now coming into its own and we can hardly keep up with the three plants which are continually covered with shoots. It has a delicious flavour and I could eat it most days lightly steamed with a dollop of butter and maybe some garlic or lemon juice sometimes to ring the changes.....

Last week I dug up the Summer Purple sprouting broccoli as the Red Arrow above has come into harvest. I can't believe how we have had a supply of delicious broccoli from four plants since last August right through the winter until now. What a wonderful variety it is! Slightly smaller florets of broccoli than the above but just as delicious and easy to gather in the winter. As you can see from the photo below it was still covered in purple shoots when I dug it up, though these had become much smaller and sparser...we still had a good meal off them though before I composted the giant stalks!

Look at the size of the Musselborough leeks! Having stood all winter in the Patch they are still a vital part of my harvest. I use them in everything and dig them up most days. This one was a corker and became the base for a sweet potato, fennel and leek bake!

There is another star of the winter/spring veg patch - kale. Cavallo Nero, Red Russian and Red Bor are all still being picked though the Cavallo Nero is now beginning to flower and will be over soon. I have decided to wait until August to sow all three varieties again for the winter...I have so much else to eat in the summer and they are invaluable for winter eating with their robust flavour. And they look wonderful standing up out of the snow!

I love picking all three and adding them to garlic, chilli, fresh grated ginger and red peppers for a wonderful deep flavoured stir fry. This dish is perfectly delicious frozen and reheated too and keeps its flavour. Kale is also great wilted down with garlic and olive oil, salt and black pepper - With all the varieties I strip the curly leaves from their tough central stems and then they will wilt down in seconds. 

We ate this a few days ago followed by walnut and raisin bread made with wholemeal flour, spelt flour, yeast, a handful of raisins and walnuts and a few glugs of walnut oil.. with a slab of raschera cheese from our trip to Piemonte.....so good! 

Diggers, Terraces and Artichokes

Mmm! Do you like artichokes? I love them. Whenever I go to Italy, which is usually about once a year, I love those first Carciofi all Romana, young artichokes slowly cooked in garlic and olive oil and wine and soft as butter with parsley scattered over and good bread. I could eat it every day. I want to grow them - you can't find them easily in the uk and they are such wonderful things to eat. 
So this year I am growing three different varieties. The best way to propogate them is to find a good plant and divide a bit of the root and put it in a pot over the winter and plant out in the spring - that way you know its going to have good fruit because you have seen it on the parent plant. Sowing from seed is more risky, some of the plants might not bear fruit. But I am sowing six of three varieties and I figure some of them will be ok. In the autumn I will take a bit of the root from the good ones and pot them up for the winter and plant them out next spring. That way I will be developing a good 'orchard' of artichokes! I am going for an Italian purple variety called Violetta di Chioggia which is an early variety and you can eat the globes whole when they are young and then wait until later in the summer for a second crop. In between I will have Green Globe improved which has been bred from Green Globe and which is very fruitful. I have also found an old French variety called Gros Vert de Laon which has beautiful fat globes with a wonderful flavour. I have grown two to a 3" pot, three of each variety and will pot them up and not plant them out until all risk of frost is over. I can't wait to see them grow...they are just appearing now.....

The first signs of a baby artichoke seedling - amazing to think it will grow to be four foot tall!

Hm...eighteen plants will take up so much room. Fortunately these thistle like plants should be safe from rabbits and so don't need to go into the Patch with its rabbit proof fence. I plan to put some amongst the fruit trees against the sheltered bank at the back of the barn. But I need more space for the others. Then, just at the right time, a friend lent us his digger for an afternoon and we dug a long strip all along the bank beside the Patch. This has almost doubled the size of our plot and made two lovely terraced beds. I want to plant the zucchini in one of these and artichokes in the other.  We scooped back the grass and nettles (which I had already sprayed to kill the roots) and formed a bank with the mass of roots. Then we turned the topsoil over with the digger to start the process of forming a good tilth. This makes it so much easier to work the soil with a spade! We had it all done in under an hour - the bliss of machinery. The following morning I got up early and moved twelve barrow loads of precious well rotted cow manure donated in the autumn by our friendly farming neighbour onto the terraces. I will leave them alone for a couple of weeks and hope that the spring rain will soak in the goodness of the manure, softening the earth and then I will dig them over ready for planting in May. 

Oh wow! I can just see those artichokes standing proudly and picking those wonderful buds, slurping them with hollandaise or melted butter and then handing round white plates with carciofi alla Romana for lunch, glistening with rich green olive oil...a cool glass of white wine... Bon appetito!

September 2011

September. 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' - one of my favourite months. We are getting a magnificent harvest every day and I am busy putting the surplus into the freezer and making preserves. Above is what I picked one day - fennel, courgettes, a barrel of perpetual spinach (it really is perpetual..I pick it most days!) and summer purple sprouting broccoli. A good haul. 

Don't you just love the roundness of the courgette and the fennel bulb in the top picture? Look at the size of it against the spade above! Lush, abundant, beautiful fruitfulness. I just had to go on taking photos. So proud! I cleaned and sliced the surplus bulbs as I did not want to leave them in the ground to go tough. Put them in plastic bags in the freezer and have been able to eat them all winter - so good in veg bakes, and pasta sauces. I will definitely grow more next year. 

The Tomato Saga! Here are my eight pots of Tamina tomatoes growing happily on a sunny wall next to the climbing french beans. I am amazed by the huge trusses of fruit and have been happily feeding them and nurturing them. In front of them you can see my four Principe Borghese tomatoes which are an Italian plum tomato that you can harvest way into the autumn and then ripen on picked vines hanging inside a shed through the winter. 

I also have three troughs full of Tumbling Toms - you can see their fruit ripening beautifully in the photo below. I have grown them twice before and the cherry sized fruit has been sweet, full of flavour and abundant. But to my horror one morning I realised that the whole crop of tomatoes was showing signs of  late blight.....brown stains on leaves and stalks and horrible brown bruises on the fruit itself. 

A drastic haircut! Though we had already had some tomatoes I knew that in order to save some for my precious winter supply of fresh tomato sauce I had to do something quick. It was too late to spray. I took off all but the very top leaves, bagging them up to take off the site together with the damaged fruit. This is what I had left on the Taminas. I left what I could on the plants but I still had the harvest below to try to ripen in the sun in boxes. Every day I took them out into the sunny yard and every night I put them in the shed to keep them from mice. I checked every day for more brown stains and got rid of the blighted ones immediately. 

This is what I did with the remaining green ones which would not ripen. A vast vat of green tomato chutney!

I was amazed how many did ripen though and I still got a bumper harvest of red sweet tomatoes for making sauce. They were not really much good to eat raw though as they were very thick skinned - I really missed having sweet tomatoes as I never buy the ones from the shops. I don't think they taste of anything so it was a dreadful blow that my usually gorgeous tomatoes were a 'wash out' as far as flavour was concerned. Next year I am going to try some different varieties (watch this space) and also be very careful how I water them. Now that I have experienced the 'dreaded blight' I can understand the horror of my Irish ancestors! Next year it is War!

This is a good batch about to go into the oven for sauce......cloves of garlic, my freshly picked oregano and some good glugs of rich green olive oil....baked until soft and then put through a sieve. I got ten bags of sauce for pizza, pasta, soups and stews for the freezer.  This year I strengthened the flavour with a tin of tomato puree - it still tasted completely fresh though.  

The caravan was filled with the perfume of oregano, garlic and olive oil...mmmmmmmmm! 

Had a lot more success with the carrots. This is the autumn harvest for storing...we had been eating them all summer too.

Scrubbed under the tap in the Butler's sink and drying in the sun ...gorgeous, sweet carrots...

I found a couple of old freezer baskets on the farm, scrubbed them with disinfectant and lined them with cardboard. Filled with damp sand they have become my winter storage for carrots, parnsips and beetroot.

This is a picture of the fruit of one of our autumn foraging expeditions into the local fields. We were careful to research all the mushrooms and found out that the green ones at the back are poisonous. Luckily we had kept them in separate baskets. The huge ones on the left and the dark gilled field mushrooms made some wonderful stroganoff with soured cream and a risotto and the best pasta sauce. When we got too many to eat I cooked them up with butter and garlic and herbs and froze them in batches. It was wonderful to put my hand in the freezer and bring out the makings of an easy supper dish....omelettes, lasagne...... mushroom, leek and fennel with spicy chick peas.....on and on and on! And all for free. 

As we come to the end of September we are fat with produce from the Patch. We have not bought a vegetable since May apart from the odd avocado or aubergine. Next year I will have a greenhouse so the aubergine will be home grown too! Above you can see one of my all time favourite veg waiting to be steamed...Romanesco broccoli. The flavour is absolutely superb...a bit like asparagus and though it takes up a lot of room and doesn't re sprout much it is worth it. It was a highlight. An autumn treat which I will multiply for next year, I'll give up cabbage and sprouts to have this wonderful brassica. We eat it dipped in butter with a cold glass of prosecco and some good homemade bread!