Odds and Ends

In the first week of October, nothing in my garden is "in its prime", but there is still a lot for me to harvest.

Yesterday I pulled up the final few beetroot. As well as providing me with another delicious helping of veg, the removal of these last beets will allow the parsnips next door to get a bit more light.

The last few beetroots harvested

Here they are again, cooked and ready to eat

I'm STILL harvesting tomatillos! The 4 plants I grew have produced an enormous quantity of fruit. Even the "little" batch I picked from the only remaining one came to more than 500g.

515g more Tomatillos

Some of these went into my dinner last night. Mexican pork with beans.

The chilli plants were looking a bit sorry for themselves -- I expect they are wishing it was still Summer...

Chillis dripping in the rain

Chillis score pretty well on VSR (Value for Space Rating), don't they? It's nice that they are coming on at different times too, and not all at once.

The Serrano chilli plant

I brought inside another huge truss of Ildi tomatoes.


Ildi tomatoes

They are now hanging on the utensil-rail above the kitchen sink. This way I can be sure that a sudden frost doesn't wipe them out.

The Ildi toms hanging up in the kitchen

There are still several trusses left on the plants as well.

Even more Ildi tomatoes!

Since we had a fair few tomatoes hanging around, and no immediate plans for using them, I decided to make another batch of tomato puree. Actually I did two separate batches; one with red toms (Ferline, augmented by a few Black Cherry) and one with the yellow Sungella toms. This is the result.

Two lots of tomato puree for the freezer

Sungella on the left, Ferline on the right. Actually the colours don't look wildly different, do they? These have gone into the freezer now, and they will be used later on (when we have forgotten what Summer tasted like!) for making soups and sauces. We generally make puree like this dead plain, without any flavourings such as thyme or basil or garlic, because this makes the puree more flexible. You can add the flavourings later when you are assembling your dish.