Harvest Monday - 7th October 2013

My harvest this past week has been mostly of tomatoes. Tons of them.

"Cherokee Purple"

It has been my best year ever for tomatoes and I'm still picking them in considerable quantity.

Of course, many of the tomatoes in the picture above were picked some while ago, but the amount of fruit I am picking means that the collection on the Dining Room table is actually getting bigger, not smaller, despite our efforts to consume tomatoes at more-or-less every meal! For instance, during the week Jane used about 3kgs of them to make another batch of ketchup, which she wrote about on her blog Onions and Paper

On Saturday I picked this basket of goodies:

In the basket are Cavolo Nero, Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Beans, Chillis and Raspberries.

The yellow "Meravglia di Venezia" beans have not been very good. The yield has been unimpressive, and individually many of the beans have been poor specimens, often brown at the edges. What do you think of this corkscrew-shaped one?

The chillis are good-lookers though. Notice that I now have some ripe "Aji Limon", as well as more of the "Numex Suave Orange" and various red types. The dark green ones that look like Green Peppers are the "Poblano" chillis that I wrote about yesterday.



I also cut one of the "Webbs Wonderful" lettuces. This is a big Iceberg-type lettuce. To be honest, it was a bit disappointing, because although it looked fine from above, the lower parts of most of the leaves had been pretty severely slug-nibbled, and I was only able to use a few of the inner leaves. However, what there was, was nice and crunchy. Jane made a beautifully tangy French Dressing for it, and we ate it with our steaks on Saturday evening, alongside that fabulous Tomato salad I showed you.


Chilli "Poblano"

This year I am experimenting with several types of chilli that are new to me. One of them is the "Poblano"

This chilli looks very much like a Green Pepper / Capsicum / Bell Pepper. It is also at the lower end of the scale as far as heat goes.

It grows pretty much the same way as any other chilli / pepper:



The fruits are supposed to go a deep chocolately red when ripe. Since mine are still completely green, I have picked a couple and brought them indoors into the warmth to try to accelerate the ripening process.

When ripe the Poblano chillis are traditionally dried and flattened, making them even wider, and at this point they are referred to by a different name - "Ancho" (meaning "wide" or "broad" in Spanish). They have a flavour that I think is a bit like a raisin. They are mildly spicy, but definitely fruity too. The dried fruits are soaked in water to re-hydrate them, and the soaking water is added to whatever it is that you are cooking, along with the chilli itself. I find that it is advisable to slit the chilli open and remove the seeds before soaking, since this type does have a lot of quite big seeds.

I'm not 100% sure how I am going to use the ones I have grown, but I think I will start by drying them (in the airing-cupboard of course, since I don't have a dehydrator). I might also try smoking one or two in my Stovetop Smoker contraption.

Tomato salad and chillis

I have put this post together simply to showcase the Tomato salad that I prepared this evening.

I deliberately set out to make this salad into a piece of "Food Art". I used several different types of tomato, cut in several different ways, and garnished the salad with springs of fresh herbs from the garden.

Star of the show was this huge 500g "Ferline" tomato...



This salad was an accompaniment to some sirloin steaks from our local butcher (which are always good), served with chips made from "Pink Fir Apple" potatoes and a bottle of our favourite St.Chinian wine - Chateau la Dournie.

I think I can also squeeze in a couple of photos of some chillis I picked today...

"Numex Suave Orange", "Aji Limon", "Cayenne" and an unknown Turkish one 

The yellow "Aji Limon" is really nice - distinctly citrussy, and lovely and hot. Most of the chillis have been very mild this year, so it is good to get some that aren't.

Clearing the Runner Beans

The Runner Beans have produced a good harvest again. Perhaps not quite as good as last year, when the damp Summer really suited them, but good nonetheless. This tiny harvest though is the very last one of the year:



How can I be sure it's the last? Here's how:

Yes, I have cut the plants down. I wanted to do this before we get any really bad Autumn gales, which would probably knock the plants and their support system right over. It's also a job best done on a dry day! Handling the huge amounts of leaves and stalks that needed removing would not be enjoyable in the wet.

Taking down the Runners means that the two wigwams of beans behind them (one of "Cobra" and one of "Veitch's") will get a lot more light.

The ones in the picture above are the "Veitch's" ones. It's not a variety I have grown before, but they seem to be very slow growers, and it will be touch-and-go whether they mature before frost comes along. I suppose I could have picked them for their pods (they look like something mid-way between a runner and a French bean), but I really grew them for shelling.

Although I removed the poles from the Runners, along with most of their foliage, I have left the bases of the plants in place in order to get maximum value from the nitrogen-fixing qualities of their roots. And in accordance with my principle of making maximum use of space I have planted in between them a double row of Radicchio seedlings.

Over the last few weeks I have stuck a few Radicchio seedlings in wherever a space has appeared, so hopefully some of them will do OK, even though none of them are ideally situated. In theory, the Runner Bean is a perennial, so I suppose I could leave those plants in place and have them re-grow next year, but I suspect that they wouldn't survive any but the mildest of UK Winters, and even then they probably wouldn't do so well in their second year. I shall definitely be starting again from scratch next year.

Hedgerow Jelly Mark 2

The other day I made some Hedgerow Jelly with Blackberries, Sloes, Elderberries and Apples. It turned out so nice that I've now got the jelly-making bug! As I wrote yesterday, I went and foraged some Rosehips, which I wanted to be the basis of an improvised Mark 2 version of Hedgerow Jelly.

Rosehips are not often used these days, despite their easy availability. I think they have a reputaton for being too "good for you". Apparently they have a high vtamin C content, and I know that my Father's generation would definitely have associated them with the Rosehip Syrup that many people made during World War Two, when fresh citrus fruit was hard to come by.

Since I was a bit unsure whether Rosehip Jelly on its own would be pleasant, I decided to combine the Rosehips with some Apples and some Sloes. Apples are always a good thing to use in fruit jellies because their high pectin levels aid setting. So my 750g of Rosehips was combined with 450g of Sloes and 1.2kg of Bramley apples. For extra flavour I even chucked in a handful of Raspberries from the garden! [My Raspberries are very late and very scant this year, so I didn't have a quantity big enough to do anything with.]

So here's the fruit cooking:

The Rosehips were very firm and took a long time to soften. I helped them a bit by squashing them with the back of a wooden spoon.

I strained the pulp overnight through a jelly-bag, and the following morning I had almost exactly 500ml of juice. With the addition of 450g sugar, this eventually made two jars of jelly:

I'm not going to describe the method I used for making this jelly, because it is exactly the same as that which I described the other day. If you would like to see what that was, please follow this link: Hedgerow Jelly

Just a word on that first batch of jelly I made:  It is absolutely delicious. The depth and intensity of its flavour are miles greater than anything you can buy in a shop. I had some on a buttered crumpet on Saturday morning - heavenly! I haven't tried any of this second lot just yet (other than licking the spoon while I was making it), but it is a fair bit lighter in colour and hopefully it will taste significantly different. I expect it to taste quite "plummy" because of the sloes. I'll let you know...

Foraging again

Inspired by the success of the Hedgerow Jelly I made the other day, I have been out foraging again. When I went out for the Blackberries and Elderberries I saw a place where there are huge quantities of Rosehips, so I decided to go back and get some of them.



The place in question is a small country lane between Fleet and the little village of Dogmersfield. If you take the time to examine it, the countryside here is really beautiful, despite being very close to the M3 motorway and the railway line from Basingstoke to London!

My earmarked Rosehip patch is just near the bridge from which I took the photo above. There are huge quantities of fruit in the hedges here:

These things are not easy to pick - just look at those thorns! [Note to self - next time, wear your gardening gloves.] Fortunately, because the fruit is so plentiful, you don't have to reach up very high to get them, and it's perfectly possible to just walk along the lane gathering them at chest level.

In the same area there are loads of lovely Blackberries too:



I didn't want any Blackberries this time, but next year I may well go back to this place if I decide to make more Hedgerow Jelly.

Sloes are also available there in great profusion. I hadn't really intended to pick any, but I just couldn't resist, and I came back with about 450 grams of them. The main target harvest however was the Rosehips, and I picked about 750 grams of them:

I'll write about how I used these fruits in a day or two, but let me just finish this post with a close-up of one of them, to show you just how attractive they are:



Harvest Monday - 30th September 2013

Well, September is just about finished, but my tomato harvest isn't!



The cucumbers are finally giving up. The plants look very tired. The leaves flop during the daytime, though they revive again overnight.

I hardly dare to think how many fruits they produced between them. It was a huge number. The ones being produced now are not prime specimens - mostly rather yellow and "weedy".

We have had so many cucumbers that Jane even made a batch of curried cucumber pickle this week, which I expect she will write about on her blog Onions and Paper.

This week I picked my pears. Actually, half of them picked themselves, in a manner of speaking. They fell off the tree, which I took to be a sign that they had reached maturity. It wasn't a very clever thing to do really, because two of them got bruised in their fall. Anyway, I picked all the others to save them from a similar fate:

"Conference" pears

It's not a lot of pears, is it? Still, it's better than no pears. The big one in the middle of the group is enormous. It weighs 280 grams. Pears like this are traditionally ripened indoors, so they have joined the multitude of tomatoes on the Dining-Room table.

A rather different crop that I picked this week was a couple of Brussels Tops (the ones I wrote about on Saturday). They are very much like Spring Greens, and they went very nicely with the venison we bought at the Farmers' Market on Saturday.



I have harvested my very last potatoes of the year - two pots of "Pink Fir Apple". At 1.6kgs, the yield was not bad, but several of the tubers were covered with scab. This makes them unsightly, but is not a major problem, since it is only skin-deep and can be removed by scrubbing the tubers before cooking. (Peeling PFA potatoes is not really possible, due to their very knobbly shape).

This week I'm not going to post a picture of Runner Beans, because I'm sure you are all bored of looking at Runner Beans. I have picked a few, though not many. I have also picked more chillis, and the basket of them drying in the airing-cupboard is gradually filling up.

My final harvest of the week is not one from my garden, but a wild one instead, from the local hedgerows: Sloes and Rosehips.

These have now gone into a batch of jelly, which I will write about soon.

That's it from me for this week. Why not visit Daphne's Dandelions to see what other people have been harvesting?