Re-potting the Chives

Checking on the coldframe where many of my potted herbs are over-Wintering, I noticed that the Chives had begun to put up new leaves. This told me that it is time to re-pot them, a task I do in late Winter every year. It is something that is best done when the plants are just coming out of their Winter sleep.

I grow many of my herbs in pots because I like to move them around the garden. When they are looking at their best they are given a prominent position, but before and after that they live somewhere else. It is important to take good care of potted herbs - well, any potted plants really - because they rely on human intervention to provide the right levels of water, nutrition and growing-space, something they can more easily correct of their own accord if they are grown in open soil. Chives produce a very vigorous root system and they can easily become pot-bound, like this:



When they get like that they cannot get enough moisture or nutrition, so it is advisable to re-pot them to restore their vigour. I tip the plants out of their pots and trim away about 75% of the root-ball, using an old kitchen knife, before putting them back into their pots, filled with fresh compost, into which they will soon spread out.

For the past couple of years I have covered the compost in my Chive pots with pea-shingle, in the hope of suppressing the growth of moss, but it hasn't really worked, so I'm not going to bother with it this time.



So that's it - the Chives have been re-planted with ust the tips of their first shoots of the year just sticking up above the compost, and ready for the off. Before long I will have to do very much the same sort of thing with my potted Mint as well.

Pruning Raspberries and Apple-trees

One of the tasks I do at this time of the year (weather permitting) is the pruning of the Raspberries. Mine are "Autumn Bliss", a late-fruiting primocane variety - meaning that the fruit is borne on the current year's wood (as opposed to the previous year's in a floricane).

Until the weekend, my Raspberries looked like this - a jumble of brown dessicated canes, with just one or two leaves left.

Pruning them is simplicity itself (as long as you wear a stout pair of gloves!). You just use a pair of secateurs to snip the canes off at ground level, and dispose of them. It's not considered good practice to compost the canes, because their hollow stems may be harbouring any manner of bugs and diseases. I put mine in old compost bags and take them to the Council tip.

So this is what the Raspberry area looks like now, with the canes removed and most of the soggy fallen leaves raked out:

The Raspberry plants are not visible, are they? However, they will soon put up new shoots and the cycle will begin again. Last year was a very poor year for Raspberries (for me, at least). I had a very small crop of decidedly second-class berries. I'm blaming the weather, as usual! This year will be better. (There, if I say it often enough I'll begin to believe it.)

Of course the removal of the Raspberry canes made it even more obvious that the Apple trees needed pruning too. I have one which is several years old now, a "Scrumptious" which is trained as a Minarette (kept very slender), but last year I got two more trees. One is a "Bramley", which is planted quite close to the older tree, (in the foreground of the photo above) and the other is a "Gala". The latter is still a very small sapling. Jane won it in some competition or other, and I just plonked it in a pot because I didn't plan for it and I still haven't really decided where to put it. "Gala" is apparently one of the most popular types of apple ever, but I must say it is not one that I would have chosen to buy. Maybe I'll just keep it in a pot on the patio.

Anyway, pruning... With a Minarette the aim is to keep the tree very thin by repeatedly pruning the branches to just a few inches long. You cut them back to just above a fruiting bud, like this:

When I came to this one, I was a bit unsure what to do. I really wanted to remove the bulbous bit above the two buds, but I was reluctant to risk damaging the buds with my secateurs, so in the end I just trimmed off a long thin twig growing vertically from the bulbous bit and left it like this.

 

Well the Apple trees are all done now, but I have left the Pear for another day. It is a bit bigger, and has masses of shoots, so it will be more time-consuming to prune. Maybe next weekend?

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P.S. I drafted this post on Saturday, but since Sunday was a nice day with some sunshine for a change, I actually got on and pruned the Pear-tree as well, so now I'm all up-to-date with the fruit (and feeling all self-satisfied to boot!)

Roses are red, Violets are blue; I love Radicchio, and so should you!

My contribution to Harvest Monday this week is in the salad department.

This year my Radicchio has remained very small, probably because I planted it out too late. It really needs the opportunity to get itself well established before Autumn. However, what it lacks in size is made up for with colour:

Supposedly, Radicchio gets redder as the weather gets colder, and until now I would have agreed with that, but this year we have had very little cold weather and even that has been much less cold than usual, so I don't know why my Radicchio has gone so dark.

The strange wording of my post title is occasioned by this photo. Don't you think this diminutive Radicchio looks like a red rose? 

Here we see the same one after a bit of "artification" has been applied:

On a more practical note, this is where the Radicchio ended up - in a salad, with my indoor-grown Mesclun.

Despite its reputation, I find that Radicchio is not particularly bitter. Certainly the paler inner leaves of the heart have only the slightest hint of bitterness, and even that is in no way unpleasant. It just adds another dimension to your salad - as well as contributing some amazing colour, like this:

Just for the record, here is the Mesclun, moments before being trimmed:

It's amazing what you can get out of one little tray! For us, the best component of the Mesclun was, without a doubt, the Celery. It had an amazing intensity of flavour. I'm definitely going to grow some more of that to use as micro-greens!

Pintadeau au vin rouge

Today's dish "Pintadeau au vin rouge" (guinea-fowl in red wine) is based on a recipe in a book called "Recipes from a French Herb Garden" by Geraldene Holt. This is a book which really inspires me. The recipes in it all use herbs in some form or other, either fresh or dried. As regular visitors to my blog will know, I am very keen on growing herbs, and we use a lot of them in our cooking, so you will know how much this book appeals to me. This particular dish uses Thyme, Bay and Winter Savory (Sarriette) - all from my own garden.

For those of you not familiar with the Guinea-Fowl as a culinary ingredient, let me explain that it is like a small and ever-so-slightly-gamey chicken. The meat is a little denser than chicken, and slightly yellow in colour. Certainly you could use chicken if you can't find, or don't like, guinea-fowl. 

For copyright reasons I'm not going to give you the exact quantities of anything or the exact recipe, but I'm sure my post will give you enough to go on if you wish to re-create the dish yourself.

The first step is to divide the bird into four joints - two breasts and two legs. If this were a chicken, I would keep the backbone and other bits to make gravy with, but I personally think that guinea-fowl gravy is not very nice, so I discarded them.

The recipe proceeds along fairly conventional lines: brown the meat; cook some smoked streaky bacon; soften some onions and garlic in the bacon fat; (I threw in the last of my home-grown Shallots);

stir in a little flour with some wine to moisten it; chuck the herbs in; put the meat on top;

cover it with the wine (the recipe uses a whole bottle, so think carefully before you put your best Chateau Lafitte into it!);



cover and cook over a medium heat (160C) for about half an hour; add some button mushrooms and baste them with the hot wine; return the dish to the oven and cook for a further 30 minutes or until the Guinea-Fowl is fully cooked. I added a little slaked cornflour to thicken the sauce, but you could also pour it off into a saucepan and reduce it before adding it back onto the Guinea-Fowl.

Hey, that's pretty much like "Coq au Vin"! Well, yes... and just as nice.

I served our Pintadeau with a classic Gratin Dauphinois,

and a side salad of home-grown Mesclun and Radicchio - oh, and of course a bottle of French red wine, in this case a St.Chinian (Chateau de la Dournie, 2009)! Anyone would think we liked French cuisine, wouldn't they?

Here's the finished dish:

The dish was everything I wanted it to be: succulent; tasty; winey; yet not brash; very French. And do you know what was the star of the show? Surprisingly it was the small amount of Celery leaf in the Mesclun - amazingly tasty. So tasty in fact that I have resolved to buy a packet of Celery (or was it Celeriac?) seed, just to grow it for Micro-greens. 

I haven't shown it here, but I just want to say that we followed the Guinea-Fowl dish with some French cheese- some Beaufort, which Jane brought back from France a couple of weeks ago. It was the epitome of  what cheese should be: tangy, powerful (unpasteurised), full of depth; worlds apart from the "plastic" Cheddar that sells in such huge quantities in our supermarkets.



Final thought: one Guinea-Fowl will easily serve four people, not two! Now, what do we do with the leftovers?

Winter greens

Yes, Winter greens, not "Wintergreen", as in "Oil of Wintergreen" that pungent plant extract used in perfumery and medicine!

In Winter-time it is more difficult than at other times of year to provide a reliable source of vegetables, and I have decided that I will make a bigger effort in this area this year, but at present my produce is a bit limited. I have some of the ever-reliable Cavolo Nero still, but the Brussels Sprouts are long gone and the PSB is nowhere near ready.

Cavolo Nero "Black Magic"

To try and keep up the supply of greens I have grown a few bits and pieces indoors, such as this tray of Mesclun, which has had the benefit of the Growlight House for all of its short life:

That lot has been grown from a pack of seeds supplied on the cover of Grow Your Own magazine. A lovely selection of leaves - apart from the rather bizarre inclusion of carrots! What are you supposed to do - leave the carrots to mature, or eat the leaves?

I have also grown three small "Little Gem" lettuces in a seed-tray, initially in the Growlight House and latterly on a windowsill.

"Little Gem" lettuces on the windowsill, with an aerial view of  Mark's Veg Plot behind!

The plants began to bolt before hearting-up (hardly susrprising, is it?), so I picked all the useable leaves.

Out in the garden I also have something else very green:

Not "greens", but certainly green. It's a sprig of this Rosemary plant, seen here surrounded by several pots of Sage:

Looking closely, I see that there are lots of flower-buds on the plant, so hopefully before long it will put on a good display.



Rosemary is often described as being susceptible to damage in cold conditions, but I have found it to be very hardy and resilient. It is one of the few herbs that is available for picking all year round. Most of my other ones are in pots in the coldframe and it will be a fair while before I can pick anything from them:

Over-Wintering chillis

Towards the end of the Summer of 2012 I bought a very bedraggled little "Scotch Bonnet" chilli plant, for 50p in a Garden Centre sale, but I administered a lot of TLC and nurtured it through the Winter. Last year it really thrived. It grew so huge that I had to prune it several times, and it went on to produce loads of really fiery hot fruit. Following on from this success I determined to attempt a similar thing this Winter. I duly bought two chilli plants from the same Garden Centre as before (fairly cheaply, but not at the same knock-down price), and potted them up. One was a "Red Habanero" and the other was a "Nosferatu".

They went on to produce a welcome, but modest harvest of very handsome fruits:

Red Habanero

Nosferatu

However the weather soon obliged me to bring the plants indoors or lose them. Our spare bedroom's windowsill became a temporary greenhouse.

Reading up about over-Wintering chillis I learned that it is recommended that you prune them very hard so that they don't lose too much energy through transpiration. I applied the technique and hoped for the best. From then on it was just a case of doing an occasional bit of watering. I added a bit of "Baby Bio" houseplant food, because that's what I always feed my houseplants with!

My efforts have met with variable success. The old Scotch Bonnet seems to have given up the ghost, as has my Numex Twilight. Did I mention Numex Twilight? No, I thought not...

Numex Twilight

But the Nosferatu and Red Habanero have done better. The Habanero is very vigorous, and has already put out lots of new foliage:

"Red Habanero" in foreground

Whereas the Nosferatu only has a few fresh leaves so far, but has optimistically produced a couple of  flowers:

The slowly-shrivelling fruit you see in the photo above ( the last remaining one) will hopefully yield a few seeds, and if it does I plan to sow them in order to "maintain the succession", as it were.

"Nosferatu", flowering in mid-January

I would be interested to hear if anyone else reading this has any experience of over-Wintering chillis, and if so, how they did it.

"Cape Malay" curry

In the culinary context the term "Cape Malay" refers to a type of cuisine which evolved in South Africa via a fusion of indigenous food and that of the immigrant Indonesian community. It involves a mix of fragrant spices which we call "curry", and the mandatory inclusion of fruit, preferably apricots...

Here is my rendition of the concept:-

This is Cape Malay Pork with Calabrese Broccoli and Basmati Rice - subtle, warm, tasty spices, not searing-hot chilli, along with the soft, mellow sweetness of apricots.

We start here, with 100g of semi-dried apricots, halved:

A couple of onions, peeled, sliced and gently softened over a low heat...

And some diced pork that has been marinated in grated fresh Ginger, crushed Garlic, and a generous quantity of Jane's home-made curry powder, and now browned in a little vegetable oil...



When the meat is browned, add it to the onions, along with about a litre of good stock...

Throw in the apricots...



Now cook long and slow until the meat is tender (about 3 hours on 140C?)...

Here is the end result. Notice how much the liquid has reduced. During cooking you should check every so often to make sure that the dish has not dried out, adding a little boiling water if necessary.

Meanwhile, cook the broccoli. Mine was simply boiled until just tender but not too soft....



And the rice of course (not illustrated!).  Finally, dish up:-

You know what? That is Comfort Food par excellence!