Beanz Meanz Mine!

As is probably obvious from the lack of posts, I have been away on holiday. I returned at the weekend to an allotment groaning with produce.
Whilst we were away, kind neighbours watered tomato plants and salad leaves which are growing in my garden at home. I had also introduced them to the lottie and encouraged them to help themselves to anything they fancied whilst I was away, as the raspberries were at their peak, the beans were beginning to crop and the spinach just goes on and on. They assure me that they took all they wanted but even so I picked and either cooked or froze 2.7 kilos of French beans at the weekend. I also prepared and cooked a similar weight of runner beans. Since everyone tells me that these don’t freeze very well in their natural state I did these in a garlicky and well-reduced tomato sauce.
We ate some of the runner beans in sauce on Monday evening and they were lovely. They have also been delicious simply dressed in a very good extra virgin olive oil with sea salt and freshly-milled black pepper.
Alongside this epic beans marathon was 7 loads (and still counting) of post-holiday washing and finding all the uniforms etc for the kids to return to school on Monday.
All this, needless to say, took ages and I was busy complaining to anyone within earshot that I was feeling exhausted despite having had a lovely 2 week holiday. But this is my crop from my lottie. What am I doing it for, if not to be able to return home overflowing with organically-grown and freshly-picked food to put on the table? In the words of Mrs Doyle from Father Ted: “Maybe I like the agony”.

Blackcurrant sorbet

IN addition to the produce from my own garden and allotment I am also lucky enough to receive soft fruit from my parents' garden in Devon. They grow far more gooseberries and currants than they can use themselves so Mum is always looking for a home for it. Him Indoors has laid down the law a few times to limit the amount I take (I think that had something to do with not being able to close the freezer door on a number of occasions) but I am allowed to accept the occasional donation.

The challenge at present is finding things to do with it which do not involve putting them in cakes and puddings as we have been consuming rather too much of these lately! At the weekend I decided to have a go at making blackcurrant sorbet. Yes, I know sorbet is still a pudding and full of sugar but it is fat-free so that's ok, right?.

Well it turned out to be a bit of a palaver since the currants had to be stewed, then blended in a food processor, then sieved (and we only have a tiddly domestic sieve so that part took ages and required the help of hubby and oldest daughter whilst I got on with the evening meal). In the end I risked the kids' wrath by halting proceedings at that stage, leaving the resulting puree to be frozen into the final sorbet on Monday evening. The girls went to bed bribed with chocolate for pudding and the promise of sorbet for tea on Monday after school, which they duly got and it was gorgeous. I daresay there was even a bit of Vitamin C in it too.

Plum bonanza

We have had a huge crop of delicious Victoria Plums from the tree in our garden this year.
Unfortunately the dog has developed a liking for them and as you can imagine they have played havoc with his digestive system: messy business! We have to do a sweep of the garden to remove windfalls before letting him out - or deal with the consequences.
They are so good fresh that I was reluctant to do anything else with them, and I really did not have time anyway this week. I have been at loss to know what to do with them all and have been virtually begging friends and neighbours to take them off me.
Eventually, having been assured by a couple of people that they freeze well I have started to put them in the freezer. So in the depths of winter I will be able to recapture the flavours and smells of summer by making plum chutney, jam, and crumble.

Weird and wonderful

I had some fabulous shapes in the Pink Fir potatoes I harvested this week. Just look at these: almost worth an "Ooh er missus"!
I chose this variety as we often used to receive them in our organic veg box from Woodlands Farm (in the days before we had the lottie obviously) and they were always great.
I harvested them following the local advice to "Always lift your tates before the end of August or the slugs will get them". I have learned not to ignore such pearls of wisdom.
I am guessing that if I had left them another couple of weeks they might have separated out into individual tubers. Anyone know if this is the case?

A new Spice Trade

Having been kindly given 4 saffron crocus bulbs (yes, the real thing) by my friend and colleague Jon Whowell, I have a little experiment underway at the lottie. They were planted on 8th August and I have my fingers crossed.    I would never have thought of it myself but now I have the bulbs it has become quite compelling. They are carefully marked and labelled so I don't forget where they are. This would not be a good crop to strim to death. And let's hope they escape the attentions of the Phantom Weeder (see my post of Monday 27th June for more about him or her!)   Of course, I realise that 4 bulbs will not produce much of a crop, but it is a start. Wikipedia tells me that one fresh-picked flower yields an average 30mg (0.03g) of fresh saffron or 7mg (0.007g) of dried saffron. Still, from little acorns, and all that…They will either love the soil at the allotment or hate it. As with all gardening and growing, only time will tell.

Successful gardening with children - for a change. Hurray!

Having previously bemoaned my failure to garden successfully with children I am pleased to report that I have cracked it in the past week – once or twice at least.

I have had a couple of really enjoyable afternoons at the lottie with my oldest daughter, harvesting potatoes and picking raspberries.

Working together along a row of potatoes was great. I have not watered the tates at all during this long drought (reserving any precious water that I take to the lottie for more vulnerable leafier crops such as spinach and newly-planted purple-sprouting broccoli. The tates have had to look after themselves. As such the earth was so dry that we could simply brush it aside with our hands to reveal the crop underneath. This had lots of the factors that are likely to win around a 7 year old – it was tactile and immediate with a sense of unearthing buried treasure: in short, a real wow factor. She squealed with excitement as we unearthed kilo after kilo of whoppers!

Topping this off by picking raspberries and eating them on the hoof also went down well. My autumn raspberries are in their third year now and are doing fantastically well. Again, I haven’t watered them at all but the fruit is wonderful.

Much as I love strawberries, I maintain that nothing beats the flavour of freshly-picked raspberries. Unless of course you take them home and make them straight into raspberry jelly. Now there’s an idea to get the kids excited!

Children and allotments

We started off with the idea that the lottie would be a whole-family activity - in one of those misguided, knit-your-own-sandals sort of moments.

When we were simply clearing the plot it worked quite well. At that stage the girls were so young that they were happy enough just grubbing around in the mud. We made them a make-shift sandpit to play in and installed a cheap barbecue with the idea of spending long hours as a happy family working and playing together. 

It was always a challenge, though. In the absence of clear boundaries the little people seemed to have great difficulty knowing where to walk. They would seemingly be happily engaged in some harmless activity but all too often I would turn around to find them wandering across a neighbour’s plot (and seedlings), not meaning to do any harm but effectively flattening everything in their wake. 

 

The rose-tinted spectacles didn’t last long, particularly in light of the distinct lack of facilities at our allotments. There is no water supply, which obviously also means no toilets. Not much of a problem for the male allotment-holders, more of a challenge for us women and a distinct problem for little ones. Yes, we could have taken a potty with us but we were trying to move on from all that. We made the mistake of dangling my youngest daughter over the compost bin to have a wee during one early visit. She thought this was great fun and suddenly needed a wee each time she came to the allotment with me. This quickly got tiresome (and tiring as she got bigger and heavier to lift) but at the age of only 3 her cries of “But I really really need a wee” were ignored at my peril!

No water also means no hand-washing facilities. So the idea of happy family lunches wasn’t easily reconciled with Mummy’s hand-washing fixation (not an unreasonable obsession when we were all elbow-deep in freshly-manured soil, I still maintain).

 

The girls made a fantastic scarecrow with help from the in-laws and this helped maintain their interest for a while. Taking advice from others including my own parents, we also provided them with their own small plot, complete with child-friendly and easy to handle seeds like radish and beetroot plus pretty Love-in-a-Mist. Again, this was initially a great success but they quickly lost interest and it just turned into somewhere else for me to weed.

Over time, of course, the more I wanted to go the allotment, the less the girls wanted to come too. They decided it was boring, and I decided that actually, I prefer going on my own. I now limit their visits to the “big wins” such as the fabulous pumpkin my daughter grew last year (well ok, she sowed the seed and I then did everything else) or the current favourite: raspberries to pick and eat on the hoof.