Category Archives: Vegetables

Hedgerow Colours and other Bits and Pieces

Rosehip Cordial My gesture towards autumnal hunter gathering (ha!) has been limited this year to these two little projects. Rosehip and (assorted friends) cordial and the hawthorn ketchup recipe which comes from Pam Corbin’s book Preserves but can be found fortuitously (and probably not very surprisingly) in Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Guardian Weekend column this week along with other fashionable hedgeforagy ideas. More about haws here in Alys Fowler’s column too.

out of focus washed haws (hawthorn berries)

I managed to make one little jar from 500 g of hawthorn berries. Not sure if it was worth the effort somehow!

I barely picked any blackberries and there were very few sloes, apart from a few I found in the freezer, the damsons were almost non existent and the squirrel has stolen and buried all the nuts – so it goes. And I suspect that this is the same for many people, hence the interest this year in the hawthorn berries and rosehips which are plentiful.

I am working my way through the apples from the garden slowly. I spend a lot of time not doing very much and what I do, I do quite slowly. Here is a squishy apple cake, which I made yesterday from a recipe from Cooks Illustrated by Andrew Janjigian. It is made with oil not butter and has a clever construction whereby you mix egg yolks into part of the batter for the bottom and extra flour into the top part thus creating a layered effect in the cake. I am not sure I did it justice as I was working from cups, which as we know is not my strong point. Edit : My apples are for some reason all floating to the top in any cake with a soft batter. I think it is me as it has happened now in a couple of cakes ! I have added a link to the recipe, which I didn’t have earlier and I see there is a video too… if I had known…. ah well there is always next time !

I had better add a slice shot too

I ‘tore’ up the original bright and breezy tra la version of this post as I need to find a new voice. I am not a good housewife, I am not a good gardener, I am just a fallible and imperfect human being who for some reason strayed into the blog world and stayed for company. I like your company. Truth.

Sometimes I think I am channeling the Guardian. Alys Fowler confirms that it is perfectly acceptable to rehome supermarket basil in this week’s magazine too. I can report that my two are still rampaging away and people come and lop stems off and cart them off. It really is much the easiest way to keep them going with minimum fuss and outlay. I am not convinced by the micro herb thing. Seeds, though not expensive when you grow full size plants from them, do become pricey for relatively small return when you eat the results so small. They don’t always come out nicely either, sometimes very small and a bit stringy and sad, if you don’t have ideal growing conditions indoors.

Outdoors the flower sprouts, which now dominate the raised bed with their dark and purply presence are…. yes they are…. growing flower sprouts – this is quite exciting for me as I have never grown sprouts in any shape or form. They are frilly and they lie in the space between stem and leaf. Ooh! The broccoli rab threw up two leaves, a yellow flower and died in the shadow of the giant flower sprouts. The winter creeping thyme drowned mysteriously having started off quite well. The half a dozen bulb fennel babies are living in their fortress where I shall protect them from the marauding pigeons if I have to sit on the veg bed with a knife between my teeth.

Brian has taken a beautiful photo of the Trail of Tears beans drying on a north facing windowsill.

And what else did I think might amuse you as you dance through the internet? I attempted to clear one tiny corner of the garden yesterday, with much moaning and wingeing and pulled out the cold frame with Brian’s help to give it a rudimentary tidy up before the winter and managed to disturb Madame Frog. She made me scream of course but then I steadied my nerve and picked her up to move her to an undisturbed spot and I swear she is is smiling here. You have heard of Puss in Boots? This is Frog in Glove.

Zeb went to look for the frog but he has some funny ideas.

No frog in here…

NB For Rosehip Cordial. Pick as many ripe rosehips as you can manage. Put them in the freezer overnight to help soften them. Cook them gently in water until you can mash them up. They have little hairs inside so you do need to strain them or let them drip through a fine muslin in order to get the juice out, as you would if you were making jelly which is also an option.

A mixed bag of rosehips, hawthorn (haws) berries and blackberries

I added a handful of blackberries and some other bits and pieces to use them up but you don’t need to do that. Then once you have your strained juice, add 325 grams of sugar or so to each 500 ml of juice, heat till dissolved but do not boil. Then bottle in clean bottles and heat in a water bath if you don’t have a canner. The water bath is basically a deep saucepan with a clean folded tea towel in the bottom full of water in which you stand the bottles up to their necks and then bring the water up to a set temperature for a set time, (varies depending on what you are canning). If in doubt freeze your cordials if you have space and then you won’t have to worry about this.

Seedy Penpals – First Letters

…sons of bankers, sons of lawyers,
turn around and say, “good morning” to the night.
For unless they see the sky, but they can’t and that is why,
they know not if it’s dark outside or light

Elton John

Seedy Penpals is up and running thanks to the hard work of Mel at Edible Things and Carl Legge. Some of the people doing it I know a little, like Carla in Rome, and Maria Paola in the New Forest, but we are not necessarily paired up with people we know and in fact that is part of the excitement and the mild terror of writing to someone you don’t know at all, have no clues about at all, except a willingness to reach out to another human being and begin tentatively to make contact.

So now I have two new friends, I don’t know what else to call them, Joyce and Michelle and the potential for many more in the future. Joyce and I exchanged email addresses and a clutch of emails describing our gardens to each other and what we like to grow and then Joyce sent me these in the post. She wrote to me as well describing the seeds and why she had chosen them

The Christopher Lloyd french marigolds are much taller than other french marigolds. I keep the seeds from year to year and they are very precious. Christoper Lloyd was my gardening idol and influenced my gardening style greatly….the white borage is quite an untidy plant – the bumble bees love them

and very excitingly because I have sown them already – a selection saying

Sow Now

(like something out of Alice in Wonderland) a selection of Japanese Greens, Chervil and Corn Salad for autumn eating – in salads and stir frys I am hoping.

I have sent in my turn some seeds to Michelle who also runs the 52 week salad project (we don’t send and receive to the same person) which somehow got put to one side as I went up and down the country earlier this year. I will post something about that again soon.

I have been reading loads of gardening blogs and thinking about how very hard people work at their gardening. I think too about all the thinking that goes behind it, the exploring and the reading, the fine tuning and most of all the complex set of emotions that growing food and flowers, raising trees, looking at soil and weather engenders in our hearts and minds. At the risk of romanticising the work, it is a wonderful thing to be able to do and embeds you in your life in a way that sitting in front of a computer screen can never do.

Special Tin for Seedy Penpals Seeds. This is an old perfectly airtight Japanese Seaweed Cracker tin given to me by a lodger many years ago

I don’t get involved with that many people I don’t know – let me amend that – I don’t think of myself as someone who is good at making new friends – but – of course I have made new friends with people who read this blog, people I have met on baking days, people I talk to when I walk the dogs and people I tweet with on Twitter. Some of them I will never meet in person, but all the same, there is connection, a reaching out to the Other and as you get older this is increasingly precious.

Here are your seeds coming up Joyce! Fingers crossed and I will let you know how they do and what happens next. Thank you so much for being my Seedy Penpal. It was thrilling to receive your seeds and I hope I can nurture them well.

This is just the start and Seedy Penpals will be carrying on into the future, so if you want to join in, even in the smallest, most tentative way I know you will be welcome!

Do you have friends you will most likely never meet? In my teens I wrote to a prisoner in a German prison, something my language exchange family suggested. We wrote for a few months and then I think he left prison. He just came back to my mind, but I am not sure I can remember his name now and that is the other thing that all this reminds me of: friends do indeed come and go; there are people with whom you have great long exchanges of emails who then just vanish again, but that’s all fine, life is like that.