Garden Update

Now is a good time to look at what flowers and shrubs have done well in your garden this year, in order to increase your stock and hopefully have an even better display next year. Everyone's garden is different, and has it's own little idiosycracies of soil, climate, and so on, so it makes sense to note what you can grow well and make the most of it.
In my garden this year I have been pleased with, amongst other things -

The Blue Wall - an early display of Wisteria, Ceanothus, and Solanum on the south wall of the house.

This  pretty little pale yellow daisy like flower is Anthemis Tinctoria EC Buxton, and has flowered all summer long, wonderful value, and easy to grow. I will split the clump quite soon and have a large patch of it for next year.

And the surprise star of Spring was Allium Schubertii, which looks like a violet exploding firework when in flower, and afterwards the dried seedhead looks almost as good. I have just harvested the dried seedheads which I intend to spray with silver paint for Christmas decorations

Apples continue to ripen and I am storing the best unblemished fruit in perforated plastic bags in the garage along with my garlic and onion crops.  Plastic bags are not as picturesque as wooden boxes or slatted shelves but work pretty well, although you do need to keep an eye on them whatever storage method you use, the old saying about one bad apple is indeed correct and can spoil a whole batch it you don't spot it early and remove it. You can see the dried Allium Schubertii seedheads hanging on the left.The Hubbard table chickens are now 13 weeks old and  I will  have to start thinking about dispatching and processing them. They are quite variable in size however, so I intend to take advice from Sid about whether they are ready to go yet or not. The four cockerels are, unsurprisingly, a bit bigger than the rest, and some of the hens are a good size and others quite small.

Food Glorious Food, but so much of it..

It's that time of year when I seem to spend every waking moment picking, jamming, pickling, storing, bottling, etc etc. I love it really, but it does get a bit exhausting at times, and the worst part is, you can't moan to anyone about it like you can with say a normal job when things get busy. I regularly hear people say how busy they are, rushed off their feet, loads of orders to fill, paperwork to do, blahdy blah.
And I do sympathise, and say how hard it must be for them, working so hard and everything.
But if I say I'm a bit knackered from harvesting stuff from the garden, people just look at me and say,
"Well don't grow so much then". 
As though it's obvious. Clearly these people have not grasped the problem. It's a bit like saying to someone with a hangover,
"Well don't drink so much then".
Unhelpful in the extreme. Apart from anything else, the deed's already done. If the observation had been made as the beans were going in in May, or indeed as the vodkas were going in at midnight, it may have been a bit of use. But it's too late now. I do realize that in a good year you can feed a family of four, a dog and a hamster from one good courgette plant, (actually probably not the dog),  let alone the half dozen plants that I've got, so I've really no idea why I grow so many. Same with beans. Tomatoes however, are another story.

You can NEVER grow too many tomatoes. There are so many things you can do with tomatoes, and they are useful all year round that you will never have too many, though if you've got loads you may possibly not have enough energy to deal with them. I usually freeze a few bags of runner beans, though I often don't use them, and although I know I could freeze various courgette dishes etc, I don't bother, because to be honest, I never really fancy eating courgettes in the middle of the winter.  But if you have a stash of concentrated home made tomato sauce in the freezer, you always have the makings of a quick tasty supper.

I believe I have already waxed lyrical about Jamie's Mothership Tomato Salad, and I'm still enjoying it, but I'm finding now that I can use the best fruit for said salad, and the rest - especially split, bruised, and otherwise imperfect fruits, of which there are many, can be used for the

Easy Roasted Tomato Sauce

Take a large roasting tin and add as many tomatoes as you can fit in one level, cut in half, if you can manage lots of different heritage varieties, the flavour of the sauce will be enhanced, but even a box of the cheapest supermarket ones (I recommend Lidl) will do fine

Add a head of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped  and sprinkled over
And a large handful of whatever herbs you have to hand, stalks and all, I had thyme and parsley.

Pour over a generous few glugs of extra virgin olive oil.

Season generously with salt, black pepper and a teaspoon or so of sugar.

Place in the top of a hot oven for about half an hour, or until softened, and possibly even slightly charred around the edges. Discard the woodiest bits of the herbs, and then tip the whole lot into the food processor and blend well. Store in small containers in the freezer.

Come January you'll be so glad you bothered.

Perfect as a quick pasta sauce, spread on a pizza base, and enriching sauces and casseroles of all kinds, for example -

Quick Chicken Curry

Brown two or three boned chicken thighs in a frying pan in oil.

Stir in a spoonful of the curry paste you always have lurking in the fridge.

Stir in  a container of your defrosted tomato sauce.

Add  coconut cream to taste, and a squeeze of lime juice if you have some.

Simmer a few minutes to cook through.

Serve with rice or flatbread.

It may not be authentic, but it's delicious, quick, easy, inexpensive, and has no e-numbers.

Please feel free to comment on this post, or just say hello! Click "comment" below....

Order, Order

Someone once said to me on discovering my interest in gardening, that they didn't think that I would have been "that much of a control freak". Now no one, of course, likes to think of themselves as any kind of control freak, but I can kind of see where he was going. A certain amount of interfering with and organizing of, Mother Nature's bounty is what it's all about. Leaving it entirely to nature only really works if you live in the Amazon Basin; if I left my greenhouse to nature for a couple of weeks it would in fact resemble the Amazon Basin, and I wouldn't be able to get in the door. Indeed I often can't. So there has to be a certain amount of "ordering nature" going on in all gardening to make it work. Or as a cleaning lady I once had, used to put it "Making order out of chaos dear", (what could she have meant?).

Certainly serried ranks of tulips have faded from fashion in suburban gardens, and with council bedding schemes becoming as rare as hens teeth, cheaper and more natural looking prairie style planting is springing up on roundabouts the length of the country. There's been quite a fashion for gardening "au naturel" in recent years, and I don't just mean that naturist couple who garden in Malmesbury in the altogether. Of course, gardeners have always looked to acheive a "natural" appearance in their schemes - hiding supports under the flowers and foliage and so on. But we all know really that it's complete nonsense, and that looking natural has nothing at all to do with how the garden would look if you really did leave it to nature. But wildflower meadows, ornamental grasses, natural ponds are the effects for which we all must now strive if we are to keep pace with modern horticultural trends.

I I have to confess I can't seem to get to grips with ornamental grasses very much really, I think they know I don't like them much, and so they don't do well for me, - you can only grow what you like the look of, as indeed you can only successfully cook what you enjoy eating, but I have made a small experiment with a wildflower patch, and it has been sufficiently successful to encourage me to expand the idea for next year.

I used a packet of wildflower seed, although most of what came up was the pretty yellow Corn Marigold, which used to be a ubiquitous weed of cornfields before industrial farming did for it (and many other once common but now rare and endangered wild flowers).

Anyway it has spread its grey-green foliage and bright yellow flowers around enthusiastically, almost as though it can't quite believe no one has come along in a tractor and sprayed it from a great height with Glyphosate, and in company with some red field poppies, the odd bright blue cornflower and a bit of white chamomile has made a tiny "natural" patchwork of the kind you would never ordinarily plant in your border, but which has a charm all of its own. It's also good for the bees, which is always a consideration in my garden. So I've been collecting the seed from the very many seedheads, and am hoping to expand the planting area next summer into a Monet-esque cornfield ( what do you mean ambitious..?) but without the corn of course. Come to think of it, the corn might actually come in handy for the chickens...Hmm.. Anyway it's a sloping area under trees which currently supports a good display of daffodils in the spring, but not much else, so I'm hoping this plan will fit in with the early bulbs and provide a continuity of flowers through the summer and autumn.

Party Party

As I said, I dropped and broke our camera, so I have been experimenting with my phone camera, and it seems to be reasonably good, so here is a picture of a cake I made for a family party the other day. In case it's not obvious, it's a drum kit, the birthday boy in question being a drummer of great distinction and promise, (good luck at Uni, Lee). I was quite pleased with how it turned out, though there is a degree of "sag" that I did not forsee. I used an ordinary victoria sponge cake and vanilla buttercream for the cake and fondant for the icing. The "sag" effect could have been avoided by the use of rich fruit cake, but most people seem to prefer sponge these days, except for Christmas. Black fondant isn't all that easy to come by in darkest Wiltshire, so I had to send away for a supply of that, - special stuff like that is much easier to find these days, God Bless the Internet. I used the Blue Ribbons Sugarcraft Centre and would highly recommend them for quick and helpful service http://www.blueribbons.co.uk/

And if you live in London there's a great shop called Party Party near Dalston market that my daughter took me to, that sells everything you could need for parties and has a whole floor dedicated to cake decorating. It's just past the Multi-Coloured Wig shop, and the stall selling Giant African snails (alive!!) but not as far as the trendy cafe full of media types with laptops and capuccinos. London is such a treat for country bumpkins like me!

I must have made millions (well not millions, but quite a lot) of cakes over the years, and I always come back to the good old all in one victoria sponge cake, made in a food processor. It really does make the best sponge cake in my opinion. It's couldn't be easier to make, is quick, and endlessly versatile. My recipe is pretty much the standard one (though I have adopted Nigella's suggestion of an ounce of cornflour in the mix) and I do tend to have a bit of stock syrup* around the place these days, (being a beekeeper) which is useful for all sorts of things including brushing over the cake as it comes out of the oven, and ensuring a soft moist cake, even on those occasions when you know you've left it in the oven five minutes too long, and have aquired HCS (Hard Crust Syndrome)

4 eggs
1 pack of butter at room temperature

8 ounces of self raising flour

1 rounded teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon of cornflour

8 ounces of caster sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

about 2 tablespoons milk

Put everything in food processor and switch on till blended. That's it. You might want to mix it without the milk first and then add as much milk as you think you need to get a soft, smooth, but not too runny mixture. Depends on the size of your eggs really.

Cook in two 8 inch sandwich tins, a large loaf tin, lots of little bun cases for butterfly cakes, a roasting tin for cutting into initials or numbers, or whatever you fancy. I cook the 2 sandwich tins on the bottom shelf of the roasting oven of the Aga with the cold shelf on top for about 30 minutes, which is probably about a Gas 4 but only you know your oven. The cake should be a pale golden brown, and springy to the touch, and slightly shrinking away from the sides of the tin when it's done. What you really want to avoid is cooking too fast and over-browning, leading to the dreaded HCS, and dryness. Now, where is that jar of syrup....

*Stock syrup - Dissolve a pound of sugar in a pint of water, or a kilo in a litre, gives you a medium syrup useful as an emergency feed for bees, or cakes.

Win Some, Lose Some

Success and Failure in the Veg Plot

First of all, I dropped and broke the camera today so as I have no photos to upload, here is a nice picture of a Painted Lady on one of my sunflowers to be going on with. Hope to obtain a repair/replacement soon


It's very easy to blog about all the great successes you've had in the garden, and conveniently forget about all those things that didn't quite turn out how you expected, not to mention all those things that were complete disasters. (Cherries spring to mind) Part of being a gardener is the ability to ignore, or at least learn from all the mistakes, and still feel enthused enough to carry on regardless. Although I did think for a while that I might give up on peas altogether. Well not really, even though my harvest was about the size of half a small bag of Birds Eyes, I will put it down to the variety, or the poor weather at vital times, (and will not mention my inadequate supports, lack of watering, and forgetting to pick regularly) and try again next year.

On the plus side, garlic has again been good,- variety Music,- although struck by rust which made the leaves brown prematurely, the crop is still good and we are already enjoying it. I'm not sure whether to use some as a seed crop as I did last year, or whether to buy some fresh, I don't know whether the rust will carry over on the bulbs?

I haven't grown runner beans for some years, but this years crop is excellent, I'm managing to pick the beans young and tender, variety Enorma. Courgettes, as always are excellent, and as usual I've planted far too many, variety, Nano Verde di Milano.

Tomatoes have done ok, I sprayed with old fashioned Bordeaux Mixture against blight as I lost all my crop the last two years, and it seems to have worked reasonably well. There is still some blight on some outdoor plants but most of the greenhouse plants are clean. I used Jamie's recipe for the Mothership Tomato Salad to good effect, it's delicious, and what's leftover makes a great sandwich the next day for lunch. In fact I'm rather addicted to it, which is jolly healthy and a sight better for the arteries than other common addictions like chocolate cake or gin, though I do like them as well.



For anyone who doesn't have Jamie's book the gist of the recipe is, I'm sure Jamie won't mind my saying, very simple. Roughly chopped garden tomatoes, the greater the variety, the better, sprinkled with salt and left in a colander to drain for a bit. This concentrates the flavour, ready for the dressing of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar 3 to 1, as much mashed garlic as you like, some pepper and chopped parsley and basil. Use plenty of dressing and serve with some home made flat bread to dip in with, and to make the sandwich with the next day.


This year's tomato varieties in order of success - Sungold, Red Zebra, Black Prince, Prudens Purple, Amish Paste, Brandywine, Sub Arctic Plenty. My son The Professional Gardener thinks that Gardeners Delight is the best flavoured, he may be right, but I didn't grow it this year. Next year I think I will try the blight resistant variety, I think it's called Ferline, has to be worth a try as I have lost so much in recent years.


Every garden has its instrinsic problems, mine is fungal diseases, - blight on tomatoes and potatoes, black spot on the roses, and rust on the garlic, roses, and hollyhocks. Other people suffer with different things, often to do with the climate and situation. The PG, for example has slugs and snails, which I happily do not suffer with. Although I know what it's like as I've had gardens full of them in the past. My chickens and ducks take care of every slimy crawling thing for me. He, the PG, has a walled garden and no chickens - I did offer to lend him a chicken, but I think we came to the conclusion that it might actually do more damage than the slugs, with all the scratching you have to put up with, you have to have a certain kind of shall we say, laissez-faire style of gardening to accomodate poultry. And he, being a PG, holds no truck with that kind of thing. For myself, I keep the birds in a run for some of the year, during the time they would do most damage to young seedlings and so on, but for most of the year, from about July onwards until the following late Spring, they are free to roam, and the damage they do is manageable.


I've even had some success with aubergines this year, Viserba, in the greenhouse, I usually grow some plants and then throw them out when they get whitefly and duly keel over. But I picked a good size one yesterday,and several others are coming on. There's an italian recipe for pasta with aubergine stuffing that I think I might try out, will report back if it's as tasty as I hope.




The Ornamental Garden
A good tip when planting out in the Spring is to remember that some plants grow very tall and others don't. This may seem like an elementary observation, and someone who's been gardening since the old queen died could reasonably be expected to know this. No one in their right mind for example, would plant a big clump of Michaelmas Daisies in the front of a border so that during the summer when it's growing like BillyO but not flowering, it will completely obscure the lovely Rosa Mundi behind, which is in full flower, and even the tall blue globes of the Agapanthus will be bobbing about behind it like someone at the theatre seated behind the woman with the big hat on. Like this for example.... [picture follows..]
So next year I shall move it somewhere more sensible, and make loads of other ridiculous mistakes.

O Frabjious Day! Another Swarm!

I'm thrilled to announce that I have today captured my first swarm!

I was busy in the veg garden, when I first heard the noise, I looked up and saw a huge cloud of bees directly over one of my two hives. At first I thought my own bees had swarmed, but I knew, having looked at them just a couple of days ago, that it could not be them, and the swarm were probably attracted by the bee smells, and were checking out the hive to see whether it was vacant. Having found it occupied, they moved off down the garden, then across the lane and into a sycamore tree in the hedgerow, followed by me, with a cardboard box and a white sheet. I was lucky in that the bees were in an accessible spot, and I was able to knock most of the bees off quite easily into the box. I left the box for an hour or so for the stragglers to go in and then brought it back to the garden where I put them into a spare hive. This is the second swarm I've had this year, but the first one I've actually collected myself as the first one just arrived in the hive all by itself. So now I feel like I'm a Proper Beekeeper!

Sorry no pics, was too anxious to get it done properly to think about the camera!

Three Sheets to the Wind

Rumour has it that I only give a dinner party once every seven years, which is a massive exaggeration. We had one on Saturday and it was at least the second or third this decade. On the menu was Mushroom and Blue Cheese Canapes, followed by home made Chicken Liver Pate, with home made Focaccia, (herbs from the garden), Roast Saddle of Wiltshire lamb, with garden veg ( potatoes, runner beans, courgettes) and for pudding we had a Chocolate Truffle Torte with cream, or an alternative of (or in some cases in addition to - you know who you are, Wayne) Vodka Jellies. Lest you should think I'm sounding too smug, I would point out that I didn't raise the lamb, grow the chocolate beans, or distill the vodka, so some of the credit/blame has to go to someone else.

Three Sheets to the Wind* Vodka Jellies

*This was my mother's description of my father returning home from the golf club on a Sunday lunchtime "your father's three sheets to the wind again" - I don't know where it comes from but it seems an appropriate link to the sheets of gelatine in the recipe.

Enough sheets of gelatine to set a litre of liquid (varies with the make, I used three. You'll be using a bit less than a litre to compensate for the alcohol) Don't use commercial packet jelly unless it's for five year olds, in which case you'll probably have to reduce the vodka)

400 ml warm water
about 2 tablespoons caster sugar

juice of half a lemon

400 ml vodka

raspberries, blueberries or other fresh berries

Soak the gelatine sheets in cold water for a few minutes.

Dissolve the sugar in the water over gentle heat, and add the soaked gelatine. Stir until dissolved.

Add lemon juice, and when cool the vodka. You don't want to be adding vodka to anything hot as you may vapourise the alcohol, and end up with no sheets to the wind at all, apart from the gelatine, which would be a shame.

A couple of spoons of raspberry juice colours it a delicate pink, or leave it clear. Place a few berries in pretty glasses and top up with the jelly, and leave to set in the fridge. Do bear in mind you have the equivalent of 8 large vodkas in this recipe, and it tastes fairly innocuous. But it's very pretty and quite fun. Isn't it Wayne.

If you should find the fruit floats on the top you can set it at the bottom with a thin layer of jelly in the fridge, where it will set faster, and then top up with the unset remainder. Cheers.

How to start beekeeping for free (almost)

I'm really pleased with the progress being made by my bees this year. Having started the year with no bees I now have two thriving colonies, one nucleus of Carniolian bees which I bought, and the other a swarm which came in of its own accord. The swarm is doing extremley well, and has filled up a box and a half with eggs and brood, and almost a full super with honey. I forgot to put the queen excluder on and they seem to be doing so well that I thought I would just let them get on, and they have kept the brood to the bottom and the honey stores in the top super, so all is well. They also seem to be very good tempered bees and I almost feel I could handle them without gloves and bee suit. The carniolian bees are making plenty of brood but have not yet filled up the brood box although their wax is a beautiful pure white.



I have been doing quite a bit of research about bees recently, and have come to the conclusion that I will change my way of keeping bees quite radically in view of what I have learned. Most people are aware of the concern about the welfare of bees worldwide, and many suspects including pests, disease, global warming, poor husbandry, and pesticide use have been suggested. I think it quite likely that most of these are contributory factors and that bees are indeed the "canaries in the coalmine" early warning to us all about the dangers of not caring for our environment. It was interesting to me that when this problem first appeared in the press and on the news some time ago, it was suggested that the difficulties were largely caused by "bad beekeepeers", messing about in their back gardens and not doing a proper job. There were "inefficient amateur beekeepers" allowing the varroa mite to run riot in the population. This reminded me of the way that amateur poultry keepers were set up to be the scapegoats for last years H5N1 or bird flu, before the danger turned out in fact to be closer to intensive factory farms like Bernard Matthews. And then of course this year's great profit making scam for Roche and Glaxo Smith Kline, H1N1 or Swine flu and so on and so on... Sorry, I'm digressing into Rant Mode... Amateur poultry keepers, beekeepers, and gardeners are not the culprits in these scenarios but more often the last bastions of common sense, traditional and local knowledge and practice, many of whom make a substantial contribution to the future of healthy food production and protection of the environment. OK rant over, but to get back to bees - there are similarities between keeping poultry and bees, and it's not just that they both have wings.

Picture from the Barefoot Beekeeper by Phil Chandler showing the author and one of his home made Top Bar Beehives


Before the Reverend Langstroth invented the modern wooden framed beehive so familiar to us all, bees were kept in basketwork skeps where they were free to make whatever kind of honeycomb they wanted. But in return for the wooden framed hive we now give them we have taken away their freedom to live in the way they have chosen to live for thousands of years, and it seems to me that if we keep them like chickens are kept in battery farms, it will all be for the worse. We put them in homes not of their own devizing, try to control and alter their natural behaviors to suit ourselves, transport them around the countryside to pollinate various different crops, sprayed with chemicals, robbed of their precious honey for which we substitute refined white sugar. It's no wonder bees are suffering, it would be amazing if they were not with this kind of treatment. We now largely accept that keeping chickens in tiny cages gives us an inferior product, causes harm to the environment, is less healthy to eat, and is immoral. It's pretty much the same for bees. If we think bees are "just insects", and consider them in welfare terms, we must at least consider the consequences to the wider environment of their being abused.



I've been keeping bees for a few years now and it has always seemed somehow not quite right to me in some way. Now I know why. I now find it appears to be entirely possible to keep bees in a much more natural and "non interventionist" way, by using simple Top Bar Hives and giving up the slightly obsessive control freak style of the modern hive. I'm definately going to give it a try and anyone who is interested in finding out more about these issues should take a look at the Barefoot Beekeeper by Phil Chandler, and the associated web site for natural beekeeping at http://www.biobees.com/ And if you are interested in keeping bees in a simple, natural, and (not the least important consideration these days) inexpensive way, have a look at Phil's book. He describes how you can start beekeeping without any of the expensive equipment you may have thought you needed and how to make what you do need yourself, if you're even a tiny bit handy or have access to someone who is, neither of which applies to me, unfortunately.



And as a final sad footnote, it even seems that the very people who have been entrusted with looking to the welfare of bees, the BBKA The British Beekeepers Association, are in league with chemical companies like Bayer who produce agricultural chemicals and pesticides of proven danger to bees!! See http://vimeo.com/1158245 I have written to the BBKA and will not be renewing my membership.

Loadsaweeds! And a Mystery Egg Thief?

I have been away at an exhibition "up north" so have a bit of posting to catch up with. Like most people with livestock I have to rely on friends and neighbours to help out when I go away, so I try really hard to make the arrangements as foolproof and user friendly as possible. However I've noticed that my idea of foolproof seems to not always hold up to daily scrutiny by other people, and so my long suffering neighbour and friend Alison comes round before I go to see what kind of Heath Robinson contraptions I have come up with this time, guaranteed of course not to go wrong, break down, fall apart, allow escapes, fox attacks etc etc. The neighbours all know when we're going away with the incessant racket emanating from our garden, of hammering, sawing, and generally banging about for the whole of the previous week. Anyway, this time I spent a few days making some proper automatic feeders and drinkers with components from the Solway Feeders whom I highly recommend - website http://www.solwayfeeders.com/ -they sell all the bits and pieces you need for various options, and I also found a small industial unit in Cirencester who sell off used plastic barrels cheaply. (Contact Rachel at MJP Casings Cirencester http://www.naturalsausageskins.co.uk/ - also an excellent contact for anyone wanting to try sausagemaking at home) The large containers make excellent water butts and the smaller ones are useful for making large automatic feeders, and they are safe to use for livestock as they are approved food use containers. I will try to post some more construction details and photos later.


All this does mean that every time I go away I spend the preceeding two weeks preparing to go, then a week away, and when I get back there's a months weeding to do. And boy can those weeds grow in three weeks! The veg garden looks like a jungle! But at least there were no serious problems this time for Alan and Alison, and my new automatic feeders and drinkers worked pretty well. Even the automatic greenhouse watering timer seemed to work. Amazing!The weather up north seemed quite cool and rainy, and I think it was similar down here, which has also contributed to the weed overgrowth situation. Anyway, I set to, with help from the chickens, - I did the weeding, and they ate the insects - here they are tucking into an ants nest they found in the woodchip path.




One interesting thing Allan mentioned whilst I was away that he saw what he was fairly certain was a ferret in the garden. I have noticed the remains of some stolen eggs in the garden recently and had put it down to crows or magpies entering the duck house and dragging out eggs before I had collected them. Now I'm thinking it maybe another culprit, so I have brought the defunct squirrel catching cage out of retirement and baited it with an egg - nothing so far, but we will see.
This is a picture of one of the eggs, not broken as you can see, but opened on one side and completely emptied. So quite a delicate job really, I would love to hear from anyone who has seen anything similar.

Life is just a bowl of cherry...

In view of my much vaunted Tesco Plastic Carrier Bag Anti Bird System, I thought I would post a photo of this year's fantastic crop on my Stella cherry tree. Yes, this is the total crop, not an example of a choice fruit, not one of the biggest fruits, but the complete and utter total crop. It's all I was able to find when searching this morning,.. Oh no , tell a lie, the total crop is more like double that at least......

Hmm, well of course it's my own fault, for not keeping an eye on proceedings, and being too busy doing other things, but it's a disappointment, since there were very many more fruits on the tree before the birds got to them. By way of excuse, here is an example of a mere fraction of

my strawberry crop for this year -

so it's not all bad news. Even the Tesco carrier bags can't be expected to do the job on their own, and I should have a) put out more of them, and b) kept a more careful watch on them. So where I had been intending to offer you a lovely recipe for the famous and delicious French cherry pudding Clafoutis Aux Cerises, or in my case Au Cerise, I felt that a single cerise in a large plateful or Clafoutis was going to be a bit heavy on the carbs. I was going to offer the recipe, not because I particularly love it, although it's nice, but because it reminds me of the yorkshire version of it that we used to have as children, which was I suppose Clafoutis Au Rhubarb. My dad used to make a Yorkshire Pudding, strewn with chopped rhubard just as it went into the oven then sprinkled with sugar as it came out, and served with cream or more likely evaporated milk. In fact my dad was quite a fan of batter in general, quite apart from the compulsory Yorkshire Puddings, he often made us apple or banana fritters, - just chunks of fruit dipped in batter, deep fried and sprinkled with sugar, - I think he felt it was good value and filled up three hungry children at little cost, (he was a Yorkshireman after all) the rhubarb being doubly beneficial being a garden crop that was effectively free.

Anyway, to gloss over the lack of cherries, and concentrate on my surfeit of strawberries, I feel I could effectively drown my sorrows with a Strawberry Daiquiri, a delicious if old style summer drink that I thought of when looking for ideas on what to do with strawberries besides ice cream, jam, and well, just eating them. I came across Hugh Fearnley's recipe for Strawberry Granita - as strawberries don't keep very well, you can use up some less than perfect ones (chuck the mouldy ones though) by making his Strawberry Granita and using a scoop of it to make my Strawberry Daiquiri thus ..

1 cup of Strawberry Granita ( basically you put some sweetened strawberry puree in the freezer and when it's nearly frozen solid you scrape it up with a fork to make a kind of strawberry snow)

Half a cup of white rum

Juice of half a lemon or lime

An assortment of umbrellas and other vulgar 50s cocktail decor

If you use Hugh's proper granita you can just stir in the rum and lemon juice and that's all you need to do, apart from drinking it, or if you're using frozen strawberry puree just whizz it all together in a food processor,and tip into suitably 50s style cocktail glasses.

Drink through a straw whilst putting your feet up and enjoying some old Fanny Craddock cooking programmes, ( don't worry you're not required to actually eat any of Fanny's gruesome confections, it's entirely for amusement) or if you're not up to that, Marilyn Monroe in the Seven Year Itch would do as well. Perfect summer entertainment. But then, as must be apparent by now, I am very easily amused.

First of the Summer Veg and Poultry Update

I decided to get some fertile eggs for the white duck, and was a able to obtain six mixed Indian Runner Duck eggs from Mark Henham on Ebay, which I slipped into her nest this morning. and I must say she was remarkably unappreciative of my efforts on her behalf, giving me a good pecking and hissing like Sid, as I slipped the six eggs under her and removed the dummy ones I had left her with for the time being. I still have my doubts about her ability as a broody, but I decided to put all the eggs under her and hope for the best. It might work, but it might not, we'll see.


The broody hen, on the other hand, is doing extremely well with the fourteen table chicks. and I have let them out over the last few days, to explore further afield she's very good and strolls authoritatively around the garden with them, clucking all the while, so that they know where she is, and they chirp and chirrup so she knows where they are, and if someone gets into difficulties, stuck behind an obstacle of some kind, the volume soon ratchets up, so that she knows whats happening and where and can take appropriate action. It's amazing really that she manages not to lose any of them, considering that there are fourteen of them and she, being a chicken, can't count. It's quite difficult for me to count them actually, as they' re always on the run, but they're definately all still there, They don't look quite so cute anymore, as they've grown a lot and lost their downy fluffiness, and are starting to get feathers like proper chickens. Just as well really, as I must keep clearly in mind that they are Table Birds. even though I do want them to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs and to have as good and as natural a life as possible enjoying a plentiful diet of worms insects and hopefully weeds.

From this.......


to this in three weeks.....




Artichokes


I do so love artichokes, - my son once picked one in a field for me when he was on a cycling holiday in France as a young teenager and brought it all the way back on his bike, ah what a perfect gift that was, and tonight I enjoyed the first one of the season from the garden with dinner. I was quite prepared to share it with David, but he regards artichokes as just an excuse for eating loads of butter, and as he's supposed to be on a diet and can anyway take them or leave them, that suits me just fine as I can have them all to myself.

I prepared this one by slicing off the tops of the leaves, and scraping out the hairy choke in the middle, and then boiling it until tender, about ten minutes in this case as it was quite a big one but very fresh from the garden. When cooked, I drained away the water, and set the artichoke into a dish. I then melted a large knob of butter in the pan, added a good dollop of the garlic scape pesto I recommended to you last week, ~(see recipe) , a good squeeze of lemon juice and poured this over the artichoke. We had this with the last of our venison steaks that our Game Man Sid brought us in the winter, and some of my home made foccaccia style flat bread, spiked with rosemary and more of the garlic scape pesto. I will admit to a certain tendency around this time of year to garlic scape pesto creeping into every dish, it's such s versatile thing to have in the fridge and so delicious, it's hard not to add it to everything, pasta, bread, salad dressing ( just add olive oil and a squeeze of lemon), spring veggies, the list is endlless. It's also lovely on courgettes and we had the first of the seaon tonight, always such a treat. The variety I have grown this year is Nano Verde di Milano, an Italian variety which should give a regular supply of baby courgettes through the season, although no doubt I will forget to pick at some point will find myself with a supply of large marrows for chutney making. Once courgette plants get into their stride they can be so generous in their bounty that they appear on the dinner plate with overwhelming regularity and summertime suppers are referred to by my daughter's boyfriend Ian as "Courgette Surprise" - the surprise being of course when there's no courgette in it.