Marsh (and other) Mallows

When you mention marshmallow, most people think of the pink and white fluffy sweet things. And not the delicate wild flower above, Althea officinalis. Of course, the sweets or an ancient version of them, used to be made with extract of the roots or leaves of the plant, although modern marshmallows, you may be relieved to hear, no longer contain any trace of the plant. Now it's just sugar and glue (not really).

Marshmallow contains a large proportion of what herbalists call "mucilage", which when mixed with water forms a kind of gel which is used topically to reduce skin inflammation, or can be taken internally to calm inflammation of the throat or stomach. "Mucilage"sounds pretty unappetising, so I guess a large amount of sugar would have helped to make it more attractive to the consumer/patient. I've never tried making anything with my marshmallows, but I do like the plants, they are tall, with rather soft velvety foliage and delicate flowers of the palest marshmallow pink - I didn't plant them, they just appeared on their own in the bog garden (so weeds then really) next to the pond. I have an overgrown area of yellow irises and the marshmallow grows happily amongst them, together with a few Willow Herbs and Purple Loosestrife, which I know people think are dreadful weeds but I quite like them and I justify them as being a good dinner for the Elephant Hawk Moth,and bees and butterflies generally. The marshmallows look a bit like a wild and more delicate form of hollyhock, Althea rosea, to which they are closely related

All kinds of mallow make good cottage garden plants, - especially the white form of the common mallow Malva moschata

 which again appears uninvited and is a sparkling white low growing flower that goes on for ages, so I usually leave it to grow. It's easy enough to pull out if it gets a bit too rampant.  And then there's the good old hollyhock, Althea rosea, which I love but it always gets rust in my garden so I don't usually have them unless my brother gives me a few of his spares.

And finally there's the shrubby mallow, or Lavatera

which I grow as an easy fast growing plant for difficult places. It's unfussy and never fails to produce its mass of bright pink flowers in the summer months. This one is a proper garden plant and numerous named varieties are available, notably Lavatera Barnsley which is a softer colour than this ordinary one in my garden,  but they all need to be cut back after flowering though, or they just get very woody and bare at the base. They strike easily from cuttings, and it's just as well to have a few coming along as the plants are often short lived and die away after a few years.

Blueberries or Blackcurrants?

I don't really get blueberries. To be fair, I don't have the right kind of garden for them, they are ericaceous, or lime hating plants, in the same class as rhododendrons which also luckily don't grow here. So I have two blueberries in pots.

I got them because I kept reading how delicious/ fruitful/ good for you they are. And easy to grow. My two plants in pots did nothing the first year, so to give them more space I potted them in half barrels (old water butts that I sawed in half, and I used rather expensive ericaceous compost).  And they have produced a little fruit this year. Thing is though,I'm not impressed with the flavour overly much. And the quantity would have been fine if I'd been looking for the kind of quantity I need with say cranberries, (ie a couple of handfuls per annum for some sauce to go with the turkey) They are low acid, and therefore edible raw, but they tasted a bit dry mealy and uninteresting. Is it just me? Tesco's are selling them by the ton. It must be just me.

But give me a blackcurrant anyday. Now there's a proper berry. Juicy, tons of them on each bush, and enough acid to strip the paint off the garage doors. That's the kind of berry we like in England. There are some new varieties introduced in recent years that are meant to produce larger sweeter berries, such as Big Ben and according to Graham Rice's New Plant Blog on the RHS website can be eaten raw so I'm intending to give them a go, since my old plants are just that, getting on a bit, and producing less and less each year. I would also like to give Jostaberries a go since I heard Bob Flowerdew recommending them. And there's a man who knows his fruit, if not his hairstyles.

Blackcurrants make excellent jam, second only to damsons in my book, partly because they are strongly flavoured and highly acidic. But they also do very well in traditional English puds like Blackcurrant crumble, a great favourite of Him Indoors. You can even make your own Ribena, and I discovered by accident last year, that if you bottle some blackcurrant coulis you can make an instant dessert simply by mixing the coulis into a little ramekin of double cream. Blackcurrant coulis, by the way is not as complicated as it sounds, and is just a posh way of saying sieved stewed fruit. A recipe would be something like

Blackcurrant Coulis
8oz/250gr blackcurrants in a saucepan with a little water and sugar to taste. Probably about 3 or 4 oz.
Stir over gentle heat to dissolve the sugar then  bring to a gentle simmer for a minute or two, just enough to soften the skins a little, then pour into a processor and blitz to a puree.
Pour through a strainer to get rid of pips.
Bottle in hot sterilized jars, or freeze in little plastic pots.

Instant Blackcurrant Pudding
First of all I apologize for the name, it sounds like one of those horrible powder things you get in packets, but I can't think what else to call it, it's not a mousse, no air or whipping involved, it's not set with jelly or anything, just fruit and cream. Blackcurrant Cream maybe?

Pour some double cream into a ramekin dish, and stir in a few teaspoons of your coulis to taste. Miraculously the cream will thicken up as you gently stir, and voila, your dessert. I do like to understand how things work so if anyone can explain the science behind this miraculous transformation, I would love to hear it, (it doesn't seem to work with other fruits I've tried)- I'm not whipping the cream in any way, it's not curdling or separating at all, but it just thickens into a lovely creamy dessert.

PS did youknow that blackcurrants contain seven times as much vitamin c as apples? Considering that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, if you planted a couple of bushes of the new blackcurrant Big Ben, you could probably deter a whole range of NHS personnel in no time at all.

Wasps and The Waspinator

I had a visit from the Wiltshire Council Pest Control Department this morning. Which is not as alarming as it sounds, it was the Wasp Lady as I call her, a lovely lady who gets rid of wasps nests in difficult positions.  I don't mean she does it standing on one leg, it's the nest that's in the difficult position, in the roof space once again, same as last year. The Wasp Lady is kitted up in bee suit, or wasp suit I suppose, and a spray on the end of a long lance which enables her to reach up to the roof level. It costs £50, but is a necessary expense for me to protect my beehives from wasp invasion.

As I've mentioned before, wasps are a bit of a menace if you're a beekeeper, as they usually turn to robbing the beehives at some stage during the summer. I always wait to see if this will happen before ringing the council, as I would otherwise leave the wasps well alone, but I have found that my strong hive has a battalion of guard bees at the hive entrance fending off the wasps quite successfully, but my other hive, the weaker one is looking  pretty much overwhelmed by the invasion. Wasps steal not only honey from beehives, but being carnivores they also eat the larvae, and even the bees,  and over time can destroy a weak colony of bees. In fact we have two wasp nests in the garden, but the other one is in the ground and I can deal with this one myself. It's an easy matter to don my bee suit, and spray the nest with a proprietory wasp nest destroyer, best time to do it is at dusk when fewer insects are flying.

At least this is what I've had to do until I discovered the Waspinator recommended on Sarah Raven's website, and anything that's good enough for the sainted Sarah is good enough for me. They are imitation wasp nests which are apparently very effective at convincing wasps that the area is already occupied by another colony and so they give it a wide berth. Frankly it sounds pretty improbable but they are sold out on Sarah Raven** though still available from the manufacturers direct, so I've just sent off for a couple of Waspinators, and I will see whether they work and report back in due course. It would be lovely to have something that just kept wasps away, and didn't involve toxic chemicals and/or wholesale death and destruction. Generally speaking I'm in favour of life, rather than death, even for wasps.

**See comment below

An At Risk Group

To quote one of my favourite comedians, David Mitchell,
"I do not have OCD, I've checked . Three or four hundred times. I definitely don't. I've stopped myself catching it by washing my hands an even number of times. But I'm aware I'm in an 'at risk group' "

If you grow sweet peas, you may notice a tendency towards this kind of behavior. I certainly do. I took the dog out this morning in the pouring rain, the first pouring rain I've seen for ages so I wasn't complaining, just put the wellies on and set off, and  we were making a fairly cracking pace towards the front gate when I was obliged to stop and attend to this

Seed pods on the sweet peas. (Variety Cupani, by the way, an old fashioned variety with smaller but highly scented flowers) Seed pods however, are not allowed to form on the sweet peas, it contravenes Garden Regulation 472 paragraph 7 subsection 3.1, which clearly states that if you allow a seed pod to ripen on sweet peas the plant will fail to initiate any further flowers even if you take it off later and it will just sit there for the rest of the summer, a pile of pale green leaves and tendrils. I'm not sure that this is even correct, my sweet peas grow in a tangle on a wigwam so it's impossible to discern accurately. But I'm not taking any chances, and so every single time I pass the wigwams I have to stop and gather any seed pods that may have formed since last time I walked past, even if it was only ten minutes ago.
I have to do it. Even in a force ten gale, three feet of snow have fallen, and the house is on fire, David's revving the car in the drive waiting for me to open the gate because we're late, I just have to stop for the few seconds it takes to pick them off.

But of course however careful you are, like the labours of Penelope you will never finish, and this morning when Mo and I came back some twenty damp minutes after the first Seed Pod Incident and we were both desperate to get into the kitchen, dry out, and have a cup of tea (she likes tea), I spotted out of the corner of my eye...

there it is, lurking at the back.  And there were numerous others too.So we had to stand there in the pouring rain just to pick off the rogue seed pods ( actually I did all the picking, she just sat there in the rain, no help at all...)

I'm definitely in an "at risk group".

Tomatoes

I had intended to show you a mouthwatering array of home grown toms, but I seem to have got the light setting wrong on the camera for this shot and they all look more anaemic than Tesco's offerings. So you must take my word for it that they are lovely -the varieties for gardener's info are top row left to right Black Prince, Mr Stripy, Marmande, and bottom row left to right Sungold, Sweet Million, Costelluto Fiorentina. I would recommend any of them, but I especially liked Black Prince, with it's dark and unusual colouring, but delicious flavour, and Mr Stripy is good too, -I think this is also known as Tigerella in some catalogues.

So far, and I hardly dare say it, there is no trace of the dreaded tomato blight. Not wishing to be slow to award myself the credit for success I am putting this mostly down to my Anti Blight Measures taken earlier in the year, (although I also suspect that the much drier weather this year has helped quite a bit too).  We are getting a steady and manageable supply of ripe tomatoes at the moment, plenty for salads and everyday needs with some to give away, but not a super huge amount for sauce making for the freezer as yet.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the plants keep on producing and stay healthy. Any one else had improvements on blight this year?

Cherries Jubilee and Other Incendiary Devices

You may think I'm going on a bit about cherries, but when you've waited as long as I have to get your hands on some of your own cherries, you certainly do want to make the most of them. I have frozen most of the crop in syrup in plastic boxes. It's worth getting one of these nifty cherry stoners if you have many to do as they get the stone out without wrecking the fruit. Also useful of stoning olives.

 They do take up quite a bit of freezer space like this, but I'm not intending they should be there for very long and the space they occupy will be vacated over the coming weeks. I'm not really keen on summer season fruits in the middle of winter anyway. They also bottle very well, and it's a good way of storing them.

Cherry jam is excellent and best made with Morello or sour cherries as they have better setting qualities. I mentioned Cherries Jubilee in my last post and it's a lovely easy pudding if you have some cherries in syrup either bottled or frozen, mine were frozen. I'm sure you'll be fascinated to know that the dish was invented by Escoffier for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897, and the original involves thickening the cherry juice with arrowroot or cornflour, which refinement will stretch your cherries to serve more people and looks nice, if you want to take extra trouble and do the flambe stuff. It's not recorded whether HM was amused...

Cherries Jubilee

Heat the thawed cherries in a small saucepan,and drain off the syrup. Spoon some good vanilla ice cream into individual dishes. In another small saucepan gently heat a sensible amount of brandy, and when it's hot put a match to it and pour it over the cherries, and then over the ice cream, watching out for people's eyebrows. If you're not of an incendiary frame of mind of course you can just heat the cherries and brandy together and pour over the ice cream, which is what I did and it tastes lovely. The pyrotechnic version is good for a dinner party although I recommend rehearsal first to avoid an unexpected visit from the Fire Brigade...

Once, years ago, I overfilled the petrol tank in my little car and parked it at a bit of an angle causing petrol to drip rather ominously from the petrol cap. It was a very hot day, and I was a bit concerned about the safety aspect being as the car was parked right outside my front door. So I phoned the Fire Brigade for advice, not 999 or anything you understand, just their normal enquiry number, and explained my concern. The nice man on the other end said I was right to be concerned, and that I should stay in the house and close the front door, and they would send someone along. Someone, he said. No sooner had I hung up the phone than a huge fire engine with sirens, flashing lights and the full works came hurtling down our little road, causing all the neighbours to come out onto the street to see where the fire was, and vast numbers of burly firemen running along, hoses aloft, ready to deal with the imminent danger to life and limb. Now I love a man in uniform, but I have to confess to being slightly overwhelmed and embarrassed at the response to my little domestic scenario. They were all lovely about it though, and said that I had done the right thing, and they had to respond in that way because  it could have been much more serious than it had seemed to me at the time. Apparently petrol being highly explosive, I could have blown up the whole street.
It must be great having me as a neighbour.

I've reminded myself to post the results of this year's anti bird tactics in the fruit garden, after  last night's lovely pudding of Cherries Jubilee ( recipe tomorrow) made with some cherries from the freezer. I should have posted this a few weeks ago when I harvested them but here's my thoughts anyway. The  Buzz Off product, which is a thin plastic line that whirrs in the breeze and frightens away birds has proved useful though not revolutionary. I have found that it has to be used in conjunction with other barrier methods to keep birds off cherry trees, and my plastic bags and bin liners, whilst not aesthetically pleasing, do seem to do the job quite well. I've made a mental note not to put the bags on too early though, as I lost quite a lot of fruit from doing just that, and they either dropped off or rotted. But I still got quite a good crop of sweet cherries from the Stella tree

and also sour cherries from the Morello tree

 where I used only the line as protection, and no bags, since sour cherries are not quite so readily taken by birds as sweet cherries, (although they've stripped the tree bare in the past). So for me a couple of buckets of cherries as opposed to no cherries as in previous years, is a result. And at £3.99 for 30 metres it's well worth a go.

 I have found the Buzz Off line most useful over the strawberry bed, where it can be placed two or three feet above the plants, but I also cover the bed with plastic netting. In previous years I have often found that birds get under the netting,- it's quite annoying to have to rescue a corpulent blackbird who's spent the morning gorging himself on strawberries and can now barely waddle flatulently off down the garden - but I think the Buzz Off line has helped stop this from happening. Although the soft fruit is mostly finished, I still have the lines in place as I'm wondering if they will help to deter pigeons from the winter brassicas that I've just planted out into their final quarters. Once again I will be netting the plants, but I think the lines may have a bit of a belt and braces effect, and frankly anything that helps protect the plants is welcome in my book. I really can't be doing with pigeons, the only ones I like are on a plate with bacon and mushrooms, accompanied by a glass of red wine.

 

A Pot Of Basil

This is the famous Pre Raphaelite painting Isabella And The Pot Of Basil, based on a poem of Keats, and depicts the heroine Isabella draped over a pot of basil in which she has, somewhat gruesomely in my view,  buried the head of her murdered lover. The basil seems to be doing quite well, which is surprising in the circumstances, since basil is a mediteranean herb and prefers quite hot and dry conditions, which would presumably not be found in the humus rich environment of a composted head. But that's artists and poets for you. No horticultural training at all.

This is my own somewhat less romantic pot of basil.

I've never thought, even on a difficult day, of burying David's head in it, it's far too small for a start, and come to think of it, if you look at the painting, Isabella's other half must have had a remarkably small head to have been accommodated in that pot, allowing as you must, for the roots of the plant and a reasonable amount of John Innes No 3.

Anyway, my basil has done remarkably well this year. I've often found that I had much less basil than I would like so this year I sowed a line of seeds alongside my tomato plants when I planted them out, and the ones in the greenhouse have done very well. The ones outside have fared less well, they do have fleshier leaves but far fewer of them.

But it's always feast or famine in the garden and my plants were starting to produce flowers before I could use them all, so I cut them all off at about four leaves from the base (so they can sprout again for a second cut) and brought a great armful into the kitchen.  I have made a pot of classic basil pesto (basil leaves, garlic, olive oil, parmesan, pine nuts, seasoning in proportions to suit you all whizzed together in the blender). Float a layer of oil on the top to prevent discolouration. Keep it in the fridge. You will notice I have very efficiently dated the pot so that I will remember not to keep it too long. Low acid food in airless conditions like this has a very slight chance of playing host to botulism, and that's not something we want to be trifling with is it. It's the reason commercially made sauces like this are always acidified and therefore taste terrible. The risk is extremely slight, so I don't suggest you worry too much about it, but  I always think that knowing about and understanding the "science bits" makes us better consumers. So all the more reason to stuff yourself and your family with as much as you can manage to eat for a few days, and keep the rest in the freezer.

 Basil isn't the easiest herb to store, but if you have a surfeit freezing is the way to go. I wouldn't add the nuts and cheese before freezing as they won't keep as well, and you can add them later if you wish. Just whizz up the basil leaves with some olive oil and you can either freeze it in ice cube trays, or as I do, just freeze it in a flat sheet in a plastic bag and break it up when it's frozen to make pesto or add to soups, sauces or pasta. Disembodied heads are entirely optional.

Fig Trees and The Sentimental Garden

You don't often see figs growing in England. Fig trees yes, but actual figs, not so often. The RHS says that figs will crop three times a year in tropical countries, twice in the mediteranean, but only once in cool temperate areas like England. The tree is hardy enough to withstand our winters happily, but getting some fruit is apparently, as with so many things in life, all in the timing.

Fig trees make an enormous amount of growth, and often sucker at the base - this tree in fact was a sucker that I pulled up from a tree growing in the garden of the French house we had a few years ago. So it's a kind of nice souvenir, although I don't know what the variety is, but it reminds me of those few balmy summers we enjoyed in the Charente every time I look at it. One of the differences between one's own garden and a public garden like the RHS (apart from the weeds) is that in our own patches we have some plants for sentimental rather than purely horticultural reasons. And there's nothing wrong with that. The Edwardian gardener Gertrude Jekyll would certainly not have approved, she said the gardener has to have a hard heart, and remove any failing plants and replace them with something better. And I can see her point, why struggle with a plant that is clearly unsuited to its surroundings. But we home gardeners have no paying clients to please and we can afford to be a  bit more sentimental, and persevere with our funny old fig trees and so on.

Anyway, according to the RHS, if you want to grow figs in England, the thing to do is to leave the little tiny figs that form late in the year, as next year they will grow and mature into your single crop.  My crop is, of course, entirely accidental, it  just seems to have turned out right. Now I'm hoping we have enough sun to sweeten and ripen them up by the end of summer.

New Toy

I've treated myself to one of these..

and no it's not some weird victorian medical contraption, it's a steam juice extractor. I bought it very cheaply on Ebay from a lady whose dad used to use it for wine making. I've got such a generous harvest of fruit this year, I thought it would be a useful bit of kit.

There's basically a pan at the bottom which you fill with water, then a second pan on top that collects the juice with a funnel in the middle that directs the steam up to the fruit which sits in the top layer in a basket. It's difficult to describe, you kind of have to see it to get how it works.

So far I've used it to juice a bucketful of gooseberries, from which I made an elderflower jelly which is as clear as a bell,

 and the remaining pulp I used for a batch of summer chutney.

It takes up quite a bit of room and will go in the garage in the winter, so no good for anyone pressed for space but so far I'm quite pleased with the results. Cheese and chutney sandwich anyone?

The Luscious Pea

FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Forbidden fruit a flavor has

That lawful orchards mocks;

How luscious lies the pea within

The pod that Duty locks!

Emily Dickinson

I've had more luscious peas this year than even Emily Dickinson could have dealt with. Some have even made it to the dinner table. Usually they never get that far, and to be honest, having had a few servings of cooked peas, we have decided that we like them best raw, and so I serve them in the pod as a kind of starter before we eat. It reminds me of a trip to Italy, a couple of years ago, when we ordered broad beans in a restaurant, and were presented with an enormous plate of raw beans, not only were they raw, but also still in their pods! I later learned that this is a local speciality in Puglia, and although I couldn't finish the whole plateful, I did enjoy them as they were young and tender, if a little inelegant!

As you can see my peas are tall, the variety is they very old variety Telephone, and they require staking. I think it's worth the extra bit of effort, since you get far more pea per square foot of row than with the short varieties, which  have mostly been developed for the convenience of  Messrs Birds Eye, who require peas that grow uniformly, mature all at once, and can be harvested mechanically. And you can't harvest six foot tall plants with a machine. The peas aren't all ready at once, which is what we as gardeners are looking for, and can be picked over a period a week or two. The only problem is that there's such an abundance of them that it's difficult to keep up with the picking, and it 's looking like pea soup will be on the menu pretty soon for the older cannonballs that I've missed.

I've also grown "Alderman" another tall pea, whose seed is more generally available, and whilst it's perfectly fine I would still recommend Telephone for its stronger growth, and bigger pods containing up to nine finely flavoured peas. Seed can be obtained from Real Seeds, who warn that the pods tend to swell up before the peas have developed so don't be fooled into picking too early. Seeds Of Italy also supply the seed under the name "Telefono".