Recipe Roundup

Needless to say, after my last post I've been busy in the kitchen trying to wrangle a few gluts.

First up were the courgettes, the best use for them so far must surely be the Courgette Brownie recipe I picked up from Mumsnet. I used 100% courgettes instead of half courgettes and half carrots and chocolate chips instead of nuts (This is a bit like Theseus' paradox, if you change the ingredients is it still the same recipe?). There was a cloak and dagger element to the preparation as I couldn't let the children know there were (gasp!) vegetables in them. My deception paid off and the girls adored the dark, moist, indulgent tasting brownies and I could polish my good mum halo as they chomped down the courgettes.

Next were my bounteous crop of tomatoes. My whole reason for growing lots of toms this year was to repeat the Ketchup I made last year. Incidentally, I was out attempting to pick some wild apples for the recipe and, to my horror, discovered many local trees completely bare. Is anyone else finding the same? I'm wondering if the dry spring had something to do with it. I may even be driven to the extremes of paying for cooking apples for goodness sake.

Finally, I used my plums to make Plum and Lavender jam after being inspired to try the maceration technique by drroothair's comment on my Yellow Bullace Jam post. It took ages to stone the fruit but once that drudgery was out of the way it's a lovely way to make jam although I have to admit I went for the 'just boil it all up' method rather than fiddling about removing bits and then re-adding them. I couldn't taste the lavender in the final product at all but luckily, it didn't set first time so I re-boiled it and added some mixed spice which produced a lovely, tangy jam I was very pleased with. Hmmm, Theseus raises his head again, if you change the spices and the technique .....

Now, breakfast time, I'm off to pick some tomatoes for fresh tomatoes on toast - it's a hard life!

This year's tomatoes.

2011 is the year I actually pay attention to my tomatoes. For the last 3 years or so I've bought a few garden centre plants, put the Gardener's Delight in the mini greenhouse and the Tumbling Toms in hanging baskets, watered them but little else.

A friend of mine called round last summer and expressed loud dismay at the state of my greenhouse whose plastic seams were creaking with the effort of containing plants of Little Shop of Horrors proportions. I did have a decent yield of tomatoes, enough to use fresh plus home made ketchup and green tomato chutney, but the tomatoes were all tiny and I'm greedy so if I can get more bang for my buck then so be it.

This year I have decided to pinch out in the approved way in the hope of getting bigger tomatoes. I'm finding all the greenhouse fiddling a bit tedious to be honest and the blasted things insist on growing every 5 minutes, it's housework outdoors really. I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it considering I had enough last year but we'll see. Maybe next year I should stick to bushy varieties and leave them to their own devices.

I'm also a bit worried about a couple of plants who seem to be yellowing excessively. I know it's usual to yellow around the bottom but it's usually later in the season and this time only a couple of plants are affected. As far as I can tell they're adequately watered and fed. One of the plants in question is pictured below so any opinions on the cause will be gratefully received.

My tomato Holy Grail is a tomato salad like the one Jamie Oliver made in his 'At Home' series which featured loads of different types of tomatoes, yellow, green, stripy, purple etc etc. I've hopefully gone some way towards it this year, I've got Gardener's Delight (seeds free from Mumsnet!), Mr Stripy (bought seeds), Tumbling Toms (bought seeds), Roma (plants donated by a friend) and hopefully some yellow ones (plants donated by another friend who thinks she may have got her seedlings mixed up)

Ideally, if I had, say, 9 plants, I'd like them to be 9 different varieties. The problem with this is that I'd have to buy 9 packs of seed as I wouldn't get 9 varieties of plants in my local garden centres. From the 9 packs of seeds I'd only use a few then what would happen to the rest? Would they keep long enough to use the next year? Or would they go to waste? This is all starting to look a bit expensive too ....

But look what I found yesterday! Packets of mixed seeds! With a picture looking like Jamie's salad! Now if only I could find courgettes packed in the same way, I'd be a happy bunny!

AB Seedy

Had to get that pun in somewhere as I'm so proud of it! It's my suggestion for the name of the seed growing 'club' that a couple of friends and I have formed. The idea being we would co-ordinate our planting (eg, I do courgettes, Anna does lettuce), grow a few extra seedlings and then do a vegetal runaround, swapping excess plants. Of course this makes my germination rates uncomfortably public. In the past I would be quite sanguine about failures and just buy garden centre plants to fill any gaps. I really should have remembered that I did that with tomatoes for a couple of years on the run, last year was the first year I gave up and just went straight to the garden centre.

I think you've probably guessed where this is going already .....

Most of the seedlings are going well. I have a germination rate of over 50% for the sweetcorn which isn't too shabby. Borlotti beans more or less 100%, ditto courgettes, various squashes, chard, Cavelo Nero, calabrese etc etc

And my tomatoes? The ones which are supposed to be bounteous? Enough to share with friends? The value adding obscure varieties? Nada. Zip. Absolutely nothing. A handful of Tumbling Toms are struggling up but Mr Stripy are stubbornly staying soil bound.

In the meantime, I've taken my first delivery of leek seedlings from David. I had to share his seed tray idea in the photo above, I thought the cut off milk bottle was genius. Of course the size of the donation (the bottle in the photo, plus one more, plus a full conventional seed tray) causes me even more embaressment in having no tomatoes to give in return, let's just hope he likes courgettes ......

One for Carol

Who was dubious that tomatoes would ripen without a greenhouse. Here are my ripe Tumbling Toms, there would have been more red ones if I'd remembered to take the photo before I picked enough for the children's tea! All the large tomatoes in my mini greenhouse are still green, showing no sign whatsoever of ripening yet.

Much excitement on the foraging front, today I discovered some cherry plums and what I think are yellow bullace in a hedge near school. Trouble is, they're not very accessible being on a narrow, high bank alongside a busy road and they're quite high up. Over to Adam for that one I think.

Strawberries, strawberries everywhere.

After the gloom of the courgette debacle I thought I'd take the opportunity to dwell on my successes for a change.

The strawberries are doing well this year. Last year was disastrous, they were in a pot on the ground, imprisoned behind the ubiquitous netting to protect them from the chickens. They still managed to break in a couple of times though and decimated the crop. This year the strawberries high up on the fence and safe. I've also fed them with some berry fertilizer and that seems to have given them a boost.

We have a total of 9 plants which sounds like a lot but is really only enough to give us a regular snacking supply rather than a jam sized glut. They are a delicious snack too, the four of us regularly squabble over who's getting the next ripe berry. I have to confess Adam and I sneaked out into the garden after the children had gone to bed last night to snaffle a few.

My plan is to transfer the plants to the allotment (when/if we get it) next year and then start planting up runners to eventually create a large strawberry bed as, at the moment, strawberries and raspberries are the only jam fruit I buy so I'd like to grow my own supply instead. In the meantime, we're off to the pick your own fruit farm this weekend and I'll commence the 2009 jam making season.

Also doing well are the tumbling toms in hanging baskets. They are already covered in loads of green fruit but, as ever, the plants themselves look really ropey. This is my second season of growing them and last year I was worried, thinking they were on their last legs. A quick trawl of the Internet told me their appearance was fairly typical and, sure enough, they cropped and cropped and cropped. We had enough for several lbs of green tomato mincemeat as well as meeting all our salad needs for a sizeable chunk of the summer. Let's hope this year goes the same way.