Holiday harvests

It seems like a long time ago since my last post... I am currently on a two week holiday from work, and the first week Em and I spent in a holiday cottage in Somerset, which was amazing. This was the sunset there the first night...

It was wonderfully relaxing, but it has been equally relaxing and rewarding being back home and  returning to some steady seedling progress and some encouraging harvests(!).

Recently we had to move the hen house from the back of the garden to the front, and so I decided to relocate my plants and greenhouse to the space vacated by the chickens. A bijou potter's paradise, if you will...

It's starting to look very promising in the greenhouse, with radish and beetroot front on the top shelf, dwarf beans and kale behind; cabbage at the front on the second shelf, fennel and spring onion behind - all growing well... I had to re-pot the dwarf beans and fennel as they seemed top heavy to me - in other words, needing a little more room to grow down under...

You could see in the left of the wide picture the runner bean plants, which are still producing flowers higher up the canes. I took my first handful of beans from them the other day - perhaps a little undersized, but I prefer them on the tender side. They were delicious in a sticky rice I made - the recipe for which will follow soon...!

I also emptied one of the potato grow bags - the leaves were looking decidedly pale, and they were beginning to droop and go brown, so I decided to cut my losses. I was happy with the result though - about a kilo of white potatoes. Still not sure about the variety, but I used them in a vegetable curry and they were a lovely texture.

It was the first time I have emptied a potato bag, and it was like digging for treasure! I also guess that's the reason that no matter how small, I kept them all (note a few of them that are no bigger than marbles). I'm sure someone could start a business selling the little ones as 'popcorn' potatoes... seems a shame to think that on an industrial scale they may go to waste for not being the correct size...

I also took a chance on what surely must now be the last good rhubarb of the season - I last said that around a month ago... unprecedented growth from the rhubarb patch this year. I have frozen it and I am using it in a number of experimental dessert/baked recipes(!). 

This picture has an unusually soft focus - not sure why...?!

Elsewhere in the garden, the honey bees seem to be enjoying the buddleia - Em was sat nearby watching the chickens and came up with these shots... there are some even better shots  of bees taken by Sue at Green Lane Allotments.

We have two sets of bee traffic in the garden (they have been very kind in pollenating my veg, so it seems rude not to give them a mention!) - the bee top right is one of the ones from under our shed; whereas the other three are clearly a different breed... someone down the road sells honey from their drive, so I think they may have found their way along from hives there.

On the plot front, it won't be long now before I'm over there again, planting out some of these seedlings - the dwarf beans are pretty much ready, and I think the beetroot are almost there too... I'll keep you posted...

Rhubarb jam

We have a rhubarb patch in our garden - I would say there are about three or four crowns packed together in the one spot, and every year we have been here it has produced a good 2 - 3 kilos of tangy goodness!

I made a kilo and a half of rhubarb jam earlier in the year amongst other things which was delicious, and I thought that perhaps that I had harvested my lot... but it would seem that with all the wet weather the crowns have undergone a renaissance, and I was able to pick a further kilo the other day with only one thing on my mind... more jam!

So, here we go - how to make rhubarb jam. First of all you will need:

1kg of rhubarb
1kg jam sugar (containing pectin)
1 lemon (although both times I have used an orange)

Firstly, I cut the rhubarb into chunks add them to a large pan with the juice from the orange and soften them over a medium heat.

As the edges of the rhubarb chunks start breaking up, I add the sugar.

At this point, you wonder how on earth you will get rid of all the sugar, but after a bit of a stir it melts into a syrup.

This is the key part - get the fruity syrup in the pan up to a running boil and time 4 minutes.

After the four minutes are up, turn off the heat, grab a spoon (not your finger!) and get a blob of the syrup and put it on a cold plate... after 30 seconds or so, if you push your finger through the syrupy blob, it should wrinkle, meaning that it will set (if that doesn't work, boil the syrup for a few more minutes).

If you have a lot of bubbles formed on the top, after a few minutes you can whisk that layer off the top with a slice - however, in order to keep more of the jam I decided to quickly stir them in whilst the syrup was still molten (jam perfectionists will shudder as they read this).

Then decant into sterile recepticles (preferably jars - as you can see, I didn't have any), et voila! Let it cool down and set, and then you're ready to go!