Rhubarb rhubarb (and chard)



Chard stalks before being blanched

Before the deluges came I harvested a vast harvest of rhubarb and chard. With 2kg of rhubarb and 1.612kg of chard I had to get out all the recipe books to use up the bounty. I made three dishes with each so it's been a week of rhubarb and chard for us.

The recipes were:
- Rhubarb and cinnamon cake for Riverford Farm Everyday and Sunday cook book
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Everyday-Sunday-Riverford-Farm/dp/0007388268/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1335172840&sr=8-2#reader_0007388268
It comes out a little 'puddingy' - I like to call it moist (apart from hating that word).
60g unsalted butter
380g sugar
3 large eggs
drops vanilla extract
300g self raising flour
1 tsp bicarb of soda
1 tsp cinnamon
250ml creme fraiche (I used used up left over custard and 0% fat Greek yoghurt)
450g rhubarb cut into 1cm pieces

Rhubarb cinnamon cake

Oven at 160 degrees. Cream the butter and sugar together. Add eggs, vanilla. Add flour (sifted if you can be bothered - I couldn't), bicarb and cinnamon, fold through creme fraiche and rhubarb. Cook for 40-50 mins until skewer comes out clean.
- Rhubarb and custard cake where they advise using ready made custard - I used more than the recommended quantity but then I also used a low fat version.

Rhubarb and custard cake

- Pickled rhubarb. This is something I first tasted at Mike and Ollie's supper club in Deptford and it was great with mackerel. I liked it so much I got the recipe and here it is in Mike's own words "Boil together cider vinegar, 1/4 of the vinegars volume in sugar, a few bay leaves and juniper berries. Pour over chopped and cleaned rhubarb and hey presto! It will keep for some time."

Chard gratin

- Chard gratin using stalks. Basically layers of blanched chard stalks (save leaves for the 'risotto' below. Top with a reduced tomato sauce (mine was left over from a pasta). Mix chopped onion and garlic into creamy mix, with cream cheese and 0% Greek yoghurt. Finally top with breadcrumb mixed with Parmesan. Pop into the oven for a bit until browned on top.
- Chard stalks and anchovy mix, served with pasta. Essentially chopped blanched stalks mixed with melted butter, garlic and a few anchovy fillets. From 'Vegetables from an Italian Garden' http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vegetables-Italian-Garden-Season---Season/dp/0714860808/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335173364&sr=1-1

Chard 'risotto' with barley

- I used the left over chopped chard leaves in a pearl barley 'risotto' (I think it's called orsetto in Italian) inspired the latest series of Two Greedy Italians. Here they made it with pork mince but I kept it veggie and substituted chard for spinach. http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/pearl_barley_with_21752

The rain has limited my planting plans but in fear of running out of space at home I scraped a trench into the plot with a hoe and plopped the pea seedlings into it and left them to the garden gods. I must remember to provide pea sticks for support but they will have to muddle through for the moment. I also created a little line of beetroot seedlings on the garlic onion borders.
Apparently I can't harvest the onions and garlic until early to mid Summer. The internet informs me that this is probably June at the earliest. Perhaps I can care for the tomato and courgette seedlings long enough to delay planting them out till June?

2011 yield review and the best intentions

Laziness, a new job and Winter has meant that I haven't updated in a while but now that Spring feels like it's round the corner, I am stirring like the snails crawling out of the nooks and crannies in the allotment and feel it's time to start writing again.

Where better to start in January but a review of the last year and a blog full of good intentions?

This is what I wrote back in July
Slow start to the year as things got into their swing. Things came early due to warmth but when growing from seed still need a growth cycle so not as successful than established soft fruits. Heat may have been a check and certainly the raspberries need magnesium (Epsom salts) to correct yellowing leaves. They also should have been tied in better. Next year or in the autumn I will create a framework of wires which should resist the weather better than normal string.

Now for the update in January 2012
We had a dreadfully wet summer and that meant the tomatoes got blight and yields were poor. It also didn't help that I didn't tie them in or support them well. Again - must do better next time.

Yellow was the colour of the season and yellow courgettes, patty pans, ornamental squash and yellow beetroot were great fun. The squash stored well and we are still eating it now in stews and bakes. Despite a slow start and early lack of germination the beetroot ended up doing well though they weren't the impressive giants that Bernie managed to grow.

I can't tell you what varieties did well because I forgot to label them, or labelled them in pen that washed off or on sticks that got lost over the season. Again, must do better this year.

Now in the midst of winter, incidentally the warmest winter since the early 80s apparently, we have had just one frost and the chard is still going strong and we are starting to harvest the Jerusalem Artichokes. We also had a potato harvest to make an Irishman proud. Sadly, though we tend to eat bread or pasta more as our chosen carbohydrate and my constant on/ off diet discourages me from even that so we still have mountains of potatoes at home. 

My resolve is to find recipes that are both healthy and that use up potatoes in vast quantities before the next season returns.  In fact the whole chest freezer needs a good clear out as I fear we may even have vegetables from Autumn 2010 lurking in there! 

So that will be my challenge for the next four weeks is to use up all the stored vegetables before Lent starts on the 21st February. Watch this space for recipes using fruits of the freezer...

Oh and I promise to:
- cut down a third of the raspberries to see if they are autumn or summer fruiting
- tie the raspberries in with wire (string just didn't work)
- label things properly
- tie in and support the tomatoes I eventually grow.
- I can't promise not to order too many seeds because that horse has already bolted but I can sow them with caution to avoid a glut

An update from before the rains

1st June (excuse the mixed timeline but I also updated this on the 16th)

The Maris pipers are flowering but are they ready? They are a main crop after all. (I harvested 940g of pentland javelin on the 12th and made salmon and potato salad - yum) I think I'll leave them till I need the space and the other varieties have been harvested.

The peas are nice and fat as are the broad beans. I am always disappointed by the yield of peas once you shell them. The beans on the other hand a great and filling and mashed with some spring onion on sliced ciabatta rubbed with garlic made a delicious pre meal snack. A fortnight later and mangetout are the stars.

I am so enamoured of the beans and mangetout that I will try a second sowing at the weekend. When clearing the old plants I will leave the nitrogen fixing roots in the soil. I will also plan to sow more beans this autumn.

A couple of plants are bolting and going to seed - sorrel and chard. I've pulled up the chard and resown and keep snipping the sorrel spears off.

I am lucky enough to have a surfeit of strawberries way ahead of my birthday. I harvested even the slightly soft ones and lightly boiled them down with sweetener into a sort of jus. Then you can make a pretty healthy pudding. Cut sponge fingers in half line bottom of a medium bowl, pour over half the jus, add more sponge, then the last of the jus, cover in natural yoghurt. Leave to let the flavours mix. Light but tasty. A fortnight later and the raspberries are coming into their own but rarely making it back home - they're just too tempting.

Beetroot is doing well and I can see tiny kohl rabi seedlings.

I still have two spare patches. What to do with them? I am considering maybe planting sweetcorn among squash. A bit like native Americans who traditionally relied on Squash, beans and corn for food.

Recovering from hard knocks

I moved the rhubarb and the Swiss chard and they didn't like it. They wilted, withered and sulked.

(The rhubarb had to be moved despite being very happy in the dead zone behind the water butt to make way for a new path - hope it survives).

You should usually cut back large leaves to give plant chance of surviving. This means they can concentrate their efforts on establishing roots not on other matters like photosynthesising through leaves. Unfortunately I was in a hurry and just dumped them in the ground without even a splash of water.

It's easy to forget that plants need care from us if we want the best from them - most often in forms of time, food and water. But also just pay them attention - watch for signs of stress or recovery.

Here's a (rare) philosophical thought - plants are like people. We also can sulk and shrink as we change situations. As we move out of our comfort zone we have to adapt. In that moment of adjustment we can flounder a little and feel pulled in several directions - maintaining showy magnificent leaves while trying to put down roots and find deeper sources of stability and sustenance. Sometimes it's too much to do at once and you flounder.

At times like this, maybe it's a good idea to take a lesson from plants and concentrate your energies into one goal.

Here endeth the lesson.

Potatoes, shallots and garlic

I planted up garlic in among the rhubarb (including the plants I had to move because they are building a new path). The elephant garlic is also looking good.

I have 2 varieties of shallot I planted - Red Sun and Golden Gourmet (two packs of the latter one of which was from Poundland and in fact had more bulbs than the pack from B&Q). Come end of July/ early August I hope to harvest a bumper crop. I planted them in furrows 10cm deep, 10cm apart and kept rows 20cm apart to allow for hoeing. Golden Gourmet is supposed to be sharp while red sun is supposed to be gentler in flavour.

I also harvested the last of the Jerusalem artichokes and replanted a few of the tubers to grow again this year.

I relocated the Swiss Chard as edging to the plot.

Finally, I planted 4 varieties of potato. Positioning the Maris Piper and Charlotte closest to the rhubarb/ garlic to allow the space freed up by the speedy first earlies Rocket and Pentland Javelin to be planted up with something else. I forked over the soil into the trenches so that it would be easier to create a furrow. The only one where I didn't was the Maris Piper and I'm concerned that the soil is too compacted.

I didn't find time to plant the Autumn Bliss raspberry canes from B&Q nor the asparagus crowns from Aldi.

Disguising swiss chard

Top tip: Small leaves of Swiss chard are more tender and subtler in flavour. Keep picking the leaves to avoid bolting.

The mix of sunshine and (copious amounts of) rain has been perfect chard weather and it has been growing fast. In fact I harvested over a kilo the other day and some of the remaining plants are bolting (putting out flowers and trying to set seed).

It's pretty popular stuff with gourmets and not often found in shops however the taste can be 'earthy' and isn't always popular with people. Tom, my husband, objects to it neat (even with chili, garlic and/ or bacon) so I have to disguise it - ideally with some pasta and cheese. This recipe is easy to do and tasty.

2 tubs of quark (or Philadelphia if you can't get quark, though quark is lower in fat)
Some grated chunks of left over cheese
A few cloves of garlic chopped
1 onion, chopped
Swiss chard, a good handful
A simple tomato sauce
8 lasagne sheets

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Blend the quark, garlic, cheese and onion. Blanch the chard for 3 minutes or so, drain and squeeze out the excess water. blend in with the quark mixture. Boil the lasagne sheets. Separate and roll (they can be a bit sticky so I often boil a few more sheets to allow for ripping accidents). Put a couple of spoonfuls of the mixture into a lasagne sheet and roll up. Place in an oven proof dish, cover with tomato sauce (in this instance it was home grown) and more cheese. Cook till bubbling and brown.

Autumn in August?

Top tip: Enjoy the daylight before the clocks go back (or forward - I always forget), keep harvesting crops and sow green manures when bare patches start to appear. Enjoy the bright colours of approaching Autumn.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Autumn is already here despite it being still not even mid August.  The days seem shorter and there is a definite chill in the air in the morning. Maybe this is normal and the exceptionally dry and warm summer we have had was the aberration but I had almost forgotten what rain was like. Last Tuesday, the skies decided to remind us with a vengeance. Following the driest weather for 80 years August 12th saw vast amounts of rain - so much so that the Met Office issued severe weather warnings. Looking on the positive side, it means I don't have to spend so long watering. It does, however,  encourage the weeds to spring into life and though you are supposed to keep on top of weeding a) I am not going out in the rain and b) there is no point hoeing weeds if the rain might 'replant' them. So I've stayed indoors and read gardening magazines.

This might be another reason why I think it might be Autumn as, infuriatingly, monthly magazines insist on talking about tasks to do in September despite coming out in early August. I seem to be living in a time warp.  Luckily I also buy Amateur Gardening (the UK's oldest consumer gardening magazine, I believe) and Garden News which are weeklies so they should be more relevant for mid August.  According to them, this week we should:
- Harvest early apples (only take them if they come off easily when twisted)
- Keep picking runner and french beans to keep the plants flowering and cropping
- Lift and sort out potatoes - eat damaged ones first (obvious I would say...)
- Sow salads. Apparently if you sow them in the morning they will germinate better. Worth a go.
- Direct sow spring cabbages now to either crop for winter greens or leave for fully grown plants in spring.
- Remove all but two or three fruits per pumpkin plant to allow them to ripen properly and put the fruits on a tile/ lift them off the ground to stop rotting and encourage ripening.

In this gloom it's good to have a few unusual and colourful produce to make a change from the tidal wave of green (courgettes, salads, cabbage, beans etc) so I was particularly pleased to see that my Swiss Chard 'Bright Lights' have produced a great range of coloured stems.  The variety of colour ranging from hot pink to burnt orange is truly psychedelic. Steam the leaves and use like spinach. Cook the stems separately and apparently you can treat them like asparagus spears. A good way to preserve the leaves and stems is to freeze them but rather than have the leaves in a giant block, steam them, squeeze out the water and then pop them into a muffin tin so that you have easy to use portions.

I'm also loving the cute mini-spaceship shaped Patty Pan summer squashes. I'm not sure what to do with them though the online view seems to be to either treat them like courgettes (ARGH - not more courgettes!) or to stuff them. Tempted by the latter, though I am a bit suspicious about stuffing things - it's almost like disguising the filling.  I also spotted among the triffid-like squash patch a developing 'real' pumpkin and a butternut squash so am watching their progress with interest.

PS Charlotte, her darling little daughter Tabitha and I harvested one of the neighbour's giant cauliflowers (he did give me permission). Though impressively huge it was also full of woodlice - less than appealing but I did get rid of them all by the time I posed for this photo!

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Sowing: the waiting game

Top tip: 
Prepare the ground well, water in and follow spacing guidelines. Don't avoid thinning seedlings out - it's a false economy. Be patient (or at least, sow fast growing plants next to slower growing plants.) If you can't grow seedlings at home because of space or you can't be bothered - cheat and buy plug plants. Label sowings unless you have an amazing memory.

25.07.10
Sowing seems to be some form of magic or alchemy. From such tiny things, amazing plants appear and grow. You create drills and water them on a wet and cold day in spring, drop seeds in at the right spacing. And then wait. And wait.
Then, once you've almost forgotten what you sowed (a learning for next time is a more rigorous labelling system – marking variety & sowing date) a tiny shoot pops up. This is an important time and you need to water them, keep them weed free and generally cosset them. Sometimes it is tough to recognise them from weeds and in some instances they are so tiny it is best to wait till they grow up a bit so that you can spot the difference and thin them properly.

Another learning is to believe the books when they say not to sow things all at once otherwise you will end up with a glut. Successional planting allows for you to plan ahead and spread the harvest. Some plants, such as Swiss Chard, just keep on giving and you don't need many of them to get a good crop from them. Others, such as french beans, need more plants to get a really good continuous crop in sufficient amounts.

Of course, some seeds, such as radish and salads appear (and grow) faster than others and they are perfect to sow along with slower maturing plants but it's worth keeping an eye out that the other plants don't start to need more room or overshadow the seedlings.

Finally, think ahead to when gaps will start appearing. Having harvested the early potatoes, I have a cleared space that is begging for plants while in another area my courgettes are squashed (pardon the pun) in too close. If I had prepared some french beans, sweetcorn and more squash then I could have planted things up there. As it is I think I may have left it too late and will have to concentrate on beetroot, salad and radishes.

Before....








And after.....

Thick and fast

Top tip:
Keep a record of what you are harvesting and when so that you can plan for gluts. Balance the flavour and satisfaction of growing your own with the cost of buying it in - if it doesn't taste better or save you money, it's not really worth giving it limited space.

26.06.10
I have been harvesting cut and come again salads and chard for some time now and had may first sweet and juicy birthday strawberry (in early June) but things are speeding up now. I have been lifting the first of the potatoes since the 14th June but today I got 1.73kg and I feel this is just the beginning.

Slightly anal, I know but I have been keeping an excel record of the main crops by weight and date harvested. Between 26th June and 10th July I harvested 2.75kg of mangetout. Thinking that the plants were spent (and some were very yellow) I cleared half but left the healthiest plants to see what would happen. By the 20th July there was a new crop and I'll keep you posted on the total haul.

Courgettes are notoriously prolific and my heart sank when I read that one plant produced enough for a family of four until September as I had planted at least 6 plants. The first proper lot of courgettes arrived on the 7th July and by 24th July I had harvested 7.77kg of courgettes (and that doesn't include an enormous marrow that I missed). I have had to become pretty inventive in finding new recipes to cope with this and am on the look out for a third freezer to accommodate the loot.

Radishes, a plant normally so easy to grow they give it to children, have more or less failed me but I am persevering. Carrots were pretty when pulled but slow to germinate and so cheap in shops I am not sure if I want to repeat them next year.

When wandering around the allotment it is hard to avoid plot envy – one plot's sweetcorn are magnificent and has grown a turnip enormous enough to make Baldrick proud (it must be all that water), anothr neighbour has inherited an amazing collection of fruit and one green fingered allotmenteer has raised infamously hard to grow cauliflower with impressively large heads. My Chinese neighbour has a perfectly neat plot (I must do better next time) and one of theTurkish ladies has built little earth walls around her plants which seems like a good idea to adopt in later years.

One other plot has not fared as well - most of the plot is left fallow and the gooseberry bushes are groaning under the weight of soon to be wasted fruit. For a greedy person like me that has aspirations for a fruit zone this frustrates the hell out of me – I wonder if I can wangle another plot?

Just a small sample of the courgette glut.

Over-ambition

Top tip:
Get to grips with what you have before starting on new projects. Don't get lured in by seed packets - think about sharing or swapping with friends.

14.04.10
One of the dangers of being greedy is that, by the very nature of greed, you want it all. You refuse to relinquish the opportunity to grow even one plant and want to try them all – raspberries (summer and autumn fruiting), rhubarb, blackberries, you covet your neighbours tayberries and loganberries, you want plums, strawberries and a ballerina apple tree. And that's just the fruit.

In blind denial of the actual size of your plot, your plans verge on the grandiose and you start to have ambitions that would make the Eden Project seem paltry in comparison. This gets even worse when faced with such a harmless thing as a seed catalogue (or website). It is all the easier to pop these little packets of promises into you shopping basket and not take into account the fact that each packet is more than enough to keep you in peas/ salad/ beetroot (delete as appropriate) for the next two years so why you need 3 of them is anyone's guess.

My particular weakness is for a bargain. There is nothing I like more than browsing the pound shops for garden related goodies. You soon find out that the old adage of 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' works in reverse in a poundshop – focus too much on how much you are saving and you lose sight of the fact that many items at £1 still add up to many pounds. I have gone mad at the pound shop on many occasions: netting (both pea and anti bird – not sure of the difference), battery operated lights for the inside of my lock up, seeds, fertilisers, watering cans, garden ties, canes, hose heads and trowels that bend or snap (a less successful purchase among many good ones). One word of caution it is worth bearing in mind when not only the quality and whether you really need it but also check if you can get it cheaper at a mainstream shop – sometimes £1 for an item isn't such a good deal if it is 89p in Sainsbury's.

Among these delusions of grandeur, it is important to develop a sense of proportion and ask yourself which will I need most of? Chard is long lasting and a cut and come again crop so, unless you let it bolt, you won't need too many packets of seed as you will get more than enough to last throughout the growing season. Equally, my husband hates beetroot and despite trying to cook it in a variety of ways he won't budge on that so it would be crazy for me to sow too many of them as i can't eat that many all alone.

A word of warning to the congenitally greedy – it might be tempting to ignore recommendations to thin seedlings but that would be a false economy. I chose not to thin radishes and ended up with many woody sticks rather than swollen, ripe, pink radishes. What started out as a desire to grow more resulted in the waste of all the plants.

Finally, it is always very tempting to buy ready grown pots from nurseries but do consider your return on investment. A single Borlotti bean plant won't generate enough beans for a meal but will create enough beans to multiply next year's crop (perhaps I should have harvested them more often and they would have created more beans). A ready grown plant of tomatoes with fruit already formed looks inviting until you work out that it only has enough fruit to fill a punnet but costs three times as much as a punnet in the shops. Once you factor in your time and effort that tomato plant stop being so appealing.

B&Q bought Borlotti beans waiting to be recycled into seeds for next year.