Fruits of the freezer

If, like me, you are facing a new growing season with a freezer full of vegetables you never got round to eating in the last one, you may well appreciate recipes that help you use up the last of them. Especially if they are a little past their prime.

I love runner beans for their scarlet flowers, the traditional feel they give to an allotment and for their prolific cropping. However they are not the most versatile of vegetables. Basically it pretty much seems to be a case of with or without bacon. I did dabble in chutney but there is a limit. Therefore I had a lot of blanched beans in the freezer along with some mushy courgettes (which, I have discovered, don't freeze well).

This is where the secret veg mush comes in. Admittedly I may have to refine the name a little. But basically you chuck unloved veg in with tomato, onion and garlic and reduce. Blend and serve with pasta. Maybe not the most complex or thought through meal but bloody useful. And pretty healthy.

With a simple name change and the subtraction of pasta and addition of butter nut squash you can call it 'BNS ratatouille'. Or not. The choice is yours.

Taking a break

I have been on holiday. The neglect and mini Indian Summer while I was away combined with the previous wet, bad weather meant that crops stopped much earlier than last year.

On my return I decided it was time for a tidy up. I took up the beans (remembering to keep the nitrogen fixing roots in the earth) and, with the help of my friend Carole, weeded the plot.  Now all I need to do is shift (I did say shiFt) a load of manure that a local pony owner left and mulch the plot to prevent weeds from regrowing and to nourish the land.

Earlier this year I was forward thinking and, looking to future, I ordered purple broccoli plants.  Unfortunately they arrived just before I went on holiday and while I was away in Sicily they died when left out (unplanted - very wasteful Katrin) in the unexpected late sun.

In the mean time I have gone mad and bought a myriad of vegetable based cookery books:
- Verdura - vegetables Italian style by Viana La Place
- River Cottage Veg Everyday by Hugh Fernley-Wittingstall
- Vegetables From an Italian Garden by Phaidon deserves a special mention for being a simply beautiful book with special seasonal sections on growing vegetables too. A delight to look at.

I can't wait to try out some of the recipes.

Less than legendary legumes

The legumes family includes broad, French and runner beans, mangetout and peas and asparagus peas.

I have discovered I like broad beans and these are the earliest to harvest. Their one drawback is that you seem to need a lot of plants to get a substantial crop. They also suffer badly from blackfly which is a bit gross. I definitely plan to sow some in November to get a great harvest early next year as the Hungry Gap hits. If you pick them young enough you don't have to faff about with taking the inner membrane off.

Peas are definitely off the cards next year after yet another lacklustre performance. The purple flowering mangetout will be repeated (if I remember to save the seed) if only for their lovely flowers. Asparagus peas were something of a novelty and grew well but were rarely eaten as they taste of neither asparagus or peas. Not convinced.

Runner beans are just now coming into their own and even though I only have 6 plants they provide more than enough for two without us suffering overload.  They are nice lightly boiled and served with red pesto.

The dwarf french beans are slow taking off but should be OK and I frankly have not idea what to do with the Borlotti beans which looks pretty but I think I have to dry and then cook later (why bother? Canned beans are great).

Whatever variety you grow, once the plants have stopped cropping, cut them down but leave roots in ground so they can give back nitrogen to the soil.

Weighing up 2010

Despite the snow and ice thawing and in theory I could revisit the allotment and start digging. But as the rain falls I still don't feel like it.

Instead I am enjoying staying on my sofa and dreaming of the crops to come in 2011. Surrounded by seed catalogues and an insatiable urge to buy more seeds and plants I find it useful to look in my seed store to see what I already have, look over past posts to remember what was problematic and, in a nerdy way, look at my crop spreadsheet.

Not only did I weigh every harvest (apart from a few of the later ones) and chronicle when they were harvested but I also went round a local supermarket getting a guide price per kilo so I can now work out which crop was worth the effort and if the plot itself broke even.

As we were starting from scratch there was some spending (£253) on tools and plants and scaffolding for raised beds (still not built!) which will be spread over the years but on the whole it seems to have worked out well. I slipped up a little in record keeping in the party season and didn't measure everything (including the Brussels sprouts on Christmas day) and don't have prices for all the vegetables I grew but even taking that into account, the value of what was grown was £800 (and 187kg of produce). Of course we had to buy a new freezer to keep them all in!

By far the most productive vegetable was the tomato - 67kg and worth £374 alone. 23kilos of Runner beans while worth a decent amount, £152, was excessive as they are not as versatile as tomatoes and courgettes. I also got 23kg of courgettes (worth £79) however they proved to be great for cakes and stews though not so good at freezing as they get water-logged.   26 kilos of potatoes were very welcome and we are still eating them now. Definitely worth repeating again though I will have to switch our carb habits from pasta and rice to potatoes so we use them up quicker.  Jerusalem artichokes are promising to be very productive too - 3.6kg from just one plant already. Delicious and difficult to find in shops - definitely on the list for the coming growing year. Salad is not only easy and fast to grow but also expensive to buy in shops - another winner.

The Patty Pans were cute but I wasn't fast enough in using them all, equally the excitement of finally managing to grow radishes doesn't overcome the fact I'm not too keen on them.

What else is on the plans for this year? More soft fruit like currants (red and black), gooseberries and raspberries.  I can't wait.

Pumpkin, squash and a damp squib of an aubergine

Top tip: Learn from my mistake - don't be in too much of a hurry to clear runner beans away. Leave the pods on the plants until the end of October.  Save seed by podding them and drying them on newspaper in a warm, dry place.  This also works with sunflower seeds.

With sunshine predicted this weekend and Tom having some free time on his hands, I decided it would be good to clear some of the plot. The tomatoes are almost finished and the courgettes are sending out very few finger sized courgettes.  The patty pan squashes are never making it larger than a golf ball before starting to rot and the runner beans are getting enormous and stringy. 

On the whole this was a good idea. We collected over 7 kilos of tomatoes (including 2 kilos of green tomatoes - if they don't ripen by the end of the month then more chutney is predicted. Friends and family you have been warned! Maybe I can get empty jars from work to put it in once I have a kitchen to make it in). We discovered a ripe butternut squash and the pumpkin has ripened to a proper Halloween orange. The debate now is whether to save it for Halloween or to eat it. Considering that I can't cook it properly and can't remember if it is a variety that is particularly tasty I think it might be best to keep it for a bit.  It can live next to the unfeasibly tiny aubergine I rescued from Tom's clearing onslaught.

2 kilos of runner beans were destined for my aunt but then Tom and I were struck with the cold lurgy so the fridge is stuffed again until I can work out what to do with them.

We also picked the largest pods off the runner beans before they were hacked down - making sure to leave the nitrogen fixing roots still in the ground. My plan was to to pod the beans and save them either for seeds next year (ignoring the fact that I have loads of beans already) or else to boil them up as dried beans in the same way that you would treat dried kidney beans.  This is where I should have waited until the end of the month as too many of them were under ripe and not worth the effort of podding - they should be a pretty mottled pink and purple.  Still they are now in the summer house next to the sunflower seeds and I am dreaming of winter stews.

When a greedy person has to give food away. The pain is made up for by roast garlic.

It's finally happened. I had to give produce away. With three freezers full and a running total of over 52kg of tomatoes and 21kg of runner beans we are feeling overwhelmed. It doesn't help that we have no kitchen. We don't even have no kitchen. We have no kitchen floor. We are surviving on food that can be steamed, slow-cooked or microwaved. If truth be told we haven't even done that - the local take-aways have done very well from us.  I must say that the novelty is starting to wear off.

So with the allotment bursting with food and nowhere to go, I took the plunge and offered runner beans to my allotment neighbour Bernie who said that he knew an Englishman who might want them (I gathered that as an Irishman he doesn't hold much truck with them). I also offered them to my friend Anna but despite having an unproductive north-facing garden they had managed to grow too many for the two of them.  I offered them to my city dwelling friends who take in an organic box but even they felt over-loaded with runner beans.  Hating to let the food go to waste I resorted to offering them to a great new cafe, The London Particular, that has opened in New Cross that serves local and organic food (and what can be more local and organic than beans from an allotment round the corner?). Thankfully they took them and I might even claim a free hot chocolate at some point!

I'm very excited as I have a new full time job. It will be a bit of a struggle to keep up the plot just on weekends but things are winding down now and the main things to do are to sow sweet peas, broad beans, move and turn the compost, relocate the giant shed (don't ask - it's all to do with planning permissions and being too greedy to sell it for a song), build raised beds and plant garlic.

I have at least done the last of these. I planted 12 cloves of elephant garlic and am hoping for a good crop in June/ July next year. As I paid £3.90 from a farm shop in Cornwall last week for a head of elephant garlic I am looking forward to being as rich as Midas. Or at least to cut it in half, wrap it in foil, roast it a low heat and scoop out the sweet flesh and spread it on a slice of good bread. Oh and use a good layer of unsalted butter. Total YUM.

Top tip: Don't be in hurry to clear everything away. 

I learnt this earlier on in the summer where the mangetout came back to life and it's true again this month.  

After the first broccoli (or more precisely, calabrese) harvest I made a cross cut in the stem and a few weeks after we got an extra harvest of shoots.

Meanwhile I am struggling to keep up with the runner bean glut - I have even taken to giving it away to our builders as without a kitchen I can't blanch them and the freezers are full.  A few pods (well quite a few actually) have got too big to be tasty and will have developed a tough inner skin. Rather than use them to eat when I already have so many tasty pods I have decided to let them dry on the plants and use them as seeds for next year.  Doing this will discourage the plants from flowering and creating new beans but I think I can probably cope. The books say that runner beans keep on cropping until the first frosts but I'm not sure I can cope with any more beans.  In Cornwall at the weekend I saw that someone made runner bean chutney - I suppose that's a possibility if I get desperate. And if I ever get my kitchen back again.

On the other hand it can be good to clear things away. A recent preference for fast food has slowed our salad consumption. Unfortunately this means a) that we have put on weight and I feel toxic and b) the lettuce plants have bolted. An attempt to braised them from a recipe in Nigella's 'Forever Summer' wasn't quite what I expected and they are still sitting on the plot, gradually reaching for the skies. I will clear them away when I'm not spending all my time harvesting beans and tomatoes (52 kilos so far!) though I suppose they provide a good diversion for the slugs which are sneaking around the plot eating beans and tomatoes (fill your boots guys!).  My other attempts at organic slug control was too gruesome to keep up. They recommend snipping them in half with scissors but when I tried it the poor thing oozed in a totally gross way that stopped me from ever doing it again.

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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The myth of speedy vegetables or how speedy is speedy?

Top tip:
Experiment with fast growing plants. Keep records of when things are planted and when they start to crop.

21.07.10
It seems it depends. On what? On the variety, the vegetable and the time of year.

Some packets promise salads within 3 weeks and radishes in weeks and I tried to put this to the test – admittedly during a fairly brutal heatwave but it's all in the name of science.

I can see signs of some radishes, runner beans and salads that have appeared within 2 weeks of sowing – how long they will take to mature we will have to wait and see. There are also some beetroot seedlings but I suspect they will take longer.

I also bought at Hampton court flower show a Russian lemon cucumber that promised to be ready in 50 days so that's the end of August – we will have to wait and see.
 
Beetroot seedlings

The kindness of strangers

Top tip:
Take time out from all the work to talk to your neighbours - you never know what you might learn. Besides, it's just nice to get to know new people.

20.07.10
Having an allotment is more than just growing food for yourself, it is about connecting with a variety of people in your area. Much like your family, you cannot choose your allotment neighbours but you are united by a common interest and it is in your interest to get along with them as it makes life much more pleasant. Whether it is advice, help with the watering or free plants there are great benefits of building relationships with your fellow allotmenteers.

Within just four months I have received spinach, peppers, curly kale, Spanish onion plants, runner beans, Jerusalem artichokes, a fabulous metal rod for holding my hose, help with carrying scaffolding boards and eaten some wonderful broad beans, spring greens and cima di rapa (a fast growing sprouting broccoli type of plant). These last 4 days we have had winds of over 45km per hour and my immediate neighbour has kindly helped piece together my runner bean framework. I've also had a convivial drink and a chat with a few others along the way.

This generosity of spirit spreads around – some seeds here, tomato plants there or the offer of a building job is offered in return. Even non-allotmenteers start to benefit as the gluts become so great that the freezer and belly is full of chard, tomato or courgette.

My Spanish onion courtesy of a fellow allotmenteer