With over 4 kilos of mangetout, it's been hard to eat it all

Top tips: Keep picking mature pods to encourage flowering and therefore more pods later. At the end of the season leave a few pods on strong plants to grow big so you can sow them next year. Make sure the roots of your plants are well watered and there is space for the air to circulate. Aim the water at the soil not the leaves to avoid scorching and mildew.  When the plants are finished, cut the stalks off and leave the roots in the ground as they will fix nitrogen in the soil.

The mangetouts have finally given up the ghost. They have been a fantastic success. Initially, I thought they weren't going to perform well as all I got were a couple of pods sporadically but in the end they were miles better than the peas.

I guess I'd better come clean about my shameful secret. In a pretty anal way, I have been weighing the crops that I bring home.  A spreadsheet and graph even exist. 

Looking back I am glad I did as I can see that the mangetout started cropping on the 26th June. They produced a prolific crop of 2.7 kilos in  two weeks.  At that point the plants were looking sorry for themselves so I cut down half of them and left the others to see what would happen.  It was a good thing that I did as 10 days later they started cropping again and we got another 2 kilos. Not bad from half a packet of seeds.

On top of that you can use the new shoots in a salad - just like they do in smart restaurants. I've been freezing them like mad and have even had to buy a new freezer to accommodate them as unfortunately I don't have many recipes to use them up with.

Any ideas?

Three things to do with broccoli

Top tip: Bulk bake to add variety and stop you feeling like you're eating a mountain of the same vegetable.
I harvested my first broccoli at the weekend.  While not as big as the giant cauliflowers that were grown on a neighbouring plot (and were also left to fester and rot) it was pretty impressive and I decided it would make 3 decent meals.

The first dish was an easy mid week meal and a variation on a Nigel Slater recipe - broccoli in an holandaise sauce. I cheated on the sauce and used a packet and served it with runner beans mixed with onions and bacon. I am a firm believer in bacon jazzing up any vegetable.

The second meal was a broccoli and bean bake based on a recipe from The Great Allotment Cookbook.  I used cannellini beans instead of butter beans as it was all I had in the store cupboard and added horseradish and mustard to give it a bit of a kick.  I served it with a dollop of Hugh Fearnley Wittingstall's courgette 'glutney' (love that name!).

1 onion finely chopped
300ml milk
2 tbsp flour
1/2 teaspoon herbs
425g beans, rinsed and drained
tbsp of horseradish and mustard to taste
150g broccoli divided into small florets
8 cherry tomatoes or 4 full sized, chopped
1 tbsp of tomato paste
1 tbsp cheese
50g breadcrumbs
Preheat the oven to 180 C. Soften the onions then add the flour, milk and herbs and bring to the boil. Once sauce is boiling, reduce the heat and cook for 3 minutes or until thickened. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, horseradish and mustard and salt to taste.  Add the beans, broccoli to the sauce and bring to the boil. Pour into an oven proof dish. mix the breadcrumbs with the cheese and put on top of the broccoli mixture. Cook for 20-25 minutes until the sauce is bubbling and the breadcrumbs are beginning to brown.  Here is what it looked like before I added the breadcrumbs and cheese.

I also prepared a twice baked cheese souffle as a friend is coming on Friday and i thought I'd serve it with a sharp green salad.  Souffles are not nearly as scary as they are made out to be if you follow the steps. 

Twice baking also means that you can cook it ahead of time (and even freeze it) and then just reheat it when friends are coming round. It's much more fun to socialise with them than worry about egg whites and souffles rising.
I used a recipe from the Fruit and Veg Grower's Cookbook.

75g butter, softened
150g broccoli (avoid thick stalks but some thinner stalks are fine)
25g flour ( I used wholemeal for fibre)
150ml milk (semi or skimmed is fine if you're watching your fat intake)
50g mature cheddar (the stronger the better), grated
3 large eggs, separated
2 tsp of mustard, powder or British (brings out the cheese flavour perfectly)

Preheat the oven to 190 C. Grease an oven proof dish (you can also do 4 large ramekins) and place a circle of baking paper on the bottom (though mine got tangled up and I had to remove it and the souffle still came out of the dish OK).

Finely chop the broccoli along with any small stalks until it resembles chopped herbs. Melt 25g butter in a frying pan and fry the broccoli until just softened. Remove from the heat.

Melt another 25g into a saucepan and stir in the flour. Cook while stirring for 1 minute. Remove from the heat. Stir in the milk bit by bit, then return to the heat until the mixture boils and thickens. Remove again from the heat.

Stir in the broccoli, mustard, grated cheese and egg yolks and mix well. whisk the egg whites till stiff and fold in with a metal spoon.

Pour into the oven proof dish and cook for about 30-40 minutes until risen and browned. Allow to cool for 10 minutes. Cover and chill till ready to serve. Or you could freeze it at this point and it will last up to 6 months. If you do decide to freeze then let it thaw in the fridge overnight and then cook as below.

When ready to serve, preheat the oven again to 190C. Put the souffle on a baking sheet. Melt the remaining 25g and brush over the top. Sprinkle with a little Parmesan and bake for 20 minutes until warm and crisp.

Much ado about tomatoes

Top tip:
It's not just important to mark plants when planting out but also clearly label seeds and seedlings to avoid confusion later on. Pinch out outdoor grown cordon tomatoes after they have set fruit on 5 trusses. Remove lower leaves if they look a little crowded.

One important thing when growing any seedlings is to mark the varieties well. Something I failed to do earlier this year when I grew two varieties of tomato - 'Garden Pearl' and 'Alicante' (or 'Moneymaker' - it's a mystery plant). Both sets of seedlings did well and once the risks of frost were over I proudly planted them out. I couldn't label them as I couldn't remember what varieties they were and which was which but they looked happy and I gave them a good feed of tomato fertilizer to set them off on their way. So far so good.

Unfortunately it turns out 'Garden Pearl' is a trailing bush variety. There are two types of tomato - bush and cordon (also sometimes known as indeterminate). The bush one grows as a bush and you don't need to pinch out sideshoots and the cordon one grows as, you guessed it, a cordon so in one main stem and you remove side stems and stems that form in the leaf joint so that the fruit produced by the main stem can get all the goodness. As you can see, once the seedlings really got going the difference in plant types is pretty obvious.

This particular bush variety is also a trailing variety and very suited to hanging baskets and pots but not so great at ground level. Bernard suggested I lift the tomatoes on straw to improve air circulation and protect the fruit from the earth - this is supposed to ward off a bad disease called blight where the leaves turn black and the plants collapse.

I also have a couple of other plant varieties - marmande (a large beefsteak tomato) and baby plum tomatoes and another mystery one picked up at a local plant fair.
I have just read that it is a good idea to remove lower leaves to allow air to circulate and let the sun in and the fruit to ripen. Also we should pinch out the growing tip when the fifth truss of flowers has set flowers. this allows the plant to concentrate it's efforts on growing the existing fruit without wasting energy on creating new fruit that will be still too small and unripe before the frosts come and stop harvesting. I tried to do this on my cordon plants but I fear they may have gone too far. I have roped them in as much as possible as they were flopping over the other plants. I did snap off some of the stems that had grown in the leaf joins  and replanted them as tomatoes often can grow roots from cuttings.  Again, I fear this may be too late in the season but will keep an eye out.

While I did have a tomato ripening on the 12th July that was from a plant that had been raised in a greenhouse I suspect so further on in the growing cycle. The 'Garden Pearl' cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen up now and I suspect we are in for a bit of a glut - over 500g collected today but I worry they are a little pink and watery and I might have to be better at feeding them next year.

Weeds can sometimes be good

Top tip: Know your weeds and don't dismiss them all as enemies.

Quite apart from the hackneyed phrase that a weed is just a plant growing where you don't want it, weeds can actually be quite useful.

They can attract beneficial insects if they have attractive flowers such as dandelions.

They can improve the minerals in the nitrogen fixers, clover.

They can be edible - apparently chickweed is a good salad leaf as is dandelion. Brambles of course provide fruit but need to be kept in check. Nettles are also very nutritious and can be used in a potato champ or soup.  In fact this was the first official crop from my plot - I made a delicious nettle and potato soup (basically chicken broth, cubed potatoes, onions, nettles and salt boiled up and chucked into the blender).

They can also create great fertilisers. Both comfrey and nettles can be turned into 'tea'. Pop the leaves into a bucket with water and wait for them to rot down a bit. Pongy, but a very effective fertiliser if diluted and fed to tomatoes, beans, sweetcorn and squash and other hungry vegetables.

I still haven't found a use for other weeds such as bindweed or couch grass but watch this space.

Recipe: Moroccan style garden vegetable couscous

I am not just greedy in terms of growing or shopping, I also love food. And hate waste. At the same time I try to stop my greed from expanding my waistline so tend to cook healthily avoiding cream, butter, salt and too much sugar but have been known to indulge occasionlly and have a weakness for cheese.

This is a simple weekday recipe that you can adapt to whatever you have to hand at home but it's perfect to use up a glut of courgettes and tomatoes. It would serve 4 or else you can portion it up for a healthy packed lunch - it's good hot or cold.

3-4 courgettes - sliced on the diagonal
1 butternut squash - chopped into chunks
1 can chopped tomatoes
1-2 tbsp tomato concentrate
1 onion roughly chopped or sliced
Garlic powder and mustard to taste
Scatter in some herbs - I used ras el hanout (a Morroccan spice blend)
80g plain couscous
1 drained can of chick peas

Put the lot into a slow cooker and cook on low for 4-5 hours until it's all soft.  Blend half of it into a chunky soup texture and mix in a large bowl with the couscous. Cover until the couscous has fluffed up (should be fine in 15 mins max). Roughly chop the remaining vegetables, drain the chick peas and mix in with the couscous. Healthy, speedy and ideal for summer.

PS This is a very versatile dish and you can leave out the couscous and serve the vegetables as a side dish (seen this refered to as a tumbet) or whizz it up in a blender as a thick soup or pasta sauce (thicken it first).

Useful resources: books

26.07.10
It is not just food, plants and land that I am greedy for. I obsessively buy books and magazines to help me learn more and find new ways of growing and cooking produce. My current measure of if a book is a good cookery book is the variety of courgette and potato related recipes it offers.
Some books defy classification into gardening or cooking as some have cleverly combined the two but tend to skimp on detail for either.

Both
Food from your garden and allotment (Reader's Digest)
- Billed as all you need to grow, cook and preserve your own fruit and vegetables, this is a very comprehensive compendium of fruit, herbs and vegetables. It is excellent on how to grow and care for your plants and for this rigour we can forgive it's brevity on how to cook the produce – besides other books cover this more extensively and with better credentials. What it does have is an excellent section on preserving fruit and vegetables with a good variety of recipes. It goes into the difference between pickles, relishes and chutneys and even has a section on making wines – my own personal new area of focus. NB suggests a 3 bed rotation system)
Fruit and Veg Grower's Cookbook – Kathryn Hawkins
- Recipes ordered by course rather than vegetable
- One Swiss chard recipe – Swiss chard with sweet spice
- 4 courgette recipes (with eggs and chorizo, summer veg and pesto meatball pasta bake, tagine of chicken and autumnal vegetables, and muffins)

Cooking
Delia – The Frugal Cook
Delia – Kitchen Garden
- How to grow the plants (with advice by Gay Search) and some recipes by Delia
The Cook's Scrapbook (Reader's Digest)
- A return to traditional recipes organised like a cook's notebook with wisdom on seasonality, growing tips and a strong section on preserving and game
The Great Allotment Cookbook (GAIA)
- Comprehensive and laid out by season – courgettes here are classified in Autumn despite me enjoying the onset of our glut in mid July
Tender – Nigel Slater
- Very comprehensive and inspirational cook book devoted to vegetables – I can't wait until his fruit volume comes out (though it will frustrate me as I don't have all those lovely fruit yet).
- Excellent on Potatoes and Courgettes – chard recipes are limited
Using the Plot – Paul Merrett (noticed it has been renamed to 'The Allotment Chef' in paperback version)
- A humorous book written by a chef taken with the passion to be self sufficient. Pleasing to see that others have similar challenges when starting out and definitely reliable on the recipe front – very good on variations on the crushed potato theme
The Ration Book diet – Mike Brown, Carol Harris, CJ Jackson
- Going right back to basics – the original driver to get Britain growing and self sufficient. Based on newly discovered science about nutritional values and a desire to reduce dangerous importing of food from the colonies, the British government encouraged the home front to a) waste less b) grow more themselves and c) cook more healthily.
- This actually is now mirrored in our desire to not over-cook vegetables, to move to a more vegetable based diet rather than eating red meat, to grow food organically (though mechanisation, fertilisers and pesticides meant that women found the arduous job of farming easier and more productive) and to eat locally and seasonally
- Good recipe for Nettle soup and nettle champ
Perfect preserves – Hilaire Walden
- Good for using up gluts through jams and chutneys
A Greener Life - Clarissa Dickinson Wright, Johnny Scott
- Old school skills includes a section on preserves and foraging (possibly more useful than spinning and butchering)

Gardening
Allotment Gardening – Kevin Forbes
- Pocket sized and hard backed – should survive the rigours of the plot well
Your organic allotmenteer – Ian Spence, Pauline Pears
- Sensible approach and comprehensive without being preachy
- Four bed rotation system recommended (potatoes put with squashes & tomatoes)
- Good on green manure
Alan Titchmarsh How to Garden series – Vegetables and herbs
Dr Hessyan series
– Very good, reasonably-priced specialised books on vegetables and fruit. Also with compact pocket editions.

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.

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