I hope you like jammin' too

June has brought us a mammoth crop of 8kg of strawberries and the freezer is now overflowing so I used 2kg to make some jam and boy is it tasty...

Say Cheese!

There is nothing quite like a big pile of cheese to celebrate your birthday so this year I thought I would go one better and got Matt a cheese course!

This weekend just gone we headed to the Yarner Trust (http://www.yarnertrust.org/), near Bideford in North Devon. Located in the little village of Welcome, just 1 1/2 miles from the coast, this organisation is dedicated to providing training for people who are interested in becoming self-sufficient.

They are based in a beautiful 14th century farm. We stayed the night and had a lovely little room with wobbly walls and original floor boards. It was very difficult to drag ourselves back to boring old London!



The cheese making course was run by the incredibly knowledgeable Vera Tooke. Over the course of the day (from 8 until 3) we firstly made soft cheese flavoured with herbs and garlic (a bit like Boursin). This is it hanging and then the finished product...




Second was the mozarella - a remarkably easy cheese to make - you just add the starter and rennet and then leave for 2 hours before pulling out lumps of curds, adding some bioling water, then stretching into mozarella balls



Finally, we made a Gouda like cheese. The Gouda has to sit for a month before it is ready so we currently have it in a cupboard - we turn it every day for the first week then once a week from then on. It's already looking lovely and yellowy on the outside so we'll report back once it's ripe.



Not only did we make cheese but we had a thoroughly lovely very short break away. On the way down we visited Clovelly, which I haven't been too since I was little, and it was just as lovely as I remember. You have to pay to enter the village because it's so popular in the summer and it consists of one, very long, very steep street down to the sea. They still have donkeys to carry goods up and down. In fact, here's a donkey we picked up on the way (his name's Dominic)



In Welcombe itself we had a good explore - we walked the vert steep road to the coast, which is protected by the National Trust and has a gorgeous little river ending in a waterfall at the sea. Opposite the river was a very beautiful house at which I said, "you know, I swear that's Kirsty Alssop's house" and do you know what?
It is!



Our final event was a visit to the local pub - and what a local pub it was! The Old Smithy is a lovely thatched building from the outside and inside wouldn't look out of place as a quirky London pub. Needless to say we fully sampled the local cider (well, it was half the price of London!) and were treated to an impromptu performance by a Quartet of chapscalled The Show Ponies playing varous instruments and singing what can only be described as twenties ragtime meets cabaret - brilliant!

Mak'n Bac'n

Something we've wanted to do in a while, is try our hand at home curing. We finally got our acts together in January and bought us some pork from Tablehurst, the wonderful bidynamic farm in the Ashdown Forest that we go to occasionally.

I followed a recipe from one of our home craft type books - I don't have the weights but I mixed curing salt, sea salt, raw brown sugar, juniper berries, peppercorns and some herbs (thyme and rosemary) together and made sure I got it all over the belly (the pig's, not mine!)





We then left it for 2 weeks, covered in muslin in the fridge (although a cold larder will do) and occasionally drained the liquid. After 2 weeks I tried a bit - it was very salty - so I soaked it in cold water over night. The finished product was deeeeeelicious!



After about a week it started to smell a little so we used it up quite quickly. I'm not sure whether I should have put more cure on it or whether that's how quickly it goes if you don't hang it in the salt for longer. I have read, in Home Farmer magazine, that you should entirely cover it in the cure (lots and lots of cure) so I'll try that next time but a reat first attempt!

Produce 2011

As I didn't do any updates last year, you will have no idea how well our allotment has been getting on so this is a gallery-style update on things what we grew last year...

A basket of produce (this must have been autumn time)


My beautiful "Twilight" chillis (one of three varieties I grew - I have so many!)


Some strawbs in the fruit cage from early in the year


The onions, ready to come up


A GIANT carrot (after never having had much luck before, we outdid ourselves this year!)


A GIANT mooli! Slightly enexpected and we only managed to use some of them sadly...there's not that much you can do with a mooli it turns out!

Update on chickens

Our first 5 hens (Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch followed by Blue and Bell) were all ex-battery hens. There really is nothing like seeing the battered, naked chickens going from their first day (being scared of air, sun, rain, flies...) to becoming confident (some might say a little too confident!) proper chickens. BUT, they are hard work - I always say that they're like foster children. They'd had a tough start in life and you can tell. We lost our last ex-batt (Rom - who behaved more like a cockrel!) late last year and not long before that decided that we would get some *normal* chickens for a while...enter Water and Cress (following the theme of being named after heritage railways).

Here's Cress, she's the boss, and a big chicken:



This is Water, she's an "Amber", isn't she pretty? She's the under-chicken (and therefore our favourite!). Good ol's Rom-the-bully is in the background (I think Water was pretty glad to see the back of her!)



They're very well behaved and lay pretty much ever day. I'll post an egg count soon but this gives an indication of how productive they are...

Produce update

I haven't done an update on the food that we're getting from our garden for a while so I thought it was about time...

A couple of weeks ago we went down to the allotment, basket in hand, and had a good old harvest. The peas are pretty much spent so we picked the last of those (I think we've had over 4 months of peas, which is great considering I only successionally sowed twice and we had pea moth larvae). Some of the squash had also gone orange and hadn't grown in a few weeks so I decided to pick those. I'm glad I did because we now have a load more femal flowers fruiting, which is very exciting. We obviously had some courgettes (who doesn't?!) and the first of our tomatillos were ready so I picked some of those. I collected a jar of raspberries and I have also presented, harvest festival style, some of our chillis here. We've had over 15 chillis now from our 3 plants (and a good few to ripen yet) and 1 chilli is hot enough for a good kick in 4 portions of chilli!



To celebrate our bounty, I roasted a squash, some courgettes, tomatillos and a chilli (which was a bit too hot!) with some of my mum's garlic and some thyme form the garden and we had it for a few meals with couscous.



We are also continuing to get a continuous crop of tomatoes, although no new ones are growing now as you would expect. I picked a small punnet's worth today to add to a paella that I'm cooking for friends on Friday night. Despite it not being a traditional paella ingredient, I am going to see if I can hide some courgette in there!

We all need some...preservation

It's been a while since I've updated the blog as you will see (once again I blame it on weddings, festivals and a PhD) so I have quite a bit to update on.

Following on from the tomato ketchup success (it really is very delicious) i got the preserving bug.

Firstly, I emptied the fridge of summer fruit so made a "summer fruit jam" which contained various quantities of blueberries, blackcurrants, raspberries and some alpine strawberries. It's quite delicious and has a lovely tart edge from the blackcurrants:



Secondly, in true self-sufficientish style, I swapped half a dozen eggs for 1.5kg of plums from a lady at work. I kept some aside to grill with sugar and serve with ice cream but the rest I made into little jars of spiced plum chutney, which is yummy, and should be good for Christmas - I think it'll go well with turkey, or with my special Boxing day sprout and sweed sarnies (yummm!).

Unfortunately I haven't taken any photos of the chitney jars so here is a montage of some of our produce:



Finally, I walk in the gate every day and brush past the lovely bushy mint bush and it makes me long for mojitos so i decided to do something useful with some of the mint and make some mint jelly. My mummy made some delicious mint jelly when I was younger, which had lots of sugar and was like minty-jam. So, I decided to immitate this and make some lovely sweet mint jelly. It's very sticky but very nice and goes well with potatoes (and, I imagine, the aforementioned sprout and and sweed sanger):



So we have well stocked cupbopards for the winter...as long as our diet consists only of preserves!

1 more of our 52 meals

We managed to have another of our 52 meals to save the planet (from Home Farmer magazine - aiming to grow enough to make 1 meal a week from your own produce) last week - stuffed courgette (stuffed with breadcrumbs, nuts, tomatoes, courgettes flesh and cheese)with new potatoes and salad. All from the garden! (apart from some of the stuffing)



Very excitingly, we are also getting loads of ripe tomatoes. We have always suffered from Blight in the past and, as such, have always had to make do with green tomatoes but tihs year we have red! We have just had some for dinner with cheese and ham on toast - yummmm!

No potato famine here!

This Sunday, Matt had his family visiting while I went off to a friend's wedding. Normally you would expect a family visit to involve tea, maybe a nice dinner or some wine. But oh no, Matt put them to work on the allotment, they had to earn their keep!

They filled the water butt (well needed!), pulled up the spent beans and dug up the early potatoes. The potatoes have suffered from the lack of water and too much heat somewhat and the first earlies were hit by frost so we were sure that we wouldn't get much of a crop. How wrong we were!

The first earlies, which looked very pathetic, produced a nice little crop of new potatoes (Chopin):



The second earlies were more impressive. The kestrels in particular, with their lovely purple splodges, produced some whoppers! One of them will provide us with a nice sized jacket potato to share!



The Condors have produced some lovely red potatoes, which I reckon will be good for fat chips. Yummmmmm!



We need to sort them and store them to make sure they don't go mouldy (we are a bit rubbish at storing produce normally!). Excitingly, we still have a bed of maincrops, which have lots of foliage, so fingers crossed they will produce some good sturdy potatoes for storing. We'll leave them in the ground for a bit longer and keep our fingers crossed that the Blight stays away.

Egg count - June

Start of a new month so time for another egg count. We've seen a bit of a dip this month:



This can be mainly explained by Blue, who was laying the most regular beautiful brown eggs, is having a bit of a tough time. A lot of hers come out soft and are gobbled up by the "old girls" in seconds, and the rest of the time she is laying tiny brown eggs with no yolk. She seems fine apart from this so we will just need to keep an eye on her as always. The others seem to be doing ok though, we have 2/3 most days. It's also probably down to the hot weather - I wouldn't fancy trying to squeeze one of those things out in this heat, would you?!

We can't really complain with this month's figure, which averages out as more than 2 a day. We are still selling them relatively regularly which is paying for their food. All you can ask really considering their poor start in life so well done girls!

Broad bean and pea falafel

We have the inevitable glut of peas and broad beans at the moment and we've now had our fill of pea and bean salads. We had our first pea and bean risotto of the season this week, which until now has been my favourite early summer dish, but not any more!

Courtesy of Jamie at Home we discovered the recipe of broad bean falafel, and I have adapted it slightly to use some peas by including a pea and mint dip.

For the Falafel

1kg broad beans (add smoe peas if you don't have enough)
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 chilli
1 tsp cumin
1 small bunch mint
1 sprig coriander
1 tbsp flour

Blend all of the above, adding the flour last. Once blended make into dumpling shape falafel, 8-10 of them. Cook them in a deep pan of oil until brown on the outside.

For the dip

Some peas (couple of handfuls probably - I can't remember how many I used!)
Half small bunch mint
Small pot natural yoghurt
Zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
splash of olive oil

Blend everything except the oil together, adding more or less pea/mint to taste, and a bit of salt and pepper. Splosh oil in at the end.

Serve with pitta and salad, like this:



Absolutely delicious! Try it!

We are doing so well at making home produced meals - we've at least 5 now which are almost entirely from our own garden/allotment. Hurrah!

Egg Count - May

As the end of the month has passed it's now time for another egg count. I think I forgot to do April so you won't have seen the massive spike in activity - they were obviously enjoying the Spring weather!



May saw a bit of a dip (although certainly not anything to complain about). In April we were regularly getting 4 a day but in May we had a number of problems - the egg eating started which we think was brought on by some soft shelled eggs. Luckily it looks as though it hasn't turned into a bad habit and they only eat the soft shelled ones, which are must less frequent this month. We think they happening partly because the older girls are getting on a bit and because of their battery farm days they probably don't have much more laying in them - but we also think it might have been because we were feeding them too many treats. In the worst type of parenting technique we kept giving them corn and kitchen scraps to shut them up if there were wingey. We're now being much more harsh and they're not getting treats until evening and only a little, and that seems to be much better.

At the moment we are getting 3 a day most days, athough they don't seem to like this weather and we have had a little dip again.

So concludes your monthly egg report!

So many things!

Well, where do I start. I think I've been rather tardy again and it's been a month since my last post so plenty of things to update on.

In the garden the flower bed is looking wonderful - full of colour with bees buzzing around all over the place. We have two giant Iris as well as a host of Alliums on one side of the bed (the purple side!) and an amazingly successful Lupin on the other side fighting for space with the Acer, which also looks lovely at the moment.




The girls are also doing well - we're getting three eggs most days and today they produced 4 just to impress our visitors from Basingstoke. They have taken a liking to lemon balm (which is fine by me because I dug it up last year and it refuses to go!) which they are all enjoying in this photo:



Now to the allotment and boy have we been busy. The broad beans are all in flower (and are now being attacked by black fly - grrr - which the ladybirds are doing their best to keep under control), as are the peas. The first early potatoes are a dissapointment but the second earlies and maincrop are doing well. We also has courgette, squash, cabbage, cauli, purple sprouting and calbrese, celery and a whole host of fruit (strawbs, rasps, red and blackcurrant, goosberry and tayberry). Much excitement this week when we had our first peas (one pod each!) and strawberry - we were so eager to eat them that I didn't get a photo but I do have these as a bit of a summary:






We've also been doing some building work on the plot with avengance - we've built ourselves a fruit cage. I foolishly discovered that I haven't yet taken a photo of it but needless to say it's great (!) - made entirely from pallets, we only had to buy the netting and the nails so we have a 5x2 metre fruit cage for only £40 - bargain! I will try to post a photo soon but my "parent blog" (te he) is slightly suicker than I am so you're likely to see it here more quickly. In the meantime though, I can show you this rather smart brassica cage that Matt made as well as him posing as "man about the allotment":

The event of the gardening calendar...

...why, it's none other than the Whitchurch potato fair! For the second year in a row we made a quick trip to Hampshire to get our seed potatoes for the year. Last year we were growing them for the first time so didn't really know what to look for but we've tried to be much more strategic about it this time.

Having more space is going to be great - we're using 2 of the beds on the allotment for spuds, one for first early, one second early and one maincrop. We got 8-10 of each variety and will have two varieties in each bed. This is what we chose:

First earlies - Swift and Chopin
Second earlies - Kondor and Kestrel
Maincrop - Majestic and Navan



There really were so many to choose from, as you can see from this picture (each coloured label is a different variety) but we tried to get ones which were quite disease resistant and useful (last year we had some that just fell apart when boiled - completely pointless!). We mainly use potatoes boiled, mashed or chipped so we have some of each includign some lovely looking salad potatoes. Can't wait until they're ready!



Quite ridiculously for chicken keepers we have a shortage of egg boxes so we've just started chitting the first earlies. The others will have to wait a little.



In other news...since we found out that the chicken that we have been buying from the farm shop isn't free range we've pretty much stopped shopping there. Which is such a shame because it was lovely in other ways. Once we're over the shock we might go back for dried goods. But, it has brought one good thing. We have started getting a veg box delivered again, which we haven't done since we left London. This isn't just any veg box, it's a Kentish veg box (all produce is grown in Kent. Amazing!), from these people. We met the owner last year at a game cooking demonstration and he was so passionate about what he does that we thought we would give them a go. We haven't been dissapointed so far, it's been great, even if we are coming into the hunger gap. He keeps his customers up to date with a little newsletter each week, including a recipe and some information about what we can expect coming soon (tomatoes in February...from Kent! I kid you not).

The reason that I'm telling you this is because we made some good use of the root veg that we've been getting this weekend in some vegetable pasties. Yes, they were as good as they look.





I think that's all for now. The chickens are settling down (although Blue is still being a bit bullied) and we did a little bit of digging on the allotment this weekend but the ground was quite frozen so we just have to be patient.

January's egg count to follow some time this week...