allotment news - 21/12/11

It's some time since I have had chance to update the blog, what with rushing around the children every weekend and sometimes during the week, things on at their schools etc.

I have just picked the two last ordinary tomatoes and last cherry tomato from the office plants, although I am going to do what we have successfully done with the tomato plant at home - prune it right back, let it grow shoots from the stem and enjoy tomatoes again by early spring! (I hope...)

In the allotment my wife has finished digging up all the stray potatoes and digging the patch over. We have got winter onions in and garlic at the top end where the beans were.

First time we have grown sprouts - two plants looking good, should be ok for Christmas dinner - although it is not me that eats them!

We also have occasional brocolli, both green and purple shooting, plenty of parsnips still, some beetroot, plenty of leeks.

We have potatoes and onions and garlic in store, we have just finished the apples.

4 or 5 allotment vegetables in December isn't bad for a meal!

pumpkin chutney (and the big stink!)

As it's getting a lot colder now (frost predicted tonight as I write this) and the 2 pumpkins in the allotment looked ready, I picked them on Saturday and proceeded to turn them into chutney.

The variety of pumpkin is "Turk's Turban" - you can see why from the picture above.

Now, these pumpkins were really tough to get through - I still have the blisters from peeling and chopping them! However, there was much more flesh per pumpkin than you get in the traditional ones for Halloween, and a lot fewer seeds.

So, once chopped up finely it is time for some cooking

I'm using just over half a bottle of Sarson's pickling vinegar (like most other British brands nowadays it is owned by another company, in this case Crosse and Blackwell, though I would imagine someone else owns them by now....). It's ready spiced so there is no messing around with a small muslin bag of pickling spices - you can of course do this if you have your own secret pickling recipe!
Also a 500g bag of dark brown sugar, some ginger, curry powder and garam masala, although of course you can add your own spices to taste.

The pumpkin was chopped up quite fine into rough cubes about 1cm cubed.

Now for the bubbling, and this is where the big stink comes in...

This is the chutney bubbling away in my mum's jam pan that I think dates from pre-war and didn't get melted down for Spitfires... It's steaming away just as much as the Icelandic hot springs we saw last year, and although not a sulphur smell, it is really quite a strong vinegar smell.
So much so that when my daughter came back up the street from a walk she could smell it from 3 houses down the road!

Anyway, the two pumpkins made 7 jars of chutney, now all I have got to do is keep my hands off them for a month or two while they mature!

late peas

These peas are still going, as long as the weather holds out then we shall be eating fresh peas at the end of October!

Sunflowers

The unusually warm and summery weather for the first weekend in October gave a new lease of life to various things, such as the sunflowers, but also the sweetcorn and the courgettes.

Allotment Report 9/10/11 - Still harvesting!

I don't know whether it was because everything got off to a bit of a slow start this year, but we are still harvesting plenty from the allotment.

The prettiest things have got to be what we think are borlotti beans  - we really ought to keep a better track of what we put in! However, these are the first of our "drying" beans to be ready to pick and store, the pods were dry almost to the point of cracking open. The unusually hot and dry weather during the past week or two (last weekend was 30 deg C - in October!!!!) has really helped, although I presume nature is a bit confused having gone from a not very warm summer into an autumn storm and then back to the highest temperatures since May! Autumn has now resumed with a wet and windy weekend....

This lunchtime have picked beetroot, broccoli, a leek (first one this season), and quite a number of reasonable carrots most of which have avoided the dreaded carrot flies... We are going back over the potato patch to locate any that we have missed first time round so we don't end up with potatoes in the middle of the peas next year!

unexpected Hazelnuts!

At the back of our allotment is a small tree which is a good perch for the local birds. The other day, after a early autumn gale I noticed a hazelnut on the ground, just assumed it has been blown by the wind into the allotment. A day or two after I was in the allotment with one of my daughters, she found another one and we looked up and noticed that the tree had some hazelnuts! Now, having had the allotment over 5 years and the tree being there for all of that time it was quite a pleasant surprise! It will also be a time saver as I have been going up to a local wood (about a mile away) to forage for them.

Anyway, we roasted them in their shells and they are pretty good!
Hope next year we get lots as the tree matures!

apples and more apples....

Just stored away one minarette tree worth of apples - at least 70 in all - not bad for a 4 year old tree! We have three minarette apple trees, the allotments do not allow any large ones, although that doesn't seem to have stopped them growing in some allotments! I think it's the problem of removing them if someone gives up, but one allotment has been cleared recently and they left the two big apple trees, so maybe not.

Anyway, here's one of the trees, this one and the one next to it seem to be a bit later than the one by the fence, and so some of these aren't quite ready yet, but we've tried one which came off easily and it was alright.

So, I have just spent the evening stroring apples. I need to get some more boxes from the supermarket, I went in one in north Leeds the other day and the assistant looked at me a bit blank when I asked for apple trays and boxes, and went off to get someone else! Happily he did know what I was on about and so I got a big box and some of those dimply cardboard trays. Needs some more though.

We should have apples until Christmas all being well, I hope I am storing them correctly, I have left gaps for the air to flow round the apples and not packed them too tightly. They are in our porch where we also store the potatoes and so they should be ok, it's not too cold in that corner.