The First Homegrown Food of 2024............

........was a small courgette from the greenhouse. I could have let it grow but cutting it will encourage others.

Later there will be plenty for all the courgette recipes but this time  it was grated and added to some part cooked and mashed frozen peas,  plus flour and an egg to make fritters - very green and colourful food again! I served them up with bacon and my home made tomato relish.

Also in the greenhouse the tomatoes are setting and there are cucumbers on the plants that will be ready in a few weeks - they grow like crazy once they get going. I need to check that recipe for the Sweet and Sour cucumber pickle so I'm ready for the glut.

This week I found a few raspberries off the canes that were here when I came. I cut them back each year and they seem to fruit at random times, producing a handful now and again from now until September. The row of summer fruiting canes that I planted are buzzing with bees all the time and looking hopeful for a good crop in July. My first three strawberries were ready from the small plants my sister gave me,  I added to some picked from BiL's strawberry bed - his are really getting going now.

The basil cuttings finally had enough roots for me to pot them up - 4  plants from my 79p pot bought from Aldi in the first week of May. 

Next door neighbour's cat is still causing me problems, there is one area of the three veg. beds unplanted. Does she use that bit? No - she pushes her way under, in and around all the fences, covers and barriers and digs up the leek plants instead!....again. I thought even a mouse wouldn't be able to get in but she managed to find a weak spot. I've used even more metal pegs to hold the netting down now - hopeful that the remaining leeks will be ready in the autumn.

Thank you for all the comments about Foxgloves yesterday - seems they are popping up in gardens everywhere and bees love them. Must be the only good thing to come from all the rain we have had.

Back Soon

Sue

Missed the Low Oil Price and All Sorts of Other Things

 I get emails from Boiler Juice - a company that compare heating oil prices and you can order via them too. Yesterdays email tells me that oil prices are at a nine month low - of course I haven't got room for 500L - the minimum order, because 730L were put in in February . It's all a guessing game when it comes to oil prices although the difference isn't hugely massive, just a bit annoying - £490 now against £543 then, and I'd rather fill up when the tank is just under half full than risk it getting really low waiting for a better price and who knows when the next war, pushing up prices, will happen! 

Got my usual pot of Basil to take cuttings and root them in water. Last year it didn't work very well so I'm hoping for better this year but once again the pots are forced so much that the shoots shoot up without any side leaves - which is where you have to snip to get roots growing.

Did anyone watch the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest on Tuesday night? There were some wild and wacky singers, songs and stage effects although I like Olly Alexanders song but not the weird performance. Hope he does well - anything has to be better than last year (25th out of 26!). Did you know that since the first Eurovision in 1956, 52 different countries have taken part and it's watched by a massive audience every year. Love it or hate it or couldn't care less? We always watched when I was little and have ever since although unlike my Mum I don't fall asleep before the end!

This below was a very good read. I wondered what the author would do with this series after the Queen died but she's solved this by going back to 1957. These are great fun to read and totally (almost) believable!

Old men playing snooker is the sport on TV to keep me company this week - Seniors from years gone by, although they're not That old, it's on 5 and 5Action. Surely I can't be the only blogger to like watching snooker, I'm not sure I've seen anyone else mention it. Excited about Tennis and Olympics  in the summer too.

Look what I won! It's a very unusual occurrence for me to win a prize in a draw, raffle or tombola but I still have a go as it's always a fund-raiser of some sort. This lovely box of goodies was won from a church flower festival event last weekend. (Church and flower photos next week). The theme of the flower festival was 'Going to the Movies'  and the prizes in this draw had been gathered by colour into boxes with each box being a film title with a colour in it.

 My Blue Hawaii box had chocolate biscuits, a mug, Cath Kidson tea-towels, hand lotion, wine, a tin of pretty notelet cards and a folding umbrella. I was so pleased even though I will be giving most of the things away!

Thank you to everyone for comments yesterday and apologies as comments keep going into spam without me realising until days later.

Back Soon

Sue

Basil

 I've not bought Basil seeds since someone in blogland shared this tip

Pot of Basil from Aldi 67p. I cut off 4 pieces just below a leaf node, took off the lower leaves and popped in water. The pegs around the top of the jar just prop up the shoots so they don't fall right in.

Roots appear within  a week and then pot up. The rest of the bought pot of Basil shoots I divided in 3 and planted into bigger pots of fresh compost. So now I have 7 pots of Basil in the greenhouse growing nicely.

Plenty of Basil to make some home made pesto for a Courgette Crumble to go with the "few" courgettes I have already (four plants is 3 too many as I knew they would be but planted them all just-in-case!).

Back Tomorrow

Sue

Saturday Round-up + One Week Eating Local (2). Part 4

Did anyone watch the programme about how the 2012 Olympic open ceremony was organised yesterday? I caught the end. There were so many bits I'd not seen at the time (or when this programme first went out in 2016). 2012 was a busy summer for us - as Colin had given up full time County Council work in March so we were growing and selling even more than usual and he took on lots of local work too. The Olympics went by in a blur, so I shan't mind watching a few bits again although I'd rather have seen what we should have been watching from Tokyo. Hope it happens next year - perhaps Covid 19 will be long forgotten by then. Boris says things might be more normal for Christmas - goodness knows if he is right or not. We can only wait and see.

Meanwhile I'm going to be shopping even less than I have been after next Friday because I find wearing a mask very claustrophobic (Wow I got the right spelling first time!). For the last 4 months I've been once a fortnight to either Asda or Morrisons and then a quick trip to the local Co-op in between. I've not been in any town centre shops and other than food shops have only been in the bank, post office, farm shop and local hardware shop. Far from encouraging me to rush out to all the other shops in Stowmarket or Diss the mask wearing will make me visit less - no help to the economy at all!

A mixed weather week but OK for getting some grass cut and weeding done.  Wednesday evening was positively chilly and when I got up Thursday morning I found the boiler running - not good for mid July and then Friday the temperature suddenly shot up to the high 70s. I haven't been far all week again, just local Co-op, Farm shop and Post Office where I sent another parcel of books off to Music Magpie. Not a lot earned but better than nothing.

The Runner bean seeds sown late on July 1st have now been planted out and  the Basil cuttings which had rooted really well in their modules have been put in bigger pots. 6 very healthy plants from that £1 pot from Morrisons and all the remaining leaves were used  fresh and or dried in the microwave.

The eating local carried on with the rest of the bacon and egg pie with home made potato salad and my own cucumber and beetroot. Still honey on toast for breakfast. Cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch with beetroot.


This week I'm grateful for

• Locally produced food
• Lots of veg. from the garden
• Time to get back to the cross stitch 

I hope you have good plans for the weekend.
If the weather is fine I shall have a socially distanced coffee with Col's sister today and the car boot sale tomorrow............ MUST get up earlier, although the forecast says rain first thing. I need to look for a rolling pin and palette knife as I'm making things with terracotta coloured air-drying clay (More hamper gifts so I won't be putting the photo up until December 26th!) and I don't want my good kitchen tools stained or spoiled.
Otherwise I'll be reading, cross stitching and probably a bit more grass cutting - the only way to keep up with it is to do some almost everyday.


Back Monday
Sue

It's All About Basil

The common name for Basil might come from the Greek word for King -   Basileus. In some countries it was valued highly and in others thought of as evil and in some old herbals it was thought basil could turn into scorpions- Strange what people thought hundreds of years ago.

Back in early smallholding days, when I grew herbs to sell at the Suffolk Smallholders show, I often grew different sorts including Purple Ruffles and Large Leaf Lettuce basil. Basil is supposed to be a good companion plant for tomatoes so always planted out into the polytunnel beds - it did well there.

 This year my basil seeds failed to germinate - twice - so (when I eventually remembered ) I bought a pot of basil from Morrisons for £1 and took lots of cuttings, put them in water and hoped for roots.

(The pegs around the edge aren't pegging the cuttings to the jar, just there to lodge the cuttings so they don't fall right into the water.) Every few days I stood the jar in the sink and ran in some fresh water.
The leaves I took off the cuttings before putting them in water were dried in the microwave on a bit of kitchen roll, then crunched up and stored in a jar.

For ages they didn't seem to be doing anything but eventually the cuttings produced some good roots

Only one cutting failed to root and the others have now been potted up into compost to grow on and hopefully give me plenty more to use fresh and dry for winter.


Thanks to everyone for comments on Saturday.
Back Tomorrow
Sue

Growing Herbs

I've been growing herbs since the mid 1980s, when I discovered that many were interesting to grow and easy to sell. In the summer of the year before I had Youngest, when the older two were at school I used to pick raspberries to be frozen for a PYO fruit farm and then went on to sell the herbs there and then after we moved to the smallholding I grew for several years to sell at the gate and at the Suffolk Smallholders Annual Show. Eventually I found all the greenhouse space was needed for starting tomatoes, cucumbers and all the other things we  grew for selling and ended up only sowing parsley and basil each year.

Way, way back I wrote a page for Suffolk Smallholders Society monthly newsletter all about which herbs I would grow if I only had room for a few. Back then we had a huge herb garden which was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time but needed too many hours spent on it to be sensible for a busy smallholders. We cleared it all when the Bay tree centre-piece got to 15 feet tall and more than 8 feet wide!

I can't find a copy of the page I wrote years ago so started again and I can't find the list of herbs we had growing - I'm sure it was more than 20 different ones - several were more like weeds than herbs - Tansy for instance.........I had to pull it out from the flower garden for years after removing the herb garden.

Anyway,  if I only had room for a few Herbs they would be............

Parsley
Slow to get going from seed, it's the one thing that I make sure to buy a new packet of seed each year. It can be sown quite early and there are all sorts of old wives tales about the best methods of getting it to germinate. I usually pour really hot water over the compost before sowing (the old way was to pee on it!) then sow quite thickly and cover with a plastic lid, then keep it in a warm place.
I prefer curly leafed rather than flat-leaf but proper chefs usually seem to use the flat-leaf sort. Parsley will often survive through the winter outside in a sheltered spot giving some new growth early before running to seed in June - that's when I pull up the old clump and start using the new plant. My favourite way to use it is in potato salad and fish-cakes.

Chives
First to reappear after winter, so bits can be snipped to add to sandwiches before there's any other sign of green stuff. Difficult to start from seed but once you have one clump you can easily divide them and re-plant. I like to have two clumps around the garden, so one lot can be left to flower for the bees and another can have all the flowers taken off so there are no thick un-edible stems. Also use this in potato salad and with scrambled egg in sandwiches.

Mint
Either grown in a pot - which it hates, or left to spread in the ground .....depends how much room you have. Another herb hard to grow from seed but once you have a pot it should last years and is ever so easy to propagate from a rooted cutting. If grown in a pot dig out some with a root on to move into a new pot each year. If grown in the ground it might take over but I just  pull out some  each year. If you cut some down when it starts to run to seed in late summer then new growth will appear for the autumn. I use this when cooking new potatoes from the garden and for mint tea. I've tried umpteen times to get Peppermint to grow for me but found it always crossed with the common spearmint so ended up all the same. (I remember a slightly tetchy discussion with a man at one of the Suffolk Smallholder's shows when I had Eau-de-Cologne mint for sale. "How can there be Eau-de-Cologne mint - it's a contradiction and impossible". Oh no it isn't!)

Basil
I love pesto stirred into pasta and tomato/basil sauces also for pasta so always grow some. It needs heat to get started and then a warm place to grow. Some people swear by a pot on the windowsill but whenever I've tried that it's got invaded by greenfly. I nip out the flowering tip when they get to about 9 inches tall to get lots of branches. There are lots of different types of basil but I reckon the big green leaved Sweet Genovese is the most useful. I've seen on youtube that it's easy to take cuttings from basil just by growing in water - must give it a go although I don't need tons.

Thyme
No matter how many times I bought a pot of this to plant in the garden at the smallholding (another herb fiddly to grow from seed) it never lasted more than a few years. Yet in many places in the country it grows in the wild and often seeded itself easily at the smallholding so that I could dig up seedlings to sell. Lemon thyme is lovely but I don't think it's as hardy as common thyme. On moving here I found a patch of common thyme growing in next to no soil right by the paving slabs at the edge of the patio and it's looking well again this year. So maybe at the smallholding the soil was just too rich. Most useful with chicken I used to put a big handful inside the chicken when roasting and more between the skin and breast. Don't use it so much now as I rarely roast a whole chicken.


I've also got a very large Rosemary in the flower garden, some Lemon Balm and Common Sage at one end of a veg bed and lots of golden Feverfew that comes up every year in the rose garden. And of course Laurus Nobilis........... the Bay Tree.

And another good reason for having herbs..........There's a class in the Produce and Flower show for 'A Vase of Herbs' which I entered last year and came second. Hope to do one better this year! And today is the day to decide what to enter as entry forms have to be taken to the village this evening.

Last years 2nd place

Back Tomorrow
Sue

The Seed Catalogues

They've all arrived, so I went through the seed tin and wrote a list (always a list!). I don't need much but do like to pick the varieties.

D.T Brown are local to Suffolk, have some good choices and cheapest postage. I need beetroot,  tomato, cucumber, sweet red  'pointy' peppers, leeks, curly parsley, nasturtium and basil. Then maybe sweetcorn...... and here's a weird thing........... I could have sworn that sometime last year  I bought a packet of mini sweetcorn to grow to use for stir frying BUT the packet in the seed  tin are ordinary corn cobs. I even mentioned finding them at a car boot sale in a blog post. So why aren't they what I thought they were? ............No idea.

I'm ordering a big plum type Tomato that I've not tried before called Big Mama , a mini plum that I grew last year - Sungrape. and for something completely different a yellow grape variety called Ildi . I've just 2 cucumber Euphya seeds from last year so have ordered some Louisa, another variety I've grown in the past. Sweet Peppers will be Bullhorn Mix. I have a few very old leek seeds so I'll get some new and a new large pack of beetroot to add to the pack of Bolthardy left from last year. The rest  - parsley, nasturtium and basil I can get from anywhere and probably cheaper - as long as I remember to write them on a shopping list.  D.T Browns don't have a mini sweetcorn so I'll look elsewhere for them, my Essex friends love to grow lots of corncobs so I could pass the packet onto them because I don't want to grow the big cobs.

Apart from the above the other things I'm planning to grow are the same as last year...... French Climbing beans and Runner Beans - both from seed I saved from what I grew. Aubergines, chard, Mange tout peas, lettuces and courgettes.I also have  4 butternut squash seeds to hopefully grow better than last year when only 1 plant survived and produced just 1 squash!

Back Soon
Sue

How Does My Garden Grow

The patio between back of house and garage and the corner with pots and the shabby chic ladder which after 4 years is looking much more shabby than chic. I'll need to give it a coat of colour stain sometime

The Greenhouse with tomatoes on the right, cucumbers straight ahead and peppers and aubergines on the staging on the left. Also in there are pots of Basil, a pot of parsley, French Marigolds to attract in the hoverflies that eat greenfly, some small Heuchera that will go out when they are a bit bigger. There is also an Abelia which I got last year, it says it's slow growing and that's certainly right as it's taken a year to get from 3 inches tall to 6 inches tall and I bought it to go in a pot on the patio as it's a shrub - Ha! Might have to wait another 3 years until it's shrub size!

The Vegetable beds on the part of the garden behind the garage. Colin sowed a whole bed of beetroot, so there should be enough! I have mangetout peas in the next bed plus climbing French beans, with canes up ready for the runners.The next bed is courgettes and leeks plus the last couple of spring cabbage. I need to take down the frame work of netting that's round it. The fourth bed is potatoes with rhubarb at the end and in the distance the bigger soft fruit bed.
The House is next door neighbours, almost all their land is in front of their house beside my garden. They want to buy part of the field behind the house but other neighbours in the lane have tried to buy a bit of field without success. Apparently the farmer who owns it is a grumpy bloke who won't even discuss it!

The old raspberry canes that were here when we came, they are covered in fruit this year, I'll need to chuck a net over the top in a few weeks time, that's what the stakes are there for.

Orchard and Polly. These trees were here when we came. A family apple, another apple, 2 pear and a plum. We added 3 more various apple and 2 apricots - one of which is looking very sorry for itself.

Looking back at the veg beds from the soft fruit bed, with the garage on the right and the back of the house. The oval rose garden and my cutting garden are on  the other side of the greenhouse.
There are sun flowers surrounded by canes and string in the middle of the fruit bed because I couldn't find anywhere else to put them

There are also lots of shrubs over the other side of the orchard and mustn't forget the meadow and new trees. The tall poplar trees in the centre of the picture with Polly in the orchard are down the right hand side of the meadow. Our land is L shaped with the house in the corner where the two bits of the L join. The garden is the bottom of the L and the meadow is the upright of the L. I'll draw a map one day!

Back Tomorrow
Sue