Tag: preserving tomatoes

It’s a good job I’ve got no badgers among my followers

Only someone who’s attempted to grow sweetcorn in the open will know that they need a high ring of steel around them to keep the badgers out, – because so acute is the badger’s sense of smell they can judge exactly when the corn is at its sweetest and ripest exactly 24 hours before you planned to pick it. We think we may have solved the conundrum this year by growing them in the polytunnel with an improvised half door to ventilate the tomatoes and by surrounding the entire tunnel inside and out with African Marigolds whose strong scent masks the rapturously tempting sweetcorn. The Marigolds were meant to be Mexican Marigolds ,Tagetes minuta, but we received a mislabeled packet of seed this year. Actually we receive mislabeled plants and seeds almost every year; last year the red peppers turned into Scotch Bonnet chillies and we now have a lifetime supply of them, dried and in a jar.

It’s been a tough season, much of the blame for which lies with weak government and the unregulated greed of the privatised utilities. Why are we forced, like Oliver Twist to ask – “Please Sir can I have some more?” when the oil companies continue to promote a global environmental catastrophe and the overseas owners of privatised water companies, trouser the proceeds of their monopoly and conceal them overseas. As always, we – the despised customers – get the blame and pay the price. It’s our profligacy; demanding to keep clean, flush the toilets, water the plants and make a cup of tea, that’s causing the water shortage. Heaven forfend that we should prevent a 10 gigawatt data centre from sucking the life out of a small town.

And so we were up at six this morning trying to keep the allotment alive. It’s too hot to weed during the day and so we’ve had to prioritise the crop and worry about the Rosebay Willowherb and Dandelions shedding their ever virile seed next season – and bang on cue the so-called neighbourhood rage website hots up its campaign against anything that makes life in our traffic choked city more tolerable. For any of its contributors who read this – I doubt if I’ll get much flack, I wouldn’t think many of them can read – the whole trashy enterprise is run by the Mirror Group who’ve taken over local journalism like a metastasizing tumour.

Anyway, let me revert to real life and offer the picture of a plant that shows how strong is the will to live in nature. I’ve given it a full sized picture as a kind of prize. We bought this blackberry in 2020 and planted it at the edge of the fruit cage. To say it failed to thrive there is something of an exaggeration. It wilted, the leaves fell off and I can’t tell you how many non religious prayers were said over it. For three years it survived as a barely living stump. until it was accidentally amputated by a wildly inaccurate bit of pruning. I’m not blaming anyone – but it wasn’t me. However I couldn’t give up on it so I moved it into another border (I had visions of making a living fence out of it. I have to be careful because anything that actually looks like a fence is explicitly forbidden in the rules. Another three years have passed and I tended it like a sickly child – much to Madame’s amusement, until it grew several leaves in year two and this year, six years later, it’s suddenly taken off. I can almost hear it growling “Feed me now!” I’m thrilled to report that it’s well on the way to becoming a blessed nuisance. You’ll notice the Field Bindweed underneath it. Field Bindweed never seems to have a bad year

Even in a difficult year, a couple of post-dawn hours on the allotment is a special joy even though carting 30 gallons of water down a tricky path is a test of the ankles. I was thinking about – well, feeling miserable about how complicated life is in a drought accompanied by a heatwave. Our crops have either perished or are romping away, ripening early and behaving as they’re back in their home countries. Deep in the plant genes there are expectations that may or may not be honoured in real life. Plants can adapt, but not that fast. It’s we the gardeners who must learn to adapt but the harvest rush seems to have arrived about three weeks early and we’re flooded with far more vegetables and fruits than we can eat. There’s a crop drop scheme on the allotment site and at this time of year it’s mainly populated by marrows – otherwise known as neglected courgettes. We’ve cleared the freezer(s) in anticipation, and the bottles and kilner jars are all assembled ready for jams pickles and chutneys which at least improve with age (unlike us). There will be less tomatoes to process into ketchup, sauces and passata this year because they hated the second or was it the third heatwave. They’ve just started flowering again on the fourth and fifth trusses so we might get a late crop. The biggest challenge is making substantial changes to our diet to accommodate all the fresh veg. Harvest and cooking go hand in hand but you soon discover that the passion for courgettes and aubergines doesn’t take you as far as eating them every day; almost to the exclusion of all the other veg. And so we muddle on and I occasionally wonder if I should be spending more time on the blog and I’m reminded of the Brother Lawrence saying which suggest that the best road to contentment begins exactly where you are. I also remember hearing my mother saying (on one of the rare occasions she actually stood still) “Well this won’t get the baby a new coat” turning again to the sewing machine where she worked as a dressmaker or measuring up the local ladies for new corsets. (So now you know just how old I am!). I am content, I really am! But I’m also knackered; longing for a couple of weeks continuous rain and hoping, (probably hoping against hope), that this shitstorm of weak government and corporate greed will end before I do.

A hot day in the kitchen

Every year the processing of tomatoes comes around; always surprising, always rewarding but always knackering. The polytunnel is a tremendous asset on the allotment, but the crops inside it seem always to ripen almost simultaneously, leaving us with a challenging glut. Our small flat has limited storage space so the more reduced the crop is, the easier it is for us. This year, fortunately, we need to make tomato ketchup which reduces 2 Kg of tomatoes to three small bottles. The ketchup is intense and – dare I say – much better than the commercial ones and tomatoes are the only crop in which we’re almost completely self-sufficient. I could write volumes on the sheer impossibility of total self-sufficiency which could only ever function well in a close community with a tradition of barter – the kind of community that only a small handful of us now live in. Having lived in a couple of comunes we would say that they’re no kind of primrose path to happiness and contentment. There’s always at least one person who refuses to work!

That said, before we could get going in the kitchen there was heavy work to be done on the allotment because we have decided to remove the fruit cage which has become a climbing frame for bindweed and serves no useful purpose except choking and shading our soft fruit. The forecast had the temperature rising to the low 20’s by mid day, so we went out early to break the back of the job. Two hours later we’d removed the roof and three of the four mesh walls and rolled them into giant builder’s bags to take down to the tip. This should open up the space and make watering, picking and pruning much easier. We were pleased to find, once we’d fought through the jungle, that our mulch of sheeps’ fleece and wood chip has completely suppressed the weeds around the plants, but of course bindweed travels aloft and laughs at mulches.

Back at the Potwell Inn; hot and sweaty, I popped shallots, chopped garlic and sliced tomatoes, sprinkled them with herbs from our little pot garden on the pavement, drizzled olive oil and shoved them in the oven to roast. As I’m writing they’re cooling down and later I’ll put them through the passasta machine – which is the most useful piece of kit for anyone who needs to process a lot of tomatoes. Honestly I’ve spent so many hours trying to push tomatoes through a sieve doing a job that now takes minutes. Later again I’ll unite the passata with some cider vinegar, sugar and all the spices, reduce it down and bottle it.

With later harvestings we’ll make straight passata and two kinds of readymade pasta sauce which we use as a base for anything else that needs a shot of tomato umami. It looks likely to be a punishingly hot week so we’ll have our work cut out with watering and finishing the fruit cage. Early starts are the only way to get it all done before the energy sapping city heat takes charge.

Next on the tomato agenda is one of our favourite Italian recipes panzanella made to the recipe in Anna Del Conte’s wonderful “Gastronomy of Italy”. I’ve never been fond of raw onion, but her suggestion of steeping thinly sliced red onion in iced brine for an hour in the fridge transforms the sulphurous heat into something altogether more lovely.

While all that cooking was going on, I’d brought home a small piece of the (inedible) Stone Parsley I found next to the shed door so I could take some macro photos of it using the focus stacking facility on the new camera and the big tripod arranged over the dining table (my desk). The tiny compact camera, only 50g heavier than my phone looks a bit ridiculous on top of the full sized tripod, but camera shake would ruin the macro focus stacking. I was really pleased with the results – especially when I used some sharpening to clean them up. The photo is below and, for reference, the flowers are only about 2 mm diameter – so we’re almost in microscope territory. Not necessary for identifying this plant because one of the diagnostics is a strong – some say unpleasant – smell of petrol when you bruise the stem. I can certainly vouch for that.

Last night I slept for nine hours and woke up dreaming I was paddling the kayak down a small river. What a glorious start to the day!

Stone Parsley, Sison amomum photographed with an Olympus TG-7 using in-camera focus stacking and a bit of sharpening applied later.

Shelling the borlotti

It was a bit of a culture shock coming home from Snowdonia for sure. As the fortnight drew to an end and the weather continued cold wet and windy, notwithstanding the forecast of unseasonably hot weather almost everywhere except where we were. But more than that, we were missing the allotment and worrying about our winter sowings in the polytunnel and all the usual autumn jobs still needing to be done. The plus side of a rainy holiday is the amount of rest and reading we were able to do without feeling that we should be somewhere else – like on the allotment!

The first frosts of autumn are almost impossible to predict and so we prepare for them around the second week of October just in case. Knowing that the basil wouldn’t survive we took most of the outside plants to the compost heap, knowing that we’d got a reliable supply of pesto in the freezer. The best of the tomatoes were processed before we left, but today we shelled and dried the borlotti and, because we were proposing to treat them for any lurking weevils by heating them to 60 C for two or three hours I grabbed a bowlful of wrinkled tomato runts and shoved them in the oven at the same time so they can be dried to a still moist consistency and packed into olive oil. It seems a crime to waste anything; but sometimes we get properly caught out. Last year, determined not to waste a single iota of vegetable waste , we chucked all the extracted seeds from the passata machine into the compost. A year on as we spread the compost on the tunnel beds we had a magnificent flush of tomato seedlings within days.

We’d never had an infestation of bean weevil before, but last year’s saved seed was somehow completely infested and had to be thrown away. This is a bit of a conundrum which I’m quite sure the commercial seed merchants solve by fumigating the seed – but we don’t have the means or the desire to do that so it would be good to know how to kill the weevil eggs organically. This year because of the odd weather we decided to dry the whole crop, but I might hold back a handful of seeds to see if they’ll still germinate after heat treatment. I’m not holding my breath.

Autumn has a whole set of compulsions of its own. Even as I’m writing this there’s a big pan of leek and potato soup on the stove, next to a sourdough loaf that was started yesterday, plus the aromatic perfume of the drying tomatoes. Yesterday I was desperate to make a pie, and we feasted on our own French beans, broccoli and carrots along with (vegetarians please look away now!) using my mother’s recipe for a shortcrust pie (25% butter and 25% lard and 50% plain flour), that uses no flavourings at all apart from stock, salt and pepper. It’s the very essence of my autumn memories. My sister still makes exactly the same pie to the same recipe.

Allotmenteering or any other kind of gardening never quite feels like the glossy magazines describe it. Casually describing it as therapeutic hardly covers the gamut of emotions that it induces – it’s hero to zero and back again every season, even every week in our case. Nobody who’s ever been in therapy, made a pot and fired it, painted a watercolour or written at length would ever call any of them therapeutic except for the way they teach you how to ride the punches, celebrate the fleeting triumphs and do the essential work whether or not you feel like it. As for me I’d never do anything except by the grace of deadlines; and so we’ll sow more rouge d’hiver lettuces this week because if we don’t there may be no lettuce, or spinach or whatever next year. No food for you Mr Smarty Pants! We’ll also sow some Christmas potatoes to grow on in the polytunnel.

Part of the autumn compulsion will be, I know, the urge to sow broad beans – aquadulce claudia overwinter very well – usually; and this year the young plants, instead of tillering obediently and bringing in an early harvest of delicious beans, suffered from a month of cold east winds and passed away before flowering. This year we’ll give the early sowing a miss and start again in March which will, of course, ensure a balmy spring with record crops of early broad beans.

What certainly will be going in is some garlic. A good deal of the holiday reading was taken up with getting my head around epigenetics. The basic DNA – the genetic material of a plant which determines its general form; doesn’t change aside from mutations. However, apparently different genes can be switched on and off by all sorts of environmental factors – and this is one possible reason for the fact that seed saving of successful crops can lead to better results (on your unique patch of earth) – than expensive commercial varieties because the starting variety gradually adapts from year to year. Anyway, the upshot of this is that this year we’ve selected the best of this year’s garlic crop which we’ll replant tomorrow. We had them netted all last season so there was no trace of fly damage but some of the plants suffered from basal plate rot where the selected seed cloves didn’t. We’ll label these athletes carefully and grow them alongside what we South Gloucestershire peasants like to call boughten seed. Six years of being told off at school for using that dialect term showed it was a surefire way of annoying teachers who thought educating us involved severing all our roots. We shall do a properly scientific comparison next year and onwards to see if any of these epigenetic changes occur: so long as the plants don’t get sicklier and sicklier.

Finally, here’s a photo of a stranger who dropped in for a rest and a warm up on one of our fence posts today. It’s a common plume moth that’s apparently mainly a night flyer. When I first saw it a thought it must be a lacewing but it wasn’t. One of its endearing habits is to roll its wings up like a brolly when it’s resting. But it’s most endearing habit of all is that it lays its eggs on the bindweed which its caterpillars like to eat. We have an abundance of the foodplant lurking on the edges of the allotment silently waiting for the moment to tunnel in under the fence. I had a word with the little moth and she promised to come back mob handed with her mates next week.

Something hot?

Habanero – the hottest one we grow!

Well, in the midst of this strangest of seasons we have managed to grow enough chillies to keep us going through the winter, although taking the extraordinary weather into account it looks as if ripening the last few stragglers is going to be a problem. For the first year since we’ve been on the plot, we managed to eat all our sweetcorn before the badgers/rats/squirrels and possibly deer got to them. We only managed this by planting them in the most inaccessible place and surrounding them with sheep netting barriers – it was, however, worth the hassle because home grown corn (like most veg) is so much better than the shop version. You wonder if they’ve been 3D printing them from cardboard.

The chillies seem to be a bit of a blokey enthusiasm, with fierce competition to grow a chilli hot enough to heat a small town for a week – a sort of vegetable willie waving, if that’s not too lively a metaphor for a Tuesday morning. We don’t even eat anything much hotter than a Jalapeño, so my Apache chillies are dutifully frozen, and the Habaneros respectfully avoided. The pleasure it seems is in the achievement of getting them to bear fruit and ripen – which in a season that’s swerved between the biblical extremes of flood, fire and storm is a bit of a problem. *Even the frogs have done exceptionally well this year but the boils have mercifully stayed away.

However the cherry tomatoes have suffered terribly from brown rot, and that’s down to the erratic rain and sunshine and exacerbated by water splash on the leaves. But we’ve gathered enough from the rather sad looking bushes to make a couple of litres of oven dried tomatoes in oil. It’s a skill to balance dryness with sheer toughness because once they’ve gone to far, no amount of olive oil will bring them back to life. I like to give these tomatoes twenty minutes in their oil at around 110C in the oven after drying them overnight at 65C because low acidity bottled fruits can, in exceptional circumstances, develop botulinus contamination.

The same problem happens with figs if you dry them in their skins. To be fair, nearly everything is better eaten fresh, straight out of the ground or off the tree. I’d make some fig compôte except we’re cutting out sugar at the moment and all of my favourite preserves are close to pure carbohydrate. As Oscar Wilde said – “I can withstand anything except temptation”, and DH Lawrence got positively aroused by them, but I think they’d both be quite safe with this year’s efforts in the Potwell Inn kitchen.

So this year has been pretty good. I love the fact that the old, unglamorous plants like savoy cabbages, brussels sprouts, and especially leeks are all loving it. The autumn leeks are stout and sweet and the succession ones are coming along far better than they have for the past four years, which – I guess – is what allotmenteering is all about. You have to embrace and enjoy success when it comes, but never get blown off course by failure. Once you’ve renounced the chemicals and given up the extractive attitude then you’re in a one on one relationship with the earth which has its own ways and is a far better teacher than any book. In many ways, ‘though I can’t claim any deep knowledge of the subject, the earth teaches a form of Tai Chi, or Taoist spirituality. I don’t mean all that stuff about being ‘closer to God in a garden’ which completely misunderstands what happens when merely looking at something miraculously becomes beholding. Forgive me, I’m digging deep here but it’s a crucial distinction.

There really is a huge difference between hard gardening that wants to bully and harry the earth into submission, and contemplative gardening that opens intangible channels through which we can ‘hear’ and even ‘understand’ what response is asked of us.

Don’t cling! Don’t strive! Abandon yourself! Look beneath your feet!

Ryōkan

* Biblical joke, sorry. Old habits die hard.

It was all going to be so easy

The weather forecast was pretty clear – the present heatwave would end in the usual thunderstorms and torrential rain earlier this week, and the plan was to get on with jobs in the Potwell Inn kitchen – like processing tomatoes into sauces, and passata for the winter. This is the third day we’ve scanned the sky and not spotted a single cloud, and so with the temperature climbing to 34C in the shade, watering has become an exhausting necessity. Plants in pots, even large ones, suffer from stress very quickly. The only plants truly loving the heat are the greenhouse chillies, and there are enough ripened now to freeze and keep us going until next year.

But at the top of this post is a picture of some calendula flowers that we’re wilting before extracting from them in almond oil. We’ve never done this before but the calendula is so useful as a companion plant on the allotment it makes perfect sense to get an effective second benefit from it and so we have oil, beeswax and jars waiting to store this first attempt. We find the commercial cream incredibly effective, and so we’ll soon know whether our home-made version is worth the expense – organic almond oil isn’t cheap. They’re wilting well enough to move to the next stage tomorrow. I really hope it cools down a bit because the thought of reducing 10 kilos of tomato pulp in a kitchen that’s already airless and at 30C is a bit daunting, although the fruit is ripening in a box on the kitchen floor and there’s at least as much again ripe on the vines.

The decision to put ourselves on a pretty savage diet has been helped in one respect by the heat. Who wants to eat in this weather? But the other half of the plan – doing a brisk five mile walk every day before breakfast – has been a struggle, but a fight that’s worth winning. Got to get rid of the lockdown lard!

So we’ve been hiding from the heat indoors most of the day and I’ve been redeeming the shining hour by watching a series of webinars organised by the BSBI – (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland) – on the Irish grasses and grassland. There’s plenty of overlap with the UK to make them very useful indeed, and I’m gradually discovering just how useful a knowledge of the grasses is, in searching for their more glamorous relatives. Grass looks like grass, and fields – from a distance – can all look the same, but imagine how powerful it would be to go in to a meadow, take a look at the grasses and the easily identifiable flowers and know that it’s worthwhile searching for something special like orchids. If you search for BSBI on You Tube you can watch them all.

Botanising in this heat has been a no-no, and so the photos are a selection of bridges in Bath, taken in the last 2 days. The still air and unruffled water have created some lovely reflections along our morning route. The odd one out is the heron that likes to perch on Bath Deep Lock. It’s pretty tame, and this is the closest I’ve ever got. I really love this place, but it’s hard to escape the fact that the heatwave, which is affecting gardeners, allotmenteers and farmers, not to mention the people who have to work indoors in it; is a symptom of something terribly wrong with our climate. Our clean air zone has been postponed until next year, and today a white van driver ran his engine outside our flat for at least an hour, to use his air conditioning – like that’s going to help!