British Sweetcorn

 I was very surprised to come across British sweetcorn in the supermarket!  I have seen this before, but only once and that was a few years ago.  As you can see, this is part of the Waitrose South of England range, so presumably it has just come into season.  I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with them yet, I know of boiling or grilling the cob and having it with butter (very nice), but I shall investigate if there are some other good ideas out there.

 My attempts at growing various vegetables in pots on my patio has not been very successful.  The biggest problem has been with slugs and snails which just come along and consume any young plants, particularly things like spinach or lettuce.  I have been using pellets, which seems to be working.  I found some excellent 'organic approved' pellets, which are apparently completely safe to pets and other wildlife such as birds which might eat the slugs or snails.  Also, they are safe to use around edible plants, which is good.  Despite the attacks, the tomatoes are doing well and one is just beginning to turn red:

 I'm only growing two plants this year, of different variates, so I probably wont get enough fruit for making chutney again.  Unbelievably, I still have chutney left over from last year and, more importantly, it still seems to be edible!

 A friend has also been teaching me about Thai cooking just recently, which is exciting.  I have to be careful though, as the recipes are closely guarded secrets and I had to promise not to reveal them.  However, I might be able to come up with some variants that I can post here, so look out for British / Thai fusion cooking some time soon!

Seasonal produce

After all the fuss I made about the regional produce I bought in Waitrose last week, I thought it was probably time that I wrote a little more about it.  In the end, once I'd sampled some of the vegetables raw, I realised that they were far to fresh to be cooked to death in some complicated dish.  When vegetables (technically, tomatoes are a fruit of course...) are this fresh, I think it's almost a crime to cook them beyond the bare minimum.  The spinach and the asparagus in particular seem to really benefit from actually being in season at the moment, you can really taste it.  So, one super simple dish that I like to do when I get home from work and am hungry and in need of something fairly quick is to just basically cook some pasta and add some olive oil, freshly ground black pepper, course sea salt and the freshest vegetables available.  This could be done with almost any vegetables really, but in this case I used asparagus, mushrooms and spinach.  This dish is perfect when the vegetables are so fresh because they are not really cooked at all, just warmed through.  The end result should look something like this:

 This really is the simplest thing to prepare.  Put the pasta into little salted, rapidly boiling water.  While it's cooking, wash the vegetables.  Slice the mushrooms and the asparagus.  When the pasta is nearly done, add the slices asparagus for no more than three minutes, it takes a bit of practice to get the timing for the pasta right, but it's worth persevering.  A time saving trick I like to use is to wash the spinach leaves in a colander under the cold tap.  Once the pasta is cooked, drain the pasta through the same colander, leaving the spinach in.  This way, the pasta gets drained and the spinach gets steamed by the hot water!  Nice.  Tip the pasta and the spinach back into the saucepan, add olive oil, freshly ground black pepper and course sea salt.  Stir it around and add the mushrooms.  That's it!

 We've been having a lot of warm and wet weather just recently, which of course has done wonders for my attempts to grow my own food:

 As you can see, the tomatoes are coming on well, the mint is progressing but is still too small to use really.  Unfortunately, the sweet peppers are not doing much and appear to have been munched by snails.  However, the alpine strawberries are doing well, though I am surprised that they haven't produced any flowers yet.

Home grown food

 In my last post I promised to blog about my latest efforts to grow some of my own food.  As I don't have a garden, I am slightly limited in what I can grow, but I think you can do quite well with just a patio.  So, here are some of the things I am growing this year:

 Last year I grow a few tomato plants in a grow bag, which worked really well, but I thought that this year I would go for something that looked a little better!  I think the pots provide a bit more flexibility as well as you can move them around and arrange them more easily.  Anyway, I have two tomato plants, of different varieties, so hopefully they'll do well.

 These are radishes, which are really very easy to grow and make an excellent salad vegetable.  They grow quickly, particularly  in the hot weather we've been having recently, so I am keeping a couple of pots going planted some time apart.  I hope that this will allow me to have an extended supply of radishes, though continuous would be even better.

 These will be spinach fairly soon...

 This is regular garden mint, which I find is superb for making fresh mint tea!  It's a bit too small at the moment, but when there is enough of it, the thing to do is to simply cut a short branch, wash it, put it into a mug or a cup and pour boiling water of it.  This makes a suitably refreshing hot drink for the hot weather!

 I also planted some Alpine strawberries, which are those really small berries you sometimes see in the shops.  They may be small, but they have a lot of flavour, so hopefully these will turn out well!

 And these are red peppers!  To be honest, I'm not sure how well these will do but I bought them as seedlings from the garden centre and the label said that they were ideal for patios...  It will be exciting if they do produce fruit, but I tried growing sweet peppers indoors last year and it wasn't very successful. 

 I've got space for quite a few more pots, so if I have time I shall be making some additions.  The great thing about using pots is that, once planted, they are really low maintenance, except for needing watering and the occasional feed.

Home grown

I was up in Lincolnshire visiting family earlier this week, who, being in possession of a reasonably sized garden, are much more into growing fruit and vegetables than I am! Actually, the apple trees seem to have produced an abundance of fruit this year compared to previous years.

They have also had an excellent crop of runner beans, although I think everyone ends up in the same position with runner beans in that you wait for ages and then they all come at once! Someone from work was selling runner bean chutney a couple of weeks ago - a product of a glut of runner beans and wondering what to do with them I suspect, but an enterprising one at that.

The squash were also looking good:

And, I couldn't help but notice that the hawthorn berries were ready to be picked:

So, I have gathered a good crop of hawthorn berries. I plan to have another go at making fruit leather in the manner described by Ray Mears on TV a couple of years ago. I tried this once before (see here), but it didn't really work properly, so I'm keen to have another go. Watch this space!

The first crop of tomatoes!

225g of tomato goodness! Actually, there are so many tomatoes still forming that I am beginning to wonder what to do with them all. Though we did have some stormy weather last night, so I think a few of the longer branches might have been damaged. None have broken off, so we'll have to see if they recover. However, it looks like I'll easily have enough to make a good quantity of chutney! Super.

Plants - Grow your own chillies, sweet peppers and tomatoes!

To my great delight, I noticed while watering last night that some of my tomatoes are starting to ripen! It's such a great feeling, watching plants grow knowing that you're going to be able to enjoy the fruits (literally!) of your labour very soon. I never cease to be amazed at how few people even try to grow their own, it's great fun and requires very little space. I only have a small patio and yet I can still grow a decent quantity of tomatoes, even if they are now a little on the rampant side:

Unfortunately, my attempts to support the plants with canes has failed, with the result that they have tumbled all over the place. However, they still seem to be doing well, though I am concerned that some of the fruit is resting on the ground which probably isn't good. I'll have to do something about that soon.

The chillies are continuing to do well, actually, they are nearly all ripe now I think, so I shall have to pick them soon:

Plants - Grow your own chillies, sweet peppers and tomatoes

All of the fruit I'm growing seems to be doing really well! The chillies are coming along nicely and I think some of them will be ready for using fairly soon:

The sweet peppers are also looking good:

I'm not sure how much longer it will before these start to ripen, but I don't think they'll be ready for a while yet. I have three other sweet pepper plants, one of which is now flowering, but the one featured in the picture is along way ahead for some reason. Treating them with washing up liquid solution for the white fly didn't do them much good and resulted in the leaves curling up a bit, but the good news is that they are all producing new leaves which look perfectly healthy!

Last, but not least, the tomatoes are doing amazingly well and I'm looking out every day now for the first red fruit:

These are just the fruit that are easy to see, there are plenty more hidden underneath the branches of the other plants! The leaves have started to turn a bit yellow, which I think happens has the plant starts to put more energy into producing fruit. I have pinched some of the tops out to let the plants focus on ripening the fruit and I have been giving them a little liquid fertilizer every time I water. Hopefully, this will mean that I get lots of great tasting tomatoes!

Plants - Home grown chillies

Well, the plants I'm growing are continuing to do really well! Actually, I noticed the other day that the chillies are starting to ripen! So, some good curries are not too far away. The sweet peppers are coming along nicely to, but they are still green.

Plants

Well, I haven't posted for a little while now, but needless to say the plants have been getting on well! The tomatoes especially have been growing like anything and are now producing fruit: I am really looking forward to being able to eat some of these! Although, judging by the number of flowers on the plants, I'm going to be inundated with tomatoes. I shall probably have to make some chutney, so that I don't have to waste any. But, that will be great as I can then have tomato goodness through at least some of the winter.

The sweet pepper plants are also doing OK, although they suffered a major attack of white fly. I dealt with this by spraying them a strong solution of washing-up liquid in water, which isn't terribly good for the plant, but is much worse for the white fly. I gave them three treatments in all and it seems to have done the trick, so fingers crossed!
As you can just see in this photo, these are starting to produce fruit as well, which is exciting! Hopefully the washing-up liquid wont have done too much damage.

Plants

My attempt at seeing how much food I can grow myself at home, despite only having a small patio, continues to go well! The tomatoes are doing splendidly and are beginning to produce flowers, as you can see here:
I've had to do some minor structural engineering to support them though. I've grown tomatoes before and the plants do seem unusually bad at supporting themselves. Looking at the leaves and the stem closely reveals them to be covered in lots of tiny hairs, which makes me wonder if in the wild the tomato plant would sort of 'Velcro' itself to other plants growing around it. Otherwise, I really don't see how they would get on in the wild with no one to make some sort of supports for them. Of course, tomato plants such as these are the result of many, many years of careful selected breeding, so it's quite possible that the original tomato plants were more than capable of supporting themselves. Through selective breeding, plants will have been developed to produce the most fruit, which could well have lead to plants that seem intrinsically top heavy and unable to support themselves.

I have also been growing chillies, although I haven't blogged about these before. A friend has very kindly been looking after these for me whilst I was in the process of moving, which was much appreciated! However, I now have them in my flat and they are doing really well! They have produced fruit before and I did have an attempt at making curry from them, which worked well, but I am looking forward to perfecting it. I did try eating one of the fruits whole, straight from the plant, which was something of a mistake. They may be small, but they are very powerful! The plants themselves make quite nice house plants as well; they produce small, pale purple flowers which actually smell really nice. When the sun shines on them through my patio doors it makes the whole living room smell! Home grown chillies and free air freshener to boot, you don't get much better than that.
The sweet peppers I planted are also continuing to do really well:
I believe that these will get to be about one or two feet in height before producing fruit, so they have some way to go yet. It's interesting that one of them has got to be much bigger, by almost a factor of two in terms of height, then the others. I'm not sure what could have caused this, except perhaps it has had more sunlight, so I have rearranged them to see if I can't even things out a little bit.

I have also planted some butternut squash seeds, which have germinated and are growing very quickly:

This is quite impressive as I only planted these just over a week ago! These will be able to go outside once they are strong enough. Luckily, I have two spare spaces in the grow bags I'm using for the tomatoes, so I shall plant these there.

Plants

Well, it's been a busy couple of weeks there, so sorry for not posting for a while! But, while I've been away the tomato and sweet pepper plants have been doing really well. I have now transferred the tomato plants to grow bags, which are outdoors. It will still be a while before they have any fruit, but hopefully they'll do well. The sweet peppers are also looking good and I have now separated the four strongest plants. It's always sad having to throw away all the others that have grown so well, but none of them would survive if left in the same pot and I simply don't have enough pots (or space) to keep them all...

Plants

Well, the tomato plants I'm growing are doing really well! They are almost ready to be planted out in a grow bag. In the end I kept the five strongest seedlings and planted them into individual pots. I only photographed one of the five, which happened to be the biggest, but the others are similar. The peppers are not growing anywhere near as quickly, although they are coming along. I have decided to wait until they grow their second set of leaves before transferring them into separate pots, just like I did for the tomatoes. Actually, this works out really well because by the look of it they will be ready for this at just about the same time as the tomatoes are ready to plant out.

I don't know quite how many I shall keep, probably only three or four. I have to remember that all the other seeds I have bought but not planted yet will need some space!

Plants

The tomato plants I've started growing are continuing to do really well:
They will soon be ready to be transplanted into individual pots. The time to do this is when they get their second set of leaves. The first leaves to form will have smooth edges, as you can see in the picture. The second set and all subsequent sets, will have jagged edges, so it's quite easy to tell when they are ready. You can just see in the picture that the new leaves are starting to form, but it'll be a day or two yet.

The sweet pepper plants are starting to shoot as well!
I shall leave the cling film on for a little while yet, just while one or two more shoots appear.

Tomato plants

To my great surprise, the tomato seeds that I sowed earlier on are already shooting and looking fairly healthy: So, they no longer need to be in a propagator, so I have removed the cling film covering from the pot. I will let them grow a little bit bigger and then I will transplant them into individual small pots. I didn't expect anything to happen quite so soon. There is no sign of activity from the sweet peppers yet and I haven't had time to plant all the other seeds.

Home grown vegetables

Well, it's been a while since I last posted! I've been busy moving down to the South of England and starting a new job, which I think is a good enough excuse.
Anyway, I now have some outdoor space, so I can finally grow some of my own food! This is quite exciting because it means I'll be able to have British grown tomatoes, courgettes and butter-nut squash. Well, British tomatoes will be in the shops eventually, but it'll take a while. Mind you, the seeds I've bought will take a while as well, so we'll have to see which is first - watch this space!

I also bought seeds for coriander and basil, both of which I use a lot in cooking. As I found when I did the year of eating only British food, it's very hard, if not impossible to find British produced herbs. And, because there was a special offer on, I got some sweet pepper seeds as well, but they'll only grow indoors, along with the herbs.

So far, I have only planted the tomatoes and the sweet peppers:


I don't have a propagator, or a green house, so I've used clingfilm over the top of the pots. Not very exciting yet, but watch this space, they should start germinating soon! Now is the time to get planting most things, in fact it's almost too late for the tomatoes. The butternut squash and the courgettes will get planted next month. I will transfer these to grow bags on my patio once they are big enough to fend for themselves outside.