24th February 2008
Has autumn arrived? I lit the fires for the first time this morning when I rose - rain beating against the windows, cats huggling close, very chill. The leaves are turning, the haws are brightest red, the pumpkins, so many of them, are in and lined up waiting to be eaten or turned into flour or mash. The freezer is chockers of food - yesterday I made up a gigantic batch of flu busting chicken, garlic and chili soup and froze it up into single meals.
An American market gardener recommended to me a wonderful preserving book: Preserving Without Freezing or Canning. It is a collection of traditional French methods of preserving, and I have been in hog's heaven ever since it arrived ... and storing all my green tomatoes wrapped individually in newspaper in the pantry for winter. If you like preserving, or just want to know how to get the best storage possible out of your harvest, then this is one brilliant book.
Most of my time this past month has been spent turning garden produce into preserves, or preparing it into meals for freezing. I have stored away 30 bottles of my best tomato ketchup (and am thinking about 20 more bottles), have dehydrated tomatoes and ground them into flour (as I have also done with pumpkins - pumpkin flour makes the best thickener), have frozen something like 20 kilo of tomatoes for cooking over winter, am collecting walnuts, have dried and stored many herbs, included the haws from my hawthorn hedge, I have more pasta sauce than I know what to do with, likewise pumpkin gnocchi and mashed pumpkin.
Oh, and I am also in beetroot heaven - roast beet and sweet potato chips, garnished with rosemary and salt and garlic - are just the absolute best ... I have planted more beets and hope the autumn weather will prove beneficial to them.
On the other hand my winter crop of onions have not kept well. They did not do well at all, and I suspect this is because, just for once, I did not grow an heirloom variety but a shop bought hybrid. Total disaster. Well, almost. Some have kept OK, but most have rotted or just were not good enough to start with. Thank God for my garlic and shallots and leeks (now coming in again), because without them I would have been lost..
I have kale seedlings which I might transplant today, and I will start off some more leeks and even beets for the greenhouse.
I am so happy with my tomato crop this year. I have got almost 50 kilo from just 4 plants. The only hassle I have had with them was with the rats ... but by taking the green tomatoes from the vines and ripening them either inside or in the greenhouse, I brought the loss to rats down to almost nil.
Has autumn arrived? Well, it has dashed in and taken a nip out of my heel, but I feel sure we will still have some warmer weather left. But in the meantime, I am out to see if there is snow on the mountain today.
