Harvest Sunday 27 September

leaf beet - I am still eating spinach as a veg frequently but I have also chopped up lots and wilted it slightly to put in the freezer for the winter. 

raspberries - there are a few raspberries and we have had a few puddings of raspberries with greek yoghurt, sometimes with blackberries too.

courgettes - they are still growing nicely. Enough to eat and give to my family too. I have been eating lots of carrot sticks and courgette sticks for my lunchtime salad. Lovely. We also have one or two marrows which will end up in soup and with some as "pudding" for the hens

runner beans -  I picked the last two beans yesterday : ( No more now until next year.
blackberries - We must have picked over 40 lbs in August and September. I have made blackberry and apple jam mostly for Christmas hampers  and also blackberry chutney this year for the first time. And there are lots of bags of frozen berries for the winter. Just a very few berries left to ripen now - if they ripen, although with warmer weather forecast for next week, I might be lucky.
potatoes - We have had a good harvest off the the potatoes this year. We only planted a few but we had several "volunteers" that we had missed last year.
cucumbers - we have just the one plant that is producing a few cucumbers. They do need peeled but the plant was given to me so I am just pleased with quite a few free cucumbers : )
tomatoes - we had quite a good crop this year but sadly have lost half of them to blight again. The ones I have eaten do taste wonderful, though. And we have had fried green tomatoes several times now - yum!
cabbages - we have had several very nice cabbages, lovely and firm

Drying stuff

A friend has just acquired a dehydrator at a car boot sale. They were going to stay in their caravan for a couple of weeks so she offered to let me have the use of it while they were away. So I have been drying stuff. I have two big jars of dried apple rings, although some of the "rings" are slightly funny shapes because almost all the apples I have are windfalls. I also have almost a 1lb jam jar full of dried and powdered kale to add to winter soups/stews/whatever is suitable. I had three huge "bouquets" of kale, each one bigger than I could hold in my hands and when dried and powdered, it has all gone down to just under a jam jar full. I could not believe how much it reduced down. I have been reading about how kale is a super food and so a half teaspoonful in lots of things should give us lots of health benefits, hopefully. I was thinking about winter colds and flu and the coronavirus and that all this kaley goodness might help and certainly won't hurt.

I have also dried and powdered rosemary, sage and thyme. A vast pile of the herbs has been reduced to half a smaller jam jar worth of powder. I intend to mix it with some salt to have "Herb Salt". Some of it is for me and some to pop in Christmas hampers as something different. This is another thing i have been reading about. The idea is that not only is it flavourful but if you use the same amount as you usually use of salt, you will end up using less because of the herb content. Hopefully it will have more flavour than bought because it is made with home grown herbs. I am also looking for interesting and inexpensive ways of padding out the Christmas hampers as I am still doing considerably less shopping than I used to.

I went though the French beans at the allotment and was amazed at how many beans I have missed. I was hoping for a few to keep as seed for next year but there were so many! Last night I watched a film on the tv while podding the beans and put them in the dehydrator overnight - apart from a few to be kept for seed. I now have a jam jar of dry beans to keep for the winter. I foresee a couple of bean stews in our future. I am now absolutely convinced that there are no beans left but I daresay that I will find a few when we pull the plants up next time we are down at the allotment : )

I am now looking around to see what else I can dehydrate for the last couple of days while I have the use of the dehydrator. I have had fun. I want a dehydrator now. Maybe I need to write a letter to Santa this year...

Back into lockdown

Last week was a good week because I managed to see all my grandchildren although not all at the same time, obviously. One walked up to our house from hers to fetch something as there is only one road to cross. She is 8 now. Her parents crossed her over the road by her house and then I crossed her back. That family also dropped something off at our house one afternoon and we chatted for a few minutes with them stood on the pavement and us stood on the doorstep. We also saw little grandson briefly one day and oldest granddaughter too. With this new lockdown in our area, I am pleased to have some recent memories!

Mind you, we are back in lockdown again here but you can go to the pub or to a restaurant or to work or to school. It is a very halfhearted lockdown!

Blackberry cake

I have made three cakes with blackberries in this year. I have made them before but I found a different recipe this year and it was lovely. It is a low fat cake made with yoghurt and it is really nice. It also keeps better than I expected for a cake with so little fat. My youngest granddaughter's favourite fruit this year is blackberries so I made her one of these cakes for her birthday this month. I made one to try out the recipe and we liked it a lot so I made her one and of course, since the oven was on anyway, I made another for us at the same time : )

I found the recipe on Ang's blog and copied it. I expect this will turn up at regular times during the coming year because I have put a few bags of blackberries in the freezer. Ang originally got the recipe from the Dairy Diary. I used to have a copy of this book but I think it must have ended up in a charity shop pile by mistake because I don't seem to have it any more...

http://angalmond.blogspot.com/2020/08/berry-good-cake.html