Sunday, 2 October 2022

Golden Skans

Rosehip jelly
I made the rosehip jelly - it was a bit of a palaver to be honest. Two little jars of gold - they look great, but I think they may just be super-sweet and maybe not worth the effort. We’ll find out in a couple of months… I used this recipe from LarderLove. We ended up having to buy the apples and then today someone has left bagfuls of crab apples on the freebies shelf - they would have been perfect for it. 🙄
Rosehips and apple
I only had 250g of rosehips so used about 500g apples and 250g sugar plus a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice. I filtered it through coffee filter bags (I didn’t want to risk getting the itchy hairs in the jelly- yuk!) The juice was cloudy throughout the process so I was pleased when it went clear during the final part of boiling the juice with the sugar. All that sugar!
Peppers and squash
I picked the last of the squash as the temperature was forecast to fall last week. It did and reached 0.6°. I’m sorry that we only got those two Honeyboat squash, they’re usually one of my favourite squash varieties. The peppers have been delicious fried up on cheese toastie-lunches and there are plans to eat the remaining ones this week. They had to be picked because I snapped a branch off the plant by mistake. There are probably another 8 big ones that we’re still hoping will go red on the plant.
Squash storage
And finally the tomatoes are going red in (what’s now) the squash store. The cold nights have gone for the timebeing and we’ve had some good heavy showers. The sweetcorn is delicious but the pollination is a bit hit and miss as you can see.
Sweetcorn
We had a lovely few hours on a mostly-sunny 17° site this afternoon. My Czechmate Wight garlic arrived from DT Browns yesterday, so I planted it out. It’s a hardneck variety so hopefully we’ll get garlic scapes to eat ahead of the bulbs - two harvests from one planting 🙂
The two bulbs gave us 31 cloves! They’re on Plot3 by the leeks, in front of the squash tunnel. I’ve planted some of them a bit deeper this year, in the hope for bigger bulbs.
Garlic planting
The squash tunnel is useful for storing the canes off the ground over Winter and we’re thinking we’ll grow our beans up the tunnel next year and have the squash elsewhere for a year.
Empty squash tunnel
The slugs have arrived with the rain and have found my Chinese cabbage, which is annoying! They don’t seem so keen on the pak choi so far. Jamie’s lettuce are still tiny but should provide us with a bit of salad in a few weeks if they don’t get decimated…
Lettuce seedlings
The chard was looking good in the sunshine. I’ll be having some more of that made into ‘crispy seaweed’, it’s my preferred way to eat chard now that the leaves are bigger.
Chard in the sunshine
You may remember the ugly warty Desiree potatoes from my last post. We’re pleased to report that they made delicious mashed potato and we’ll be having more tonight. We expect to have a few more courgettes this week and I’m hoping to have some roast veggies, including the smallest butternut squash - unless the courgettes get bigger than expected!
Autumn on the plot
The zinnia and other flowers are still looking okay and still need deadheading, but windy weather in the week caused a bit of damage, so I have a bunch of flowers beside me. The Love-Lies-Bleeding is going to drop everywhere I think.
So that’s another weekend over, another new month begins and we had another COVID jab last week - my 6th one… I hope you can all have a good week. Here’s a great song by the Klaxons with ‘golden’ in the title, but don’t ask me what ‘skans ’ are, perhaps ‘scams’ is more apt in England at the moment.

6 comments:

  1. One advantage of drought conditions - no slugs. Shame about the sweetcorn. i expected ours to look like yours but was pleasantly surprised.

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    1. Yes, we got used to life without slug-damaged leaves but they're back 😖

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  2. Blackberry and rosehip jelly is delicious. The rosehip smooths the taste of the blackberries.

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    1. Aah, well I'll decide whether to ever use rosehips again once we've tasted this batch...

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  3. At least it's not Golden Brown. I think your sweetcorn is all Yellow. (Have such a poor showing this year that I haven't even picked one yet)

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    1. Aah, golden brown, but I've used both of those great songs already 😊 Sweetcorn is so delicious but it is frustrating when you pluck a fine looking cob to discover only half has properly formed ☹️

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Belinda