Purple Cottage Pie

Had lovely veggie cottage pie for dinner. Instead of browning on top it went a deeper purple - really beautiful!

Green Tomato Chutney

We made the chutney using this recipe:
http://www.pickleandpreserve.co.uk/index.php/rapid-recipes/green-tomato-chutney
We only used half the amounts specified as we kept lots of the tomatoes for salads. Looked good enough to eat as soon as the apple, tomato, onion and sultanas went in the pan!

About 21/2 hours later it was finally reduced enough for packing into the jar. Looks delish!

Purple mashed potato

We had our first ever purple mash - looked amazing, maybe some would find it a little off-putting, but I like purple!!

Spuds and Tomatoes

The Congo potatoes are still looking amazing with their lovely white flowers. However, either blight or some other mould has got some of the leaves, so we chopped some of the foliage down.

 

And, because we weren't convinced that there would be any actual tubers we dug plant up. It was amazing! Really nobbly long spuds and lots of them. They were mainly growing pretty close to the surface but the roots spread a long way either side.

We couldn't wait till dinner time so had some boiled for lunch. The water that came off them was a fabulous green! Some lost a lot of their purple colour but plenty were purple throughout and you can see some have a great greeny-type skin! They look fab and they tasted good!!

We decided to pull the tomatoes (Gardener's Delight) because the foliage has blight and we wanted to save the toms to make some green tomato chutney. We had lots of fruit on the two plants - some we'll be able to ripen up at home. We've eaten some of the tomatoes and they're super-sweet, such a shame the site always succombs to blight - we need to try and get our tomatoes fruiting earlier next year...

So, we had a lovely trugful of goodies to take home! Obviously including a courgette which had grown too big and runner beans (cos it's September!)

Growing, harvesting and preserving

The weather is making it feel like it's later in the year than it is, but things are still growing on the plot. Our little turnips are looking good, though pigeons (or something) have eaten quite a few of the leaves on some of the plants.

Our Rocky cucumber is going off at right-angles to where we wanted it to grow, but it's got lots of little cucumbers appearing and we've picked 3 in the last couple of days.

A bit disappointed that the crimson broad beans didn't actually produce crimson beans - though the flowers were very pretty. We've got our first harvest of these for dinner tonight along with Kestrel spuds. Still picking loads of carrots (living on carrot soup most of the time for lunch!) and patty pans are for dinner tomorrow.

We also picked masses of runner beans. We're making chutney this afternoon with 1lb of them (using our usual recipe, but with red onions and the runner beans) and the rest will be for Jamie tomorrow and for me to take to work.