Heritage Junk Food

Crisps made from Highland Burgundy Red and Salad Blue potatoes.

A poor sense of humour...

I think I've apologised for my poor sense of humour on the blogs before but this made me laugh.*

Worral Thompson cocks it up.

Let's all forage safely out there!

*it will also be the straw that stirs the teacup before my pride takes a karmic fall, just you wait and see.

Fingers crossed for the tomato harvest

I'm hesitant even to talk about our tomato crop. So far we've managed to avoid getting blight and the fruits are swelling. I've managed to harvest two ripe tomatoes so far, both from plants in containers, one by the back door and one from the plants in mini polytunnel. The main crop in the field is growing well, with a little sun it won't be long before we can start picking.

And it's breath holding time because for several years now we've had no tomatoes at all from plants grown in the open. Blight has destroyed our entire harvest. I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever have a tomato glut again and I miss it.

The weather, which has been warm and dry, has just taken a turn into stormy rain. Humidity is up and the wind is from the west. We need the rain for all the plants which have been parched for a week but for the tomatoes this has come at just the wrong moment.

The blue splodges on the leaves in the picture are Bordeaux mixture sprayed on as a prophylactic measure to stop the blight spores from getting hold but it's still a poison and I'm reluctant to keep using it, particularly as we need to eat the produce. Its effectiveness only lasts for a couple of weeks at a time - less in wet weather.

Please keep your fingers crossed for us.

Some Greens less Ordinary

Cardoon flower

Although they look a lot like artichokes, Cardoons; Cynara cardunculus, are grown for their leaf stalks which are tied up and blanched, a bit like celery, for use as a cooked vegetable. I've never actually done this, although we have been growing cardoons for several years since we inherited a patch on our allotment in Newport Pagnell. I've seen large fields of them in preparation for the markets on the east coast of Spain around Valencia but they are an unusual vegetable for UK and as far as I can tell for Northern France.

The plants are perennial and can be propagated from slips or offsets which form around the parent plant. It's also possible to start from seed but we've found it easy to keep ours going by regular vegetative reproduction. They seem slightly hardier than artichokes and since we haven't been worrying about eating them, just enjoying their statuesque architecture and thistly flowers our patch is rather cruelly treated. It keeps going.


Magentaspreen

We first grew the annual chenopod, Magentaspreen; Chenopodium giganteum, as a novelty five or more years ago. It's been with us ever since. I was shocked to discover two months after we first came over here that there were seedlings of it growing in the gravel of the yard. Seeds which must have fallen out of pots that I thought had been cleaned up for the journey. It's a survivor!

Although I wonder the appropriateness about introducing another prolific alien into the environment it is barely more than funny Fat Hen and can be used as green vegetable (but take it young). It will grow taller than a person so hoick it out pronto if it's in the wrong place, its vigour will weaken all around it.


Golden Purslane

Purslane; Portulaca oleracea, is one of my all time favourite vegetables used most often in salads but also in cooked dishes. It has a fleshy texture and a slightly sharp taste which holds up well under dressings.

The one in the picture is described as Golden and this is often suggested to be best flavoured but it seems little different to the green version we've grown before. Once you have it, again it will stay. The plant looks a little weedy because I left it too late to get seed for this year and was seduced into buying an expensive pack of plants at the HDRA at Ryton when we were there last. I will save a little seed but I expect to find seedlings happily popping up all by themselves next year as soon as the weather warms up.


Scuplit

Which brings us finally to Scuplit. Way back when I was looking for large bean seeds I found seeds for this plant, which seemed entirely new to me on the Seeds of Italy site. It's actually Bladder Campion; Silene inflata (or vulgaris), a native (or possibly naturalised) plant of most of Europe including the UK but it seems it's only used as a herb in Italy.

I have to say it's a bit backward in coming forward on flavour. Seeds of Italy suggested it was somewhere between Tarragon and Rocket, I'd say grass might be closer. It doesn't like being photographed much either, you can't really see the bladder heads of the flowers in this shot.

Maybe it will grow on me, Good King Henry did when I gave it a chance but at the moment it seems more like an addition to the wild flower meadow than a useful vegetable.


Cardoons by Night

Allium Harvest

It's the time of year to lift the onions, garlic and shallots. These onions were the first to mature, grown from some inadvertently created sets when I started seed in the spring of last year and failed to plant out the resulting seedlings. They stayed in their modules for a year, baked in the sun of the greenhouse and were finally planted out this year. They've put on good sizes but the first one I tried had a brown skin halfway through the bulb. Experience shows that onions like that rarely store well.

The rest of the onions, started from French sets at the usual time are nearly as big and will be coming out to dry in a week or so, but the red onions, started from seed this year are pretty insignificant. A couple of jars of pickles perhaps.



The early planted garlic; left just a week or two too late and the sheaths are rotted and blackened. The garlic is fine though and the bulbs (and the cloves in them) good sized. The late planted garlic is much smaller as well as being riddled with rust. The early crop came from culinary garlic originating in Spain, the late crop from proper 'seed' garlic from the garden centre. If the difference in size due to growing periods is disregarded I think I know which method to choose next year. The Spanish actually seems much healthier.



The shallots also came from the same garden centre. To be fair they were almost too late to be planted so any crop at all is surprising but it must be said they are a bit weedy. Normally I would save the biggest bulbs for planting next year but none of these seem worth it.

Also, the chives are putting on a second spurt of growth after I rescued them from the mint and the Babington leeks are making their usual bulbfilled flower heads with abandon. I really need a bunch of leek seedlings from the market but may not be able to persuade myself to make the trip to town in time. Those deer are overfed as it is.

New Blog

In order to put more pressure on myself to get on with my painting I've created a tumblr blog where I hope to update at least five times a week with new images of the work I'm doing.

The Saatchi thing just wasn't right, not least because their site is such pooh. This way I have more control over the way things are displayed and visitors won't be bombarded by a mass of incomprehensible advertising and broken links.

Eventually I hope to be able to actually sell some of this stuff but for the moment I'd just be happy to get people looking at it!

Stormy Weather

We've had a hazardous weather warning for this area, thunderstorms are expected and as I type the wind is whipping up excitedly, the sky is grey and the temperatures have dropped not one degree since this morning.

Time to batten down the hatches I think.