With the village produce show looming, the weather has done noone any favours. I was sure that this year I could improve on my last years, first-time-ever entry of 3 courgettes, but with not a single one ready to pick my prospects seem gloomy.
Jam and chutney are my only hope. In fact with a dresser laden down with the stuff my biggest problem could be narrowing down which to enter. There is only one category for jam and marmalade and another category for chutney. I’m presuming that you can only enter once in each category, though someone did tell me that they enter several time in categories under other family members names. My household could be the only one with jam-making cats in that case. Tiddles Nicol’s entry of seville orange marmalade could be a bit of a give away!
Anyway, my challenges for the next few days includes making some crab apple jelly. My new friend Deborah kindly allowed me to pick some lovely red crab apples from the tree in her garden (does anyone know what this variety is?) and I have 2 bags full waiting to be made into this lucious amber gel. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Everyone has food stuffs or flavours that they aren’t particularly fond of. Sometimes we decide early on that we don’t like something when in actual fact we just haven’t eaten it prepared in the right way. That’s what I’m like with blackcurrants. I think my mind was made up after drinking Ribena in my youth and without ever having tasted them freshly picked. My neighbours blackcurrant bushes are heaving with fruit right now and noone seems interested in using it up, so not keen to see a crop go to waste I have decided to harvest the berries (I do have permission!) and find ways of using them that might change my mind.
As I am in jam-making mode I thought I’d start with a preserve and am really thrilled with the result. Blackcurrants are a great fruit to work with as they have a distinctive flavour with a tart kick, quite similar to damsons, which I really love. The recipe that follows is somewhere between a jelly and a jam; it is without the bits, as the skins and seeds are pureed out, but doesn’t need straining through a muslin bag as required to make clear jelly. The resulting jam has more body and texture than a jelly. Rather than the fruit being boiled to smitherines, the cooking time is minimal and so ends up absolutely bursting with flavour. This jam has a lower sugar content than usual which gives a lovely softish set and as the skin of the currants are removed there is no need to cook them first by boiling the fruit in water. It has just the right sharpness to make it ideal as the filling for a chocolate cake and is fab slathered on sourdough toast. This jam has turned me into a blackcurrant enthusiast, it’s that good.

BLACKCURRANT JAM
1 Kg blackcurrants, leaves and stalks removed
800g granulated sugar
1 lemon

Choose ripe or slightly under ripe fruit. Rinse the fruit if you must but make sure to drain off the excess water by patting dry with kitchen towel. Place the blackcurrants, sugar and juice of the lemon in a preserving pan. Gradually bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar then remove from the heat. Pour into a glass or ceramic bowl and cover with greaseproof paper pushed down onto the surface of the fruity syrup. Leave in the refrigerator overnight. (I went away for a couple of days at this stage with no adverse effects!)
Put the fruit and syrup through a food mill fitted with a fine disk or push through a sieve held over the preserving pan to remove the skins and seeds. Bring the resulting puree to the boil, stirring occasionally, and cook at a fast boil until it reaches setting point (it only took me 5 minutes). Skim if required and pour into hot clean jars, filling right up to the top and seal, preferably with screw top lids. Cool the jars upside down.

What is so great about gardening is that as a vast ocean of a subject there are always new things to discover and be interested in. You can be passionate about herbaceous borders one minute and then find that your focus has gone elsewhere and suddenly growing potatoes has become all consuming. I do love flowers but right now it is vegetables that really get me going.

I suppose these photographs should be called plant portraits and I like them because they are just shades of green. Plants don’t have to be ‘in your face’, colourful and blousey to be admired and these have the added advantage of being only a short hop from your dinner plate.

At long last the sun is beating down and things in the garden are starting to grow. Everything has been at a standstill for the last 4 weeks or so and this change in the weather is just what’s needed to kick start the seedlings from infancy on to their adolescent stage. The peas have begun to twine around their supports, the first tomato is starting to swell on the vine and the blueberries are filling out with the first hint of blue.

The tomato terrace is coming along nicely, thank you, and so far I am growing 8 different tomato varieties including a white tomato which I found at a farmers market in Bristol the other day. I love unusual things but I have to admit that a white tomato is getting pretty weird even for me. A tomato, basil and mozzarella salad made with this ‘White Beauty’ variety could no longer be called ‘tricolore’. I am still on the look out for a green tomato that is green even when completely ripe and am intrigued to know what colour it would be in its unripened state. Presumably at the end of the season you would need to leave them on the window sill to ripen and turn from green to …. green.
Anyhow, who cares. It’s summer at last, and that’s official.

There is very little that I miss about living in the city but dropping by a Japanese noodle bar to cheer myself up when the afternoon seems flat as a pancake is one of the few things. A simple bowl of edamame, fresh soya beans steamed in their pods and served in a heap sprinkled with salt, was always a delicious treat guaranteed to raise the spirits.
To eat them, you have to pick up each pod one at a time, holding the pod on edge, then pull the beans from the pods with your teeth, using an empty bowl brought to the table with the beans as a receptacle for the discarded empty pods.
A few years ago I found a little American book about edamame in a bargain book shop, which states that soya bean seeds are now easily available, and I have been searching for the seeds, so I can grow my own, ever since without success. The name, edamame, means ‘beans on a branch’. and they are supposed to be easy to grow, just like growing peas, only they grow as bushes and are self supporting. Like most leguminous plants, they take nitrogen from the air and fix it into the soil, so they fertilise the soil as they grow.
So I was thrilled to find that Thompson & Morgan are now stocking a soya bean seed variety, called Ustie, which is particularly suited to the British climate. The packet says to sow May to early June so I am all set to plant mine this week.

I’ve got a few friends who are fantastic gardeners. They have years of experience and dedication behind them and they seem to know the right time to plant everything and generally get it all done on time. Their earth is always dug ready for planting, their seeds get sown on time and their seedlings are planted out before they show the slightest signs of stress (plant or human).
Unlike them, my ambitions are always much greater than what I manage to achieve. Last year, my planned tomato terrace of unusual heritage varieties didn’t quite come off. I started them all off from seed, the plants were doing ever so well but just when I needed to pot them on, on to the ‘terrace’, my attention was diverted for a few weeks and that was that. The plants tried their best to flourish in their tiny pots but without divine intervention they didn’t stand a chance.
That is just one example where time and other commitments took precedence over my gardening schedule. Still, it is always better to dwell on the successes rather than the failures isn’t it?. More recently I have been examining my ‘style’ of gardening in order to find other ways around these problems. Of course in the ideal world we would all follow the rules as told by wise old gardeners with knowledge handed down through the generations, or, at the very least, by following those charts with coloured coded ‘sow’, ‘plant out’ and (hopefully) ‘harvest’ bars. There are thousands of gardening books out there spelling out the ideal scenario.
I have mentioned before that I am fast becoming a fan of buying ready grown veg plants when you only need a handful of plants but yesterday I went one better. I belong to my local Freecycle group. For anyone who doesn’t know what Freecycle is, it is a global network, split into local and regional groups, whose main aim is to prevent reusable things from being discarded and sent to landfill. Since I have been a member I have seen caravans, wood burning stoves and even condoms! change hands. It is a great way of recycling stuff, getting rid of things and acquiring other things you didn’t realise you wanted.
Plantstuffs, which don’t really fit into the landfill remit, occasionally come up for grabs, as well as bean poles, peasticks and plant pots. A constant stream of emails all day long can become a little annoying but the advantage of opting for immediate updates is that you can be first to bag a bargain. Yesterday someone was offering a few trays of vegetable plants that were surplus to requirements and I was able to go and collect them straight away.
It seems to me that this is just the most brilliant way to do things, for people to always plant more seeds than they need and then to swap the excess for something else they don’t have time to sow. I know this goes on to some degree already on gardening forums etc and seed exchanging is quite established but I’m sure that with grow your own veg becoming increasingly fashionable combined with the technology we now have at our fingertips, plant swapping makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, I still don’t know where the seed potatoes are going to be planted and the clock is ticking.

I have just ordered some Nemoslug and I am feeling in two minds about it. Nemoslug, in case you have never heard of it before, is a biological slug killer which when watered in, introduces nematodes into the soil which in turn kill the slugs that are lurking underground. It arrives in the post in a small box, but as it is full of living organisms, it has a limited shelf life and needs to be kept in the fridge and used within two weeks. So long as the soil is the right temperature and so long as there isn’t a heat wave which dries the soil out, the nemotodes get to work, thus in theory creating a 6 week window of opportunity for seedlings to avoid slug damage for just long enough to be well on their way. It isn’t particularly cheap and they do recommend that you give the soil more than one treatment.
Now this of course is all good stuff. Slugs and snails are the bain of a gardeners life and it is soul destroying when your nurtured crops dissapear overnight and you are left doubting your own sanity, ‘I’m sure there were some seedlings growing there yesterday, but perhaps I imagined it?’ So what is my problem with Nemoslug?
Some people say it works and others say it doesn’t. There are alsorts of uncontrollable variables as regards the conditions which will make it work effectively or not and as all the work is carrying on unseen underground anyway it isn’t as if you can be sure that anything is happening at all. It is intriguing that some of us are trusting enough to hand over money for a product that only might work and comes with not a single guarantee. As an entrepreneur myself, it is certainly one of those products which I only wish I had invented, that and the water filter. At what point do you add up what you are spending on growing your own food and say, ‘This is costing me a fortune!’

Anyway, enough of that. As I have very little luck when sowing directly into the ground, I have been busy starting my seeds in pots, making my own pots using a Paper Potter. At least with this ingenious invention, once you’ve bought it, it goes on working for ever more and uses up waste paper at the same time. I did get rather carried away, starting by making pots out of newspaper, then using the colours and fonts to get creative. The weekend Guardian is really good for this as it is well designed making it easy to find lovely headings and typefaces to use. I also found some cheap wrapping paper in the shed which made even fancier pots as well as some wicker-patterned paper for pots that look like baskets. Thankfully, at this point I told myself to get a grip. Using the Paper Potter you can make pots for your seedlings out of any waste paper of a newsprint quality that will absorb water and biodegrade.
Here’s how you make them.

I wish I could say that the rhubarb in the picture above, growing in such abundance it is flowing over the fence, was mine, but it isn’t. It belongs to my neighbours and I am suffering a serious case of rhubarb envy. Of course in gardening there are some things you can’t possibly cheat. Trying to control nature is like King Canute turning back the tide – it aint going to happen. When you plant rhubarb all the books and any expert gardener will tell you, the first year you mustn’t pull off any stems and the second year you can harvest but only sparingly as the crown takes that long to become established and strong.
I thought that my two rhubarb plants which went in last year were doing really well and was looking forward to a crop of some sort in the months ahead, if only a handful of stalks. I’d be happy with just one rhubarb crumble to keep me sweet till next year. But on closer inspection I realised that what I thought were leaves all knubbling up and ready to unfurl were in fact flowers.

I have seen the flowers on sale in smart London florists and when fully grown they are really fabulous, towering and architectural (if a little wierd) but when growing rhubarb for culinary purposes they are not at all desirable. They sap all the strength from the plant and if not removed as soon as you see them appear can mean that the plant will never ever recover properly. My rhubarb could be destined for a life with chronic fatigue syndrome if I don’t take immediate action. Then to add insult to injury, I noticed my neighbours rhubarb, so full of vim and vigour it looks set to leap over the fence.
So again it is a lesson in patience that nature kindly teaches. I’ve removed the flowers and will need to keep removing any more that appear and just hope that with some TLC next year I will be rewarded. I have read somewhere that you can eat the flowers, (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!) and they do look a bit like calabrese, but I think I’ll give it a miss as everything ever written about rhubarb shreiks about the leaves being poisonous and NOT TO EAT THEM. In the meantime, luckily for me, only one of my neighbours, in the house with the plentiful supply, likes rhubarb so I have been told to help myself to theirs. So expect a few rhubarb recipes in the coming weeks.

Today is positively spring like. It really feels like the first day of spring and for me that means getting a washload of laundry underway and pinned out on the line to dry in the fresh air. Of course my optimism could be short lived but at least for the moment life has a uplifting vibe.
My bed is surrounded by gardening books and bits of paper detailing my horticultural hopes for the season ahead. I am always way too ambitious but at least in March anything seems possible. The four edged beds, they can hardly be called ‘raised’, that I made last year are in pretty good shape; dug over, weed free and raring to go with any freshly-dug bare earth covered with hessian coffee sacks to keep them safe from marauding cats.
The globe artichokes which were planted last year are looking very lush (I think I was supposed to have cut them down to the ground over the winter but I forgot) and the rhubarb (Glaskins Perpetual – I chose that variety just for the name) is also looking very promising.

I have a few more new beds to dig, nowhere for my chitting potatoes to be planted and rasberry canes that need to go in somewhere. Gardening can be another of lifes big pressures if you don’t approach it right and it can cost a fortune as well. I don’t have a greenhouse and with limited windowsill space in the house I am trying to be realistic. I’ve still got lots of viable seeds from last year that I will be using up this year but I don’t need acres of tomatoes, just a handful of plants and likewise with other vegetables. So why do I think I have to grow everything from scratch?
Last year when I had not got round to planting something on time or else my carefully nutured seedlings disappeared overnight when the slugs had a snack attack, I started looking for ready-grown plants to buy. Mail order veg plants, ready to go in, is an increasingly growing business and you can now have a whole vegetable plot delivered to your door based on square metreage.
This trend is becoming apparent on ebay too and I feel sure this is likely to be a real boom area. I wouldn’t feel comfortable buying in my whole garden like that but I have been finding some really great things on ebay to help lighten the load. So far this year I have bought in a great selection of raspberries from Blacklands Plants and they arrived in the post in excellent condtion, have pre-ordered 5 organic tomato plants each one a different variety from helenchenplants who is growing some really interesting varieties of tomatoes, chillies and aubergines, and found unusual beetroot seed, burpees golden and chioggia, from Pelican Seeds. Last year I bought in leeks, sprouting broccoli and cavola nero plants on ebay because it was too late to plant from seed and they are all still doing very nicely. This is definitely the way to go.

We are experiencing a bit of a cold snap this weekend, so I’ve got the Rayburn all warm and glowing and batches of damp, freshly-washed laundry are draped over it to dry. I call that a win, win situation.
Last weekend we had a surprisingly spring-like day on the Sunday. It could have been April. It was so warm and sunny that I sat outside, overlooking the vegetable garden and ate spicy squash soup (made using the only 2 squashes I managed to grow last year) and cheese scones (thanks Dan, fab Guardian recipe for scones here) in the sunshine.
It gave me time to peruse the veg plot and start to get my head in gear to begin planning what needs to be done, what I am going to grow and where I am going to grow it in the year ahead. One thing that is definitely my number one resolution is to try and plant the seeds on time. I am always full of ambitious plans, do a ton of research so I know all the varieties of lettuce and the seed merchants who sell them, then I buy them, then I miss my planting ‘window’ and it is all for nothing.
Best to try and not be quite so ambitious I suppose. Lets face it, gardening is a battle. You have to face all sorts of unexpected obstacles, freak weather conditions, disease and pestilence, and hope that at the end of it you end up with some salad on your plate. I’ve got a few evenings of planning ahead to decide what to grow where and I want to add a few more beds to what is there already. The great thing about a sunny day in January is that you suddenly feel raring to go and ready to begin all over again. Let the battle commence.