Grow your own

 

Dean wrote: I have no problem with store-bought - most of it tastes just fine - some home-grown tastes different (not necessarily better), but not enough to get excited about - home-grown tomatoes can taste better than some supermarket toms, but again, not amazingly so.

 

Sure, if you pit the worse store-bought tomatoes against the best home grown then there is a world of difference, I'll conceed that point, but compare average with average and there's isn't a whole lot of difference. Besides, here in the UK it's been another poor year for tomatoes and nothing is ripening - looks like another year of green tomato chutney.

 

If you've got good tomatoes then good for you, if you prefer them to shop-bought then good for you.

 

The back-end of the garden where these trees live is allowed to run a little wild, partly because (as observed before) I am a lazy gardener and partly because it is an easy way of "cultivating" wild forage fruits such as brambles, raspberries (I do "tend" these and prune as required) and elderberries without the pollution of diesel fumes from the road that runs past the front-end of the garden. This year has been a good year for brambles and we've dined well on blackberry and apple pie, and soft blackberry jam and have plenty of the fruits in the freezer to tied us over winter.

 

What I did notice at that end of the garden is the beech tree is heavy with beechnuts (this is always an unpredictable forage-crop because only really old trees produce and then somewhat sporadically), these will take a few more weeks to ripen and probably need a good frost to open, the trick is catching the nuts as they begin to open but before the nut kernels fall to the ground. Beechnuts are not a nut you see used too often because in large quantities they are mildly poisonous, but roasted and ground they can be used instead of ground almonds in wheat-free baking. I just need to be vigilant over the next few weeks so that the squirrels and I get our fair shares of the crop.

 

Anyway, yesterday I visited our local greengrocer to buy a few plums, for a litre of gin I don't need that many, the fruits are steeped in gin for a couple of weeks, then decanted into small bottles with some sugar syrup, the left-over booze soaked fruit then becomes a tasty treat served with some whipped cream. While queueing to pay for the plums I spied some fresh ginger and couldn't resist picking up a couple of roots for cooking and making into refreshing drinks, either fresh ginger beer or "English sangria" (sliced ginger and cucumber, 5 parts white wine, 2 parts gin, 1 part elderflower cordial and 10 parts soda water served in tall glasses with plenty of ice). Amid all the roots I found one with a small green shoot growing from one of the knobbly nodes, this was careful placed in the brown-paper bag and with an equal amount of care, transported home to be planted in a large pot that now sits on the windowsill in our conservatory alongside the pineapple-top that I managed to root earlier in the year.

 

The plums are currently sitting in the freezer where the freeze-thaw technique will be used to split the skins prior to immersing in the gin, meanwhile here is a picture of a jar of home-grown raspberries steeping in a 750ml of gin waiting to be turned into liqueur, unfortunately this photograph does not do justice to the amazing colour this has produced:

 

 

I'm glad the container-grown strawberries have worked-out for you. We have a 2 foot high double-skinned wall that I took the coving off and filled the gap with soil many moons ago, for years I've been planting this with bedding plants such as begonias and impatiens for a mass of summer colour. This year my good lady wife decided to plant it with swiss chard, heritage carrots, together with marigolds and pansies instead - still producing a mass of colour but edible too. (marigold, viola/pansy and chive petals brighten up a green salad and add a little unexpected kick of flavour).

 

I lost an apple tree a few years back that I should replace to help cross-polination, while the bees seem to find suitable varieties in neighbours' gardens I ought to be giving them a bit of a helping hand. I'd like a good bramley cooking apple or a russet as they are by far my favourite varieties.

-> Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Leeks, Lettuce, Mushrooms. Only it requires 1/3 of our backyard.