Let the jam making season BEGIN!

I'm going to need a larger storage area for all the jams I'm making this year.  I hope everyone is practising their 'happily surprised' faves for opening their Christmas presents this year- as everyone's getting jam!

Last week I decided to make the most of the squillions of Rose Hips locally and try turning them into jam.

Baby Wild has a wee cold, so my intentions started out good with the idea to make her some Vit C packed Rose Hip Syrup.  I love this Ministry of Food release recipe during WW2 to encourage people to make their own medicine, and was going to use it as a basis for my recipe.

But then I read somewhere (maybe on the Cottage Smallholder?) that the syrup is best made after the first frost, and so until then jam is a splendid idea.   So I made jam with my pickings.  And it is DIVINE!

I topped & tailed the hips, boiled them up so soften them, mashed them up in the pot and then left them to drip slowly overnight through a double muslin lined sieve into a bowl.  Then I boiled up the resulting orange liquid with some pectin laced sugar and jarred it up.

Pretty eh!  Too pretty for my local flower show who turned their noses up at it!  I am planning on making more this week, and will tweak the recipe a bit.  Next time I'll chop up the hips first so that they don't need to be boiled so long as I bet this ruins the Vit C content.  I ended up with about 430ml hip liquid & only added 200g pectin sugar and it's definitely sweet enough at this ratio.

I had no idea jam making was so easy, and now there's jam everywhere!  I'll never loose the baby pounds at this rate, especially now that my local Tesco has finally started selling Sourdough bread. Thank god it's too expensive to be bought regularly.

PS check out these amazing sounding vegetable jam recipes from HFW via The Guardian! Oh YUM! I'm away to pull up some carrots already.....

Award winning flowers!

I won First place! Yay!

I was intrigued when the local town, which is not exactly renowned for beauty, community spirit or show gardens, was putting on it's Annual Agriculture & Flower show in the community hall. I had to go and see for myself, so I decided to enter it too. It doesn't take much to entertain me these days! It was a bit farcical when I showed up. Obviously they haven't had a new entrant for some time and were rather confused with what to do with this younger person showing up out of the blue. They were less than impressed when I tried to enter unusual jams, as they were only accepting lemon curd or raspberry jam this year. Obviously this is pretty daft and I found it very difficult not to giggle at the old fashioned-ness of it all.

The photos are a bit rubbish as I didn't get a chance to photograph the flowers until last night and they were already starting to wilt and the light was fading, but I think you can get the gist of them.  I called them 'Summer Scents (Sweet peas, apple mint, sage and eucalyptus) and 'Autumn Glow' (Nasturtiums, fennel flowers, beetroot flowers, fuscia, yellow daisies and bits & bobs).

I had never imagined myself as an award winning arranger of flowers!  In fact I've never been qualified to call myself an award winning anything except possible wine drinker & talker of shite.  As 1st prize was a mammoth 60p, I decided to leave it in repayment for the confusion I had caused, and promised to return next year better prepared!  There's another Flower Show in a nearby town next weekend, I think I'll enter some of my veg and see what happens there and hope they're a bit friendlier!

As a complete contrast to the fine art of flower arranging, I then spent Sunday bricklaying.  A woman of many talents, I am.  It may be the squinty-est wall in Scotland but I'm rather proud of it none the less.  Photos and description to come upon completion.

A productive weekend in all!

Growing colour combinations

It's taken me a whole week to get around to write this post - am struggling with work, toddlerdom, and the general 'stuff' that needs done daily!  So forgive me for being a bit lite on posts these days....

Last weekend we went to Kelburn Castle (again) for the Vikings.  We had a great time.  Check out our photos of the roaring Vikings on the other blog.  But this was the first time we wandered around the walled garden at Kelburn.  Man, I am a big sucker for a walled garden.  I WANT ONE!  And this was a big walled garden, full of various flower beds and stunning borders, Ewe trees that were over 1000years old! Wow!

It's a shame we didn't manage to see the borders earlier in the summer when they were in their full glory, but I could still admire the colours and textures, despite most of the blooms fading in the August rain and cool.

But the main thing I took away with me was the inspiration to be a little cleverer with the juxtaposition of colours in my flower garden.  I love both these combinations above and below, and hope to find some space in next year's garden to try to replicate such striking colours.

Imagine if this was the view over garden?  Swooning? I am...

PS. Can you tell I've finally got my new camera?!



Radish Beer Snacks, anyone?

Not so sure what to do with the amount of Radish pods, or nuts as I think of them for some reason, I have amassed since it was suggested that they'd make good beer snacks!  Even I can't drink the amount of beer that would be necessary to wash this lot down!

 Check out all these health benefits of eating radishes, but I'm still gonna need tastier ideas here...

 I've tried cooked radishes and hated them, so I'm not so keen in trying to cook the pods, even with these tempting recipes.

And there are even more still growing!  Help!  Anyone need seeds?

Growing Wild in August

It's the start of mushroom season!.. Check out this Scottish website for advice
Cep; I really want find some Cauliflower fungus; Chanterelle; ring Champignon; Field mushroom; Giant puffball; Horse mushroom; Parasol mushroom; Shaggy Cap; Wood Hedgehog a mushroom with teeth!
Black mustard
Blackberry in milder spots, not here in western Scotland just yet
Elderberries
Hazelnut
Heather flowers fancy some heather mead or heather ale? mmm
Raspberry - not many left though!
Rosehip not content with the stash of wild rose jam I have waiting for a winter treat, I plan to also make some rosehip & apply jelly
Sea beet
Wild strawberry

Happy hunting!  Let me know what you find and show me your foraged treats please!

Pea shooter

Baby Wild loves the peas growing in the garden so much, she calls them "sweeties"!  Every time she sets foot outdoors she makes a break for them screaming for help to pop open the pods she tears from the bush.  I am proud that at such a young age she appreciates the value of growing our own and understands where some veggies come from.......

But she's destroyed one of the bushes!  It's collapsed altogether into a big tangled heap from being pulled at so enthusiastically.  Oh dear.

Garden progress - August

 

 My garden has really come into itself this month.  Most flowers are in full bloom, making me realise that I need to do some research into what I can grow to fill the gap between my spring bulbs and mid summer when my garden was so bare!  All my herbs are in bloom too, making the front garden gloriously fragranced.

 It's also a little wild though!  I am regretting growing so many nasturtiums.  They are drowning out my opium poppies which have decided to flower for a second time this summer, as well as the more delicate but no less prolific Californian poppies.

The veg patch is doing a great job of keeping the food bills down (and we all need that right now!!) as we have been living off salads and snacking on the peas on mangetout, which are still fruiting happily.  I'm still throwing bags of lettuce over the fence to neighbours, and made a huge batch of lovely lettuce, apple mint and pea soup to deal with the remaining surplus.  I've also been experimenting with thinnings, as I'm so reluctant to throw any thinned seedlings away I've been replanting them elsewhere and giving them to friends.  We've decided that salisfy does not appreciate being moved, so in future the weaker seedlings shall be resigned to the compost heap.

I have new seedlings sprouting up to see how they fare being sown mid summer.  To be honest I also wanted to use up some of the packets of seeds.  That's another lesson learnt this year - stop buying so many seeds!

The flowers a the end of the patch in this photo are the radishes that I let go to seed.  I remember Alys Fowler doing this in her programme The Edible Garden, recommending that they go rather well with beer, sounds good to me!

You can just see two scrawny courgette plants at the bottom of this photo - I managed to rescue these after being almost decimated by slugs a few months ago.  One of them is thanking me by starting to fruit at last!

The asparagus pea plants are still tiny, and took an age to germinate but what pretty flowers!  I'm really looking forward to tasting these.  It has been hard work keeping the slugs away from these guys and munching on my beautiful curly lettuces edging the pot.  The effect is somewhat ruined by the smattering of bright blue slug pellets I ended up having to buy in bulk.

I've started planning a winter veg patch too... but we'll go into that at a later date.  Right now I need to go pull up some greedy nasturtiums!