Ha-ha-harvest

You’re welcome.

I had a big harvest today – picking, or digging up a bit of everything except the little aubergines that are still developing. The sweetcorn is being eaten tonight and those tomatoes (which amuse me by looking so like those novelty ketchup bottles) and cucumber will be headed for sandwiches with a slice of gouda. Add a bit of mayonnaise and you have a tasty concoction indeed.

Cucumber cake

The cucumbers in my patch are growing faster than I can eat them, so when I saw a recipe for courgette cake in The Week, I thought I’d give it a go with cucumber instead. Thus Nigel Slater’s courgette cake became my cucumber cake. The result is very tasty – light, but still full of flavour.

Ingredients:

200g butter
200g caster sugar
2 eggs
150g courgettes / cucumbers with the seeds scraped out
1 small apple
200g plain flour
a large pinch of salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch cinnamon
60g pecans
80g sultanas / raisins

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC / Gas 4. Line a loaf tin measuring 20cm x 12cm x 9cm deep. (I have cunningly useful loaf tin cases)

2. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat the eggs and mix them in, one at a time, making sure each is fully incorporated before adding the next.

3. Coarsely grate the courgettes/cucumbers and the apple. Squeeze them with your hands to remove excess moisture (with cucumber at least, there will be a lot), then add to the mixture.

4. Mix the flour, salt, baking powder and cinnamon, and gently fold into the mixture.

5. Stir in the nuts and fruit. Transfer to the lined loaf tin and bake for about an hour, or until golden and firm to the touch. Allow to cool in the tin before turning out.

Click for the whole set

Recent pickings and pullings

That’s 98g tomatoes, a 10g runner bean, 363g kinky cucumber and 74g beetroot. Gradually more tomatoes are turning red, but they seem to revel in not quite doing so in unison, so you can’t just pick off a vine of them to parade about, they’ll be coming one or two at a time. The cucumbers on the other hand enjoy growing much faster than we can eat them; there are a couple in the fridge and two or three in the patch that need harvesting.

The first 144g sweetcorn cob gave us all a taste for dinner the other night. It was a very good taste too. We’ll be having a few more cobs to share in the coming weeks.

And then today came these six-inch beauties. Their tops looked so big poking above the surface that I just had to dig down to see how long they might be. I wiggled the first one about a bit and could tell it was good and long and so up it came, followed by its neighbour. Of course the huge pile of frondy leaves that crowned the roots are already warming up in the compost bin.

[Click to see what else is happening in the vegetable patch]

When you oversleep…

We were on a teambuilding exercise and Barack Obama was there. We hung out and he gave me a birthday card.

People wanted to know if those two people walking down the street were Ella and Louise. I followed them to find out. They weren’t.

There was something frustrating with chairs in the toilet.

And there was something with a young boy that I recognised from primary school (kindergarten, I explained to the Americans who were apparently there) – he lost the lid to my pink pen.

When we left the teambuilding place in the minibus we still had one of their plates. I wanted to leave it on the gatepost, but there wasn’t the opportunity. So we kept their plate and it wasn’t even that nice.

I say tomahto

The first tomato has been harvested. I had it with my tea and it was good.

Nibbled then nobbled

I’ve seen a few bites takes out of beetroots here and there and one of them has some pretty stripped leaves, but there was nothing catastrophic. To be on the safe side though, I went out late on Saturday night to see if there were any slugs about. There were a bunch of little black ones all over the place – and two big fat brown ones. Ick and yuk. I disposed of them all and realised I’d have to put some slug pellets down again.

Then while surveying my patch yesterday I found another cucumber I didn’t know was there. Apparently I’m growing a stealth variety. While down in among the greenery I noticed a tomato on the ground that had had a chunk bitten out of it. Damn it. The tomato vines are now so laden with fruit that they’ve all fallen over under their own weight, laughing in the face of the cane supports I had offered them. Clearly this tomato had come right down to the ground and had been within fanged reach of a slug.

Lifting the plant up a little I discovered a second bitten tomato – why can slugs never just finish one thing at a time? – as well as the greedy culprit, who within in a few seconds had no reason to laugh in the face of the cane I wielded. He won’t be eating any more of my tomatoes and the rest of his little buddies should feel free to chow down on those little blue pellets out there.

Ripening

I took this photo on Friday and already that tomato is much redder, almost pickably ripe. Though most of the other tomatoes are now light rather than dark green, no others have quite turned the corner to orange yet. It shouldn’t be long though! The vines have all fallen over and any attempt to lift them up again shows you why: there’s an awful lot of heavy fruit hanging off those branches.

This little aubergine is finally starting to swell too. The plant had been looking a bit sorry for itself in the hot weather, but now the aubergine is coming. These are only meant to be little ones anyway, so it’s not like it’s got a tonne of growing to do! Come on, hurry up. I want to pick you, put you on the window sill and watch you rot.

That is of course, assuming this vapourer moth caterpillar doesn’t find you and eat you first. Not much chance of that happening really though. He’s been sitting on my sweetcorn silk for the past three days and has barely moved, apparently not doing much other than leaving me a little collection of caterpillar poo on the leaf below him. I just have the idle hope that he’ll, I don’t know, vapourise before he actually does any damage to the plant.