Festive crafting

I’ve been busy making little pretties out of salt dough this past little while, with acrylic paint and newspaper spread across my desk where usually my laptop is to be found.

I came up with the design for these hanging ornaments a year or so ago and have now finally got out the paints and made a test run for my Etsy shop to see if anyone else likes them too. They’re little hanging wreaths, with a holly leaf and berry design stamped into them, all made and hand-painted by yours truly.

Tomato sauce

We had a pile of tomatoes to deal with and as a variety of parts of them had gone a bit blight-manky, we decided to make tomato sauce from them. We threw them into boiling water and then cold to get their skins off. I burned my knuckle twice on the metal bowl that held the hot water, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. The manky bits of the tomatoes were removed and we cut them in half and laid them cut side up on a baking tray.

Over the top we scattered a few sliced garlic cloves, stripped the leaves off a few sprigs of thyme, drizzled some good olive oil over the top and sprinkled it all with a bit of caster sugar. Then we roasted the tomatoes in the oven (200ºC/Gas 6) for an hour.

After that it was just a matter of tipping them into a processor (we used Mum’s fancy new hand-held blender for kicks) and whizzing everything up til smooth.

Now all we have to do is think of a way to use the sauce …

Running out of titles for harvest posts

More from the garden as I gradually clear away the rows I sowed months ago. The cucumbers are done now and all the blighted tomatoes have been brought in and the plants disposed of. Paper bags full of tomatoes now sit on my window sill – some are a-ok and just need to ripen, others are a little odd-looking and will do what they’ll do.

I’ve dug over the soil I don’t need to stand on for a while, leaving a path between my two rows of great big carrots and the compressed patch in front of the runner beans, where I stand to pick the long pods. A fat frog accompanied me while I worked on Saturday, trying fruitlessly at one point to headbutt his way below the fence before hopping off under the hedge to explore and later returning to check on my progress. Between the nematode worms and the frog and his friends, the slug population has been kept pretty low this year, so I’ll be buying more of those magic microscopic worms next spring.

Click the photo for the set.

Liberties

You see, you watch the weather forecast, hoping for a bit of rain here and there, because that way you don’t have to lug about your watering can, or unwind the hose and then rewind the hose in order that your vegetables do not fall down dead just when you’ve got everyone into the groove of eager anticipation at the next harvest weight every time your blog lights up in their feed reader, but then the rain goes right ahead and takes liberties.

Instead of just a little watering here and there, perhaps just at night even, so you can lie in bed and enjoy the sound of it on the conservatory roof, it rains and rains and rain and rains and then, in case you’d had your curtains drawn for a few days and had missed it, it rains some more just to be on the safe side.

And the vegetables are all, yay, water, we know what to do with that, nom, nom, nom, biological process, biological process. Not the tomatoes though. No, tomatoes are wily creatures that come indoors at night and read gardening books for kicks. They quietly turn the pages until they reach the part with the title “Tomato Troubles” and then they study. They study the words and the pictures and then creep back into the garden to tell their tomato friends what they learned inside the big house.

“Dudes,” they say, for I have grown the most hip and happening vegetables, “Dudes, all this yummy rain is the perfect excuse to turn black and drop dead! No, really! Droop, no longer look merry! Let those fruits hang to the ground. For this is the way to get indoors right now – and indoors? Indoors they have television.”

2420g vegetables in 2 hours

There was some work to do in the garden today. The tomatoes keep on ripening and needed picking. Some had turned a bit manky instead of turning red though, so they went into the compost. As did the remaining sweetcorn plants, whose last cobs had already been eaten with dinner a few nights before. Gradually I’m beginning to see the soil again.

A few cucumbers have been picked too, these perhaps not quite so perfect-looking as the ones that went before them. They’ll be going into another cucumber cake. The (probably) final beetroot have been pulled too. I don’t think the second row is going to produce anything worth cooking, but I’ll see what happens to the runt from the first row before I banish them all to the bin.

Another handful of runner beans were ready for picking – a couple of them of hilarious length. When the vines finally give up producing beans I’m wondering how on earth all that foliage is going to fit into my compost bin. There’s no way it’s going in to the council bin though. No, I grew it, I rot it!

After a lot of rain recently today was perfect for pulling a few carrots. Just a little loosening of the surrounding soil and then up they came like loose teeth. Except that they were a hell of a lot bigger than milk teeth. There are some monster carrots out there and it looks like the second row will produce some good stuff too.

Click for the set

7 Days: Day 7 – Laughing

Laughing at recorded episodes of The Daily Show. Jon Stewart is my husband. And now I can get digital TV I get to see him in much higher definition than in the online videos I used to watch. It’s good for our marriage.

Thanks for another enjoyable week, guys and girls, I’ll have the mosaic up soon. Ish.

7 Days: Day 6 – My Thursday

After some consideration I decided to wear my blue jumper today, but then at 1pm when I made my lunch the can of tuna I was opening decided to throw up all over me.

So I changed my jumper.

At 2pm I went to the hairdresser and got 2 inches lopped off my mane. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough juice in my phone battery for me to take a photo of the very 80s look I get mid-blowdry with one side of my hair three feet wide and the other side clipped up with a bright pink clip. Another time perhaps.

Afterwards I had my contact lens check up at the optician. I’ve previously been advised against wearing them for the 10 to 12 hours I said I wore them (9am – 11pm is 12 hours, right?), but now, as they fit and behave so well, the optician is fine with it (hurrah!). I have nearly 20/20 vision with my contacts, but my glasses aren’t as good, so keep on rocking the contacts, he says. Well, I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.