Bit of a squash

Having worked out my planting plan for next year in the vegetable garden (which you can see here) I now know that we will be using a large area at the far end of the paddock as a pumpkin patch among some young fruit trees that are going into this area in November. I won't only plant pumpkins, but all of the squash, pumpkins and courgettes that I want to grow next year.

I've been surprised at how easy the pumpkins have been to grow. This year I planted them into small soil pockets on the top of a straw and spent grain compost heap (see how I made the compost hot bed here) and I've fed them twice with a nettle tea, I have watered them when I've noticed the leaves wilting badly but other than that, I've pretty much left them alone to do their thing. Of the four young plants that I put in, one was eaten by slugs very quickly so only three grew, but I've been rewarded with 9 good sized pumpkins. The smallest of these is approximately 9-10 inches across, similar in size to a football, the largest is, at a guess, 20 inches across and 18 inches high. I'm looking forward to them being ripe enough to lift from their sprawling vines and weigh them. 

The courgettes have totally failed, not a single plant survived the slugs, but I did have some success with summer squashes and have harvested a couple of dozen (or more) patty pan squashes from the four plants that have grown in compost heaps and interestingly fewer per plant from the couple of plants that have grown in the ground.

Three butternut squash plants that looked like they had been eaten by slugs managed to survive the slimy onslaught and produced some small fruits, but sadly they have come so late in the year that I doubt whether they will ripen enough to be able to store for use later in the winter. But nothing goes to waste, if they aren't quite ripe enough for us, I can cut them and give them straight to the chickens, who will happily tuck into them.

So, buoyed by this year's encouraging experience I've decided to grow more (and different) squashes next year. I will start preparing the ground this autumn by making hugelkultur beds. I will pile up logs of wood, small branches, well rotted manure, leaves, garden compost and composted wood chippings and I will cover them with a thick mulch of straw from the duck houses to protect them from leeching too many nutrients in the winter rain.

I've been sorting through the seeds that I have in my seed box and already have several packets of squash seeds that I can use next year and I think the only seeds I'll need to acquire are of some type of spaghetti squash. As my daughter has offered to give me some seeds for Christmas, I will ask her for some spaghetti squash seeds. 

These are the pumpkins, courgettes and squashes that I plan to grow next year.

Image & info at Premier Seeds Direct

Squash delicata (winter squash). 
I really like the look and description of these heirloom squashes. They are sweet like a butternut squash but the skin can also be eaten. I've found some lovely recipes using this squash including a maple glazed one which I will definitely be trying.

Image & info at Premier Seeds Direct

Jumbo pink banana squash
Another heirloom squash that has good keeping properties and as it names suggests, it's a biggie! This recipe from Firesign Farm blog is for a squash pie looks very simple to make, I would probably only use cinnamon and nutmeg as my spices as those are our favourites.

Pumpkin Howden
This is the pumpkin that I've grown this year and I've been very pleased with it. I will grow less of them next year as I don't think we need quite so many.

Image and info at Premier Seeds Direct

Butternut Waltham
This is the butternut squash that we've grown this year and as I still have seeds, I will give it another go next year. We both like butternut squash soup and I like them baked in the oven with goat's cheese and pumpkin seeds.

Image and info Premier Seeds Direct

Courgette Verde de Milano
A deep green courgette which I hope to pick when they are still quite young as I prefer baby courgettes roasted in the oven with a host of over vegetables, garlic, salt and pepper and fresh rosemary.

Image and info Mr Fothergills

Yellow courgette
I currently have seeds for courgette Soleil F1, which look fabulous, but if I can find an organic seed that looks as appealing I will swap these seeds for organic ones. I much prefer yellow courgettes to green ones as they are sweeter, with less course skin and make extremely nice cakes!

Courgette, lemon and poppyseed cake from Riverford Organic Farmers

Oven baked summer squash Sunburst stuffed with Bolognaise sauce

Summer squash Delikates and Summer squash Sunburst
I've grown both of these this year and have been enjoying them baked, friend in ghee, stuffed, shredded and have frozen quite a few of them, sliced and ready to use in meals during the winter. The photo at the top of my blog shows these squashes (and the cabbage) used in this meal. The yellow ones look like sunny pork pies and just ask to be hollowed out and filled.

There are so many other squashes that I'd like to try to grow, but I think it would be better to try a few at a time and discover which ones we most like to eat.

Wherever possible I am using heirloom varieties and organic seeds. By avoiding F1 varieties, I should be able to save some seeds from each plant for use the next year. Our aim is to reduce our living costs and saved seeds will do their part to lower our costs. There is, I guess, a risk that plants will cross pollinate and that we'll end up with some peculiar squashes, but I don't mind, that's all part of the fun of growing our vegetables!

Wading through jelly

 On Sunday we spent a few hours with my sister and brother in law. We live only twenty minutes' drive away from her home which means that we can see other much more often than we used to. If my sister wasn't related to me, I'd choose her as a friend as we get on so well, share the same sense of silliness and have a similar outlook on life.

I took a box of fresh vegetables from the garden, a few frozen runner beans (because they are amongst her favourite vegetables), some duck eggs, hen eggs, a jar of blackberry and apple jam, a jar of apple sauce and one of the smaller pumpkins that are still ripening.

After we'd caught up with each other's latest news, we gathered some rose hips from a rose that had originally been a hybrid tea type, but over the years suckers had grown up from the root stock and now it is a wild rose with no sign of the grafted rose bush. I'm going to use these to make some rose hip syrup and add a few to some hedgerow wine. While we were picking fruits we found a few elderberries, which I will add to the berries in the freezer ready to make into some wine.

We also came home with some wooden battens (that had been on their roof, but have since been replaced), some other wood off-cuts that may have ended up rotting in a corner of their field, wire mesh, a bale of bedding for the ducks.

I felt that we had a much better deal from our swap until I remembered that, except for the bale of bedding, we had taken away items that they considered to be rubbish and would need taking to the local tip eventually, so we have saved them the trip. 

The wood battens and off-cuts will get stored away until we are ready to use them, but to have some spare bits of wood around is very useful for those days that I say 'can we just...?'.

By late afternoon I had started to feel a bit wobbly and irritatingly I have now spent two days on the sofa feeling somewhat worse for wear. I have booked an appointment with my GP to have my blood tests done again to check the level of hormones for my thyroid, unfortunately the first set of appointments that I can have aren't for another two weeks. My hope is that I will be feeling better long before then and the appointments will just be a routine check-up.

Being knocked sideways gives me little to write about in terms of activity on the smallholding as I haven't been up to walking outside, which means that nothing has progressed in the garden or in the kitchen. I've put all the picked fruits straight into the freezer and will deal with them at a later date when every step feels less like I am wading through jelly.

Mr J has been looking after the birds and of course, this is the week that the smallest chickens have worked out how to break out of their field and head straight for the 'all you can eat buffet' that is the vegetable garden. We have foiled their fun by confining them to their house and large run until we have completed putting up more chicken wire netting to prevent the small birds slipping through the flexible netting that surrounds the chickens' fields. Hopefully Mr J will feel up to doing this when he returns from work today.

I did manage to get outside for a short time this morning, but it didn't last long before I needed to come back in and lie down again. However, I got to enjoy the late summer sunrise for a few minutes. I wish my camera could pick up the intense orangey-red of the sun, but suffice to say that the sun and the pumpkins looked beautiful together.

End of summer planning

 As I type it's very warm, we've had a couple of days of summer in mid September and it's due to continue for a few more days, but without a doubt the summer is coming to an end and the activity in the garden reflects this.

I've harvested the borlotti beans, popped them all out of their colourful pods and left them to dry on the kitchen windowsill. They will be a useful addition to soups and stews in the winter. I won't be able to use them as seeds for next year as they are F1 hybrids, so I will need to buy fresh seed. Now I know that we like these pink marbled beans I will source some organic seeds that are not F1s so that we can save the seeds year after year.

The freezer is being filled up with vegetables and fruit from the garden, our neighbours' fruit trees (windfall apples) and from the hedgerow. There are pounds of runner beans, broad beans, mangetout, patty pan squash, rainbow chard, apples, blackberries, white currants, elderberries and chopped herbs. There's a paper sack for potatoes that is being filled a little more each day as I lift the tubers. And the larder cupboard is being filled with jars of jam and sauces and bottles of wine.

 The pumpkins are turning bright orange and look like they will be ready for us to give one to my grandsons and another to a friend's children for Halloween and we will be able to have pumpkin soup, roasted & mashed pumpkin and sweet pumpkin pie. Root vegetables will stay in place as long as possible and leeks will be lifted as we need them.

Most of the brassicas should be fine until we need them. 

Some of the first January King cabbages look ready to cut.

 And the red cabbage won't be too far behind. Many of the leafy vegetables will stay in the ground throughout the winter and be harvested on a 'cut and come again' basis. There are also crops that I've grown specifically to give to the chickens to supplement their pelleted food in the cooler months.

My daughter gave me some seeds last Christmas and has offered to do the same again this year, but she has asked me to select what I would like to grow. This means that I need to start thinking about next year's vegetable garden before too long. I had a plan for what I was going to grow this year (it can be seen here) and inevitably, it didn't quite work out that way. 

What we actually achieved looked like this.
The 'empty' sections are places were we haven't created the raised beds yet. Given that this was our first year here and that we were unable to rotavate the ground as we had anticipated, I am very pleased with how much we have achieved, especially as now I've realised that churning up the ground would have been a bad decision. I've learnt a great deal about the garden, the way the wind blows throughout the year, the sunniest spots, the driest places and the subtle slope of the site. 

The appalling soil that we started with is already improving having added tons of compost made in our compost bins and bays, wood chippings, well rotted horse manure and top soil. The health of the soil life is improving too, it now has masses of worms, bugs of various kinds, fungi and bacteria. 

The chickens have played their part in improving the soil by scratching at the surface of the ground and fertilising it as they go. Their used bedding materials have gone into the compost heaps and into the circles of love, which in turn have gone into the ground. Even the young chicks have been working hard in the garden. 

These seven week olds are now free ranging daily and go to their own house at night. Next week I will put them into the chicken shed with the other hybrid birds. Two of these four are female and will remain with the flock as they mature to become part of our egg laying flock, the two males will be dispatched before they reach maturity as for the next two years we don't need more cockerels in Big Red's flock.

The seven week old Austrlorps are huge in comparison to the hybrids, they now live in an enclosure and house of their own and before too long I will add the older Austrlorp into this group. Our plans for the chickens next year is to have four areas in the field, each one having a separate flock of birds. One each for the Cream Legbars, Australorps, Jersey Giants and the hybrids. By keeping them separately we will be able to offer hatching eggs for sale and also young birds for those who can travel to collect them from us. We have been careful to ensure that we have birds in each flock from different bloodlines to keep the offspring strong and healthy.

We've decided that next year we will aim to have a larger hatch of ducks earlier in the year rather than several smaller hatchings. This way we won't need to have lots of small poultry houses to keep ducks of different ages in, but can use one or two larger houses for a shorter period. If I have to clean out smelly duck houses I would rather do it for more birds for a shorter length of time than a constant need to clean throughout the spring and summer that would happen from multiple hatchings. 

So our planning for next year is beginning to take shape, little by little. Next step is to have a good look through the seeds that I have left over from this year, decide which crops I want to grow again and order any seeds that have run out and any new varieties that we want to try. I am going to start this process today, but first, of course, it's time for a cuppa!

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A sociable weekend

On Friday morning my daughter came to visit. It's been several weeks since we had a chance to just hang out together, doing nothing in particular, but sharing our time and chatting all things family related.

She was enchanted by the five littlest ducklings, although not as much as I am besotted with my grandson number two, who at ten months old has developed a lovely personality and is now getting speedily mobile.

She went home with a food box filled with vegetables from the garden, chutney and sauces that I've been making and an organic butternut squash that came from a local shop. She hadn't cooked a whole butternut squash before so I gave her a recipe suggestion and a few hours later she sent me photo of the roasted squash filled with goat's cheese and pumpkins seeds, which she said was delicious.

In the afternoon I continued to plant out the perennials and shrubs given to us by Jane and to transplant young plants that I have raised from seed. I started to think about which plants to take cuttings from so that they have time to form root systems before winter stops their growth. It's such an easy way to propagate plants and every year I forget to spend the short amount of time it takes to take the cuttings. This year I will get around to doing it before it's too late.

Saturday morning was spent in the kitchen, my neighbours have kindly invited me to collect as many windfall apples as I'd like and I've taken them up on the offer and have been collecting a bucketful a day. So, I made apple sauce (to accompany pork) and froze apples to make crumbles from in the depths of winter. The kitchen smelled delicious.

I have had some poor nights of sleep this week and have become very tired, so Saturday evening by the time we had got the birds safely tucked away in their houses, I was ready to sit quietly for an hour before I went to bed.

On Sunday we were up and about bright and early and after doing the morning chores, I baked a lemon and poppy seed cake. We were going out for the day and I was very excited to be heading off to Carmarthenshire. Ten minutes before we were due to leave the Dirty Dozen made a bid for freedom and more than half of them escaped from their run. Mr J phoned me from the chicken field to request my help in rounding them up. Over excited chicks who are hell-bent on being outside their run are not the easiest to herd back into their confines, but with a bit of extra coaxing and a lot of bribery with armfuls of green leaves from the vegetable garden, we got them safely back into their run.

We hadn't got very far in the car before I fell asleep (which is why I am not driving at the moment - falling asleep at the wheel really wouldn't be too clever) and I woke up just as got the to sign that read 'Welcome to Carmarthenshire'.

We were headed to the smallholding of Annette and her partner. I 'met' Annette via Twitter and a few weeks ago she invited us (and several other smallholders who tweet) to visit their home for a barbecue. And what a lovely smallholding they have! 32 acres of Welsh hillside and a pretty house nestled into it with beautiful views across the valley.

The barbecues were lit and heated up while we all took a tour of the smallholding. Their flock of sheep in one field were lovely as was the dog Edwin who was very well behaved. They have eight chickens and a number of ducks free-ranging around the back garden. 

 We ate a feast of food (everyone brought something to share) including burgers, lamb chops, roast pork, rabbit, vegetable kebabs, salads followed by cake, brownies, Eton mess and New York cheesecake. It occurred to me that any gathering of smallholders was bound to have fabulous food and Mr J ate so well at lunchtime that he only had a few biscuits with cheese for supper.

Mid-afternoon we said goodbye to the new friends we'd made with promises of having another get together before too long. I was more than happy to offer to host the next one here on our small patch.

After a much wanted cup of tea, I headed out into the garden and pottered for a while, planting some herbs and moving some more of the huge pile of wood chippings from the front garden into the area that will be the food forest.

Once the birds were all in bed, we curled up on the sofa and switched off our brains for a while by watching television.

It has been a lovely weekend and I'm looking forward to getting to know the other smallholders better as time goes on. Today we are starting to make an improved run arrangement for the Dirty Dozen, but before we begin it must be time for a cuppa.


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Lemon Drizzle Cake (improved)

Having practiced this Lemon Drizzle Cake many times, I have adjusted and improved my old recipe.

Lemon Drizzle Cake (improved)

Ingredients

4oz lightly salted Butter

2oz unrefined Caster Sugar
2 Eggs
Finely grated zest and juice of unwaxed Lemon
1 tspn Vanilla Extract
4oz Besan Flour (or chick pea flour)
2oz finely ground Cornmeal
1 level tspn gluten free Baking Powder
1/2 tspn Xanthan Gum
pinch Sea Salt crushed

For drizzling

2oz Icing Sugar

Finely grated zest and juice of unwaxed Lemon

6 fl oz hot Water

Method

Preheat oven to 375F, 190C, 170 fan, gas mark 5.
Grease and line or flour a 9 inch round tin or flan dish.

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs and vanilla extract and mix well. Stir in grated zest and juice of one lemon.

Sir in cornmeal, besan flour, baking powder, xanthan gum and salt and mix well
Pour into prepared tin or dish.
Bake in the centre of the oven for approximately 25 minutes. Check that it is fully cooked using a skewer (if it comes out clean, the cake is ready).
Prick the top liberally with a cocktail stick or fork.
Prepare drizzling liquid by combining the icing sugar, zest and juice of lemon and hot water.
Drizzle the liquid over the cake while it is still hot (it should absorb most of the drizzle very quickly).
Leave to cool.
Turn cake onto a serving plate or serve from the flan dish.

Variations

If I don't have fresh lemons I substitute the lemons with Sicilian Lemon Extract or bottled lemon juice.

This cake also works well with 2 large tablespoons of lemon curd stirred into the cake mixture just before putting into the flan dish or tin.

You can use limes or oranges rather than lemons.

Served hot it makes a great sponge pudding.

o-o-o

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Moving the ducklings

 

This week I am being the guest tweeter on SmallholdersUK account on Twitter. Each week a different smallholder is featured, celebrating the diversity of smallholders' lives and this week I am taking a turn at sharing my plastic beads of experience (it feels like I haven't advanced to pearls of wisdom yet). I didn't have a grand plan of what I was going to write about, but I did make some notes of subjects I knew I wanted to include.

I am surprised at how much additional energy I have used up in tweeting throughout the day, how tired I am in the evening and how quickly I'm getting off to sleep. Sadly though, I am still waking up at silly o'clock in the morning and lying in bed wondering if it's too early to get up. This morning that process of waking, staring at the ceiling, getting over hot, then too cold, dropping back to sleep and waking up again started at 1.25 am. So by 5 am I gave up and made my way downstairs and, as I often do when it's too early to start rumbling around outside, I put the television on.

I spend quite a lot of time reading and researching. YouTube has become my go-to learning resource as I can find so many really helpful vlogs and films. Obviously I don't take the word of just one person who's posted a film on the internet, I make sure that I watch several (or lots) of films about any particular subject. The more that one certain topic is covered in the same way, the more I can trust it to be likely to be true. But in the end, there's nothing quite like first hand experience. 

The experience has once again been of making compost, raised beds, preserving food for the late autumn and winter and putting in a new fence.

On Monday Mr J banged some fence posts into the ground in the duck enclosure so that we could start to section off part of it for the ducklings to use. The posts were recycled ones from my sister's home. She had replaced her fencing and these posts were of no use to her any more. My brother in law had kindly cut points on the bottom of each post to make getting them into the ground more easily.

I then stapled chicken wire to the posts and used heavy duty ground staples to secure it along the base.

 We hung a gate that I had found lying around on the other side of the of paddock (there have been some very useful bits and pieces that I've found that were left by the previous owners).

 We moved the two ducklings from their outside nursery pen into the new enclosure and watched as they revelled in the additional space that they suddenly had. Frederick was less than impressed at having two new neighbours, but over the last couple of days he has calmed down and now seems more miffed than cross.

The vegetable garden is filling out even more as the squashes make a last ditch attempt to produce their fruit before the days get cold. The purple sprouting broccoli(on the left) is an early variety, I hope that it will withstand the howling autumn and winter winds and flower early next year.

 Mr J and I created the next raised bed late on Tuesday afternoon when the strongest heat of the day had passed. I had put down a layer of cardboard in the morning and we covered it in topsoil and then in composted wood chippings. 

I will plant this up today with some purple curly kale seedlings and rainbow chard seeds (because the chickens like the leaves and we like the stems).

I was delighted to find that the compost pile made in early July is now a deep brown colour and although it's still quite soggy and I think I may move it to around the base of some fruit trees and cover it in composted wood chippings to help feed the fruit trees which have been working so hard to produce lots of apples. I've made another compost heap using chicken manure and wood shavings given to us by our neighbours, grass clippings, kitchen waste (uncooked fruit and vegetable waste), spent brewery grain and straw. I also turned the drier materials from the previous compost heap into the new one. The last heap is starting to rot down, I can still see the individual components but the centre is going brown and I will top the new heap with the partly decomposed material to add microbes to it.

I've made several trips into the field that borders our smallholding to pick blackberries. I've been careful to walk on the scrubby edges of the field to avoid damaging the clover crop that the farmer has growing there. The field is buzzing with the sound of our neighbours' bees, so hopefully there will be some delicious clover honey available later in the year.

  I have also been gathering windfall apples from my neighbours' garden. They have invited me to collect as many as I like as they feel overrun with cooking apples. Their cider apples are also ripe and they will be pressing them in the next week or so. I like it that the neighbours have a surplus to different crops to us and that they make different products to us. We are starting to swap surpluses and produce which gives both of us a wider choice of food.

I have now ordered some bare-rooted fruit trees and more hedging trees to complete the hedge planting from The Woodland Trust, who have a Welsh Farm Tree Pack scheme, which enables those who farm in Wales to buy trees to create more woodland at a reduced price. They also offer help to other parts of the UK. You can find out more information here. 

It's time to put the kettle on.

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Beetroot & Apple Relish

I made some relish today, so thought I'd share the recipe.

Beetroot and Apple Relish

Ingredients (all measurements are approximate)

1lb raw beetroot, peeled

1lb cooking apples (I used windfalls)

10 medium small green tomatoes

1 large onion

large handful of flat leaf parsley

3oz sultanas

1lb unrefined granulated sugar

9 fl oz balsamic vinegar

cold water

1/2 inch cube fresh ginger

1tspn sea salt

1 tspn coarse ground black pepper

optional -

2 tblspn cooking brandy

2 tblspn ground cinnamon

Method

Wash the apples, core and chop into pieces approx. 1/2 inch in size. 

Chop peeled beetroot to similar size as apples.

Finely chop onion.

Roughly chop parsley.

Put all chopped ingredients and the sultanas into a heavy based deep pan and add enough cold water to cover the base of the pan and not quite cover all the ingredients.

Add the salt, pepper, very finely grated ginger

Bring to the boil stirring regularly with a wooden spoon and then add the sugar.

Once the sugar is dissolved add the vinegar.

I also added the cooking brandy and cinnamon, but it would be fine without them.

 Boil (but not too fiercely) until the beetroot and apples are soft and most of the liquid has evaporated, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. 
Be careful when you stir the mixture as it may splash.
Once cooled serve as an accompaniment to cheese or cold meats.
Can be stored in the fridge for about a week or up to 6 months in the freezer.


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