Easy quince cheese recipe (membrillo)
I’m back at the helm and it’s marvellous to be feeling well and chirpy and slimmer. Forget Champneys. A week in bed with a bug does wonders for the figure. Danny put on his sensible parent hat this morning. He instructed me not to go to work, reasoning that more recuperation was required. He was right. I did feel weak. This afternoon, he relented slightly. “Why not go out foraging for an hour. You could do with some fresh air.” He passed me the foraging stick, tossed me his car keys and disappeared upstairs. I found...
read moreForaging for hedgerow fruit. How to identify wild (cherry) plums, bullaces and wild damsons
Finally I got fed up with the bully at work. I threw down my brush, jumped into Jalopy and we rumbled towards my old hedgerow fruit hunting grounds. I was out for lunch half an hour early but what the heck. I can make up the time at the end of the day when the bully has gone home. I had a suspicion that things were not right hedgerow-wise. I pulled up beside my main hunting ground, grabbed an old carrier bag and discovered that the trees were bare. Industrial hedge trimmers had hacked the branches. I gazed dismayed at yards of naked bare...
read moreTomato harvest
I have been bewailing my fate on the comments section of our first tomato blight post . I can’t find organic remedies for tomato blight or sterilising the greenhouse (soil and general environment) or the soil in the kitchen garden. If we have a cold winter with a decent length of hard frosts, the soil in the kitchen garden should be OK as the spores are killed by prolonged frosty weather (But how long is prolonged?). Then peter m gave us the link to a great site with organic treatments for vegetables. I can’t wait to try them on...
read moreTomato Blight
We have blight. When we were rushing out yesterday evening I spotted it on three tomato plants. Large blackish brownish splodges and a generally wilty look. It is unmistakeable. We had it five years ago and it devastated our tomato crop within days. At the time we were creating a website for an expert on plant diseases. The fee was to be paid in whisky. Danny must have negotiated this deal. The expert arrived with a rather good bottle of Isla whisky under his arm. He was immediately shepherded out to examine the tomatoes. “Its blight....
read moreTip top care for tomatoes
“You’ve spent hours on the Internet. What exactly are you looking for?” “I’m trying to decide what disease our tomatoes are suffering from. If I can identify it then we can treat it.” “Why? The great thing about our vegetables is that they are not treated with chemicals.” Having lost fifteen tomato plants to an unfathomable disease (blight?), I just wanted to find out what had gone wrong. I discovered that there were so many tomato plant ailments that my head whirled and I gave up in the end. I...
read morePlums in our garden
We have our own plum tree in the front garden, self seeded from a plum stone. This is its second year of fruiting and the harvest is still quite poor. Danny spotted that the plum trees in a couple of adjoining gardens were laden with plums and had branches overhanging our plot. He came into the kitchen, eating one and suggested that we pick them for plum chutney.Poor D suffers from acid tummy and malt vinegar is not good for this condition but he can eat our homemade pickles and chutney as we use cider or wine vinegar and this seems to be...
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