Harvesting parsnips

RB and I harvested the first dozen of our parsnips last weekend. A few frosts are purported to improve the flavour of parsnips, so with a couple of cold spells behind us we decided to start harvesting.

These parsnips took a bit more work to get out of the ground than carrots. We had to carefully dig away the dirt from the top third of each parsnip, enough to hold it and twist it out of its place. It is worth being careful as the parsnips can snap in place if tugged or bent in haste.

Roast parsnips are a favourite, but our first batch went into a spicy soup for 10 people. We used Jamie Oliver’s recipe which incorporates Garam Masala, and it was a resounding hit. As the soup is fairly dense it also looks great with a little olive oil and fresh coriander decoration on top.

Parsnips can be left in the ground until January, a great way to save room in the refrigerator and provide fresh home grown vegetables for the holidays.

This has to be one of the biggest winners of our vegetable garden this year – easy to sow, relatively low maintenance, and big reward when most of our kitchen garden has already stopped producing.

Autumn flower arrangement: gourds

There is something buried in our psyche that attracts us to anything in miniature, and the same goes for baby gourds. Not only are they ‘cute’, but they are infinitely interesting and exotic. RB and I were at a garden centre yesterday and found these little ornamental gourds (with the exception of the baby butternut, which was a runt from our own plot).

They are a little on the pricey side, but with how long they will last they provide some visual value for money, not to mention a talking point – from a mini turk’s turban to the strange sputnik looking one. And whilst they are not strictly flowers they do make an excellent and colourful arrangement that will last during the busy holiday season.

I have piled a few into the pot with a Cambria orchid.

You can grown these gourds yourself and I may give it a go next year. Seeds of some interesting varieties are carried at Unwins and Nicky’s Nursury.

Butternut squash tortellini

A few weeks ago RB and I harvested our butternut squash and have been very pleased with the taste. Having recently been to a cooking class I decided I had better put some of my new skills to use and make Ravioli – only a last minute decision turned them into tortellini.

Ravioli/tortellini do take time, but they aren’t as difficult as they may seem. You don’t need a pasta machine, although one helps – I made do with a rolling pin and good old-fashioned effort.

Find a pasta dough recipe using ‘00′ flour.

Create your filling. Mine is on the right, made of butternut squash, garlic, salt and sage. On the left I mixed together the last of our home-grown vegetables as an accompaniment which I threw into the oven with olive oil and sea salt.

I used a cookie cutter to cut the shapes and dotted them with filling. Make sure the surface is well floured to avoid sticking, and that your dough is SUPER thin. You should be able to read through it.

Use a paint brush (or your fingers, as I did) to paint water on the edges before closing into the shape of your choice.

Serve with sage gently cooked in butter. Et voilà!

Harvesting butternut squash

We harvested 4 butternut squashes last week. The foliage had started to die back and the squashes sounded ‘hollow’ when knocked. Tonight we made homemade butternut squash tortellinis which were lovely. It is great to finally have a use for all the sage we have planted.

I have heard some seasoned allotmenteers saying that butternut squash is not worth the space as you get so little volume or added flavour for how much ground you sacrifice. But I have to disagree. The taste was magnificent.

Harvesting sweet corn

Sweet corn brings back California for me, with barbecues and Mexican food being two of my favourite culinary categories. I really wasn’t confident about the prospect of getting cobs in Southeast England, but it has been with great pleasure that we have harvested 7 this weekend.

You know to start thinking about harvesting sweet corn when the silks (the hairy tassels at the top of the cob) start to brown. Sweet corn should be picked in the ‘milk stage’, when a milky liquid is drawn from pressing a fingernail into a kernel. If the liquid is watery, it’s too early, and if doughy, it’s too late. Be sure to pull the husk down sufficiently when testing, as the tips of the cob are most immature and can deceive you into thinking they’re not ready.

There’s not much magic to harvesting sweet corn: just hold the stalk with one hand, hold the ear at the base with the other. Twist the ear firmly downward, like turning a door handle. Sweet corn starts to lose its sweetness as soon as it’s picked so it’s best to harvest when you know you can eat it, otherwise refrigerate.

For lunch we rustled up a simple dish using corn, onions and green bell peppers from our garden with a bit of Spanish chorizo. We sweated the onions and then fried up the rest of the ingredients – it was wonderful!

Mountain out of a mole hill

Drat. We have worked hard on getting our lawn looking good. We have delighted at the vast population of earthworms we benefit from. Nice lawn + earthworms = heaven for moles. Our neighbour says a shotgun is the only way, I think we’re happier using the phone book and calling someone in.

Success with celery

When I was researching what to grow this year, I invariably came across celery being described as everything from difficult to grow to the devil’s food. That was enough to make me want to do give it a go.

We decided on ‘Full White’ self-blanching celery from the Real Seed Company. We planted them in seed trays, transferring them individually to 10cm pots until the roots were well established and peeping out the bottom and then finally planting them out in their raised bed – the photograph above is shortly after planting them out into a block of 30 plants.

The two biggest threats to celery are lack of water and slugs. We kept them fairly well-watered and benefited from regular rainfall, but planting them in a block seems to be the best help as the leaves shade the earth and minimise weeds. And as for slugs – we just ignored them. Yep, they were there, but their actual damage was minimal.

Celery is key to a good vegetable stock, another benefit to our kitchen garden – no need to use those artificial stock cubes. We have also added it to salads and as part of bean stews. The flavour out of the ground is really spicy.

One thing is for sure though: two people don’t need 30 heads of celery! In fact, RB keeps harvesting them and we end up composting 90% of each head as it remains unused, even though in a little water they last a week.

Now that we have conquered growing celery, we may have a debate on our hands about how much we grow again next year, if any.

Cooking with our first tomatoes

We have finally harvested the first of our tomatoes, the Rose de Berne and Millefleur varieties. The Millefleur should really go red, but as they were so soft and juicy we couldn’t resist picking them yellow.

We were in a bit of a hurry for supper, so we diced up the tomatoes with garlic and basil and then combined the mixture with some gently cooked through courgettes and onions from our garden.

We then poured this over our favourite pasta, De Cecco fusilli, with cubes of fresh buffalo mozzarella.

It was delicious!

Two new modern pots

RB and I were delighted to finally find two pots we love for which we have had our eyes peeled for months. The first is for three giant phalaenopsis orchids, and the second is for the Acer palmatum ‘beni kawa’ we received as a house-warming gift (thanks mom and Richard!). The pots were found at the amazing Absolute Flowers in Maida Vale, and at £60/£100 were relatively reasonable compared to their other gorgeous but pricey merchandise.

Elephant garlic

RB’s sister Julia, a seasoned allotmenteer, gave us two cloves of elephant garlic for Christmas as she knew we were preparing our first vegetable garden. We had to get them into the ground in winter, so when we got around to it we hadn’t planned for the raised beds yet, let alone worked on the clay soil properly.

So it was a bit of pot luck, and although they have been harvested small, we are quite pleased they look like garlic and not a host for rot. Julia suggested harvesting when the plant flowers, which is what we’ve done. The photo above shows the one flower, which reached 6 ft high.

If we grow elephant garlic again I would certainly work the soil so that it is less dense in order to allow the garlic to grow large. I would also leave them in the ground longer, perhaps until the flower fully blooms, maybe even until half the leaves have yellowed like with normal garlic.

We have put the garlic in the late afternoon sun to start the drying out process, which we will continue in a cool dry place for a few weeks.

I can’t say we’ve grown prize elephant garlic, but the unopened bloom adds a great modern twist to this flower arrangement given to us last night.