Celebrating seasonal, homegrown, and wild food
It's been a year of firsts for our allotment as we approach the end of our first full growing season. We've grown so many things for the first time this year including sweetcorn, potatoes, cucumbers, onions, radishes and a variety of different beans. Florence fennel is a wonderful vegetable and one that I didn't have [...]
Green tomatoes at this time of year are unlikely to have enough daylight hours to ripen, but that isn't a reason to despair! Green tomatoes are entirely edible and I really enjoy their fresh crunchiness. Every year I make a green tomato chutney using the tomatoes that are left on the plants too late into [...]
Whenever I see a bed of tumbling nasturtiums it always makes me think of the beautiful hobbit gardens in the Lord of the Rings films - is that just me? There are countless varieties of nasturtium from deep reds, through tangerine oranges, to soft yellows. At some point I want to grow all of them! [...]
A recipe with melon at its centre might seem odd for me to post on a blog all about seasonal, local food, but it is actually possible to grow melons in the UK. I know, it was a surprise to me too and I have to admit it isn't something I have personally tried yet, [...]
Today is the last day of my Instagram virtual holiday with a French theme, and is there anything more quintessentially French than the madeleine? These tiny, shell-shaped cakes with their plump little bellies are the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee or tea. The inspiration for this recipe was the combination of blackberry and [...]
This week on Instagram I'm doing a virtual holiday where each day I'm sharing a memory of the time I've been lucky enough to spend in the Loire region of France over the years accompanied by a suggestion or prompt that people can use to join in. I’ve been thinking recently about how the current [...]
The courgette glut has been coming thick and fast for the past few weeks and we've been harvesting more than we really know what to do with from our four courgette plants. They've been huge too - more like marrows. Courgettes are one of our allotment staples as they don't require too much intervention to [...]
Growing our own potatoes has been another first for us this year. We started early in the season "chitting" our seed potatoes on windowsills in our flat until they were growing little knobbly bits and ready to plant out at the first opportunity. We waited with bated breath as I worried that perhaps I'd jumped [...]
Rosebay willowherb is a perennial native to the UK that flourishes in disturbed soils. It has become widespread perhaps owing to the two World Wars as large areas of land were damaged or burned (which explains one of it's common names "Bombweed"), allowing it to colonise much larger areas than it had previously. Its grand [...]
The weather in the UK this last few weeks has been typically British: unpredictable and wet. The recent rain has at least meant that we haven't had to do as much watering of our allotment (although we still have to water in the polytunnel), but the flip-flopping between hot, dry spells, and muggy, wet weather [...]
