Beetroot, beans, more beans, curry & stuff

Hello Friends,

This week, I have mostly been Doing Things With Beetroot. And when I haven't been doing that, I've been Doing Stuff with Beans. Shortly, just for variety, I will be Doing Stuff With Tomatoes. And peppers. And pears. It's just that time of year when all our veggie gardening efforts are repaid with baskets full of good things.

Here at the People & Cats Republic, we have a Love-Hate relationship with beetroot. I love it, the Big Hairy One can't stand it....which is fine, as it means there's all the more for me! For some reason that has so far eluded me, I am unable to grow beets much bigger than golf-ball size, but the flavour is always good. This year, I pickled some of my crop & ate the rest. I'd like to say I did something cheffy with them - a bit of a 'jus' with crumbled feta & watercress, served on a shard of slate, that kind of thing. The truth is, I was stuffing them into my face as quickly as I was peeling them. I know.......classy!

I always think it's a shame not to use the leaves, so I weighed out the best of these for a curry. I remember reading Madhur Jaffrey on the subject of curry leaves. Apparently, in India, people are much more creative in their choice of greens for 'saag' type of curries, using things like turnip tops, radish leaves, etc, whereas here, we would tend to go out & buy a bag of baby spinach.

We operate a zero food waste policy here, so these leafy beauties went into a batch of Spinach & chickpea curry. I can't take the credit for this recipe. It's from a book by Mridular Baljekar which I borrowed from the library many years ago, & would dearly love to buy, but it is no longer in print.

Spinach & chickpeas in chilli & garlic sauce

1 large onion, roughly chopped

2.5 cm piece of root ginger, peeled & roughly chopped

1 long green chilli, roughly chopped (I take the seeds out first)

3 tbsp olive or sunflower oil (I use 1 or 2 only)

1 tsp fennel seeds

8 cloves garlic, crushed

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

0.5 tsp turmeric

1 tsp chilli powder

1 tbsp tomato puree

400g can chickpeas, rinsed & drained

140ml warm water

225g finely chopped spinach (or substitute beet tops)

1 tsp salt

125g canned chopped tomatoes (inc juice)

0.5 tsp garam masala

Blitz the onion, ginger & chilli with a hand blender to make a puree. Heat the oil & sizzle the fennel seeds & garlic for 30 secs.  Add the cumin & coriander & pour in the pureed paste. Stir-fry for 5 mins. Add the turmeric, chilli powder, tomato puree & stir-fry for another 1 min. Add the drained chickpeas & the 140ml warm water. Bring it to the boil, cover & simmer for 10 mins. Add the finely chopped spinach & salt, increase the heat a little & stir-fry for 1 min until the spinach has wilted down & released its juices. Add the tomatoes & stir-fry for 7 mins. Add garam masala & stir-fry for 1 min. 

There you go, it's ready. Serve it with rice or any bread. It's filling & like all Mridula's recipes I've tried, tasty & inexpensive.

If you have LOTS of beet tops & TWO tins of chickpeas in your pantry, then it's worth doubling up, as this curry freezes really well. 

So that took care of this year's beets, both the roots & leaves. As for those sneaky plants which looked as though they were growing but cheated me by not producing a root, I'm not letting them win! Oh no.

 

Those have been left in the ground, & will be used to supply baby leaves for salads into the autumn months.

I can't pretend that veggie growing isn't hard work at times, but it's good for health & fitness & provides cheap food grown with zero chemicals. I might not be feeling quite so positive later this afternoon which I am likely to spend up to my armpits in runner beans & tomatoes!

Am heartily thankful for the sunny dry weather today, as Albert Whiskers has spent most of the bank holiday weekend on Wet Playtime. Of all the cats we've owned, Albert Whiskers takes the prize as 'Cat least happy about getting wet'. As he did sometimes have to go out for Essential Functions, bedroom doors were left firmly closed to prevent drying of paws on clean duvets. As Albert Whiskers had clearly hoped to spend the weekend like this.............

 

............he wasn't too impressed!

Hope there's someone somewhere out there who didn't have a soggy bank holiday. Off to slice my body-weight in beans now,

Till next time,

C x

Summer's end

Hello Friends,
Hope you are all enjoying the summer. It won't be with us much longer. Our swifts have departed this week for African climes & as soon as I stepped outside this morning, I noticed that first hint of autumn lurking at the edges of the day, waiting to move in.
The garden here at 'The People & Cats Republic' is still quite colourful, but with those hot 'end of summer' shades:

Rudbeckia 'Chocolate Orange'

A very bog-standard crocosmia, but pretty nevertheless

Ligularia - but not the more usual one with spikes of flowers

Plenty of weeds too.........

This year's sunflowers - can't remember variety, but it had 'moon' in the name.

Mesembryanthemums still flowering - these remind me of the 1976 drought as they were about the only green thing left in our garden by the time the rains finally arrived!

Not sure what this is - it's always called 'Tall yellow daisy thing' in our house.

The 'Hagstones' frog community still enjoying warm pondy loveliness.........

..........and a certain white & tabby-furred gentleman is still spending a large proportion of his days like this!

 

So, summer is reaching its end, but there is still loads to do in the veggie garden. We're right in the middle of harvesting time now. We've had all the alliums (apart from spring onions), potatoes, & broad beans. We're currently cropping courgettes, tomatoes, chillies, the last of the summer lettuces, watercress & aubergines and the runner beans, peppers & beetroot won't be long. I've also sown some seeds for later crops - more lettuces, radishes, french beans, baby turnips & spinach, so still plenty of watering, weeding & hoeing to do for a good while yet. This afternoon, I'm planning to make my first chutney of the season - a Smoky Tomato Chutney, but more of my jammin' another time.

For fans of Albert Whiskers - A neighbour on the opposite side of the street has workmen ripping up her hall floor today. I happened to look out of the window & spotted Albert Whiskers (who isn't very good at camouflage except potentially on snowy days) sitting in the middle of all the power tools, boxes, planks & equipment, having clearly gone over to offer Cat Help. I hope he didn't make too much of a nuisance of himself. I know from experience that there is nothing in the world LESS helpful than Cat Help. Can only assume he was checking whether there was any ham stored under the floorboards which needed removing. There obviously wasn't, as he eventually came home & started meowing for......stewed greengages! I give up!

We're over the hump day now, so nearly the weekend. Have a good one, all.
C x

Tadpole armageddon

Hi Friends,
Yes, time to pick your brains about this year's Tadpole Armageddon......or should that be Tadpole Marie-Celeste? 
We created our wildlife pond a few years ago, while we were on strike. It was one of those strikes where picketing seemed pretty pointless, due to such a high ratio of people working in relation to strikers that any potential picket line was more likely to be a ' lone individual standing by the front door while everyone else goes in the back' situation. That was how we came to make our wildlife pond. We felt strongly about not breaking the strike, but wanted to do something meaningful with our time.

We wanted to create our pond using as many recycled & re-purposed materials as possible. We bought only a pond liner & a box of pond plants. The big hairy half of the relationship dug out the hole, which is when we discovered that out of a 30' x 130' garden, we'd picked the only spot where a previous occupant had tried to bury an entire smashed up greenhouse! We removed a wheelbarrow of broken glass, while I sieved the soil for archaeological treasure, revealing a 1960s halfpenny & half a rotting slipper. Not exactly the Staffordshire Hoard. The hole was lined with old blankets & clothing, the rocks & stones were collected from around the garden and the edging slabs were the bricks from inside a large ancient storage heater. The holey plastic baskets from a defunct electric steamer were used to plant marginals & pondy things. We were very proud of our efforts and you know what? 15 months later, we were doing it all again because I managed to spear a garden fork through the liner. Bah!!

Anyway, back to the wildlife, which started arriving the same week. Our pond has been home to frogs, toads, tadpoles, the occasional newt, water boatmen, leeches, whirlygig beetles, fearsomely bitey-looking dragonfly larvae, water snails, pond skaters and all manner of wigglers & squigglers. Every year, we have had an impressive quantity of frog spawn, followed first by a pond full of tadpoles, then the most awesome little froglets. Our froggiest year saw 18 breeding pairs of frogs spawning......& one Billy-No-Mates......who just stayed on the edge of the pond by himself, like the lad with the rupert bear trousers at the school disco. 

Now, in early March this year, the usual local froggies pitched up for the annual Hagstones Amphibians' Orgy & I counted 12 different blobs of spawn, appearing over about a 2-week period. The first blob got to the just about hatching stage, with the black dots of eggs elongating & starting to eat their way out of the jelly. Then they disappeared. They were there, then they weren't.....along with the rest of the spawn. Our adult frogs are still there....in fact, we are having a very Froggy Summer........

....but not a single tadpole in sight. We are on board the Tadpole Marie-Celeste. Imagine little floating froggy tables & chairs with miniature coffee cups still warm......... I thought we must have a significant predator lurking in the depths to polish off that lot, but a bit of pond dipping revealed nothing except a lot of extremely small larvae, probably of some sort of fly, and nothing else.
Early one morning in March, I watched a heron fly down as though to land in our garden, but at the last minute, he spotted Albert Whiskers skulking behind the black elder, so he had a change of mind & managed to get himself sufficiently airborne again to fly upwards, just clearing the top of the hedge & into our neighbour's tree. My only suggestion for the loss of every single scrap of frog spawn is that this heron had visited us before, at first light, & hoovered it up in a couple of gobbles. That beak looks like it could be a serious frogspawn hoover. Would herons eat it? I've no idea. There are no fish in our pond, so no obvious reason for him (or her... because our equality policy extends to the local heron population here at the People & Cats Republic) to visit.

Or were there some pondy predators in there which snarfed the spawn & were then duly snapped up in turn to become heron breakfast? Eat or be eaten. That kind of thing.

Another curious thing, probably unrelated,but who knows? All summer pond dippings have continued to net up nothing except a few small wormy things resident in the mud on the bottom. No water boatmen, no dragonfly nymphs, no snails, no beetles & only 2 pond skaters this year (though the duckweed is probably putting those off at the moment). Our pond is usually teeming with life, so this is very odd. 

We do need to do some replanting, & clearing, so we're planning to give the pond a thorough clean-out this autumn. Will that provide any clues? 

Thankfully, there is one predator whom on this occasion at least, is blameless.......

.......even though he does rather look like he's eaten all the pies in this photo.

So that's our sad tadpole mystery. Sad because no tadpoles means no froglets this year, so we won't have any new additions to our much-treasured froggy commune & I'll miss seeing small armies of them embarking on their first journey out of the water into the flower beds. Better luck next year & I'll leave you with a cheery picture of a plant I know only as 'Bear's Britches' & one of our many lovely self-seeded foxgloves.

Hope all the veggie gardeners among you are getting some good crops. I picked our first aubergine of the year the other day & have already frozen lots of chillies. Good gardening......& ponding,
Till next time,
C x

How to grow watercress (the easy-peasy way)

Hello Friends,

I was in the veggie garden early this morning, watering & chivvying a grumpy courgette plant, & I spotted that the watercress was well ready for a substantial haircut. We've plenty of salad at the moment, so I decided to make it into soup. Several people seem surprised that I grow watercress in the garden, but it is very easy. It's a myth that all watercress-growing requires a stream, or any kind of special conditions. All it actually requires is the following bit of kit:

*1 old washing-up bowl (If you've got an old skankrous one you don't want to send to landfill, perfect!)

*2 plastic flower pots (as big as you can cram inside the bowl)

*Potting compost

*1 pack of watercress seed ('Aqua' is the usual variety)

There is no mystery to this. Fill the pots with compost up to about 2 cms from the top & water it well. Sprinkle on the watercress seed. Cover it with a fairly thin layer of compost & water again, gently this time, so that you are not spraying the seeds straight out again. Now stand the pots in the washing-up bowl & fill the bowl with water so that it comes about two thirds of the way up the sides of the pot. This is your mini-watercress farm. Stand it somewhere sunny, but not in daylong full glare of the sun.

If you have naughty blackbirds who beak up your seeds looking for critters, you might need to commandeer something like this to protect them........

 

That's all there is to it. The seedlings will emerge & you will be surprised how tiny they are, but have faith because they will grow into a rather lush bowl of watercress. To start with, just cut the occasional few sprigs, & as the plants grow bigger, cut more frequently. Provided you don't cut the stems too near the roots, they will grow back & provide plenty of cuts. As the weather warms up, you may start to see little white flowers appearing. It's best to snip them off, as the plant will start to concentrate on setting seed rather than continuing to provide you with leaves.

If you tire of watercress sandwiches, scones & salads, and your watercress farm looks like it could do with rejuvenating, cut it back to about 4 cms & water well to give it a chance to regrow. In the meantime, use the big bunch you've just cut off to make some soup.

I barely bother to look at a recipe for soups these days, but I do know that most of my 'green' soups were originally based on recipes from the old 'Crank's' vegetarian cookbook, published in the early 80s. I have adapted them over the years & this is how I make watercress soup:

Ingredients:

1 tbsp olive oil

1 vegetable stock cube made up with 3/4 pint boiling water

1 large bunch watercress (leaves & stems, of course!)

2 small to medium onions (chopped)

1 potato (I use a modest baking potato size, so about 8oz) (roughly chopped)

3/4 pint skimmed or semi-skimmed milk (can make up powdered milk if you are being economical)

salt & black pepper

Method (such as it is......)

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan, add the onion & cook until softened. Add the potato, watercress, stock & milk & bring to the boil. Cover & simmer it for 20 mins or until the potato is soft. 

Don't be alarmed if the milk goes a bit Mount Etna & seems to split. This is quite normal. At the end of the 20 mins, remove from heat, cool slightly, season to taste, before blitzing with a stick blender into a beautiful smooth, pale green summery soup. If you are feeling a bit 'Oooh, get me, aren't I a fancypants', then add a swirl of cream when serving. This quantity serves 3 or 4 people (fewer if one of them is my husband) and freezes very well.

So, if you have never tried growing watercress because you don't live in the sort of property which has its own freshwater stream trickling through the garden, despair not! One old washing-up bowl, 2 plastic flower pots & a bit of potting compost is all you need to start your own mini-farm. I sow my first seeds in April, but have also sown again around now (July) to give me some watercress for picking through the autumn. If you only have a balcony, you can grow it......you can even sit the bowl on your back doorstep, as long as it sees some sunshine. Seeds are not expensive, as you will get a good few cuts for salad plus some soup, & you can feel a smug glow that you are not buying bagged supermarket watercress in a non-recyclable plastic bag full of gas.

That's all from me, but for fans of Albert Whiskers, I thought I'd include the latest high-octane action shot.......

........well, to be fair, he IS almost vertical in this one. He's supposed to be testing some new cat treats for a market research project at the moment. Suffice it to say that after the first few mouthfuls, he cottoned on to the fact that they are not his Brand of Choice & the remainder of the evening's testers were left strewn on the floor. I tried to pick them up this morning but they crumbled to mush.....clearly he'd been back & licked them all (ewwww....) but still concluded they weren't up t'job!  OK, well, I had better sign off this post & get on with today's mighty job list.

Until  next time,

C x

Albert Whiskers' Anniversary.

Hello Friends,
Well, I am so behind with everything, including my blog, as our wonderful camping trip to Norfolk was unfortunately followed for me by a fortnight of the most vile flu. It seems most odd that as someone who hadn't had flu for 30 years, I should then get it two years running, despite having a flu jab. Bah!! 

Now, I have many cat-loving friends & couldn't let Albert Whiskers' anniversary pass unmarked. 28th June was one whole year since Gotcha Day. Remember that early blog post about him escaping from his cat carry-basket just 0.7 miles from the Cat Rescue, attacking Steve & freaking out all the way home? Can hardly believe it's a whole year since we drove home wondering why we always seem to adopt the weirdest cat on offer. Albert Whiskers had been a street cat. He was un-neutered & in a poor state when he was handed in to the Rescue. He'd clearly had some nasty fight injuries to his face, which had received no veterinary attention. Even a year later, the fur has not properly regrown beneath his ear, & his eye is still slightly closed as a result of a nasty untreated cat bite abcess. Minus his 'family jewels' & with his own humans, a house, big garden, good food & plenty of strokes, he has blossomed into a genuinely lovely cat albeit wilful & attention-seeking. He is also the most absolutely bone-idle cat we've ever owned. I've put together a selection of photos which give a good flavour of how Albert Whiskers likes to spend his time. Don't think I am doing him an injustice. I searched our photo files long & hard for some action shots. These were pretty much the most energetic I was able to come up with..........

Well, justice is very important here at The People & Cats Republic, so before publishing this catalogue of indolence, I thought it only fair to see what Albert Whiskers is doing at this moment. In fairness, he could have been out watching for frogs, chasing other cats, indulging in a little ornithology, guarding the leek bed, frolicking in our wild patch, climbing the pear tree or any number of other busy feline activities................................ Umm, nope!

BUSTED AGAIN! And taking into account the close proximity of the catnip tub, I'm assuming he is somewhat 'herbally assisted'.
Oh well, it beats life on the streets of Eastwood. I'm sure he thinks it was even worth losing his man-cat assets to gain such a life of luxury.
If you are thinking of adopting a cat, do please give these older ex-street cats a thought. They make fab pets, given the chance & tend to get overlooked at the Rescues in favour of kittens. With his beaten up face, Albert Whiskers wouldn't win any beauty contests, but he's funny, affectionate & characterful & we've really enjoyed sharing our home with him over the last year. He's got some odd habits.....particularly nibbling people's tights, which is part of his attention-seeking behaviour, & some annoying ones, such as licking all the jelly off his chunks then refusing to eat them because they've gone dry. He's onto a loser with this one.......we have a zero food waste policy here which also applies to cats, so this might yet be a habit he decides to give up as a bad job. So there we are....a whole year of living with Albert Whiskers. We haven't regretted adopting him for a single minute, so let's hear it for rescue cats & the many cat rescuers nationwide who give their time to rehabilitating street cats to start them off on a new life.
Till next time,
C x

Veggie garden - June 2015

Morning Friends,
I thought I'd share a bit of our progress in the veggie garden today. I've already posted up some pics of our colourful, tangled flower borders, so now for the 'business end' of the garden. It's not nearly as pretty, but is quite productive if we keep at it.

This area provides the main veggie-growing space, with a long bed which we divide into sections, 2 large raised beds built from recycled railway sleepers & a lorry tyre, which was left behind by the previous owners with plenty more of their detritus, but which we pressed into service for courgettes & squash. We like to grow food, so we later extended the veg space into another bed just in front of the clematis arch, & of course, we also use our greenhouse for tender crops. I think we've probably got just under half an allotment in size, as well as 3 mature fruit trees, which we inherited. So here's what we're growing this summer, so far:

Autumn sown broad beans have done well. They did object to the Boxing Day snow, but recovered quickly, & we've been picking these for a week or so.

The lightly cooked beans are lovely tossed with pasta, lots of garlic & a splodge of olive oil. Surprisingly the New Model Army of local slugs & snails seem to have left this crop well alone, so all the more for us!

This bed has courgettes (Gold rush & Black beauty) in the front, a couple of tomatoes, then potatoes (Winston). The courgettes were sulking when I took this pic - they'd sat in pots for too long because of the cold nights, but fruits are starting to set now.

Runner bean  - 'Snowstorm'. Supposed to be a good variety for damp, cool, iffy weather because they self-pollinate. Sounded ideal for East Nottinghamshire, & doing fine so far. The recycled muslin curtain from that well-known Swedish purveyor of household goods is to deter our large population of sparrows. I love supporting them, as they are a sadly declining species, but they are incredibly destructive, so barriers are needed here. They don't eat bean leaves, but peck them & spit out the pieces.

Newly transplanted leeks. Tried Monty Don's method last year & it didn't really work for me, so have reverted back to the old fashioned dibbing. 1 leek per hole, then puddle them in with the hose. I will have to micro-net these later, as we have sadly been hit hard by the allium leaf miner pest this year. It's quite a new pest, but is spreading north. My good friend Helen was only telling me at the weekend about the problems of this pest on her allotment & I said we were lucky not to have it. The very next day, the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship went out to harvest the garlic & we discovered that we not only have it, but that it's had a bit of a rampant spring. The garlic was mostly ok  - big cloves & a decent crop........

....but the shallots were badly affected & had to be lifted as a damage limitation exercise. We've hung up the best ones to dry, but several had already rotted due to the activity of this pest. It's now sadly in the red onion crop too. The plants still look ok & they're not all affected, but we will still have to lift them before they are ready. That's the thing with growing food crops.....you win some, you lose some. It's soul-destroying with the effort put in, but that's nature.

The greenhouse crops seem to be off to a good start.

I've got chillies ('Heatwave'), peppers ('Thor'), as well as cucumbers & aubergines on this side, & 6 tomatoes ('Ferline') on the other.

This is one of the 3 Jalopeno chilli plants I overwintered on a bedroom windowsill. They all survived, so it will be interesting to see what sort of crop they produce.

I always like to see the first cucumber appearing, as it reassures me that I haven't raised dodgy plants. Cucumbers can be so moody - there's no end to things they don't like - too cold, too dry, too wet, not enough humidity, if there's an 'r' in the month, if you look at them funny, etc, but if you get good plants, then homegrown cucumbers are so lovely & juicy compared to shop-bought, plastic shrink-wrapped ones. 

The rest of my tomatoes are grown outdoors - a row of 'Ferline' grown in large pots.......

........always companion planted with a row of Calendula to attract pollinating insects (& because I like making marigold scones).
At this time of year, I always take it as a personal failure if I have to buy a lettuce, so I grow loads of salad - currently lollo rosso & 'Lettony'. We've a bit of a glut at the moment, but it's not a problem, as we do eat a lot of salad & when they start to bolt, I'll make them into pea, lettuce & mint soup for the freezer.

Other edibles? Well, I've got the beetroot planted out, a few cabbages, 2 troughs of spring onions, 1 of radishes & a carrot box, also watercress, a thriving strawberry tub & a fussy butternut squash plant. The herb garden is also nicely productive at the moment. The main crop rhubarb is doing well, even though I've forced it 3 years running, & fruits have set on our apple, pear & grapevine. As we had to lift the shallots early, we now have a decent sized raised bed to get something else in this month. I'm thinking maybe a couple of pumpkins, so as not to waste valuable potential food-growing space. No time to grow from seed, but will pay our village garden centre a visit & buy a couple of plants to grow on. I hope fellow veggie growers are having a good year so far. My sympathies to anyone else afflicted by crappy allium leaf miner. I'm not aware of any natural control methods for it.......or any chemical ones for that matter........I think enviromesh will have to be purchased to ensure future crops here at the People & Cats Republic. Grrr.

Till next time, which will be a celebration (?) of 1 whole year of Albert Whiskers, the worst behaved cat we've ever had..........
C x