Putting the baby to bed

Everything's just a bit tidier, now

 

I'd not really paid attention, last year, to the path of the sun in Autumn. Turns out, hardly any of it reaches the planters in the foreground, and virtually none is hitting the back of the garden, now, in the afternoons. This is good intel, and probably explains why my turnips and lambs-ear lettuces aren't thriving. But while we may not have loads of sun, we still seem to have cabbage moth caterpillars, as I keep needing to flick them off of the cavolo nero. Still. In OCTOBER. 

Today was about doing some end-of-season wrapping up. I pulled out the courgette plants (Shelob & Friends seem to have moved on, so I didn't feel terrible or terrified) and the remaining tomato plant that I couldn't be arsed with when I took in the last of the tomatoes. But can we talk about the nasturtiums, for a minute? They. Will. Not. Die. It's bananas. Still green, still growing, still flowering. This is a thing I didn't know about nasturtiums. 

The herbs are getting going, except for the poor sage which doesn't seem to want to carry on. The Sorrel continues to do astonishingly well, and the oregano is coming back to life. I need to find uses for the salad burnet and the winter savory, because I have them. There are also, as you can see, some marigolds that are carrying on just fine. 

Did I mention that I tried the black radishes? They were awful. Turns out, they're better for roasting, or grating into apple-based salads, according to research by The MiL, so I'll recover from my horrifying experience and give roasting them a go. 

I guess the focus of this blog will have to turn to "things I'm eating that I grew and then preserved" for a while, followed by "random stuff I'm cooking." Let's start with green tomato chutney. I've never been an enormous chutney fan (wasn't really a thing in the U S of A), and I don't think I've eaten green tomato anything, if I'm honest, so making green tomato chutney didn't seem like a thing I should do. But I had a huge pile of green tomatoes, and The Cook and The Gardener had a recipe, and you know how I am about that book.

It looks terrible (as most chutneys do), but Farmer Goth dove right in (he is a huge chutney fan, as it turns out) and proclaimed it to be so delicious that he practically proposed to me again. I finally got around to giving it a bit of a taste, the other day.

Y'all...

I can't..it's just...WHERE HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE? I don't know if the recipe is just that good, or if I just got lucky, but damn. I put it on some otherwise kind of meh cheese (Appleby's Cheshire, if you're keeping track), and it transformed the experience. Himself has been putting it on sandwiches for a week. I am a changed woman.

We've still got loads of red tomatoes to do things with, as well. I thought Farmer Goth was going to make a ragu, but that has yet to materialise. I may just make a pile of passata and put it in jars, for ragu later, so we don't lose them. We'll see how that goes. 

As experiments go, this was - and continues to be - good fun. I've already received my first issue of Seed Porn in the mail, and am making some plans for what I want to do, next year, and the timings of things. Given the sun disappears over the fence so quickly, we may need to adjust our "seasons", but I'm hoping that the greenhouse will let us get starts going sooner.