Wild Women do...

...and they don't regret it. I'm talking about Wild Food of course. Who can possibly not resist free food? Yesterday we went for a bike ride into Cambridge and on the way we kept seeing trees laden with green and red fruits. I know you have to be careful not to pick unknown fruits in case they are poisonous, but these just looked too edible to ignore. Finally curiosity got the better of me and I picked a small round cherry shaped fruit and had a nibble. It was sweet and sharp with a texture and taste like an apricot. I let the kids try a bit and they totally loved them. We grabbed a handful and went on our way. A few yards down the road we found a street with about 10 trees full of these fruits all in different colours, ranging from green, yellow with a red tinge, to a deep purple. Sure that these were some some of plum or damson, we filled up our lunchbox (having eaten the contents earlier!) and took them home for identification.

I discovered (I think...) that what we had were wild cherry plums! A bit of digging around on google told me that these small fruits are indeed edible and a bit of a of an old fashioned delicacy, popular in the Victorian times. I decided to opt for a wild plum jam using the small stash we carried home from the City and it made 4 pots of delicious jam which we all love. It seems that we are also very lucky in Histon and Impington as there are also many trees locally heavy with wild plums and my plan is to get a load of these babies and make a whole batch of jam to last us all winter!

Salad Days

Despite the awful weather so far in July, we have enjoyed some lovely salads from our Valmaine lettuce. This is a cut-and-come-again lettuce which is small and crisp rather like a cos. Served with our first harvest of spring onions and some fresh tomatoes, the salad was divine. Still waiting for the cucumber to get to a reasonable size and then that will get the chop and be added to our side salads.


I also harvested quite alot of our runner beans this weekend. Too many for us to eat and not wanting to live on them for the next 3 weeks, I decided to prepare, blanche and freeze some ready for the winter.



When my Dad came over a few days ago, he noticed that my Early Nantes Carrots were ready to be pulled up. Low and behold, he was right and we managed to get some really beautifully tasting carrots that were perefectly shaped, sized and no invasion by the dreaded carrotfly. Next time however I will definately use the wondermesh over my brasicas as I had to pull out my failed cauliflowers. The wondermesh is a microfine netting which allows sunshine and rain to get to the plants but not the insects. The biggest pest was the notorious Cabbage White Butterfly which ravaged my plants.

Tomatoes, Peppers, Cucumbers and Pumpkins

The greenhouse has been such a success and we can now really look forward to a huge crop of tomatoes. Each of the 19 plants is weighed down with trusses of green tomatoes all ready to start ripening.

We've also had a huge success with our pepper plants. Check out this monster growing here. Its a whopping 18 cm long. The only problem we have is knowing when to eat it! We're still ploughing through lots of courgettes. (We probably cut 3 or 4 new ones each day so courgette is permanently on the menu right now!)


Check out this knobbly little guy too! Our first home grown cucumber. Its still a bit early to pick being only 10 cm long but I guess it won't be long. If they give us as much fruit as our faithful courgettes and tomato plants, I guess we'll be making lots of mint raita!


Tom is thrilled with the progress with his pumpkins too. We have two beautiful pumpkins about the size of a large cricket ball which are looking really strong and healthy. Some people have great success growing pumpkins (and other large fruits such as melons) on a trellis which is what we are doing. I read somewhere that you can support the large fruit using netting or even (clean) tights! So if you visit our garden in the coming weeks and see some fishnet stockings among the vines, don't worry, we've not been up to unspeakable things, we're just hoping for nice big pumpkins. :)


The Chili plants are hanging in there too despite a poor start to life and here you can see 2 really healthy green chili's growing well. We cut one and added it to a vegetable concoction last night but could not taste any heat at all. Perhaps they are a very mild variety? Next time I'll add more.


Its hard to see from this photo but these french beans are so tiny! I haven't had much success from my Dwarf French Beans. The first sowing rotted in the compost. The second fried in the heat of the greenhouse. The third, planted in a pot on the patio only gave about 5 tiny seedlings despite about 8-10 seeds being planted. Then to add insult to injury, our dog was caught chomping the growing heads off the tiny plants last week. I never knew she likes legumes!
Still I harvested 4 (yes only four!) itsy, bitsy beans this morning and will be adding them to a medley of mange tout, garden peas and runner beans.

Onions bursting up through the soil. Not sure when I'll harvest these. Need to do a check on google!

Spanikopita

A couple of weeks ago I harvested the remaining spinach and made a delicious Spanikopita; a Greek spinach and ricotta cheese pie. Served with our home grown courgettes cooked with garlic, tomatoes and Basil (also home grown), it was another culinary delight straight from the garden! For a great video on making Spanikopita, check out Eva.

Spud-U-like

Finally harvested some of our new potatoes this week. It was a slight disappointment to get such a low yield from the plants but the taste was out of this world. The pure white potatoes were like nothing I have ever tasted before. I cannot even put into words the purity of that taste. Simply served with butter alongside a piece of fresh salmon. yummmm........

Huge Bumble Bee

Today we found a huge Bumble Bee sniffing around the flowers. Evie was just about the swat it with her Dads shoe when I realised it was actually a rare species....