I went to the woodyard today and picked up some wood for making more raised beds. I got enough for 4 large and 2 small beds, and my brain was all ‘this’ll be super quick to do with my awesome mitre saw, I should be able to get them all done this afternoon’. My body was less co-operative and decided 2 was more than enough work and that I must then immediately rest. Oh well.

So pretty!

This is the bit at the side of the house that spent the last year being ignored, then weedkillered, then covered in a tarp all winter to stop more weeds. There’s enough space there for 2 large beds and a smaller one (which I didn’t make yet) between them. I just need to borrow a strong man to get the digging done. Stupid getting-tired-all-the-time body.

I now need to keep an eye on it and see just how much sun it gets. I know it gets less than the main veggie patch, but the front of the house is often sunny in the morning, so I am hoping it might get more than I think. This area and the greenhouse will more than double my growing space compared to last year.

I also joined a seed of the month club. It’s soooo cheap compared to seed prices over here, it’s cheap even with international postage, and the seeds are all heirloom varieties. And I love the idea of getting random surprise seeds in the mail every month!

We’ve had a really mild winter this year, I’m not sure if it’s saving all the snow and ice and ickiness until February, or whether it’s just going to carry on being a bit rainy and windy and dreary until spring. I have my fingers crossed for the latter.

As it’s not been too horrible, we’ve been able to start on sorting out the garden a little bit…boring chores like turning compost heaps and cutting back the huge climbing rose, and general other tidying tasks. AND! moving the greenhouse!!! I love it in its new location, it’s actually on soil now so I can plant in it, and it gets the sun pretty much all day long.

I did some sawing and drilling and put a couple of beds in, but will need the assistance of awesome boyfriend to help dig in some sand and compost before it’s plantable in, though given the short work he made of digging over the plot and the trench for the base, I’m sure it’ll only take him 10 minutes or so.

I really want to plant EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW, but I’m resisting as it’s just too early for the majority of things. I contented myself with making a spreadsheet listing all the seeds we have and when they need planting and planning which heirloom varieties I want to try this year. So far I think my list is hugely tall climbing peas, some sort of climbing french beans, various tomatoes, and watermelon. Everything else will be leftovers from previous years, or from super cheap packs we got at the garden centre. I do like the idea of collecting seeds year on year and never having to buy them ever again, but I want to start off with easy stuff that isn’t hard to collect and doesn’t need hand pollinating or separating from everything else to prevent crazy inedible cross-breeds.

After entering the insane amount of seeds into my spreadsheet, I noted that there were a couple of things that were okay to plant in january, so I did! My dining room windowsill is now sporting trays of aubergines, early tomatoes for the greenhouse, onions, and various herbs. We planted autumn onion sets here and at J’s plot, so hopefully with the seeds I planted today, and more seeds planted directly into the ground in a couple of months, we’ll have a good crop of onions that lasts us all autumn and winter.

I also planted some sunflowers a week or so ago, we are going to have a giant sunflower growing competition, which we will both win, as we’ll end up with lots of yummy sunflower seeds to eat.

It is a happy day in my house whenever I decide to cook with mascarpone cheese. Either I sit and eat the leftovers with a spoon out of the pot, or I get to make cheesecake. I had quite a lot of mascarpone left over from a yummy tomato and mascarpone pasta sauce I made last night, and I also had some sour cream left over from the chilli I made at the weekend, so I thought cheesecake would be a good idea to use them both up.

This is more a reminder to myself about what I did in case it’s awesome and I want to do it again than an actual recipe, but I figured I’d put it here cos someone might find it useful

Preheated oven to 200 degrees C

Got all these things out:

First I made a simple biscuit base (crushed up digestives and melted butter) and squished that down into the bottom of the tin. I ended up using a 9″ tin because the 7″ tin I intended to use looked like it would be too small for the huge amount of brown creamy goo this made, and I really didn’t fancy cleaning it off the bottom of the oven.

Then I got the mixer out and mixed up the cheese (about 3/4 pot of mascarpone and a whole tub of cream cheese) until it was smooth and creamy. Then with the mixer still running I added 3 tablespoons of flour, and the leftovers of the sour cream (150-200ml), some sugar (150g-ish) and 3 eggs. Finally I added the nutella, I used 2 huuuuge spoonfuls. After scraping down the bowl a bit and making sure it was fully mixed I poured it on top of the base and put it in the oven for as long as it took me to do the washing up and make a cheese sandwich…about 12 minutes, then turned the heat down to 90 degrees and baked until it was mostly set but still wobbled a little in the middle when the tin was shaken (about 25 mins). Now I’m leaving it in the warm oven overnight to cool, so I won’t get to eat it until the morning. boooo.

Here’s a very unglamorous picture of it in the oven, as I totally forgot to take one before I put it in. I am very glad I decided to use the bigger tin

Yeah yeah, so I was all ‘woo, it’s autumn, no more garden work, yay!’. And I was sooo wrong. I ordered some trees from the interwebs, and we planted them in the garden. And when I say ‘we’, I mean J did all the hard digging work and I busied myself with stuff that wasn’t too tiring. I kinda failed at the not getting tired thing, but it wasn’t toooo bad. And now I have braeburn apple, conference pear, and morello cherry trees in my garden. And a victoria plum tree in a pot that I’ll give to my dad because they are his favourite fruit ever.

This is my apple tree. Not hugely exciting, but it’s planted and looks happy and hopefully will have made me lots of fruit by this time next year.

Littlecat also had autumn garden fun by climbing my birch tree.

We’ve done lots of work on J’s plot in the last few weeks too…and it was very much needed. This is what it looked like after a summer of neglect.

After a couple of hours of strimming (him), and weed pulling (me), we’d got it looking much more like a vegetable plot and less like a patch of weeds, and also picked loads of potatoes, onions, and beetroot. 3 weeks later it was still looking much better, though some naughty weeds were trying to return.

We wanted to get a head start on planting and put in as much as possible to extend the cropping season next year, so we put in onions, garlic, asparagus, peas, and broad beans. That’s pretty much all we can get in the ground now until spring, but it’s a good start. It gets dark sooo early these days, so it was hard to get a decent pic, but trust me, this area is all dug and planted and looking awesome.

I just realised I’ve been very bad at blogging about fibrey things. I have still been knitting (a lot), and spinning (a little), I’ve just not got round to talking about it, but I should probably share this as I think it’s the biggest project I’ve ever done.

Sometime in the dim and distant past (march I think), I was all full of planning and enthusiasm, and decided that for my mum’s 60th I’d spin, design, and knit her a jumper. Because November is sooooo far away. So I grabbed a pile of fibre, mostly in natural colours, with a little blue for fun.

I carded it all up on the drum carder, which took approximately a million years. I think I did 3 passes to get it mostly-blended-but-not-too-even. Littlecat thought it was the most fun thing in the history of the world.

I then took each batt, split it into 4 lengthways, and rolled it up into a little bump, planning to just keep them in a box and grab them at random to further mix up the colours. When i ended up with 52 of the things, I was starting to fully realise just how long this would take. Oh well, it was March, November was soooo far away.

And I spun. I was good to start with and got through a lot, and wound my singles off onto a cardboard core on my ball winder so I could ply the first singles with the last and minimise any differences in spinning over the time it would take. Then at some point I forgot about spinning, as is often the case in summer.

THEN IT WAS OCTOBER ARGH.

So I brought the spinning wheel up to my room so I could spin while watching tv, and plied some of the singles, so I could spin when I had the energy, then knit in bed once I got tired. And I spun, and I knitted, and I doodled, and I found some nice contrasting handspun in my stash, and when I finally applied myself to it, I FINISHED IT.

(yes it’s a terrible pic, it was dark and the lighting was poor, but she likes it, so yay!!!)

There were warnings of frost last week, so I brought in allll the tomatoes, and currently have 3 trays of ripening tomatoes taking up all available worktop space in my kitchen. At the start of the season I was all excited about making lots of stuff with them, and I made salsa and spicy tomato pepper ketchup. As time went on, my enthusiasm waned, and I just started sticking the ripe ones in the freezer. I now have a huge carrier bag full of frozen tomatoes to cook with. Nom.

After taking the tomatoes in, there wasn’t much left in the veggie patch, so I planted out the asparagus that’s been sitting in pots all summer, covered all the empty beds with a load of compost and stuck some fertiliser in the one I was planning to use for onions, then today I put in some onion sets and built an anti-cat frame to go over them (and got to use my new saw, yay!).

It’s not very exciting, but there are onions in here, and they won’t get dug up by cats or pulled up by birds! There’s also a huuuuge elephant garlic.

The rest of the area is rather boring, though amazingly the raspberries are still going strong, I keep going out there thinking it’s nearly time to cut them back and weed around them, but every time there are more fruit.

The greenhouse has meant I can prolong the growing season somewhat though, I have romaine lettuce which are very happy in there, a couple of chilli plants I really need to get round to picking the fruit off, and a tomato that i found growing randomly in the wrong bed, which i assume came from last year’s compost…it’s flowering, though I think it’s probably too late to get it to fruit, even in the greenhouse. I also moved the pot of watercress from outside into the greenhouse, and planted some rocket, arctic king lettuce, spinach, and mixed salad leaves in the two big troughs, so I should have salady things well into winter.

Next year I’m planning to grow more fruit, and after ages looking around, I decided to order this..an apple, pear, cherry, and plum. I will probably get another apple tree too so they can have treesex with each other and give me more fruit, but I’m very happy with finding 4 trees for £30, and it’s just getting to the time where I can plant bare rootstock trees, and I’ve already got a big strong man to agree to help me dig the holes for them.

And I love it!

I’ve been keeping an eye on ebay for greenhouses for a month or so, figuring this is probably the best time of year to get one if i want a bargain, but I kept getting outbid, so eventually I put out a ‘wanted’ on cheapcycle, and someone offered to sell me this one. Dad came with me to dismantle and collect it, then I spent a very long 7 hours putting it up the next day.

Eventually I plan to move it to the main part of the garden next to the veggie patch so I can plant tomatoes and stuff directly into the soil, but that’ll require a fair amount of work to level the area, so i decided to just put it up on the patio for the winter so I can sit in it when it’s raining, and grow a bit of lettuce and rocket. So for now it’s all set up with a table, a few pots, and a bench for me to sit on. AND I LOVE IT.

I am a pretty good cook, but I’ve never felt that confident at baking, it’s like some sort of magic, you put a load of goo into the oven and then it comes out and it’s transformed into something yummy. So I’ve been trying to bake more recently, and make up my own recipes, and generally try to understand how it works a bit better.

Last week someone posted a recipe on LSG for the most awesome chocolate chip cookies in the world, and I decided I had to make them. The problem was, the recipe was all in American, so it needed some amending. Firstly I had to work out a suitable substitute for ‘cake flour’, as that doesn’t exist in the UK, then I had to convert the cups to weight measurements, then I had to reduce the amount of butter as I refuse to use more than one pack of butter in any recipe. Then I had to make up for the fact I appear to not have any bicarb, I probably used it all for cleaning, or left it somewhere else in the house. Oh, and I added way less chocolate than asked for, mostly because I didn’t have enough, but also because holy fuck 1 1/3lbs of chocolate is a lot.

So here is my adapted recipe, which turned out reaaaaaaaaally well, and although it was an obscenely large amount of dough which turned into 25 huuuuge cookies, they still all got eaten in record time.

275g 00 grade flour
275g strong white flour
2 tablespoons cornflour
2.5 teaspoons baking powder
1.5 teaspoons sea salt
250g butter (room temperature)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
260g granulated sugar
250g soft light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
300g chocolatey bits (I used a bag of chocolate chips and a bag of chocolate buttons).

It is probably better that you use the recipe linked above if you want a detailed description of what to do, along with photos. This is just a short summary of what I did when I made these cookies.

1) Sift flours, baking powder and salt into a bowl and set aside
2) Using an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugars until fully blended, then add one egg at a time while mixing. Add the vanilla and the oil. Slowly add in dry ingredients while mixing. Marvel at the vast quantity of dough produced. Realise that the mixer may well break if you abuse it any further. Wish you were rich enough to own a Kitchenaid mixer. Pour chocolate chips into bowl and work them into the dough with your hands to save the poor old mixer.
3) Cover with clingfilm (so the film actually touches the dough, no air space) and put in the fridge for 24 hours or so. If, like me, you feel that 25 monster cookies is just TOO MANY COOKIES, you can make them into circular lumps now and put them in a tray in the freezer, then when they are frozen transfer them to a bag, then you can have instant cookies whenever you want them! I actually defrosted them before baking, but there is one left lurking in the freezer for me to attempt to cook from frozen and see how it turns out.
4) Take bowl of dough out of the fridge about an hour before you want to bake, because it will be solid and need time to soften up again. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Make balls of dough about 2 tablespoons in volume and squish them into circular lumps about 1.5cm thick (they will flatten and widen more during cooking) and put them on foil on a baking tray. Bake for 11 minutes, or until cookies are starting to brown. After a few minutes cooling in the tray, transfer them to a wire cooling rack and try and resist eating them for as long as possible.

I got a new toy yesterday! Looook, it’s prettttttty. And most importantly it was cheap. Yay for cheapcycle!

So now I will be able to cut ALL THE THINGS without whining that woodwork makes me tired and having to ask someone to help me. woooo. The only project I actually have in mind is I need to make some frames to go over the veg beds to protect the asparagus from cat digging when I plant it out, and to protect any seeds I put in the soil next year, but I’m sure I’ll think of plenty of other things I want to make. I am considering a lean-to shed type thing so I have somewhere to put the garden tools other than in the garage, but gren’s motorbike is currently living where I’d most likely put it, so I’ll need to do some thinking. So for the time being, here is the one and only thing I did with my new saw….cut some wood! Exciting eh?

And because I was in there, I decided to take a pic of the garage. I’ve kinda almost cleared it up enough to be useable as a workshop again, another couple of hours work to sort out all the boxes and stuff, and it’ll be done. Then I can saw things and grind things and lathe things and drill things to my heart’s content. I just need to remember to put an extension lead in there so Gren doesn’t move my grinder again next time he wants to sharpen a knife.

So it’s the season for eeeeverything. I made blackberry jam last weekend, then this week I went blackberry picking with my parents to the woods I used to go to when I lived in the city. The blackberries were crap, so we only got a few, and decided to get a load of elderberries to make wine with instead.

After about 2 hours of taking them off the stems and picking out all the bits of stem and unripe berries and cleaning my kitchen floor, I wanted to never see another elderberry ever again. I chucked them in a bucket with some raisins, 3 tsps citric acid, yeast, and some water.

After a couple of days they look like this, they all float to the top and make a kinda crust, and when you pierce it with the spoon it smells sooooo good. And yes, I am aware that wine-making experts would say I should use a white bucket, but wine-making experts can fuck off. Or buy me another bucket.

Tomorrow or the next day I’ll squish them through some muslin into a demijohn and add the sugar.

For future reference, this is the recipe. Take 2kg of elderberries and get the stems off, squish them in a bucket, add a kettle full of boiling water and 250g chopped up raisins, 3tsps citric acid, enough cold water to make about a gallon’s worth of liquid and to bring the temp down and a sachet of high alcohol wine yeast. Stir and enjoy whenever you walk past. After 3 days or so, strain the juice, making sure to squish the pulp, and add to a demijohn with 1.5kg sugar. Ferment under airlock until it stops bubbling, then rack off and leave for a year, then bottle and leave for as long as you can bear it.

I whined about my elderberry trauma on rav, and a very kind person told me something else i can do with them which doesn’t involve taking off the stems….hedgerow jelly, woohoo!

So I went and picked some stuff for it today…blackberries, elderberries, hawthorn, rowan, rosehips. I had a bag of apples already from a sneaky apple tree we found when elderberry picking earlier in the week.

I went downstairs to find the kitchen like this:

It wasn’t exactly a surprise, I made sushi, chocolate brownies and cheesecake yesterday and only did about 3/4 of the washing up, and then gren cooked dinner this evening and left everything on the side because the dishwasher was full of clean stuff. I was in a sulk with the kitchen because I got an electric shock from the dishwasher this afternoon when I went to clean up. So I decided to empty the dishwasher then get the fruits in to simmer while i was doing the washing up.

I really needed to sweep the floor too, but there appeared to be a dead cat in the middle of it.

On the hedgerow adventure today, we also picked a load of field mushrooms. I had grand plans to turn them into mushroom lasagne and mushroom soup base for the freezer, but it’s way too late now, so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Still, yum, I am looking forward to it.

It’s not reaaaally full-on apple season yet, but I’ve had a few boxes of apples and pears sitting in my garage for a couple of weeks now, and the pears were starting to go a bit manky, so we decided to try the press out and use up what we had, and collect more apples later for another try.

We got out the apples, press, shredder, jack and demijohns, cleaned everything down with water and then with trigene to disinfect, and cleaned the demijohns with sodium metabisulphite. All ready to go!

I am so glad we have the shredder, if cider-making involved hitting apples in a bucket with a big stick, I’m not sure I’d bother with it. As it is, the shredder makes light work of the apples.

We put the apple goo into muslin parcels using a frame, and then stacked them up. It worked ok, but the pile kept sliding to one side. We did get some juice though!

Our first juice!

In the end we decided it just wasn’t wanting to work the way we planned, so the easiest way to fix it was to get some plastic tubs that nested inside each other, drill holes in the sides and bottom, and use these to stack the apple pulp in.

This worked much better, so I’m going to look out for some metal baskets that nest inside each other, or maybe just a large metal wastebasket, and hopefully next time will be even easier.

We got 3.5 gallons of juice in the end. We could have had more with extra pressing, but there are so many more apples where these came from it hardly seemed worth it, and the chickens and the compost heap will enjoy the leftovers.

The first demijohn had a tablespoon of tea and a teaspoon of citric acid added, then an airlock put on, and I am hoping the natural yeasts will take care of that and make it yummy. The other 3 had the same tea and acid added, but also a campden tablet to kill anything existing in there, and I’ll add my own yeast in a day or two. The demijohn that wasn’t quite full will have blackberry juice added…at the moment the blackberries I picked a few days ago are sitting in a bowl with boiling water and some sugar. The demijohns are all sitting happily in the hallway with the mead (and yes, i really do need to vacuum the hall carpet…eek!)

And finally I bottled the elderberry wine that has been sitting in a demijohn for 2 years. Well, not the same demijohn, I did rack it off so it wasn’t sitting on sediment. I had a quick taste and it wasn’t unpleasant, but it was a bit harsh…hopefully a while in bottles to mellow will do the trick.