It's been a while....

Almost a month since the last post. Kind of says it all really. It's been a tough past month and i don't think its over yet. But whilst there's break in the dark clouds hanging over me i thought i'd take the opportunity to post a few photos of things i have managed to do in the last month.

The sweetcorn has finally been cut now, at the farm, i noticed when i drove past last week. There's nothing really to do on the farm itself now, so there'll be a little office work up to Christmas and then work will begin again in February.

I really do love it up there when the weather is good. It can be so peaceful - depending on the wind direction and time of day, but even when you do hear the motorway it is just a background hum and although the planes are annoying they've flown off before you get a chance to get worked up about them destroying the peace. The sounds of the buzzards crying, the jays and woodpeckers calling and at the end of october there was the most magnificent sound of a rutting Stag chasing the does in the woods. They were so close you could hear the rustle of the leaves when they were moving about. It would have be even more magical if they'd appeared out of the wood, but sadly they stayed hidden.

One of ladies at the farm was telling me about her 4 year old grandson, who was critically ill in hospital. He was born with a heart condition, for which the surgery hadn't been totally successful and then on top of that he had contracted pneumonia. He's been in hospital for a long time and by the sounds of it was very fed up with being there and being ill, so i put together this little craft kit, something they could do together, a spoon friend for each of them to create. I haven't heard how he is recently, however i do know they were extremely concerned and sadly not too hopeful. I'll ask the others when i next go down to the farm, they hadn't heard anything last week.

Now something totally crazy! It November. A few weeks ago this area (although not precisely here) had snow. Yet despite the cold i have sugar snap peas growing and forming!! Admittedly very very slowly, but still it's just madeness!

The cold and frosts mind you are good for one thing at least. They really enhance the flavour and sweetness of the parnsips, which seem to have become giants this year! I pulled this monster which fed all 3 of us as part of our sunday roast a few weeks ago.

Then came Mum and D's wedding anniversary - How many years was it again D??!!

I saw this idea in a Christmas book i picked up at a charity shop. But having left things a bit late, and then fighting to get it done at all, it wasn't quite as i'd hoped, and infact i didn't manage to do dinner for them in the end, but i managed to get the present/pudding done, which in fact lasted for 3 days! I didn't manage to get a cone of Oasis foam, so ended up carving my own from a rectangle.
The traditional English theme for the 4th wedding annivesary is fruit and flowers (american is linen and modern is electrical appliances) so i decided on an edible themed present! With a rose for each year on the top.
Served with 3 dips - melted dark chocolate, melted milk chocolate and vanilla yoghurt. Some thing we (ok, so more me) could all share.
With the evenings dark now by dinner time we have to remember to get any veg in from the garden during the day while its still light! This carrot had my name on it, almost literally! And is now in fact a nice "J" avatar on one forum!

And so to halloween. Again because i left things a bit late, i only managed to get very small pumpkins, and the first supermarket i went to didn't have any left at all! Seems the shortage due to poor pollination from damp weather really did affect supply. It kept my amused nevertheless. The sunflower pattern was a design i found online, but because of the size of the pumpkin my other design i had chosen didn't fit so i made up my own shooting star design.

Lidls have had some great special offer on recently including some stunning 2 spike orchids for £6!! so i picked up one for mum's collection - and for me to photograph!

And finally another great deal - a whole salmon for just under £10, from which i got 14 (!!!) decent sized fillets for mum and D. Ok so after descaling, filleting and pin boning i can understand the justification of the price difference between what i bought and the prepacked fillets. But as i had an afternoon free to do it i thought i'd save some pennies and do it myself. It worked out to 70p a fillet in the end!

i don't know whats going on with photo sizes and who knows what will happen when i hit publish, but thats me for the last month. I think i might look into some blogging events, maybe that will encourage me to post a bit more often.

Baking, Harvesting and Clearing - Busy Times

It seems to have been very busy recently but then i think a lot of that has been my choice to make it so busy. It's no secret to Mum and D that i've been struggling a lot recently and as a result i've thrown myself into what ever i can head first, whilst still managing to avoid seeing a lot of people! A month ago i started working at a farm 6 hours a week, just 2 hours on 3 days, well that was the plan but i have to adapt due to the weather at times as its all outdoor work. And the i've been doing little things for D to help him out, mainly so i'm not in the house alone, as i seem to have developed this major fear that i'm going to lose control, go on a major binge and eat every single item of food in the house, so there for if i'm not in the house i can't do it!

Anyway, i made a couple of batches of muffins for D's work collegues to keep the going during the Flu jab clinic on saturday. Seeing and jabbing about 1000 people in 3 hours can be exhausting not just phycially but mentally too, having to concentrate hard for so long without a break. I'm not sure the muffins were a success to be honest despite using the freshest produce possible - fresh sweetcorn and fresh raspberries picked with my own fair hands. Not in the same muffin i hasten to add!!
The original recipe for this one was Rasperry and cinnamon, however i decided that cinnamon may not be to everyone's taste so changed to to Raspberry and white chocolate, which is a combination i have seen elsewhere previously. As an after thought though i wondered whether i should have reduced the amount of sugar due to the fact that i had added more sweetness in the form of the white chocolate chips.

Plus then i decided to use the rest of the raspberries to make a puree and then mixed with icing sugar to make a very sticky icing. I know i made more of these than the savoury batch but there were more of these left at the end of the morning. Maybe it was just too early on a saturday morning for something sweet?

The second recipe was Cheesy Corn Muffalettas from BBC Good Food but Mum's reaction to these said it all. She sat eating it in a fit of giggles. I must admit the texture was a little strange, as the sponge was kind of chewy and rubbery from the cheddar but then there were hard little lumps in the form of corn kernels. D said it was strange finding hard bits as normally muffins contain things like raisins which are plump and soft after baking. The taste of the cheese wasn't strong either although it clearly wasn't a sweet muffin as there is no sugar in the recipe and that was clear to taste.

Having said all that all of these went, with the last 2 being taken home by one of the receptionists for her and her husband!

And so onto garden news....

More proud harvests in the form of....
Red Cabbage!!! They've finally hearted up and i'm so chuffed.

And even more chuffed when i cut it in half to find the tightly packed leaves and stunning colour. A quarter of it was used for coleslaw and i'm sure more of it will be too but i think its time to cook the warming winter dish of red cabbage almost sweet and sour style i guess, cooked in balsamic vinegar with a touch of something sweet at the end. Might even get a baby beetroot in from the garden and add that in.
With the red cabbage coleslaw again to get the colours different i used white onion rather than red to go with the yellow carrot.

Autumn is also the time to start getting the Squash in. This was the smaller butternut which i cut in half and stuffed with smoked tomatoes, olives, red onion and goats cheese then roasted in the oven.The slightly larger butternut is now stored in the cool and the dark of the garage along with.....

This stunning little thing. Who knows what variety it is, but then so long as it tastes good, who cares!!

Runner beans, carrots, beetroot, kale, chard, cabbages, onions and parsnips continue to be harvest as and when we want them. Although all the tomatoes are now inside, with the green ones on trays in the spare room, which are then transfered down stairs when the start to turn red! Stock rotation i call it.

I got some onions from work as well to string and last us over winter. The large ones make superb onion soup!

I have also been increasing the number of fruit bushes too.
Lidls had various fruit bushes at £1.30 each so i picked up 3 gooseberry bushes, which of course will need somewhere to be planted permanantly (i know thats spelt wrong but i'm running short of time!) So this weekend Mum suggested clearing the front garden to make room and turn in into a fruit patch as the raspberries and blueberries are already there. Remember how it looked before??

I can't find an old shot of the front which shows the whole patch but the photos above and below should give some idea.

And this is how it looks now:

It won't be usable for a bit as the are bush/shrub routes which now have RootOut on them, plus we are hoping to move the rose bushes from the right hand end down to where the chard is. But that where the holly and ornamental quince routes are. I just hope the don't mind the move and survive!

Anyway off to the farm whilst the sun is shining!

Wild Flower Crops

When i visited the PYO in Wimbish near Thaxted in Essex (Grace's Farm shop), although their PYO wasn't huge they had planted a couple of fields of wild flower crops. I can't remember all the flowers but i know there was certainly a corn flower in the mix.

The field that caught my eye was through a gap in the hedge, so i'm not sure it was actually anything to do with the fruit farm.

I think it was a field of Borage, which has medicinal uses, culinary uses and if often used in companion planting to protect other crops.

I just loved the 2 blocks of colour side by side.

Essex PYO Farms - 3 Reviews

I love the summer and the growing season, giving love and attention to my little plants which grow into big plants. Then in return for my nurturing they give me back some wonderful produce which has no comparison to that from the supermarket.

After watching Jimmy's Farming Heroes and seeing his visit to the Pea farm in East Anglia i realised why my sugar snaps taste so much sweeter than those bought from a shop, not just a supermarket but markets and farm shops too. The Pea Co-opperative (a group of farmers who all work together for the harvest) have just 2 hours to pick, shell, wash, blanch and freeze their peas to keep the flavour and also the vitamins to a high enough standard. When i buy sugar snaps from a shop, who know how long they've been there yet last night i picked my peas at about 6.30pm, steamed them for literally a minute as i like them very crisp, about 7pm and had finished eating them by 7.30pm! You can get fresher than that.

However with limited space in the garden, which is pushed to the limits as it is, there are certain things i don't have room for and certain crops that you need a fair amount of plants in order to get a decent yield and crop. With soft fruit and sweetcorn being the main 2 of these, this is where PYO farms play a key role in food freshness for me (and potatoes too but i don't know a PYO that does potatoes!)

I'm lucky enough to have a PYO within 10 minutes driving distance from me, and having visited 2 others in essex i've realised how good my local farm really is, so i'll save the best review until last! The other 2 i've visited are both about a 40 minute drive however they had different fruit that i wanted to try. The 3 Farms are Cammas Hall Fruit Farm, Grace's Farm Shop (brief details here) and Lathcoat's Farm.
Lathcoat's - from their website i could see that this farm was fairly large, with a farm shop on the site too. When i eventually found the place, after giving myself a tour of the out skirts of chelmsford (it is easy to find i just forgot to print the map). They had a blackboard by the little hut which had details of what was currently ripe, or too ripe and how much was left and which patch to pick. When i went, in season were strawberries, raspberries, there were a few redcurrants, the gooseberries were extremely ripe (too ripe for my taste), the boysenberries were starting to ripen, as were the blackcurrants and the first line of plum trees were ready and finally the cherries were pretty much finished.

I was looking for the boysenberries, as i hadn't tried them before, but decided to pick up some plums for mum, as i know she loves them, and some strawberries to keep me going on the long journey home.....

After looking at their map, i set off in search and managed to find what i was looking for quite easily. The boysenberries didn't really wow me, but then thats not the farm's fault - that's just my expectations! What i was amazed at thought was the amount of fruit ripe and ready for picking but not only that the amount that was going to waste. There just seemed to be a distinct lack of organisation and timing. All the varieties of strawberries were ripe at the same time and there seemed to be no rules as to where you should specifically pick. The strawberries were on tables which normally means that they don't go as moudly as when they are on the floor because the ripening berries can hang over the sides. However here there were so many ripe strawberries there were more than people could pick. They also didn't appear to have a team of pickers here to pick for the farm to then sell on to shops and businesses.

They also do a rent-a-tree scheme here with 4 apple varieties but even tho they guarentee you a quantity, there's no guarentee over the quality....

Overall verdict - Too much fruit and not enough people to pick it. Prices were reasonable but seeing all the moudly fruit made feel a little sad that there was so much waste.

Grace's Fruit Farm - turns out they only have 4 fruits for PYO here although they sell more in the shop but you can't PYO. Fruits available for PYO are strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and loganberries. I went here to try loganberries, and although i could certainly taste a different flavour (unlike the boysenberries which just tasted like giant blackberries to me), it still didn't capture my tastebuds enough for me to want to specifically get them again.

The canes were on a 2 hillsides with loganberries and blackberries in one field and strawberries and raspberries in another next to a wild flower field (i presume to help with pollination), The rows were a little untidy, with thistles and weeds growing well in between, which made it rather difficult to get to the canes. There also seemed to be large gaps in the canes, especially in the raspberries which seemed to just trail off and fade out towards the end of the rows. The other thing that put me off here was that the strawberries were on the ground which meant a lot of moudly ones with the damp weather we've had - in fact more moudly than ripe i think! The overripe fruit was not just an issue on the strawberries but also the logan berries too.

It made me realise how much easier strawberries on table are to pick and how used to it i have become. The last time i picked from the floor i just have been about 8 when i was closer to the ground myself! Not only that, but i also thought the rows were extremely close together, meaning there was no room to step in between because the strawberries were hanging down into the furrows were you are supposed to step, so unless you pick from the outside row - which of course most people have already done - you are treading on mouldy mush and trying not to squash any decent strawberries.

overall verdict - lack of organisation, more of a side line business to the farm shop which had more nick nacks than food at any rate. not somewhere i'd rush back to.

and now saving the best until last.....

Cammas Hall Fruit Farm

To get to the fruit you have to enter through the barn where they have the tills and scales and also a supply of ready picked fruit in case you don't have the time (or energy) to PYO. There is local apple juice, last year there were local plums when in season and this year they have also had their own homemade jam. Cammas Hall has both fruit and vegetables for PYO, increasing their different produce each year. The only item that is only available ready picked and not PYO is the blueberries which are under cages. The strawberries are divided into section with about 3/4 rows of tables per section, and they normally have one section set for picking at one time, which gives the other sections chance to replenish and means there is little waste - however it can also mean that supply can be low when the weather is sunny or when the conditions mean they aren't ripening as quickly.
The same strategy applies to the raspberries, however there never seems to be a lack of crop with them. There are a couple of rows of blackberries, blackcurrant, half a dozen rows of gooseberries, a field of sweetcorn, half a field of broad beans and this year they have introduced onions and also french beans.

They also pick, pack and sell to other companies in large quantities which means less waste. The pickers start at the far end of the rows but due to the length of the rows the pickers and the public never seem to meet! the staff also keep the grass cut, they cut off the runners and generally keep the farm extremely tidy and neat.

Having visited those other 2 recently, i realize how wonderful cammas hall really is. i can only hope they keep growing and increasing the types of produce they have, however the main field is now full but i'm sure they own more of the land around - maybe i should suggest they introduce PYO beetroot!!