Warm Winter Salads

If you’ve started growing your own winter veg you will be rewarded by now with a bountiful crop of salad greens that you can dress up to the nines to make some fantastic winter salads.

I made this creation last weekend by tweaking a recipe from the new book from Lorraine Pascal, Home Cooking Made Easy. I used mostly frill mustard leaves and land cress which grows so fast in my shady garden that I struggle to keep up!

The recipe is very simple. The slight peppery taste of the mustard and cress goes really well with some fried super thin strips of pancetta which are cooked first of all and set aside. I then put some peeled and quartered pears into the hot pan with a drizzle of honey. Cook these for about five mins and then splash over some balsamic vinegar. Serve these on top of the salad leaves, top with the bacon. Meanwhile add some more honey to the hot pan and a spoonful of Dijon mustard. Cook through and pour over your salad. I then added some mozzarella balls though Lorraine used blue cheese (I’m not a fan of stinky cheese!)

This was so delish that even my salad hating husband rated it. I served it with some garlic bread and the opportunity to put my feet up. What more could you want on an autumnal day?!

Winter Veg

I mentioned on twitter that I am embarking on my planting for winter and received a fair number of interested tweets back along the lines of ‘what can I grow?’ and ‘will it really grow in winter?’ Naturally I felt a blog post was in order. Growing in winter is great in many respects. Your beds will otherwise look very dull indeed and my dreaded adversary, the slug, is less prevalent. You also need to water less, obviously, as it’s more rainy.

To keep your beautiful babies warm when the cold weather comes you can use horticultural fleece which is very cheap and if you buy a few meters of it you can cut it to the size of your plant pots of beds. On my tubs I secure it down with clothes pegs on frosty nights and sleep well knowing my plants are well cared for. If I become really obsessive and it is very cold I may bring some pots of plants inside at night. This is the massive advantage of container growing. In the summer you can relocate them to another part of the garden if they are looking a bit sad and perhaps need a touch more sun. In the winter you can move them to warmer spots and even take your winter lettuces inside. I always bring my Mediterranean herbs like marjoram and oregano in for the winter and the basil if it has survived that long (it rarely has!)

So what can you grow in winter? This is my first season of going all out on my winter growing with most of my containers full and I am growing a range of winter lettuces which I will cut small for salads. A good tip for making salads appetizing in colder weather is using a hot dressing. Sounds odd, tastes amazing! Try frying up a shallot in some olive oil and adding a tablespoon full of cider vinegar. This over Mizuna, an excellent winter salad leaf that tastes a bit like rocket, is amazing. I am also growing salad onions, kale, giant red mustards, frill mustards, spinach, corn salad, broad beans and some chilli peppers inside on my window sill. As in the summer I got all my plants as babies from Rocket Gardens.

It is very heartening to be planting in autumn when you can feel the winter drawing in. I had the perfect afternoon yesterday digging around in my garden with a robin bobbing about beside me thinking it was his lucky day as I unearthed lots of worms. I have finally got to the exciting (perhaps I use that word too liberally!) place where my containers are like living ecosystems with worms in them and good healthy soil. This is what you want! If it makes you feel better I achieve this by doing very little at all and letting my garden be a bit wild (much to my neighbours displeasure!) but I like it to be a place where both my gardening efforts and nature (except slugs!!) thrives.

Enjoy your garden this winter!

Potato Harvest

I have just harvested my first ever batch of potatoes. It was so painfully easy that I am convinced absolutely anyone could do it. Look at the bounty just four seed potatoes produced!

  When it comes to gardening I’m an experimenter. Yes, some information is good but I’m convinced the best way to learn is to have a go for yourself. Each garden is unique, as is ever gardener. You may have loads of sun or hardly any, lots of time or be dashing from one place to the next all day long. I have a tiny garden where everything is in containers and I like minimal input and watering for my bounty. With the right, well placed plants such materials and habits can still produce lots of fresh fruit and veg.

This potato growing method below worked for me and it is really simple. Hopefully this will encourage you to try it for yourself and not worry about following lots of rules and regulations. It’ll be fresh new potatoes for dinner in no time!

Getting Started:

All you need is a good sized tub (I used an old recycling box -  about two ft across and 1 and a half ft deep - that I scrubbed, sanded and painted to look less bin-like), some multipurpose compost and some seed potatoes. For my recycling box I used four seed potatoes which seemed adequate room for them and produced a good crop. I planted in May and harvested in late August.

Planting:

When your seed potatoes arrive (I got mine from Rocket Gardens) fill your box half full of compost and place the potatoes in. Cover with about ten centimetres of compost and water well. Within a few days shoots will start appearing above the compost. When this happens cover them completely with another 10cm layer of compost. Continue this process until your box is full. This encourages new potatoes to form all the way up the length of the plant.

Looking after:

My potato plants were fine in a more shady spot and the mass of foliage keeps the soil nice and moist so I found them to be very little work with infrequent watering required. I even managed to turn the whole box over one day (don’t ask!) and they survived that so I’m confident it would be pretty hard to kill them! I left mine to grow for three and a half months and harvested them as the foliage started to yellow and look a bit sad. I had a good harvest from this but some small ones so a couple more weeks wouldn’t hurt I’d say!

All in all I’m chuffed with my potato season! If you have any questions or hints from your own garden feel free to comment below.

My garden’s gone fruity!

I’ve been growing my own food, to varying degrees of success, for the last two years. My garden is living proof that you can grow your own pretty much anywhere as we don’t have much more than a patch of grass and various containers I’ve picked up along the way like this old recycling boxes that I painted Cath Kidston styleee…

I give myself a fairly major helping hand by purchasing most of my plants as babies from Rocket Gardens. It is one of the most exciting days of the year (think Christmas but…muddier) when the box of plants arrive and suddenly the garden springs to life for the season. As much as I love my own home grown produce I live in a one bedroom flat with old sash windows with no window sills so the idea of fashioning some device to keep seed trays inside but still in the sun really doesn’t appeal. I would also be slightly concerned that this would be the act that finally sent my husband over the edge and it would be just me and seedlings from there on out!

I’m particularly fond of any plants I can keep year after year and can often be spotted, like a shameless lunatic, talking to them in the garden as I graze their latest offerings. My herbs got upgraded to my favourite pot last year (an old wooden vintage port box) and have a prime spot just outside the kitchen door. This year I also invested in some Blueberry plants (two, they like company apparently) and look what I picked this morning!

This has inspired me to expand my fruit growing empire and just in time for the Rocket Gardens Summer sale! My new plants will arrive in November to be lovingly tended over the winter months in the hope on bounteous production in the summer next year. If love makes them grow I’m going to be the fruitiest gardener around!

The mighty courgette

As well as eating lots of food I also love growing it. This season has been tricky due to what I call 'The Great Slug Infestation of 2011'. It has been a one woman crusade against what seems to be an army of slugs. I have won the battle of the lettuces but sadly not of the French beans who died valiantly in the early season after being mercilessly munched in the course of one evening.

What has been doing well, and is just started to produce, is my courgette plants. These are really so easy to grow (everything in my garden is because I am a very lazy gardener and just like to leave plants to do their thing!). I always get mine as baby plants because you only need three or four plants to keep you in abundant courgettes all summer. When courgette plants flower they produce these gorgeous orange flowers that remind me of Asiatic lilies which incidentally were the flowers I carried on my wedding day three years ago today!

When you do get a crop of courgettes from your garden they are so easy to use. They are much less watery than the kind you get in the supermarket and have a much stronger flavour. This makes them great for things like courgette fritters where the high water content is a problem and needs to be drained off when using shop bought varieties. I cook my home grown courgettes very simply by frying up some garlic and chilli in a saucepan, adding a tin of tomatoes and letting it simmer away while I fry 1cm cubes of the courgettes in a frying pan until lightly golden brown. I then mix the two together and serve with pasta and some parmesan. Delicious!

One last courgette tip, cut your courgettes off your plants when they are no more than 5 inches long. They are more flavoursome and it is healthier for the plant as if you leave them to grow to shop size the productivity of the plant will be significantly reduced and you may end up with a giant marrow. Fun for you but very sapping for the poor plant!

Happy courgette growing!