It’s rained heavily for the last few days here, so a clear sky today was a great chance to get out and tend to various veg plants in the garden.
I’ve grown three varieties this year: Tomatoberry, Crimson Plum and Aviditas: about twelve plants in total but lately several individual plants have been showing darkened leaf edges and stems, classic signs of early blight.
So after stripping any useful fruit from those plants I pulled them out and disposed of them, interrupted only by an alarming amount of blood when I cut a finger on my brand new and indescribably sharp secateurs.
I’ll give the remaining plants more time to ripen their fruit, which should mean a small daily harvest for a good while yet as I like to munch a few of these delicious toms each day.
That left a nice haul of 1.5 kilos, which had ‘roasted tomato passata’ written all over them. Cleaned, chopped and tossed in a nice olive oil from a wonderful Greek/Cypriot delicatessen, they even looked tasty before cooking
I then crushed in half a dozen garlic cloves still left from this spring’s harvest (at which point I learned a memorable lesson about not getting raw garlic juice into a cut..), along with some oregano that I’d lifted from the herb bed and dried a few weeks back.
Topped off with salt and pepper and they went in the oven for an hour. A quick encounter with the stick blender and there was a delicious sauce, going into the freezer for now but will be great with pasta another day.
Elsewhere the Castandel French beans keep cropping well. As I mentioned last time it’s been an interesting option to let some of them grow to the point of being able to shell the internal seeds to use as pulses. It’s not their intended use, but they are delicious and made a tasty side recently when cooked like any other pulse.
In some of the other raised beds there are still crops to be had, but they’re needing a bit of maintenance. The beetroots are being crowded out by nuisance chickweed, while the courgettes need some withered leaves removing to let the last few fruits develop.
I managed to attend to both before the rain started again!
Thanks for reading. See you next time 😊
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