Own Grown Gardening

This is the first year I took the plunge growing spaghetti squash. After flowering and dropping loads of immature fruit, one squash on one intrepid vine managed to make it to maturity. Such a thrilling survival story considering the onslaught of slugs! I made some yummy fried fritters from the spaghetti like flesh, but that didn't feel enough. I did not wish to waste any of this precious gem. With this in mind, I made a nutty snack of roasted spaghetti squash seeds, a convenient spin off of roasted pumpkin seeds. Here is the recipe. Ingredients: - Seeds of one spaghetti squash - Enough butter to coat the seeds - Dash of maple syrup - 1/8 tsp of cinnamon powder - Dash of salt Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Then,  separate all the lovely seeds from the squash flesh by feeling through with your fingers. My seeds came away easily, but I still gave them a quick rinse under the tap and dabbed them dry with a kitchen towel. Then, melt a small dollop of butter in the frying pan a...

  I was lucky enough to collect a windfall of medlar from a local tree a couple weeks ago. As you can see, they are an odd looking fruit that, due to there rather unfortunate shape, where known once as the open-arse.  Although not widely known today, in Medieval Europe, it was a prized fruit. So much so that Charlemagne , in 800AD, mandated that all his gardens grew them. The reason it was so loved is because of the season medlar ripen. The fruit are ready to harvest very late, at the end of November and into December. This is a time when little else sweet remains. Bizzarely, when you harvest them from the tree, they are still hard. Not edible at all. The windfall medlar I collected off the ground where the same. Rock hard. To ripen them, I layed them along a windowsill out of direct sunlight for a good couple weeks.  Medlar probably fell out of favour, and into downright obscurity, due to the strange way they ripen. Some liken it to rotting rather than ripening, which ...

  Winter is closing in here in the United Kingdom. I had a couple tomato plants left with some lovely looking fruit on them, but it is just too cold now and the dark nights too long for them to ripen. Despising waste, I harvested the green tomatoes and composted the plants. The question is what to do with all these green tomatoes... The answer has got to be green tomato chutney of course, lovely with cheese and oat cakes. Here is the recipe. A word of warning, the house will smell of vinegar for days.  Ingredients: - 700g Finely Diced Green Tomatoes - 360ml Malt Vinegar - 1/8tsp English Mustard Powder - 200g Demerara Sugar - 3/8tsp Cayenne Pepper Powder - 70g Diced Apples (cored and peeled) - 1/8tps Ground Ginger Powder - 70g Finely Diced Onions - 10g Grated Fresh Ginger Root - 1/8tsp Sea Salt - 70g Saltanas or Rasins Mix all the ingredients together in a saucepan and slowly bring to the boil, stirring frequently. Once boiling, turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and leave ...

Today, I'm focusing on the practical topic of taking semi-hardwood cuttings of soft fruit , specifically gooseberries and black currants. You can do this in the autumn or spring, but I prefer the autumn to give the roots more time to develop before the buds burst and top growth develops for the new season. To ensure you maximise the chance of roots forming and a healthy plant, it is best to take cuttings from this year's growth. Such growth is quite easy to identify when you know what to look for. The bark is lighter in colour and you can see a sort of joint in the wood between this new growth and older growth like in the photo below. I take long cuttings, about 20cm, to ensure they have a good string of buds along their length. About ten is great.   At the very base, it is best to cut right below a bud. This encourages root formation.   If the cuttings still have leaves, gently pull them off by hand as this creates a clean wound.   Removing all but the very top leaves m...