Monthly Archives: December 2015

2015 – The Year In Review

Just some of our homegrown produce from this year.

Just some of what we grew and produced this year. Top left - bottom right: winter squashes, parsnip, kohlrabi, a batch of jam, mushrooms, spiralised courgette ('courgetti'), plums, tomatoes and courgettes, squashes in our pumpkin patch.

This year was our first in our current home with our rather large garden. We moved into this house in May, and although we were late out with many of our crops, we’ve had a very successful growing season. In this post we’ll look back over the year and share where we feel we were successful, and where we were not. Soft Fruits By far our largest and most used soft fruit crop was our plums. We can’t really take much credit for this crop, as all of the trees were already here when we moved in, and we have…

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How to Pickle Runner Beans

Jar of pickled runner beans

A jar of homemade pickled runner beans.

In previous posts we detailed how to freeze runner beans and how to salt runner beans. In this post we look at a third method of runner bean preservation: pickling. How to Pickle Runner Beans Equipment: Large saucepan or preserving pan 1.5 litre jar   Ingredients: 500g runner beans 2.5 pints distilled vinegar Spices for spice bag Method: Choose your spices and make up a spice bag. We used 8 peppercorns, 6 cloves, 5 all spice and a stick of cinnamon. Tie the spice bag to the handle of the saucepan and pour in the vinegar. Bring to the boil…

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Late December Garden Update

Alpine strawberries starting to fruit in December

Strawberries starting to fruit at the end of December

December this year has been very mild. Indeed, the Met Office are reporting that here in England it has been the warmest December since records began in 1910. We have certainly seen that here in our garden and elsewhere. With daytime temperatures between 10 and 14°C, many of our strawberry plants are convinced that it’s spring, as the photo above shows. With no threat of frosts we have left many of our beetroots to be harvested and we are still picking them fresh as and when we require them. Even our dwarf clementine tree still sits in the front garden…

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