To those who sent emails and others that perhaps didn't, my apologies to you if you read into my last weeks blog/email that I was making an opinion re climate change. To put the record straight this was in no way the case, but rather a personal anecdote, that its been hot working outside of late and it is every summer in our nursery... (all those years of creating shelter and laying black weed cloth) and hopefully, a helpful piece of good watering advice which was, after all, the intent!!! 

All the years I have enjoyed working in the horticultural industry (mostly in the area of amenity) I have really only dabbled in growing vegetables, which was mostly the domain of my father when I was still in my youth. So I am no expert in this field, other than my skills in other areas of plants and what I gained when working in chain store garden centre retail. What I do know is that good amounts of compost, a small amount of general fert and an abundance of water means you can grow way more than what you can deal with.

This year I have really given growing food for the table a good crack and found that I have produced, from a relatively small space, enough to feed six families LOL ... perhaps I exaggerate a tad but honestly I can only deal with one lettuce at a time and of course 6 are ready at once.  I have realised that I need to keep planting small numbers every couple of weeks.  Then there are those zucchini that literally grow before your very eyes and one day they are too small and the next well they're nearly a marrow.

I have to boast about my beans too, I planted a couple of rows of dwarf ones and a decent amount of runners and now have beans for Africa.  Hopefully I have a second round coming on now and the egg plants and peppers are just coming into their own.

                    

My home orchard out the back is only on its second year and there is quite an impressive amount of fruit happening there, like  plums and peaches but had one small problem in that I'm not the only one that likes fresh fruit from the tree but rather so does a furry pest that comes out at night. The other night I picked what peaches were there on principle as I had grown them for me! LOL I have since be prompted to investigate our furry friends favourite taste and aniseed bait is now on its way.

I had to bottle the peaches so as to make good use of them. Luckily I had invited Mum for dinner and not only did she help cut the peaches off the stone after I had peeled them but supervised me into the correct amount of cooking. She did ask if I had greased the bands before using them and had to say no but it will be OK! I had to own up to the fact that they were damn hard to get off so next time they will be greased with a bit of butter as per the old girls advice.

If you need a guide to bottle stone fruits and the like then follow this link.... I don't like to use so much sugar and the peaches were reasonably ripe and sweet ...so think that I used 4 cups of sugar to ten cups of water and perhaps could even have used less sugar??

While Mum (Joy, better than old girl) was sitting there waiting for dinner, she spied Rowan Bishops book (which was sitting under the coffee table) called With Relish. Joy was browsing looking at all the relish and sauce recipes and it reminded me to look through to see what I could do with surplus zucchini and cucumber and there are a couple of recipes there that I am going to try.  Its a great book and if you are keen to preserve some of your home grown produce see if you can get a copy, it is well worth it.

Zucchini relish, as I have more every day to use, and Pickled Wasabi Cucumber because when you plant 10 plants you suddenly have quite a few cucumber and there is only so many Greek style salads that one needs.

I decided that you get to an age where you really don't need desserts and a whole lot of bottled fruit in the cupboards like Mum and Dad had, though for them it was cheap puddings for the kids in the day.  I should make more chutneys and sauces to go in meat dishes or to serve on the side with different types of meats cheeses and the like. Nothing wrong with a good relish and sausages and main stream vege for dinner.

Whilst on the subject of home orchards and fruit trees, we need to clear some of this current seasons stock and so have them discounted and imagine that more will be discounted next month when the rains come again. Now is also the time to perhaps order and reserve fruit trees that we don't currently have in stock for this coming July.  The same goes for roses.