Nasturtium Tempura

Nasturtiums are brilliant things. They're easy to grow, they look pretty, they help keeps pests away from vegetable crops, and you can eat both the leaves and flowers! Fantastic!

Nasturtium flowers

I has a go at making tempura for the first time, and my first thought was to try nasturtium flowers stuffed with goats cheese. It turned our to be a very good thought, as it's delicious! The leaves aren't bad as tempura as well, I expect they'd be even better rolled around cheese too though. ;)

The ones I made are gluten free, but if you fancy 'normal' tempura just replace the Doves farm flour with ordinary wheat flour.

Flowers stuffed with cheese, ready to be fried

Here's how I made the stuffed flowers.

Ingredients

• Nasturtium flowers
• Soft goats cheese
• 170g Doves farm gluten free plain flour
• 80g Corn flour
• 120ml Water
• 1 egg
• Sunflower oil (or another oil with a high smoke point) to half fill a deep pan (enough to submerge the flowers)

Method

1. Freshly pick as many nasturtium flowers as you fancy eating.
2. Place a blob (about a teaspoon) of goats cheese in the centre of each flower and fold the petals around to cover the cheese.
3. Mix the flour, corn flour and egg in a bowl, then add the water gradually making a smooth batter.
4. Heat the oil in a deep pan. Test to see if it's hot enough by dropping half a teaspoon of batter into the oil, if it gently sizzles, rises to float on the water and is cooked to become crispy fairly quickly, then the oil is a good temperature.
5. Use a slatted spoon to dip your stuffed flowers into the batter and then quickly, but gently, place into the oil. (Be careful not to splash hot oil on yourself!) Place enough flowers in so they approximately half cover the surface of the oil. (If you place too many in, they can bring down the temperature of the oil too much).
6. After 1-2 minutes the flowers should be cooked and crispy, remove with the slatted spoon and place on some kitchen towel on a plate to soak up the excess oil.
7. Eat whilst freshly cooked, yummy!

Tempura flowers, ready to be consumed!

Tips

Try courgettes, cheese stuffed courgette flowers, sweet potato and carrots as tempura too!

Saving Water

I'll have to apologise for the small number of photos to accompany text this month, my computer is refusing to upload from my camera and my phone thinks it's too full to take more photos (when it really isn't). I'll try to get both problems fixed before the next post.

In the UK we have fairly changeable weather. We're used to having to carry suncream, umbrella and a warm coat, sometimes all for use on the same day! Lately, however, it's just been hot... very hot and very dry.
This causes something of a problem when trying to grow your own food, especially when you've been forced onto a water meter.
We'd been meaning to sort out some rainwater collection for a while, and this last month's weather has made it a higher priority.

Our barn has a lot of holes in it and a few bits of broken guttering, so our first water collection solution was simply a collection of buckets, barrels and plastic boxes dotted around under the barn, not very attractive, but it did help us water all the plants through the first half of the drought.

We also do a number of little things to save water which we find add up, such as;

• Putting the plug in the bath when we have showers, then fill a watering can with the water saved.
• Keeping a watering can by the kitchen sink, so as I wait for the water to flow hot for washing up, I can fill the watering can rather than it going down the drain.
• Using eco products for everything, so even buckets of water used to wash the car and solar panels can be re-used on the plants.

We've been spending a fair bit of time browsing eBay and gumtree and places for a number of items, so we added guttering to our searches to see if we could make a better collection system.
We were in luck! A man was selling a lot as he'd just changed his entire guttering on his house, so for less than £2 we gained about 50m of guttering, lots of downpipes and connectors, bargain!
It was a bit of a mission getting it home, we were a bit nervous as it stuck quite high over the front of the truck. (Oh, I forgot to mention we got a new truck... sooooo useful!) Iain and I kept glancing up at it on the drive back to make sure it was secure..luckily it was. :)

Our new guttering safely home.

Our first guttering project we decided to coincide with re-roofing our power cupboard shed, as this was leaking, which is not a good thing when you have batteries and inverters and things inside. We found an old barrel already converted into a water butt in one of our barns, yay! So 'easy' guttering job 1 done. Workshop is next. The barn roof will be interesting... not quite sure how we get that high as it's taller than our ladder, but I'm sure we'll figure something out.

Iain testing the angle of the new guttering, despite appearances, it does lean to the left into the barrel!

We were pretty good on our timing, as 2 days after fixing the roof and putting up guttering it absolutely poured with rain! Within a few minutes of raining it filled the waterbutt and the barrels and buckets under the barn, hopefully that will be enough to last us through any more approaching hot weather.

The weather has been very harsh on the plants. Unfortunately, I'd planted a lot of seedlings out just before the heat wave and it was too intense for some of them, so we've lost a few crops. The broad beans are still going strong though and the chard is growing rapidly. Some onions bolted in the heat, but they've already got swollen bulbs so we're eating those now and I'll store any that don't try to flower early. The nasturtiums have been going mad, so we've had lots of that in salad and I also tried tempura...that was good! I'll put a recipe in a separate post in case any of you would like to try it too.

Nasturtiums

I'd planted out more radishes which have also started to bolt, although I actually don't mind this. They may not get swollen roots, but they will instead grow pods. Now if you haven't tried radish pods, you really should, they're delicious! They taste like a cross between pea pods and mild radishes, they're fantastic in a stir-fry. You also get more food from the plant than if you ate the root, so I always think it's worth growing some specifically for the pods.

Yet more butternut squash plants are sprouting, I have no idea how many plants I have now, but it's a lot! The first ones I planted out are looking really big and healthy, I don't think it'll be long until they start to fruit. Lets hope there's more rain by then to help them swell nicely for our tummys. :)

Happy Summer everyone, have a great month!

Elderflower Curd

Elderflowers are a fantastic ingredient found in many hedgerows during the Spring/Summer. They're light, refreshing and fragrant echoing the lighter, summery days.

Elderflower is most commonly used in drinks, but it also makes a fantastic alternative to lemon curd. Here's a recipe for how I make it.

Ingredients

• 4 lemons (unwaxed)
• 10-15 heads of elderflower (fewer if large, more if small)
• 400g (14oz) sugar
• 4 eggs
• 100g (3.5oz) butter or sunflower spread

Method

1. Shake elderflower heads gently in water to remove dirt and insects, then snip the flowers of the large green stems (leaving small bits of stem won't matter too much).
2. Place sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and butter, along with the elderflowers, in a pan and stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved.
3. Remove from heat and allow the flowers to steep for 5-10 minutes. Sieve contents, squeezing excess liquid out of the flowers, returning the mixture to the pan. (The flowers can go in your compost, the worms will love it!)
4. Beat the eggs, and whisk into the mixture over a medium heat until it starts to thicken.
5. Pour into sterilised jars, or eat and enjoy!

This recipe makes around 900g, enough for about 3 jars. (Or 2lb curd in total).

Whisking the egg into the mixture over medium heat

Jars filled and ready to be eaten :)

Tips

• It's delicious with pancakes, in sponge cake, spread on crumpets or toasted teacakes...yummy!
• To sterilise jars, you can place the lids in a bowl and cover with boiling water, and bake the jars at a low heat in the oven.
• Make sure you know what an elderflower looks like before you go foraging!

Preserving Nature

One of our general aims of living here on our smallholding is to leave the Earth as we found it, or to leave it in even better condition. We've always been conscious of trying to be environmentally friendly, but sometimes life just gets in the way and you have to take short cuts. Well, we've been putting the extra effort in and are starting a journey of becoming plastic free. This will take some time (we'll have to learn to make our own shampoo, deodorant and toothpaste...), and realistically may not be entirely achievable, but we believe it's important to try.

We're starting buying vegetables (until we grow enough of our own) from our local farm shop where most things are sold loose and as much as possible is locally sourced, which also cuts down the food miles, brilliant. :) Unfortunately, the milk they sell is in plastic bottles, so we'll have to do a bit of hunting to try to find wax cartons somewhere. (which will also be good for starting fires!)

I also buy things like washing liquid, all purpose cleaner, liquid soap and shampoo in large, recycled containers which I then decant into smaller bottles which I re-use. This is certainly better than buying small bottles, and is also cheaper, but does still use plastic, so we need to find alternatives in time. (Any suggestions welcome!)

My brother found a fantastic product, bamboo toothbrushes! I've just bought Iain and I one each as our next brush, lets see how they scrub up... pun entirely intended. ;)

Bamboo toothbrush in eco packaging

Here's a link to the one I bought, although there are many brands around;

http://www.ethicalsuperstore.com/products/environmental-toothbrush/environmental-bamboo-toothbrush---medium/

I've started to do a bit of another sort of preserving nature too with having a go at making wine! Cordials, jams, jelly and chutneys are all things I've done a fair bit of before, but alcohol is one path I haven't ventured down until now. I've started a wine of nettle tops, to make more use of the mass of nettles taking over our land, which I've now siphoned off into a demijohn where it's bubbling away happily!

Nettle tops about to be heated up for wine

Nettle wine fermenting

I've also made a jar of basil pesto and a few things from elderflowers as there are so many beautiful, bountiful blooms about. I've made elderflower cordial, elderflower curd (very yummy in sponge cake or spread on toasted teacakes) and I'm going to have a go at making elderflower champagne. Luckily the champagne only takes a few weeks to ferment, unlike the nettle wine, which we'll have to wait until next year to try.

Basil, washed and ready to become pesto

Finished jar of pesto

It's been a very exciting month for the growing. We've had the first few redcurrants and quite a lot of strawberries, which are always so much tastier when homegrown. :)

Delicious strawberries from our land!

The broad beans are producing lots of pods, which we've been enjoying daily, I also tried the pinched out tops, which are very yummy! The onions are swelling nicely. Herbs are also doing well, I'm going to try drying some rosemary, sage and thyme to use later in the year. If I manage to grow enough mint then I'll freeze some batches of that, but I use so much for tea and rissottos that I'm not sure I'll have enough this year. I've planted some more seeds so next year I should have it taking over a bit more. :)

Broad beans along with a couple of our radishes

I made a realisation recently that I'm never going to be really good at this self-sufficiency thing. I spotted a group of small rabbits outside the front of our house, and instead of thinking 'grr pests' or 'yay dinner', I ran for my binoculars and was busy saying 'aww they're so cute!' as they munched on my chives... I'm not sure how many crops I'll have left to harvest with this attitude! Oh well...

Cheeky squirrel stealing a strawberry

As well as an awful lot of rabbits, and a squirrel that likes strawberries for breakfast, we've had a few other animal visitors along with the regulars. We've got some swallows nesting in our nissen hut, they're doing a great job, along with the bats, of keeping the mosquitos down. I like the dual attack, swallows eating the pests by day, the bats eating them at night, thanks wildlife!
We had a surprising visit by a mute swan which I think must have crash landed in the lane. The poor thing looked very shocked and wouldn't move for a long time, it eventually got up to walk, but was very wobbly. The animal rescue people were called and it'll be well looked after, hopefully soon to be returned to the river.

Visiting swan

Starlings are another daily visitor for us, they're coming in big flocks and devouring all the food I put out, costing a small fortune, but it's very nice having so many birds to look at every day. :)
We have so many nesting birds in our barns, trees and fields. The most unusual bird we've seen is an Asian brown flycatcher, which we're told is very rare to be seen here in the UK, it's currently nesting on the ground in our small field! I'm not very good at bird identification, as it's a small, brown bird, I didn't realise it was anything unusual until my keen twitcher of a neighbour told me. We feel very honoured it chose our field to build it's home. :)

As I'm making so many things at the moment, I thought I might add extra blog posts every now and then of recipes and gardening tips and things. So keep an eye out and there might be extra postings before next month if I get enough time with these busy long days!

Happy Spring everyone!

Bathroom 'Improvements'

The vegetables are growing very nicely, we've harvested a fair few radishes and also a couple of spring onions. I'm also pleased to say that the grass cuttings seem to be working well on the potatoes! Well the plants are growing through it well, whether there are actual potatoes or not I guess we'll have to see with time. :) The bees are loving the broad beans too which is really nice to see!

Very tasty radishes from the field

Potato plants popping up through the grass cuttings

Broad beans blooming with buzzy bees (try saying that quickly...)

During the January sales, we decided to treat ourselves to a new bathroom suite, as our bathroom was pretty outdated and had things like a cracked sink, an unfinished cupboard which had bare concrete with jagged metal poking out and vinyl which only covered part of the floor. Now, (as you may have gathered if you've read previous posts) we've been pretty busy since we moved in so, the suite has been sat in the shed boxed up.

Having finished the minor task of planting hundreds of trees we decided another big project was in order so, this last month, we looked for someone to fit our suite for us. We felt we could manage some bits ourselves, but other bits we wanted professionals as we thought we might make a mess of it... can you guess what's coming?

That's right... The bits the professionals did were an absolute mess... Sigh...

The job was meant to take 3 days, it ended up taking about a month. To be fair to the workers, they did stay and finish until we were happy with the job (well, not horribly upset and instead reached a point of  'That'll do, I can't face any more bathroom disruption') when they could have easily run away half way through, and they were paid a flat fee, not per hour, so they probably made a loss overall. Maybe they'll have learnt something from the experience.

I have to reassure those of you who loved the special feature shower from our original bathroom... that part remains the same! We loved it too much to change it, so we still have a quirky watering can to wash underneath. :)

New bathroom, old shower :)

We've now also built ourselves a cupboard with shelving in the bathroom, which we're quite pleased with. Now we just have touch-ups to do and we'll have a lovely new bathroom!

Bathroom cupboard

This month we also welcome a couple of arrivals to our small holding. A lovely couple, Ruth and Craig, are renting part of our land to grow flowers and possibly some vegetables for themselves. Ruth runs a fantastic flower business where she uses locally sourced, in-season flowers to make the most beautiful arrangements. She's now starting to grow some of her own flowers to reduce their transport miles further, and she's using natural and organic methods to grow them. We love this as a business idea, it fits in perfectly with our morals and aims for ourselves so we're very happy to have them with us! Have a look at her work;

http://www.etheldredafloral.co.uk/

We're very lucky to experience a lot of kindness from both friends and strangers recently. We've been given plants including beans, leeks, raspberries, rhubarb, oregano, damson trees and some flowers for prettification. (Thank you Pop, Dave, Hilary, Shelagh and Dave).

One of our new rhubarb plants

We were given broccoli and eggs by a neighbour and also found a tree-surgeon who will happily deliver us a continual supply of woodchip which we'll share with Ruth for making paths between beds. We're feeling very lucky at the moment!

First use for wood-chip, tidying up our front garden!

It's pretty lovely living here in our new home, but to make you city dwellers feel better about where you live I've composed a list of disadvantages of living in the middle of no-where;

• Terrible internet speeds
• Harder work to stay in touch with people
• No local cinema or anything
• Frequently no mobile phone signal
• Takes a lot longer to pop to the shops for a pint of milk
• Did I mention the frustratingly slow internet?

Spring has Sprung

This last month has brought beautifully warm and sunny weather and it feels like Spring has properly arrived in the UK.
This warm weather has been amazingly lovely but has also created a lot of work around the small-holding. Things have been growing rapidly, whether we want them to or not!

We had a couple of weeks away (terrible timing really, but it was a welcome respite from the tree-planting and mud). When we returned we found the grass in the field had grown so much, we could no longer see the trees we'd trenched...oh dear! There's a lesson somewhere there in doing things sooner rather than later.

With careful exploration we found all the trees (well, hopefully... we might find the odd tree was missed and grows in the middle of the field!) and stoically continued our mission to plant our little woodland. We've now finally, finally finished!!! All 775 trees, or thereabouts, planted successfully! Hooray!!!

Final tree to be planted! (A bit wonky, but maybe that adds character...)

We've finished our orchard, which is now full of knee high nettles again, and finished our nature woodland (also full of nettles) which we'll make into a beautiful habitat for bees, butterflies and all manner of bugs, finished our willow tree tunnel in the middle of the field and planted some trees in our small field too. Now to sit back and watch them grow!

There are so many nettles growing everywhere, I decided to find a use for them (as well as composting them). You can do all sorts of things with nettles, including making tea, eating them and making rope. I've tried the tea, which is pretty good, I'm going to try nettle soup next. I'd love to try making rope, but that does take time which I'm not sure I have, but maybe I'll be lucky and find a spare afternoon. :)

Other things which we're deliberately growing, unlike the grass and nettles, are a variety of vegetables. We have potatoes and broad beans doing very well, onions and spring onions doing nicely and radishes coming up, the first ones I think are just about ready. I decided to try covering the potatoes in mounds of grass cuttings instead of soil as we have too many cuttings for the compost, I've no idea if this will work, but it's an experiment, and I do like experiments!

Potatoes covered in mounds of grass cuttings

I'm very happy that my grape vine which I grew from a seed is also looking lovely and healthy. :)

Grape vine that will need potting on very soon!

Newly planted seeds include tomatoes, mange tout, broccoli, carrots and nasturtiums amongst others. These went in a bit later than I'd have liked as we were away, but it's not too much of a problem, fingers crossed they all grow.

When planting my seeds, I use a lot of various containers. Some are in standard seed trays, but a lot of them I plant in old food packaging to avoid waste. Egg boxes are brilliant, as they compost down as the plant grows and roots can poke through. This means you can start plants off in 'seed trays', but simply tear the sections apart when planting on which avoids disturbing roots.

Egg boxes as seed trays

In the past I used a lot of large plastic bottles to grow leafy veg and tomato vines, as I could tie them to my fence, maximising space in a small garden by growing vertically. This year I don't need to do this as we have space to spare, so I'm using plastic bottles in a different way. I found an idea online to grow plants in bottles complete with their own reservoir of water, I've tried a few to see how they go. Here's a link to the video: https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedniftyoutdoors/videos/208309989645860/
It's a shame I didn't see the video before my holiday or I could have started more of my plants by now!

Bottle planters with reservoir beneath

So a lot more planting ahead of us next month, with a lot of digging still to go, but hopefully slightly less labour intensive than the trees and hopefully with nicer weather to work in!
Happy Spring everyone!

Doris Day

Well this last month has been a bit mad! (...She says as though that's any different from the previous months...)

The solar panels have proved fantastic! We haven't had to run the generator, and the batteries have been topped up to full capacity on most days, even if it doesn't seem sunny. :) A brilliant investment Iain!

I've been steadily planting more trees (yes there are still more to go...) as well as starting on planting vegetables in the field.
We decided to split the big field in half with a line of trees, keeping one half grass, and growing things in the half nearer the house. We've kept aside the willow trees, as in the middle of this tree line we've left a nice big gap where we're starting a willow tree tunnel! At first we thought of making a willow bird hide, but I got too excited at the thought of a tree tunnel so it's become that instead. :) We can always take cuttings in the future to make more willow features, our neighbour mentioned that he'd once made a living willow chair... that might have to happen!

Start of willow tree tunnel (not much like a tunnel yet)

The weather is becoming warmer and the days are becoming longer, which is great for growing things. We've planted out broad beans, which are already sprouting (thanks for your help with that Pop), along with potatoes, onions and cabbages amongst other veg. I've also tried planting kohl rabi this year, which I've never even eaten before, let alone grown, but it looks very intriguing so I thought we could give it a go!

Potatoes in their trench, ready to be covered in a mound of soil

Sprouting broad bean

With the weather warming up, we're not needing fires as often. This is good news for our log requirements, but is making us debate how to make hot water in the summer without having to light a fire. Do we go for a boiler, solar heater, or ground source heat pump? Decisions, decisions...

As well as becoming warmer, the weather has been very windy! We've had a few storms lately, here in the UK. The worst of which has been Doris. She was fierce! I'm very glad my parents were visiting when she hit so we had extra help to baton down the hatches. We all hid inside watching as bits of the barn were bending alarmingly and random debris was flying around. We realised how strong it was when our neighbours shed was blown completely over with a smashing of glass and a big thump. The next victim of the storm were our new solar panels! Poor Iain's face as they lifted into the air like sails and landed on their face, scraping along the ground...eek! As the second set started to lift we ran outside and tried to save them, I lay across them to hold them down, but the wind just lifted me with the panels, it was so scary! As carefully as we could, considering the weather conditions, we lay them on their face too and weighed them down with breeze blocks, also weighing down the other set which had already blown over.

A post storm inspection revealed that although the solar frame had buckled a bit, thankfully the panels and connectors were all working. There were a few scratches on the surface of the panels, but considering the impact they had, that's pretty remarkable! It doesn't seem to have affected their efficiency, so I think we had a lucky escape.
The shed around the wind turbine didn't hold up very well... that's basically now in pieces on the floor, but hey, I guess that's extra firewood! Every cloud has a silver lining and all that.

Destroyed turbine shed

Other than those casualties, we only had a stack of bricks and a few pots blow over, so a bit of soil top-up and they were fine.

So a bit of a scary month, but we survived, and had luck on our side. Fingers crossed for calmer weather now, and sunshine to help the little seeds sprout and grow!