Welsh Harvest Monday - Sept 27

Another harvest from sunny Wales: three big marrows, apples, three varieties of beans and some carrots.

Capsicums, grown in the greenhouse.
 

 And potatoes, dug up by LittleFB (can you spot the ones that got enthusatically poked with the digging fork?).

I wanted to make a cake with the marrow so I used the zucchini bread recipe that I've made before and it turned out just as well.  We also whipped up a batch of Marrow Provencal - simple and delicious.


Marrow Provençal

1 large onion, chopped
1 medium marrow (large zucchini), de-seeded and cut into 3cm cubes
1 green pepper (capsicum) cut into 2 cm chunks
1 tin chopped tomatoes
50g grated cheddar cheese
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

In an oven proof pan sauté the marrow cubes in the oil until starting to brown.  Add the onion and green pepper and cook until soft. Add the tomatoes and seasoning, cover with grated cheese, cover and cook for 45 mins in a 180C oven until the sauce is reduced and the cheese is browned.

A few pretty photos from the Welsh garden

Greenhouse grapes

Granny Smith apples

Lovely flowers - not sure of the variety

Beets and parsnips

Borage

Harvest Monday - Sept 20

Sea snails on the shore

A different hemisphere harvest today, from my Mum and Dad's garden in Swansea, Wales where me and LittleFB are spending the next few weeks. We had such a lovely day today.  We took a trip down to the Mumbles where I used to spend time as a teenager and stopped at Joe's Ice Cream Parlour, which sells the best ice cream I have ever tasted (I might be biased because I worked there as a teenager, and tasting the ice cream was like stepping back in time).  Afterwards we took a walk along the promenade and LittleFB spent a happy time beach-combing with his Grandad. 

When we got back to the house I took a wander down my parents' extremely large garden - a large part of which is given over to veggies and fruit trees. It's autumn now so most of the veggies are coming to the end but there is plenty growing to make some delicious dinners.  Feeling right at home, I gathered beets, leeks as well as some herbs: thyme, chives and oregano  The beets we ate tonight for dinner - baked until tender then cut into cubes and left to cool slightly before being topped with crumbled feta, some thyme and a splash of olive oil, lemon juice and a few twists of black pepper. Yummy. Also on the dinner table were some of Dad's home-grown potatoes which I roasted with olive oil, lemon and rosemary, and a veggie lasagna which included home-grown peppers and beans. It was all delicious, and a perfect way to end such an enjoyable day.

Eggs galore!

After the chicken dramas last week, the girls are now settled in separate places and seem much happier.  So happy in fact that they have been laying like crazy.  The egg tally for the week looked like this:

Monday: 4
Tuesday: 5
Wednesday: 5
Thursday: 4
Friday: 5
Saturday: 6

We'd already given some away but yesterday morning there were still 27 eggs in the fridge.  Time to do some baking.  A few hours, and a lot of eggs later I had made:  lemon curd, lemon curd ice cream, citrus and poppy seed muffins, fresh pasta and meringues.  Phew!    Unfortunately during the organising frenzy that has gone on here these past few weeks, I seem to have mislaid my camera charger, so there are no photos of this baking eggstravaganza (sorry!).  But, I can promise that it all looks and tastes yummy.

Lemon curd ice-cream with meringues

Ice cream
1 cup lemon curd. I made my from scratch using this recipe from Down to Earth but you could use a good bought version.
300 mls real cream, whipped to soft peaks
150 mls greek yoghurt
3 meringues, crushed

Mix the lemon curd, cream and yoghurt together and put into the freezer for a hour or so until the mixture starts to freeze around the edges.  Remove and beat with a mixer until smooth.  Repeat this step 3 times and lastly fold through the crushed meringues before returning to the freezer.

There's a rabbit in my bathroom...

...two chickens in the rabbit hutch and four chickens in the coop.  What's going on? I hear you ask.  Well, it all started like this.  MMSTL is now living with us (yay!) so his chooks needed somewhere to stay too.  I knew that there would be some trouble with the move. Chickens do not take kindly to having their social order messed with and there is generally some argy-bargy when new birds are introduced to an established flock, hence the phrase "pecking order".  In this case, we were introducing his four- Yoko, Spike, Queenie and Trouble to my existing two - Dora and Marlin.  The first few days were OK; there was a bit of squawking and chasing about but they all seemed to find a place on the perch at bed time.  The new girls learnt how to use the chicken feeder, and my girls were still laying.

Yoko

.

Queenie

Trouble

Spike

By day three though, things had deteriorated and some real bullying behaviour started.  My girls spent most of the time huddled in a corner and didn't seem to be getting enough food.  Then, the other morning I went to feed them and Dora had blood on the top of her head; she had obviously been badly pecked.  Realising that this couldn't go on, MMSTL and I figured that we had to do something. So, the rabbit took up temporary residence in the bathroom and Dora and Marlin spent the day in the rabbit hutch with a lawn mower catcher as their new nesting box while we constructed a separate new coop and run. It's a bit of a dodgy structure but at least it does the job of keeping them safe and away from the big bullies!  Now all the chickens seem much happier and are laying. up to 5 eggs a day!   We are not sure whether we will integrate them at all now and we might just find a new home for Dora and Marlin if we can.  Has anyone else had issues with introducing new chickens?