What we’re eating now: mid October

Fresh   We have just eaten the first of the leeks for this year, and I have just harvested the last of the late lettuce. The brassica beds are doing well: we have eaten some kale this week and there are a few savoy cabbages which have hearted up well and are ready to use. There are a couple of rows of leaf beet and swiss chard which I have been using in stir fries. The last of the year’s tomatoes are ripening in a tray in the greenhouse.

 Tomatoes ripening

Some sugarloaf chicory plants are starting to heart up. I have taken the odd one early to use as a cooked vegetable (braised in butter). I managed to find a handful of raspberries on the autumn canes yesterday. This will be the last, as we have quite a frost last night.

Freezer  Now that the fresh beans have finished, we have started eating them from the freezer. We have broad beans, runners and 3 different kind of french beans: (purple podded and yellow waxpods, from dwarf plants, and green pencil pods from climbing plants). We are starting to use frozen calabrese and cauliflower, from the early summer crops.  There are also a couple of bags of parsnip chunks; I am being quite frugal with these, as this year’s crop was a failure.

Store   There are still a dozen or so squashes and pumpkins sitting on the conservatory window ledge.  There are couple of sacks of potatoes in the shed, though we are still using up the ones we found to be damaged at harvest.  There are also onion strings and some beetroot  and carrots in sand. (There are still a lot of carrot pieces in the bottom of the fridge which need to be used first - remnants after the carrot fly damage was cut away). 

What else is growing?

There is a bed of brussel sprouts which are starting to bud up and should be ready in a few weeks. There are a few sprouting broccoli plants, which, if they survive the winter (last year’s didn’t!) will provide welcome veg in the hunger gap next spring. I have a few spring caulis and red cabbages growing happilly, though these were bought seedlings and I can only hope that they were suitable varieties for the time of year.

I have a few hardy lettuce plants growing in a spare corner of one of the brassica beds, and also several rows of them in the greenhouse. There are also some hardy salad onions growing at the end of the leek bed.

As mentioned, there are some sugarloaf chicory plants which are starting to heart up and should provide us with salads in a few weeks. There are also some forcing chicory plants, which will need to be dug up next month, and then stored in sand before forcing for winter salads. 

There is a bed of autumn planted onion sets, which are just starting to show. These were sowed late last month. There is also a bed of broad beans, and half a bed of garlic, both sown/planted last week, which haven’t started to show yet.

Hens

We have just bought some young hens to replace the old girls, which we gave to a neighbour who is just starting out. These new birds were hatched last spring and should be laying right through the first autumn. Unfortunately they obviously didn’t read the manual, and have slowed right up. We are getting on average just 1 or 2 eggs a day from our 6 ladies.  They don’t seem to be moulting, they are just not laying very well.  The only reassurance is that everyone else who bought hens from that batch has the same problem, so it’s not something I’m doing wrong.

Poor Mildred!

Oh yes, and one of them, let’s call her Mildred, has gone broody. I have tried in my best hennish to explain that, as we don’t have a rooster, any egg she sits on is not going to hatch, so she is never going to be a mother, so she may as well resign herself to being an old maid and get outside scratching and pecking with the others. She doesn’t seem to understand (maybe I am speaking the wrong dialect) and still trills unhappily when I lift her backside up and retrieve her eggs.

Poor Mildred!