Currants

Just about the entire crop of jewel-like white currants, and a few redcurrants.

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Plum Blossom in the Snow

Although you can’t see it, this photo of blossom on a plum tree was taken during a snow shower yesterday.

This sudden burst of late wintry weather would be called takatalvi (back winter or the return of winter) in Finland, where I lived for a number of years, the difference being that takatalvi means snow in [...]

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Pear Jam

While searching for a recipe for pear jam, Google sent me to the website for the rock group Pearl Jam, so I’m getting my own back here (with apologies to any fans of the band who have no interest in photos of my latest pot of preserves).
There were lots of recipes, mostly for those lucky [...]

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Evening Primrose in the Morning

It was a beautiful morning today and what has become the evening primrose patch is looking lovely amidst the generally overgrown top end of the plot.
I wasn’t sure if these were evening primrose - they seemed too short and stubby - until I read this text and discovered that they are biennial plants, forming ‘rosettes’ [...]

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Pair of Pears

Two pears made it to full size - double last year’s amount. I’m scratching my head for ways to preserve them. Pear butter, perhaps?
Otherwise, nature had it in for me today. Shortly after I arrived, I was bitten on the hand by an ant that had somehow got inside my glove (there’s a big red [...]

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Plums

We picked the plums from one of our three plum trees, harvesting roughly three times as many as we got last year. Nevertheless, the two other trees didn’t produce anything (one did, but all the plums fell off suddenly a few weeks ago).
Here’s another view of this year’s.

We also got more courgettes, the Tondo di [...]

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Courgette Family

More courgettes, including some whoppers: Tondo di Piacenza, Defender and Jemmer. I found a strange small round yellow courgette that had gone rotten inside and wondered whether the Tondo and Jemmer varieties had started cross-polinating! The biggest, toughest courgette I peeled, seeded and grated to make this:

It’s the Chocolate Zucchini Cake from the infamous courgette [...]

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Blackcurrants

As with much of our produce so far this season, the blackcurrant yield has provided quality rather than quantity.
Here were some fat, juicy blackcurrants from earlier this month.

On Wednesday evening, we picked just over 300g of them.

Rather than eat the lot at once in a pudding, we opted for making a large pot of jam.

(OK, [...]

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Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

I’m cheating a bit with this post, I admit, but today I photographed a few exhibits at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show that I’d love to share.

Medwyn Williams’ onions. Check out his leeks! And everything else in this stunning veg display.

McBeans Orchids in Floral Marquee 1 (apologies for the lack of specific info - [...]

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Big Radishes, Small Courgettes

I picked the first courgettes today (Defender and Tondo di Piacenza), small as they are, to try to encourage more growth in the plants, also bringing home a couple of onions and some raspberries (the raspberry canes are growing so vigorously that I struggled to get to them).
A rather large radish to the left of [...]

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