Wednesday morning

Yesterday I went into school with every intention of being home again by four. Ha ha: at quarter to six I rolled in through the front door, quite tired but feeling good. That may sound odd if you could see the state I left my bay in but I actually got a lot of work done. I made and laminated new labels for the trays and pegs and got them blu-tacked on. I made and copied loads of assessment sheets. I got the reading folder ready with all the sheets in, including the daily register and the ongoing record of stages. I moved furniture around and generally got a lot of things sorted out. As a result, I now know exactly what I have to do and have a very useful list for today and tomorrow, after which I should be just about there and ready.

Apart from that I didn't do much at all - even the tomatoes didn't need any care - it was so dull and dreary, the soil was still damp, no watering needed! I do hope we get a bit of warmth and sunshine today, although I'm almost prepared to bet that the weather will turn for the better the moment the children are back in school! That's life.

Photo: I was given a gift last week. My mum has a wonderful paperback book called 'Let's Preserve It'. It really is the best book of its kind I have come across. It's not glossy, no shiny colourful photos, only basic instructions (but complete and understandable), no index because everything is in alphabetical order . . .it's truly excellent. However, being a paperback that was used much, it was falling apart and needed handling with great care. Mum contacted David's Bookshop and they scoured the country for another copy for her, second hand as it's no longer being printed, but had no luck anywhere - I guess people are holding on to their copies. And then, to her great delight, the Times (or maybe it's the Sunday Times) started a reprint of certain classics and this book was one of them. She ordered one for herself and, very kindly, one for me too. So kind, thanks, Mum.

Tuesday morning

I was sort of right about yesterday. It wasn't wet and it wasn't really windy but, my goodness, it was chilly. The sun made an appearance in the morning and must have decided it was far to cold to hang around! Still, we can get along without sunshine so that's just what I did. After doing a weekly shop, I set to and started the preserving session off by sorting out the apples - not that they needed much sorting, they were quite obviously not windfalls as they were in beautiful condition. This takes the pressure off a bit as very few need dealing with straight away.


I then set to, to make the first lot of chutney, spiced apple chutney, which I have made before and which is very good once it has matured. I finely chopped some onion (I used red onion but you don' have to) and scoured my cupboards for 'Christmas fruit' - that is things like dates, prunes, etc. I found some rather hard prunes which I chopped, plus some chopped dates and made up the weight with some raisins. I mixed them with the onion, granulated sugar and the spices (ground coriander, paprika and mixed spice) and left them for a time while I cored and chopped the apples.




Just a word of warning - never chop apples with a new knife! While I was shopping I decided that, as my short knives are getting kind of old and lose their edge quickly now, I would buy a new one. It's lovely, my new knife, very sharp, but my technique is geared to less sharp knives and several times I nicked my fingers, nothing worse, just because I wasn't prepared for such easy cutting. I reckon it's not a blunter knife that is dangerous, it is when you change from an old to a new knife! Anyway, no harm done!
Once the apples were ready I added them and some malt vinegar to the mixture, heated it slowly, stirring until the sugar had dissolved and then just left it to simmer gently for ages and ages.

Chutney is so easy. There's none of the rolling boil, testing for set, watching carefully, etc, that you get with jam making. You just let the whole lot simmer gently on the lowest heat possible, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking, until it is all gooey and thick and when you stir it, the stirring space doesn't immediately fill in with liquid. It's a very kind process. And when it is ready you simply ladle it into the jars that you will have remembered to wash and heat in the oven beforehand (cough, cough) and screw on the lids. And there you are - seven pots of what will become a wonderfully flavoursome mixture to have with cheese, cold meats, hot meats . . . . . . and that's the only downside of chutney. The best chutneys need time to mature. Some of these are intended as Christmas presents and it will be ready by than, but the longer you leave it, the better it gets. I have some 'Christmas chutney' (a Delia recipe) which is several years old now and it is just wonderful!

I also made seven pots of cranberry and apple chutney which turned out a lovely rich, deep red, and will also be Christmas presents. At this rate I won't need to buy much at all! I'm so glad I stocked up with little jars earlier in the holiday.

Monday morning: bank holiday

. . . so, of course, it's going to be wet, windy and cold. It has to be, it's the law. Bank holidays are always so!

Being a teacher, most of the bank holidays fall in times when we are not at school (no complaints there), but there is one that creates a four day week and that's the Mayday bank holiday. Four day weeks are fun - it makes such a difference to the feel of the working week. All the more so when it falls in a half term like the first half of last summer term. Back on Tuesday (Easter bank holiday on the Monday), three days in and a royal wedding, then the following Monday as Mayday off. After that a few full weeks until the end of the half term when it was report writing day. Such a short half term it was. We're not likely to get another one like that for quite a while, thank goodness.

Anyway, it's August bank holiday today. Blocked roads, M25 gridlocked, everyone heading for the coast? Such fun! Well, maybe, but not me. I will be dealing with apples, hundreds of apples! Well, OK, about twenty or thirty of them. Some will make seedless blackberry and apple jam (for gifts as well as for me), some I will stew and freeze, some will be chopped briefly stewed and frozen ready for spiced apple chutney and some will be frozen in wedges for whatever.

As described in my last blog, the potatoes were open freezing all night and I popped out earlier on to bag them up. There's now three bags of them, ready for basting in hot oil and roasting. It makes such a difference not having to deal with endless potatoes when the family is all here for the Big Dinner. We'll be doing the same with DD's parsnips when they are pulled (which won't be yet) and maybe with the carrots too, if I can get around to it.

Right, must get going. I want to get a loaf on, dig out my recipes, make a shopping list and start the leek and potato soup. And there's a pile of washing that needs seeing to as well, so heigh ho, heigh, it's off to work I go!

Sunday evening

. . . and it's been quite a busy day one way and another. This afternoon I drove over to Billericay to pick up a couple of bags of cooking apples from a friend's garden (many thanks, J, they look wonderful). When I got home, DD and DG had arrived with rather a lot of King Edwards spuds that they had just dug up. These are going to be our Christmas potatoes (sorry) so we spent the next hour or so peeling, par boiling, laying out on trays and dredging with flour before allowing to cool. They've just gone into the freezer to open freeze before being bagged up tomorrow. I have, of course, a pot of potato-ey water now, so tomorrow I shall get some leeks and make some leek and potato soup (I have a few potatoes in the veg box) - the water smells wonderful, so the soup should be jolly good.

The feedback on the fried green tomatoes is - OK, but nothing to rave about and very calorific with all the egg and cornflour-ing and then frying. I have to think again on this one. However, perhaps the green picking has motivated the plants because there were enough red tomatoes to pick to have some for tea and very flavoursome they were too.

Tomorrow I will have to deal with a lot of apples! It's all go, isn't it?

Sunday

Where's the week gone? I seem to be asking myself that an awful lot at the moment. Where's the day gone, the week, the holiday - the year? Time is flashing past at a rate that seems alarming at times. It's nothing to do with being busy: after all, for the last five weeks I've been seriously un-busy and it doesn't seem to have slowed down in the slightest. I could, of course, put it down to increasing old age but I'm really not ready to admit to that yet, so it's got to be happiness and contentment that is the culprit. Days slipping smoothly by like pearls on a silken string with no knots or gnarls to slow their passage. Yes, as I've said before, I'm very fortunate.

Yesterday was a pleasant day. George came in the morning and focused on the front. There's something about getting rid of an old plant that is somewhat sad, even when it it old, past its best and dying off anyway. When I bought this house it had a rather straggly honeysuckle trained around the kitchen window. It was rather battered and the trellis supports were coming off so I cut it back to below the window and it flourished for many-a-year. Recently, it's been showing signs of a health struggle and over the summer it seems to have mostly died off. Some of the leaves turned brown and crisp and it was sending out no new growth. Time's up. So yesterday George cut it right back to bare stump and in the next few days I shall tackle getting up some of the roots. I think I have found the place for the three Japanese anemones that are going to the front. If I can work up the soil I think it will be the perfect spot and they should grow flowers that can be seen from inside, which would be nice.

I also made a first decision about a 'portable' raised bed. From Greenfingers,I have ordered a woven willow 'framework' that has a lining box inside. Not too big, so it will give me the opportunity to test the waters, see if I can keep it going with easy grow veg such as lettuce, carrots and radishes. It can't be long before these 'home assembly' beds are available in garden centres. There's loads online but I've not seen any in the shops which seem to go for the 'buy your wood and work it out yourself' type of thing, basically as a means of raising existing soil areas a little and dealing with difficult soil. I have the time, I'm not inclined to rush, so we will see!

I do seem to be going on an awful lot about garden stuff, as a friend pointed out yesterday. Sorry, gentle readers, it will all change once the term starts, I am, sure!

And finally, I was whinging about the green tomatoes (whinge - moi?) and someone said that they're rather nice fried with bacon for brekkie. I read somewhere else that if the tomatoes are tightly clustered, they should be thinned to give more growing space. I've put the two together and we will see. I don't have bacon (unless there's a bit in the freezer, I can't remember) but I do have a few sausages and some ham. Watch this space . . .

Clouds

Rows and rows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feathered canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way . . .

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.
From up and down and still, somehow,
It's clouds illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds
At all.

Joni Mitchell

Saturday

I managed to spend some money yesterday. After looking up about raised planter bed thingies, I had a little ponder about the gap left by the severe pruning of the bush that thought it was a tree (Black Beauty) and the space next to it that had the sunflowers earlier. It does look very bleak and bare there right now.

I gather Japanese anemones like shady places (which that bed certainly is) and they are beautiful and have some height, not to mention autumn flowering. I looked online and found an offer of six plants for not very much money, not baby plants either, two white, two pale pink and two deep pink, so I ordered them and, hopefully, they will come at some point next week when I can get them into the bed. I'm preparing the soil by digging in some 'well rotted manure', as it says on the bag! Three will go where the sunflowers were, so I can see them from the window and the other three will go out at the front where they will provide some much needed height at points along the narrow strip in front of the house. Around the temporary (I hope) stump, I wanted temporary stuff so off I pootled to B&Q and Wyvale and got a couple of chrysanthemums and a box of six pansies which have filled the gap nicely. I'm hoping that Black Beauty will have sent out shoots to cover that area by next spring/summer, fingers crossed. I managed to destroy one pansy while trying to get it out of the polystyrene container, three went in the space in the bed and the remaining two ended up under the apple tree.

While I was there I also bought a few packs of bulbs. Every year I mean to plant out some bulbs in a systematic way and every year I don't. Ridiculous. So perhaps this will be the year I do. I have random snowdrops and hyacinths that were pot gifts planted out afterwards, but not a lot else.

While in B&Q I noticed some plastic paint - that is paint that will go on plastic surfaces. I have a couple of manky low plastic tables that have been outside so long that they are grey and really yucky. If I could paint them, it would give them a new lease of life and be nice to stand containers on. So I got some paint! Maybe I will, maybe I won't . . . :0)

I also looked all over for some 'vertical blind slat hanger replacements' - those little plastic things that go in the top of vertical blinds and fix the strip to the bracket. Do you think I could find anywhere locally that sold them? So I came home, Googled, and within ten minutes had located and bought a pack of them. I reckon I spent more on the petrol looking around locally than I had to spend on the postage and certainly would have spent more on public transport, which is why so many people now don't even try to use local shops - they just don't have the necessary, it's a lot more hassle and it actually costs more by the time you've taken travelling into account. A lot of people have vertical blinds, they must get damaged from time to time, so it's not good that a local specialist curtain and blind shop doesn't stock replacement bits or be able to get order some in when needed.

My readers may remember that earlier on in the year I took some rosemary cuttings. The reason was that my rosemary bush is getting a bit on the large side for where it is and will need to be cut back or replaced in the next few years. Knowing my luck with cutting rosemary back (I killed one several years ago doing just that) I decided to take some cuttings so I have a replacement. I ended up with twelve cutting which I duly potted with a hope and a prayer. Amazingly, all survived, Mum and Dad took two and the others have been growing healthily all summer. Well, I don't need ten, do I, so I posted a message on a local free re-cycling group on Facebook and within a couple of hours all six on offer had been snapped up. Three were picked up yesterday and three are due to be picked up today. That leaves four - one for my friend S, whenever she manages to come, one for the front, I think, and two to go in containers.

I think I must have very late developing green fingers!