Harvesting the chillis
All of our summer crops are coming to an end, so today it was time to harvest the chillis. We had grown six plants from seed, and planted them back in April. They spent late spring in the kitchen, and once we’d pricked them out into full-size pots we transferred them to the greenhouse where they stayed all summer.
Rich’s mum took one home with her, leaving us with five plants, from which we gathered the harvest above.
I was going to make chilli oil with them, but that’s actually quite a lot of work and it doesn’t last all that long. Plus, if you don’t do it right you risk salmonella as the spores in the chillis can actually thrive in the oil if you don’t manage to kill them off by boiling it all up in a frying pan first. And the idea of carrying around a pan full of scalding oil is frankly terrifying.
So instead we’ve laid them out on a plate with a piece of greaseproof lining beneath them and slipped them into the freezer. As we use them through the winter we’ll defrost them individually under the warm tap and drop them into whatever we’re cooking.
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The strawberries have been our big success story this summer. Surprising, really, as they have been a dead loss in years gone by.
May saw a slight fall in the number of eggs laid by our three hens. That was unexpected, but there are some possible explanations.
A flapjack in essence, this is very quick and easy to bake and uses store cupboard ingredients, so you can keep stocked up on everything you need and make a new batch whenever you want some.
The apricot tree is looking distinctly sorry for itself and now, with a gust of wind, it’s lost two of its only four fruits.
We had a very good demonstration of why it’s worth growing your own this week, even when vegetables are so cheap in the shops at the moment. Here it is.
