the underground farmer’s and craft market

tinyinc in the boudoir

I am home after an incredibly good fun but exhausting day at Marmite Lover’s underground farmer’s and craft market!

None of us will be as tired as kirsten who worked long into last night and from early this morning with little or no help apart from Audrey and Ms Marmite Lover’s daughter.

tinyinc's corner in the living room and then we were moved to the best boudoir

You must go try it as a food and buying experience next time it is staged, it is so unique.

I was there selling my makes but how can you resist the delicious Brownies of Happy Kitchen (thanks Audrey you are a dynamo!), or devine beetroot chutney from House of Chutney (thanks Sarah & Emily), or the yummiest bread I’ve had in ages (Make & Bake).  Cakes to die for by Made by Katie, wonderful alcholic fruity drinks from Hand to Mouth Kitchen and The Deli Station cheese from Joanna’s travels to some intriguing places

Made by Katie

Ali & Sarah of Bristol Vintage did a roaring trade in cake stands and tea sets and provided myself and V (my wonderful friend and helper) with very good conversation and company.  Ali, please let me know if your pooches doggerchief’s don’t fit and I will swap for you!

The Deli Station cheeses

There are lots of budding supper clubs that were selling their wares and it is something I must try after such glowing recommendations.

It is held in a huge ground floor flat in Kilburn with access all areas bar one.  There is a bonfire, a barbeque, any number of different foods (all of which are divine), vintage crockery and handy makes.

It has been a hugely rewarding day and very entertaining.  I have met some incredibly interesting people and have some commissions (be they a tea cosy to hide a rude teapot when mum visits, cushions or customises aprons for Hiromi (well done to her lovely hubby for looking out for her and making the introduction).

I hope people enjoy their tinyinc buys or gifts and I look forward to doing it again if I am lucky enough to be invited back by Ms Marmite Lover.

marrow and ginger jam

The abundance of produce from our novice attempts at growing your own have come with the stress of knowing what to do with the surplus.

We have given quite a lot away which is fine and we are happy to contribute to people’s larder and finding things to create with the rest of the produce is fun but challenging.

huge courgette flowers

One of our unexpected successes have been the courgettes.  We grew about 8 plants from a 99p box kit from Wilko’s that I really didn’t expect would proffer much.  A couple of the platns went into my sister’s garden but have failed from neglect, ours on the other hand have gone mad and are producing courgettes at an alarming rate.

courgettes and flowers

We have been quite tenacious in our harvesting and check them every night.  We go away for a weekend and they go mad!

What do you do with a glut of courgettes, some of which are on the cusp of becoming marrows?

You turn them into jam comes the cry from my clever friend V!!

More specifically, you turn them into marrow and ginger jam with lashings of lemon.  And it is delicious!

Ingredients

3 unwaxed lemons

1.25kg of marrow or courgette (pealed, deseeded and cut into small cubes)

1.25kg of jam sugar (with added pectin)

1 large knob, about 85g, of fresh ginger (peeled and shredded/very finely chopped)

Take zest off all lemons and set aside.  juice lemons and set juice aside.  put left over lemon shells (including the pips) into a muslin bag for later.

lemons

Put courgettes / marrows into your maslin / jam pot with a splash of the lemon juice. cook on a medium heat until the courgettes become clear and soft (I don’t like the lumps so I let it go mushy or mash it).

Stir in sugar, rest of juice, zest, ginger and the muslin bag of bits.

juicing and zesting lemons

Stir and bring to the boil once the sugar is dissolved.

Simmer until jam has reached setting point.

Store into sterilized warmed jam jars.

It is a wonderful lemon curd kind of colour and not disimilar to the wonderful flowers that come before the courgette grows and although the subtleties of the courgette flavour can just be picked out, the ginger makes a star appearance.

If left, the flavour matures and intensifies apparently so I will stash one jar away to use in a few months time.

The freshly made jam is already popular and went down a treat on a big slab of bread and butter.

I hadn’t expected to like it as much as I do but I like courgettes and love ginger and lemon so what is there not to like, really?

#6 still growing our own

courgette flowers

As relative novices at this, we seem to have an abundance of certain things such as rocket and nasturtiums and this will happen with the lettuce, carrots, cabbage and corgettes too.  Staggering the planting of your produce every two weeks has been lost in translation somewhere!!

Not to be daunted by too much produce for our consumption rate, some has gone to grace other people’s supper tables other things like the spare rocket has been turned into rocket pesto for later use.

I recently found a recipe and a few suggestions for the use of the green tops of carrots so as we thin them out and eat them as baby carrots (delicious!!), we are also using the leaves in salad.  We haven’t tried wilting them into pasta or scrambled eggs yet but it works just like doing it with spinach. The flavour is quite different to spinach and it is definitely reminiscent of carrots.

huge courgette flowers

The substantial courgette coverage that we have has also offered enormous flower heads which we will be coating in batter and frying (yum yum) along with lots of baby courgettes for salad and pasta.

courgettes and flowers

We have enough Pak Choi to stir fry until christmas, the strawberry plant has taken on trifid like proportions and although it has produced a limited harvest, the strawberries that we have enjoyed have been very sweet and full of flavour; perfect to liven up a breakfast bowl of cereal.

curly red lettuce

The crispy green lettuces seem to have suffered from a bit of unwanted insect attention but are still edible if chopped into a mixed salad. The curly red ones on the other hand are looking amazing and certainly add colour.

crispy red lettuce

I don’t think we have ever eaten so healthily or so cheaply though JC wonders how cheap it is if you take into account the time spent planting, tending, maintaining, picking and preparing.  Regardless of this, our salads and vegetables have never tasted so good and it most definitely makes an enormous difference when it is straight from the ground to your dinner table.

mini tomatoes

We have learned a lot from our short venture into vegetable growing like how important it is to space things properly, how important it is to spread your harvest over as long a part of the season as possible by staging your sewing and then of course there is the things you begin to understand about the general care.  It will all hopefully contribute to making us more successful and more efficient as we progress.

nasturtiums

One thing that has been unexpected and has proved interesting is our compost.

We’ve been making our own compost for quite a while now in a concerted effort to drive down our rubbish production and having sieved it and stored it, we only got around to using it for the first time this year for our veggies.

Everywhere that we used it, almost without exception, there are mini tomato plants popping up which must be germinating from the tomaotoes that have ended up in our composter.

Free tomato plants too!

#5 one of many reasons to grow your own

The spectacle of rapidly developing vegetables in our garden has become a deep joy for me over a very busy period at work.

My days have been long and my nights restless with thoughts of the many things I need to remember and others that I need to co-ordinate.

My 6am walk with the furry one is a time to collect my thoughts and have an interesting chat with some of my dog walking buddies, but there is a deep relaxation and sense of satisfaction tending and harvesting the provisions we have started to grow in our back garden.

The rocket has gone mad, mad, mad and we have had to give a lot of it away.

The carrots are just fluffy tops at the moment but they hold such sweet promise.

The dwarf beans are still pretty small shoots but then I suppose they are dwarf so I shouldn’t expect too much.

The large but solitary strawberry plant is promising enough fruit to promise at least one dish that could be called a desert.

The spinach is ready to be wilted into a nice paste dish.

The pak choi is my absolute favourite and is so, so pretty.

It really takes me back to my childhood when Dad asked us to hoe the veg garden or my grandad was lovingly tending his vast veg garden after his retirement from farming.

I believe I inspect each plant and leaf more closely for imperfections and possible disease or pest than I spend inspecting myself for the same!  Whilst I don’t quite expect to see signs of pests or disease about my person, I should be taking care of myself a bit better.

BUT, I think this is taking care of myself. It is relaxing, therapeutic, a source of incredibly fresh and nutritional food as well as a very important contribution to the environment while those little plants gobble up CO2 at night.

I am still waging an angry war against snails and slugs but it is a slightly methodical and calm battle now rather than an angry war. I will win, however.

#4 produce in abundance

The vegetables seem to be doing well in the garden helped enormously by the recent combination of sunshine and rain.

We are eating baby leaf salads on a daily basis now and have just planted our second batch to see us through a few more weeks when the earlier stuff runs out.

The strawberries are flowering and showing the first signs of fruit hidden in there so we will have to net those soon to protect from the birds.

The black courgettes that I planted in loo roll cardboards have been planted into the ground along with the cucumbers that I seeded in an egg box and they seem to be doing fine.

We have carrots, herbs, pak choi and brocolli sprouting too and it all looks so tasty. Even the tomatoes have recovered now that they are in bigger pots and are outside.  I can hardly wait.

The most frustrating wait is for the rhubarb and asparagus!  Although they both seems to have taken very well they shouldn’t be harvested in their first year so we must wait for next year. The wait gives the root system a chance to strengthen and allows then to establish themselves.

This time next year Rodney…..

#3 recycling and growing your own vegetables

asparagus ready to flower

You know when you start something and wonder where it will end…….

We set up our raised vegetable box quite a few weeks ago along with a small plastic green house to help with seedlings, pots and 2 old butters sinks.

Not content with that, last weekend, I dug over a flower bed that was struggling under the strangling effects of a variegated grass and spreading sweet woodruff.  My efforts have revealed about 1m x 3m of ground that is going to take a mix of flowers and shrubs as well as even more vegetables than those we are already growing.  JC fancies a leek trench!!!

flowering strawberries

It is quite poor soil that we have never riddled or improved and have, historically, simply stuck shrubs into spaces when we got our hands on them.  It is filled with builder’s rubble from when our flat was formed as part of the conversion of the victorian terraced house it sits in,

In order to improve conditions a little, a healthy portion of turkey manure that we had transported from the farm has been turned into it.  The bags of turkey manure are bought as a recycled by product of turkey farming and the 2 bags that we scrounged off the farm have been festering away at the back of the garden and smell mighty potent.  It seems that you only need 10% of horse manure or other soil improvers as it is that fertile.  I was warned that we might end up with triffids.

lettuce

Our earlier efforts seem to be relatively successful, well stuff is growing. We now, however, have garlic and herbs planted in the new patch (turkey manure and all), cucumber, courgette and brocolli seeds are sitting in various containers in  the greenhouse waiting to sprout before they are planted into the newly fed flower bed.  It is very satisfying

As well as wanting to produce my own food, these tough times and the ‘grow your own’ gardening has made me into an even more committed recycler.  As a result of my planting needs and I have found some new uses for egg boxes, the cardboard tubes from a loo roll and the unused pee pads from when we were house training our wee dog when he was a pup.

loo roll 'pot' on a pee pad

Egg boxes are superb for seedlings, they hold moisture in the cardboard brilliantly and you just cut each section away from the other and plant them straight into the ground.  It means that the roots of your delicate seedlings are not disturbed and the cardboard breaks down as the plant grows and also feeds the soil.  The same applies to the loo roll tubes but these have to have the bottoms snipped and turned over to form a ‘pot’.

The most satisfying recycle of all though has been the training mats that we bought when ‘the furry one’ was a pup and house training was in hand.  He never needed house training particularly so the bulk pack of these matts that we bought have never been used.  We’ve tried giving them away to friends with pups but still seem to have too many taking up valuable storage space in our cupboards.  They now have a new life and are the moisture base of my mini greenhouse shelves that is keeping my seedlings watered!

tomatoes flowering but not looking too happy

Things seem to be thriving and it is very encouraging.  The tomatoes are the least happy of our ‘triffids’ but I have taken them out of the ‘greenhouse’, repotted them and hope the extra food and fresh air will bring them along.  The weather is a bit unpredictable, at the moment so I hope they don’t get nipped.

The more we do, the more confident we are becoming and already I don’t feel quite so ‘scared’ of it all now.  Come on sunshine, we want to start eating our salad!!!!!