Home Sown And Home Grown And Homemade Fresh Tomato And Onion Soup.

 Yes another soup post.

I helped make some tomato and onion soup for our dinner this morning.

We grew the onions from sets and the tomatoes from seed.

The tomatoes have been reddening on a table in the polytunnel for a couple of weeks.

Regular readers will know we froze a load of ready chopped onions a few weeks ago.  All we do is open a freezer bag and drop the onions in a pan with the tomatoes.

Twenty minutes later we liquified the soup and sat down and ateour fresh soup.  It was lovely.

I lit the front room stove again last night.  We are only burning logs in it at the moment.  Could do with the Irish goverment reducing the carbon fuel taxes in this weeks budget. It's 36 Euros for 40Kg of solid fuel or 18 Euros for a small bag.

Anyone else making soup and are you lighting your stove to keep warm at night?

"I Hated You, I Loved You, Too".

 We watched "Emily" the film about Emily Bronte the other evening.  

It was very enjoyable and certainly a different take on a parson's daughter from the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Patrick Bronte looked like the pictures I have seen of him in Haworth Parsonage.  But wouldn't Reverend Brunty (real name!) still have some of an Irish accent?

Also I don't think Branwell would not have said to Emily:

"Give it some welly!"

Nearly 200 years ago, do you?

I did enjoy the film though.  Emma Mackey is a big Wuthering Heights fan and you can tell this with her brilliant acting performance.

If you have read the novel you will think the film is biographical and Emily lived the passion and tragedy to be able to write the book.  She also posessed vivid imagination writer skills and often walked on the moors to Top Withens to get her inspiration.

Wuthering Heights is the only Bronte book I have read.  It's a love story that goes beyond even death.

It must be over thirty years since I last went to Haworth and retraced the Brontes steps and had a pint or three in the Black Bull where Branwell used to drink.  I walked the five miles to Top Withens and a Japanese young lady walked passed reading Wuthering Heights.  What a wonderful thing to do.

If you are fan of Kate Bush and the Bronte family.  I would watch this film.  The blog title are Kate Bush lyrics from her rock classic hit song:

I would love to have seen Kate Bush.  Have you seen her live?  Have you seen Emily the film?

Carboot Selling Or Not.

 We got up early last Saturday morning to go to a car boot sale some one had seen advertised online.

When we got there the gates were locked.  How strange we thought.  Then we checked the date of the sale and it is not until flipping October!

Last Sunday morning we went to another carboot sale that was open this time!  I emptied the van of plants and bric a brac..

My self propagated plants.

Business was very slow and disheartening.  One lady asked me how much were my Sedums?  I said:

"Two Euros fifty".  

She didn't answer and walked away.

They are at least 4. 50 in the garden centres.  Some are six Euros even!

It was a very disappointing morning.  We only  took 24 Euros.  We wish that we had stayed in bed for the weekend.  

Carbooting is like fishing.  Some days you catch and some days you don't!

I am sure if I had been carbooting in England I would have sold all my plants.  Isn't England a nation of gardeners after all?  Or is it shop keepers?

I don't think we will be carbooting this Sunday.  It's a bad forecast for very heavy rain and flooding.  I guess its the start of gale season?

Fishbox Vegetable Growing.

 

No not the name for a prog rock band.  Although it's not a bad name for one🤔.

I recently moved the fish boxes into the polytunnel to grow vegetables this Autumn and Winter.

I filled them with well rotted fym and compost.  Then I got J to sow some seeds in the fish boxes.

There are carrots, peas and lettuce happily growing in the boxes. 

I put mesh over the lettuces because Socks the cat keeps sleeping on them at night.  Have you got a polytunnel cat?

I often write on here that you don't need to have an allotment or garden to grow your own organic vegetables.  All you need is something to grow them in.  You can grow them anywhere. 

Mother Nature Gardening.

 I went down the boreen to collect some Nasturtiums for the black pig and the rabbits tea.

I noticed peas growing through a old gate lying next to the veg plot.

They must of fell out of last years compost pile or they are garden escapees like the Nasturtiums from the veg plot.

I think this could be an exhibit in the Tate Modern or a show garden at Chelsea Flower Show next year.

Isn't Mother Nature amazing?

Three Packets Of Japanese Onions And Seven Planted Up Raised Beds Later.

 I planted up SEVEN raised beds of my winter onions yesterday.  

The photo is the new raised bed I made last week.  I planted the onions six inches a part to hopefully get bigger onions.  

Our freezer is half full of onions we grew this summer.  They are chopped and sliced and placed in freezer bags and perfect for soup and meals this winter.

Yesterday we made our own leek and potato soup.  It was lovely.

We definitely like our Alliums.

What are you planting and harvesting at the moment?

Shopping For Japanese Onions.

 We had a run out and stopped in The Range and looked for Japanese onion sets for sale.

I managed to buy 3 packets for 8 Euros.  Which was a real bargain.  Other garden centres were charging 5.99 for their winter onions.  

I opened a packet of the onion sets out on to the coffee table and I counted 66 onions sets.  Don't I have an exciting life?

We have 3 packets so we should have at least 189 onions next year.  My new hobby is counting onions.  It's got to be better than knitting?😀

I also bought a packet of Spinach seeds for ninety nine Cents.  I will sow these in a raised bed in the polytunnel.  If we get a glut of it I will feed some to the livestock.  They love organic vegetables like we do.

Japanese or winter onions originate in Japan and hard winters do not trouble the onions.  Its great to see your Japs poking their green stalks through the snow and you know they will come to no harm.

We have been growing Japanese onions over thirty years and they are ready to harvest in June.  We often pick them when they are young and before our summer spring planted onions are ready.

If you have a spare veg bed I would definitely recommend you grow some Japanese onions.  Garlic bulbs can also be planted now:

A plastic bath raised bed planted with Japanese onion sets.  I planted 3 raised beds in total.

I have two more bags to plant.

If you have never grown Japanese winter onions before.  I would definitely recommend you buy some and plant them this Autumn.

Plastic Cloche Bottle Plant Propagation.

 Some of the many plastic bottles I have cut in half and made into cuttings cloches this last month or so.

I will use these over and over again before they go for recycling.

I find them very useful to protect tender vegetable plants and they make very good mini greenhouses for plant cuttings.  They trap the moisture after watering.

Newly rooted shrub plants.

I checked on some of the new cuttings yesterday which I had made over a month ago.

After removing a few weeds from around the cuttings.  I gently tugged on a plant or two.  They didn't move and have obviously rooted.

It is worth lifting up the plant pot and looking for emerging roots coming through the drainage holes.  

Any road or any way.  We have new Hebes, Rugosa roses, Hypericum and Hydrangeas shrubs for the garden for next years garden.

This is one way of repurposing plastic and using it for free and to propagate plants.

Now is a good time to take shrub cuttings and divide perennials if they get regularly watered.

Going off the latest weather forecasts.  They will get plenty of watering next week.  At least we have our polytunnel  to keep dry and even its cover is made of plastic!

I took 20 Hydrangea cuttings this very morn.  I am short of 10 plastic bottles to make plastic plant cloches for them.  

Somebody I know keeps taking them back to Lidl and placing them in their "Return" machine.  This prints out a receipt and you take it to the checkout and they give you 25 Cents for a plastic bottle.  Do they have the machines in Blighty and the states yet?

You get 15 Cents for a undamaged beer can.  However there is no machine facility for glass bottles of pet food tins.  

Anyone taking shrub cuttings at the moment?

Dog Legged Raised Bed Number 23.

Yeah you're right.  Another great name for a Prog band.

I made another raised bed the other morning.

I rescued some old decking planks from under some overgrown nettles.  They now reside in "Scruffy Corner".  Where I dump vegetation to decompose.

Then I made a rectangle with a triangle end.  Yes it's not perfectly square more of a dog leg like a fairway on a golf course, but its the raised bed function rather than being aesthetically pleasing on the eye.  

The pointy shaped raised bed.

I used no nails or screws and sledge hammered kitchen drawer metal sides and timber plank off cuts to hold the sides in place.

Fortunately the new raised bed is next to a big pile of well rotten fym that I keep digging out to top the raised beds in the veg plot and polytunnel.

So it did not take me long to dig and fork and fill up my new raised bed that I made for free or "nowt" or "nuffink" even!

All ready to plant up.

What are you going to plant in September?

I always buy and plant Japanese or Winter onions at this time of year.  I also plant garlic bulbs and see if I can source some Spring cabbage plants.  

I could also sow spinach and more lettuce in the polytunnel.  I might have look for some broad beans to plant now in the tunnel and outside in the raised beds.  

Are you sowing and planting any vegetables?

Using Black Plastic On The Veg Plot.

 

A big sheet of black plastic.

I dismantled my bean wigwam and dug up the rest of the potatoes on Wednesday.

The weathers  been glorious and I have managed to get so much done in the polytunnel and veg plot.

One area where I don't have my plastic raised vegetable beds is a bit weedy after my trip to Blighty.  Years ago I would have cleared the weeds or forked them and used them for a natural green manure.

These days I cadge second hand black plastic used for concrete and I have used pit silage black plastic in the past.  This soon blocks out the light and the vegetation dies off really quick.

This method is very useful if you  take over a overgrown allotment to rent.  You don't have to cover it all.  Just cover what you can and after a few months you will be able to cultivate where the cover was and then move it to the next area.

I have saved myself quite a bit of work.  Some one thinks I have covered it to make another plant area nursery like I covered two lawns with plastic and my perennials and shrubs.  What ever gave them that idea?

Do you put your plot to bed with black plastic? 

 Carboard also works easpecially if you cover the cardboard with compost or well rotted fym.  Just remove any Cellotape first.

You could always dig off the vegetation and compost it or even dig trenches and 'bastard trench' your plot like they did when it was "Dig For Victory".  

I have used all the above methods but I am starting to think black plastic is the easiest way.

Do you use black plastic sheeting in your veg plot?

The Repurposed Plastic Allotment.

 The next two posts are about repurposing  plastic in the veg plot.

Regular readers have seen some of my plastic raised beds before.  Plastic is not going to go away and I intend to use it around the veg plot to save it immediately  going into landfill...? 

During this Irish Indian summer of the last week or so I have been moving some of the baths to the other side of the polytunnel to make a flat area for some new potatoes next Spring.

I counted my plastic old heating oil tanks that we  cut in half and my plastic second hand baths.  There are twenty two up to now and I am still collecting.

There are also six wooden framed raised beds and two old back wheel tractor tyres in the polytunnel.

There are also fish boxes, a old washing machine drum and my grandma's old Belfast sink.  I will show you them on another post.

Now I am into the sixties I am going more for raised beds.  The soil is much deeper, you are not bending or stooping down, two foot six high gardening and you are not having to weed every inch of the veg plot.

Anyone throwing out a plastic bath or cracked plastic oil tank?  I will give them a home and tlc retirement on a West Cork smallholding in the countryside next to the sea.

Like I always say.  You don't need to have a garden or allotment to grow your own veg:

My lovely leeks in a cut down oil heating tank filled with topsoil and fym.  

Beetroot, leeks and swedes.  The tops are a bit dog eared because I feed the leaves to the rabbits, hens and ducks and pigs.

A cut in half IBC tank.  Not very rigid but the leeks are loving it!  They taste good to.

Me and my shadow and four baths I have just emptied, moved and refilled and my Japanese onions will being planted in.

Did I tell you I have twenty plastic repurposed raised beds? They will last me out and I will probably never NEC to replace them like you do with wooden sided raised beds.  Although railway sleepers last years but they are expensive and my plastic raised beds cost me nothing and need no maintenance.

Got any old baths you don't want or heating oil tanks?  Are there builders skips near you?  Any growing treasure?😀

Anyone else use plastic to grow their veg?

Three Big Balls Of Wool From A Carboot Sale Make A Really Cheap Hand Knitted Aran Ladies Jumper.

 Twelve months ago J bought 3 large balls of wool for 3 Euros!

I know.  But you have got to be a spend thrift some times.

Some one said she would knit her self an Aran jumper for next Winter.

On Sunday she finished it and here it is in all it's glory:

Didn't she do well?

Hand knitted  Aran jumpers are very expensive to buy.  Most are machine knit these days.  That is what they told us when we visited Inishmore once.  They are made on the mainland these days.

It was also when we went in Spar and we asked for breakfast rolls.  An American tourist lady piped up to us:

"What's in a breakfast roll?"

I nearly said: "Custard!"

J explained and I sighed.

Once we were in a chip shop/chipper in Dingle ordering: "chips".

Another American lady came in and asked for wet fish.

Any road or any way.

Arran knitted jumpers are very expensive to buy and I think our homemade one is a testament to someone's skill and patience.

I suppose there will be more knitting projects now it is knitting season?

I will keep checking blogs and a firm grip on the TV remote control at night.  I am not watching The Repair Shop again.  I'm more of a Place In The Sun person.  With presenters saying things like: 

"In the kitchen"

And:

" I  would knock this wall down if it was me".

It's going to be a long winter.

Another veg post next.  Just for a change.  Maybe a music video? 

Our First Harvested Leek Of The Year!

                                                      Vegetable  garden art.

 I lifted our first leek on Sunday morning with my trusty garden fork.

This particular specimen like most of our vegetables I grew from seed and planted in a cut down IBC tank filled with topsoil and well rotted fym.

Seeing that it is soup season down here on the Irish Riviera.  We decided to make a pan of leek and potato soup for our din dins:

Yep. Another soup post!

Home grown and home made Leek and Potato soup.

Lovely!

Smallholding French Onion Soup.

Another soup post.

We lit the stove in the front room last night to take away any chill.  We are only burning wood at the moment.  

Solid fuel smokeless coal is very expensive and the carbon taxes don't help. At least living in the countryside next to the sea we can light a fire or stove. 

 It's cheaper to make a pan of homegrown and homemade soup:

 When I was tidying and weeding the polytunnel the other day.  I found and harvested two big plastic buckets of our Snowball white onions:

We grow and eat a lot of the Alliums family in our house.

We bought the onion sets in Spring in Lidl.

Apart from weeding and watering them.  All they have had to feed them is well rotted fym from the rabbits, ponies and pigs.  Muck and magic!

I worked in the veg plot on Saturday morning weeding, repotting and topping up potted shrubs and perennials and I also made some new plants by division.

J made us some French onions from half a Snowball onion, our garlic and some gravy browning to give the soup colour:

Our homegrown and homemade French onion soup.  

I ate (drank) it with four slices of brown bread.  I don't like white bread but some one still buys it.  

There are some members of our household that don't like certain vegetables, onions in particular!  I eat any vegetable.

Anyone else making soup?

Polytunnel Big Tidy Up And Making Soup.

 I gave the polytunnel a big tidy up this week.

We harvested all the tomatoes and I laid the green and yellow ones out on two tables.  I also filled two buckets of green tomatoes.  We gave one bucket to my brother to put in his greenhouse to redden.

Four buckets of green and yellow and orange tomatoes.

I laid some out in the polytunnel.  Some of them kept rolling on to the floor.  They don't mind getting wet when I turn on the hosepipe sprinkler tap.  

Strangely enough.  No birds or four legged  creatures are attacking them.  Perhaps they are colour blind or they don't like tomatoes?  

Any one have any recipes for green toms please?

We also froze a few bags of red tomatoes for our curries and chillies this Autumn and Winter.

We made some red tomato and onion soup.  The only other ingredient was a chicken stock cube and a good dollop of curry powder.

Our un liquidized soup m.  I had four slices of brown bread with mine.

There was a bit of tomatoes residue at the bottom of the soup bowl.  I put this in the pig bucket and they scoffed it all down in one go.

Anyone else getting into soup making season yet?

Harvesting The Purple Rain Potatoes.

 I dug up the Purple Rain potatoes that we grew in my new plastic fym filled cut in half oil heating oil tanks.

They looked muddy and pebble like.

When we washed them and cut them in half.  They looked completely different:

More like beetroots. Not bad taste either.  Although I loved the early Home guard and Britisg Queens this year.  We have been harvesting them since early May and we still have a few meals to dig.

We have also got a glut of tomatoes this year.  

I grew them from seed and potted them on and planted them in the ground in the polytunnel.  I gave this plenty of well rotted fym earlier in the year. 

No liquid bought tomato food.  Just muck and magic and sunshine and well water from the sprinkler.

The tomatoes and potatoes and onions and now the swedes are providing us with Vegetables accompaniments every day.    Next veg to taste will be the leeks.

Organic vegetable growing is all all about muck and magic isn't it?

Have a good weekend!

Transplanting The Leeks Into Their Growing Baths.

 I have been bust emptying plastic fish boxes and emptying baths and filling them with soil and sowing seeds into the polytunnel and planting leeks that I have grown from seed and moved and transplanted into baths outside the polytunnel.  I am always on the look out for free or cheap containers like old plastic heating oil tanks and baths to fill with topsoil and fym and make more raised beds.

I have been making the most of this Indian/Irish Summer and clearing and weeding and preparing for Autumn and Spring crops next year.

Leeks In The Bath. 

Old second hand baths that are made of plastic and I made drainage holes in the baths along with the plug hole.  

Maybe not aesthetically pleasing on the eye? Yet the vegetables don't seem to mind growing in them.  

Like I often write on here.  You don't have to own a garden or rent an allotment to grow your own organic vegetables.

I shovelled many shovels of topsoil and well rotted fym into the baths.

Then I used an old wardrobe hanger pole for a dibber and made wide and six inch deep holes and dropped the leeks in and puddled them in and filled the holes with water from the watering can.  It's back to the mizzle and rain today!

The water washes a bit of soil around the leeks roots.  It will also ensure the holes blanch the white sock and they will gain girth with the thickness of the planting hole.

We ("me!") have planted lots of leeks.  I can't wait for leek and onion soup this Autumn/Winter with homemade/baked soda bread.

Anyone else growing leeks?  

Some More Of The Oxford Places We Saw And Visited..

My last Oxford post left of my trip to Blighty:

We went on a bit of a wild goose chase jumping on an off busses trying the find Wolvercote Cemetery outside of the city.

I noticed Sir Roger Bannister middle distance(four minute mile) and his wife's grave.

My friend is a big follower of Cardinal Newman who founded the Oxford Movement. Cardinal Newman was an Anglican vicar who converted to Roman Catholicism.  Our first visit of the day was to visit The College Of Littlemore.

The sisters kindly showed us around the buildings.

I was interested in the herbaceous borders and pointed out the Michaelmas Daisies.  The parched lawn shows how hot it was.

Cardinal  Newman's Chapel

The college.

Cardinal Newman bust.

Sign to the JRR Tolkein grave.

A yellow Rhododendrons type flower.  Is it a Linodendron?   It flowers around September.  I have seen them in Cornwall many years ago.

Thomas Cranmer and the other Protestant Martyrs were burned alive near the Martyrs' Memorial.  The Book of Common Prayer is said to be the work of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

JRR Tolkien grave.  I have only read The Hobbit.    One of my favourite English Prog Rock bands: 'Marillion ' were named after his book The Silmarillion.

The Oratory church.  This was JRR Tolkien's church where he attended Mass and Gerald Manley Manley Hopkins was a curate here.  We attended the evening mass.  It was different to anything I know but I found it beautiful and very very peaceful.  There are so many fine and some ancient churches in Oxford.

Ornamental fountain.

More homeless sleeping in graveyards.  I have mentioned homeless people three times on this latest visit to Blighty.  

Yet another fabulous ecclesiastical building.

Posh and expensive housing being built near Wolvercote Cemetery.  Google them if you have got plenty of money?

This concludes my series of trips to England posts! It was very tiring but we got to lots of different places and we took in two music festivals and a Chris Isaak concert.  I don't know when I will see a rock band for a long time.  

A vegetable growing post tomorrow!

Two Oxford Pubs With Literary Connections And A Moan..

We passed this pub at least 6 times both walking and by bus.  C S Lewis and JRR Tolkien often met here with The Inklings.  

I featured the pub on here on a previous visit to Oxford and Cropredy in 2022.  They affectionately called it " The Bird and Baby".  It still looks empty and it's shame it's not a pub at the moment.

Immediately across the road is the Lamb and Flag.  

This was open but we didn't visit because we presumed beer prices would be like Bournemouth and they would be charging seven pounds a pint.

I never thought I would reach a time when an ordinary man like myself could not afford to go in a pub and buy a pint or seven.  

Refreshingly there is a chain over in England that lets me charge my phone, gives me a Freedom breakfast for 4.44 and a pint for 2.74.  It begins with W.

Over here rural pubs especially are dropping their shutters like flies.  

5.50 a pint is too dear but they won't drop their prices and the government won't subsidise taxis or provide public transport.  

I buy my beer from the supermarket and my social life is on here most days!

Any road:

 When I got back here to Hibernia I Googled the pub and learned that Jude The Obscure was wrote here by Thomas Hardy.

Some Inspector Morse episodes also were filmed there.

Oh well.  Perhaps I will visit the pub  some other time?

I found this video of the pub on You Tube.

Is it Tish time tonight?  Go on open that can or bottle and the ingredients will say "Tish" to you!