Eat what you grow...it is good for you, good for the planet and needn't be difficult to achieve.

August is all about picking the annual bounty of summer vegetables and, despite the fierce drought and heat we have had recently, provided you have been able to water your vegetable patch, the pickings are rich. I love this time of year - my favourite fruit and vegetables are ready to eat fresh from the garden or to be processed and stored to eat during the winter months.

In this newsletter - what to do with all those tomatoes. What to plant now, a cake made with courgettes, an interesting heirloom onion to try and what we had for lunch today.

First off - water restrictions. If you are not sure how you are affected or what you can and cannot water (and when), you can check your situation by clicking the link below. It is an extremely clunky website, but you will get the general idea:

What to sow 

In August you can continue to sow summer vegetables successionally - i.e. so that you can continue to have a supply of fresh, young leaves, roots etc. So continue sowing lettuce, radishes, beetroot and carrots for summer and early autumn consumption. This is also the last opportunity to sow autumn and winter brassicas - for example kale and chard plus autumn and winter root vegetables such as turnip and purple kohlrabi. Along with successional sowing of the above we will be sowing Cavolo Nero, an Italian black kale which is delicious, especially after the first winter frosts. You just pull off however many leaves you need from the main plant, remove the thick midrib then thinly slice and cook them in a pan with very little water. Add a squish of lemon juice just before serving. It also makes an attractive ornamental plant. We will also be trying a purple kohl rabi (called Delicacy Purple) for the first time. This must also be sown before the end of August or you will have left it too late.

What to harvest

Another important vegetable for us, which we harvest now, is the borlotti bean (known as the coco bean and sold by the sackful in France). They look beautiful in the garden with pink speckled pods which contain pink speckled beans. You can eat them fresh - they make a lovely borlotti hummus with yogurt, garlic, anchovies coriander and lemon juice (this idea came from Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook) and can be used in soups and stews as any other bean, but we also dry them in a basket on the windowsill after podding. They can then be kept all year in a Le Parfait type glass jar. When you want to use them soak them in hot water for a few hours then boil vigorously for about 10 minutes (important, this, as dried beans contain an irritant which you break down by a fast boil). They are great in winter soups and stews and, being a legume, are a source of protein - especially when combined with either nuts/seeds or grains.

In the fruit and nut garden we are still harvesting blackberries and raspberries which have done surprisingly well given the dry weather. We freeze most of the blackberries to have for breakfast throughout the year, but the raspberries rarely make it into any form of storage - they are eaten almost immediately. The plums are over - we had just enough to make one batch of chutney this year - and the figs are starting to ripen although our favourite black figs have mostly shrivelled up before they could ripen. The hazelnuts were all eaten by something before we got to them - all I found were nutshells all over the ground. Note to self - we are not the only ones suffering during this long hot summer.

What to cook

Tips and tricks for coping with a tomato glut

Coping with the tomato glut can take ingenuity. We chop most of our excess tomatoes and then simmer them to form a thick sauce which we do not blend, preferring to leave the bits to add texture. We then bottle them (there are good methods for doing this on line, just MAKE SURE everything is scrupulously clean, cooking and sterilising times are followed to the letter and the cooled jars are firmly sealed at the end of the process). This gives us tomatoes with a real tomato taste all year round and means that we rarely buy tomatoes out of season. You can freeze them if the idea of bottling them gives you the collywobbles.

I have an electric machine for dehydrating fruit and use it each year for tomatoes and figs. You can also use your oven if it is sensitive enough. If sufficiently dried the results can be kept in sterilised Le Parfait type jars in the fridge until next year's harvest. Last year I found that I had over dried the tomatoes so this year I dehydrated them until they were 'mi cuit' and then put them in small sterilised jam jars and topped each jar up with olive oil. I am reliably told you can keep them in a cool cupboard but I am keeping them in a fridge until I open and use each jar in turn.

We also use tomatoes and chillies in a chilli jam - you can read the recipe in the blog article reproduced below:

I make tomato soup in industrial quantities, usually including some combination of courgettes, carrots, basil, lentils, red peppers and/or red onions and freeze it in reusable, stackable plastic boxes.

Finally we make two chutneys each autumn - a plum chutney (no tomatoes are harmed in the making of this chutney) and one called Roland Chutney which includes tomatoes, apples, chillis, ginger and raisins. Recipes for these in a future newsletter.

You might imagine that we are sick to the back teeth of tomatoes after all of this, but in the depths of winter when it is -5C outside there is little I would rather eat than a hot meal made with naturally sweet, home grown tomatoes.

Finally I thought this egg might amuse you. I don't know which of our hens laid it - but it looks as though it was laid at great speed and hit the opposite side of the hen house as it landed. Still tasted eggcellent though.

That is it for this newsletter - thank you for staying with it to the end.

Until next time

Sue

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