Tuesday 28 May 2013

Spicy sauces on the horizon

It's starting to look like there will be a definite glut of tomatoes, chillies, garlic and coriander this year.

So I've been looking at different storage options. Freezing or drying are always good options for chillies, and garlic stores well. But what about the tomatoes? Sure you can freeze some, and most people make pasta sauces, but we don't really eat that much Italian food, or tomato-based pasta sauces.

What we do however eat mountains of is spicy food. Not necessarily country-specific, although we eat a lot of Asian cuisine. Basically anything with chillies in it is popular in our house. 

Today I started looking for spicy sauce recipes with these ingredients and came across this wonderful website & blog:

...can't wait for this lot to grow so I can get saucing...

Chillies - Ají Colorado, Trinidad Scorpion, Ají Límon, Padron

Tomatoes - Yellow Pear, Flavorino, Super Sweet, Tigrella, Black Cherry, Green Zebra

Garlic - Cledor

Coriander - bought in bulk from Olssons
And although there isn't a single flower on any of the toms yet, things are looking promising on the chilli front...
Ají Límon

Padron

Jalastar
 :)






Thursday 16 May 2013

Red onions - starting off indoors

I can't remember where I read it, but something/someone inspired me to start off red onion sets indoors for an early harvest. And it seems to have worked.

3 February - planted half of the sets in seed compost/ half in
seed compost mixed with quality potting compost.

17 March - growing nicely, time to find them a new
home - the currently idle greenhouse perhaps...

12 May - time for the chillies and tomatoes to move into the greenhouse,
half of the onions have been relocated (again, poor things) into the kitchen garden.

16 May - all in their final resting place and settling in nicely.

Sunday 12 May 2013

Waking up the kitchen garden

Here are some progress photos of how it's slowly coming back to life.

10th January 





 16th April


 27th April



28th April



 29th April


 12th May