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Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

We’ve been lucky enough to discover a patch of chanterelle mushrooms, quite close to home.

So today we foraged up this harvest, to go with some meatballs for dinner.

Here in Sweden, chanterelle harvesting spots are a closely guarded secret, so obviously I can’t tell you where we found them.  But just look at their golden loveliness:

Remember all those carrots?

About 9kg of carrot "thinnings"

We peeled, chopped, blanched and froze a couple of kilos last night, and I also decided to try out this recipe for carrot bread.  And it’s a winner!

Carrot bread

Such a winner in fact that I have made more carrot puree and stashed it in the freezer, so I can make some more loaves.  I left out the peanuts, and used dinkel (spelt) flour and it has turned out fluffy and moist.  It’s not super carroty in flavour, and works with both sweet and savoury.   I did mine in a large loaf tin instead of two flat shaped loaves (since we tend to eat a lot of our bread toasted, this shape just works out better).

We went out for a foraging walk in the weekend, around our neighbourhood, and came home with 1.25k of ripe blackberries which I promptly made into another batch of jam.

Wild blackberry jam

We also found a patch of chanterelle mushrooms in one of our nearby bits of forest, which we brought home and fried for our lunch.

I harvested most of our beans, since they are so productive that we can’t keep up with eating them all. So I picked 1.2kg and chopped, blanched and froze them.

1.2kg of green beans

Then we did a big carrot harvest.  We’ve been eating our carrots for a while, but they were getting so bushy that they were smothering the onions they are intercropped with.  So, we did a little “thinning”.

About 9kg of carrot thinnings

Now we have to do something with them all …

And finally on Sunday we were invited to pick black currants at L’s mum’s house.  I didn’t photograph or weigh them, but we guess there was about 4kg of currants.  Some have been made into cordial, some are dehydrating, and some are in the fridge, waiting patiently to be made into jam.

I did some weeding between the remaining veges, and they were looking lovely, so I took a snap.

Happy veges

You can see our parsnips and leeks in the foreground, and possibly make out some kale, celery, one lonely broccoli and one lonely red cabbage in the background.

It’s been quite a while since I blogged.  Anneli had a cold for the most part of the last 2 weeks, so was kept out of daycare.  Luckily she has a grandmother close by who really enjoys her company, so we got lots of baby sitting.   We also spent a weekend up in Falun, which was a great way to switch off for a couple of days.

On the way home from Falun, we stopped at a beekeeping store in Töreboda.  We are both keen to get a beehive, but it won’t be this year because we don’t really have the spare cash to get all the equipment.  Instead we bought some bees wax, and I had a go at making some hand cream.

Home made hand cream

I followed this recipe, and added a drop of lavender essential oil.  It feels quite oily for a few minutes after using it, but otherwise I love it.  Most of all I love that it has a really simple ingredient list and I know what all the ingredients are – no mysterious chemicals at all.

Linus then had a go at making a lip balm:

Home made lip balm

with bees wax and honey, and this is similarly lovely.  He’s also rolled some candles from the wax sheets.

In other crafty news, I finished a pair of socks last month, the “regurgitated parrot socks”.  I called them that because I think that if you chewed on a parrot for a while, and then spat it out, it would look at least a little bit like this yarn.

Regurgitated parrot socks

I really enjoyed the entrelac knitting though, which was something I hadn’t tried before.  These socks have a project page here.  I recently went through my archive of sewing and knitting projects, and started creating a project page for each one – you can see these pages by clicking on the “Craft” tab above.

Finally, things are coming along in the gardening department.  We are often spending our evenings digging up rocks in order to make the vegetable patches larger, and we have an army of baby plants gathering their strength inside in preparation for moving outdoors soon.

Plant babies

There are tomatoes, pumpkins, broccolli, peas, cabbages, green kale, and more tomatoes.

Here’s the final installment in my 2009 roundups, and then I can start telling you all about the snow!

Our move to Sweden came with much excitement about starting a real vegetable garden. The tiny London garden had provided us with bountiful tomatos and lavender, a few cabbages and a handfull of strawberries. That had kicked off an interest and we were really excited to start playing around with our 1400 square metres and see what we could grow.

First, there was much digging to be done. Linus spent many days digging rocks out of the ground and creating 3 vegetable beds. Because of the removal of so much rock, we had to buy a lot of bags of compost to bring the level of the vege beds back up to the level of the ground around them!

Once we had beds, we started throwing seeds around with wild abandon. The first bed contained spinach, broad beans, sugar peas, onions and carrots. I planted a border of marigolds around the outside edge, because I had read that deer will deter marigolds. We have three friendly local roe deer – lovely to look at, but I didn’t want them to eat all our veges. Well, planting marigolds was clearly the right thing to do, because they ate the flowers instead!

We had delicious harvests of broad beans and spinach and carrots. The onions were not particularly successful, although we ate some of them as babies. The peas were somewhat successful, but the plants got quite giant, and we were slow to harvest so some of the peas were a big fibrey and wooden. Lessons learnt: plant more broad beans and spinach, and spread the pea plants out further.

The second bed was planted with brassicas (broccoli, kohlrabi, and brussels sprouts), radishes, daikon, and beetroot. The radishes grew wonderfully, they were plentiful and got very big! The daikon grew very fat but not very long, and were prone to splitting open. I think that we had too much manure in the soil for them. The beetroot were completely perfect and I wish we had planted more. And all members of the brassica family were massacred by slugs. So, lessons learnt: plant more beetroot, give the daikon less poo, and find some way to keep the slugs away.

The third bed was a late starter. We moved some lettuces and rocket in there after they had grown in pots for a while, and I planted some green kale, but this took a while to get going as once again the slugs had a go at the tiny seedlings.

In addition to the three “orderly” vege plots, we had some other plants strewn about the property. We had ample cherry tomatoes from a few plants that we set out against the wall of the house. Linus knocked together a makeshift greenhouse out of a couple of old windows, to keep them warm until the summer really kicked in. It was very successful, but this year I hope we can think bigger, and get more tomatoes!

And finally, our most impressive crop: the pumpkins. We raised 3 “baby bear” pumpkin plants indoors before planting out in a little bed with lots of horse poo, up against the old stone wall that runs across the garden. A few weeks later we added 2 more plants, but these were really too late and didn’t produce many pumpkins. I tried to keep my expectations low, thinking that this would be an experimental year and we would have many mistakes to learn from. But despite much uncertainty (should we prune the long dwimbly bits? do we need to hand pollinate? at what point in the season should we remove new flowers?) we had an astonishing crop of 47 delicious pumpkins.

Now we’re looking forward to the spring, trying out some new things that we didn’t plant last year, re-trying some of the not so successful things, and having another go with the big successes too.

In the spring we adopted a bunch of jeruslem artichoke plants from Linus’s mum, and planted them just next to the deck. Since then, they’ve been pretty much left alone, apart from some (not very successful) attempts to stop the slugs from eating them. They survived, and thrived, and grew very very tall … and this week we decided it was time to see if there was anything to harvest.

So Linus pulled up two plants, and this is what he found:

1.1kg of the freshest jerusalems I’ve ever met. I made this lot into a delicious soup for our lunch, and some puree for Anneli’s lunch, and we all enjoyed it very much.

These were both ridiculously easy to grow and really productive. That’s my kind of gardening!

We harvested our pumpkins about 2 weeks ago – here is a shot of 43 delicious baby bear pumpkins. At the time this picture was taken, we’d eaten 4 pumpkins already, making a total harvest of 47.

Here is the whole lot posing on our outdoor table

And here is our little pumpkin posing with the other little pumpkins. When the inevitable questions begin, we will use this photo to back up our offical stance of “we found you in the pumpkin patch”.

Our pumpkins are ripening!

These are a small type of pumpkin, but it looks like we’ve got around 30 of them.

And we’re really looking forward to trying one. We’ve also had ripe tomatoes to harvest:

And they are super delicious

Speaking of delicious, I made my honey a birthday cake on Saturday:

It was my first time baking kladdkaka. This might be Sweden’s favourite type of cake – a dense, sticky, chocolatey delight that you’ll almost always find in cafes here. I used a recipe from Leila Lindholm’s book, ‘A piece of cake’, and it came out wonderfully.

We’ve been enjoying the fruits of our labours in the garden. Delicious baby broad beans:

… and some crazy carrots:

… as well as big beautiful beetroot, peas, fresh herbs and the first few padron chilis. Then there were the smultron, which we didn’t have to labour over at all:

The red squirrel has been enjoying our wild hazelnuts:

And a little frog was spotted enjoying the shade under one of the tomatoes:

I’m hoping that little guy has not been eaten by the snake I saw lurking around one of our vege patches a couple of weekends ago. It was a viper, quite common in Sweden, but the first time I have ever seen a live snake “in the wild” so it came as a little bit of a shock!

Now here is some floral eye candy:

Further to my previous post about the garden, here’s a picture of those giant radishes I mentioned:

(Swiss army knife included for scale)