North by North

… though not so fast as we anticipated: harvesting has been slowed down by the (for us) unseasonably warm weather (all of +6!) and today and in days to come by the wintertime (yeah – thanks a lot for that, dear Management! For us it means that it is greyish instead of black when we get up – and black by the time we would usually be still working in the garden). Anyway – today we bagged the last Jerusalem artichokes, some 20 kg of them, so the patch is now ready for replanting. A few carrots, the majority of parsnips, leeks and thyme still in the ground; the idea is to have there enough of them to take fresh bounty to my daughter when we visit her family next weekend ( her artichokes she prefers to get steamed and pureed – I have obviously spoilt her…).

Yesterday we went to the city for our weekly shopping spree and to take some pumpkin pie to Pekka’s parents. At the parking place an elderly man came to us and asked whether we’d want to buy vendace he had caught that day. We for sure wanted – bought a kilo and had a festive dinner:

Fried vendace with stir-fried onion, leek, squash (Fairy), chilli (Hungarian Black), garlic and herbs. Bowing to the tradition, we ate the vendace with our fingers. – We are using these days our wood-burning stove; it is quick and gives enough extra warmth so that we don’t need to turn the central heating on.

And from the Squash and Pumpkin Gallery

Cream of the Crop

We have really done our best to ensure winter vegetables for granddaughter Alexandra (age 3.5 months) – the selection at the moment includes carrots (white, yellow, orange and the raspberry-orange in the photo),

parsnip, Hamburg parsley,  cauliflower, calabrese, courgette, squash, sweet corn – we are still discussing Jerusalem artichoke as it causes wind with some people and that would not be so good for a baby. The vegetables are just steamed, pureed and then frozen in ice cube trays. We have told her parents that for all we care they can buy a potato for her every now and then – we are not going to freeze potatoes.

As you can see from Alexandra’s diet we have  quite colourful carrots; about half of them are still in the ground – but we are getting to them slow by slow.

In the mornings there tends to be frost on the ground. Yesterday Pekka planted some 70 garlic cloves; next week we’ll plant Jerusalem artichoke. The harvest of them has been good – some 40 kg up to now and more than 30 kg still to come – we have promised to sell most of them to a gourmet restaurant that doesn’t want them all at once; I can well understand that – as you can see, peeling them is no joke!

The catering enterprise suggested we’d peel and prepare everything for them and I informed them that in that case they have to pay for time,  Salvequick for my fingers, and for damages to my future – I definitely shall not get into heaven after all the swearing involved in the peeling.

Lots of flowers still in the garden: pot marigold, various snapdragons, blue Nemophila, a misguided lily, and Aster Hulk…

Not at night but just at sunrise – quite pretty and very annoying. Especially as it means that we have to somehow find place in the freezers for carrots, leeks, parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes. Not much for Hamburg parsleys – the everlasting rain has caused them to start rotting in the ground; we managed to get some pureed for the new granddaughter but that was about all.

Only two stems of Jamaican Bell chillies left in the greenhouse – everything else has now been harvested

Today's catch: Hungarian Hot Wax, Jamaican Bell, Fish Pepper, Vlasta and Hungarian Black

Pekka has also made the first effort to harvest the Jerusalem artichokes

Next time he might even proceed to the actual beds – these were all “wild” ones from all over the vegetable garden. Fortunately the catering enterprise is interested in these, too.

The garlic has also been harvested – better quality than we dared to hope; not all of them are in the photo as we had to scatter them everywhere in the house – such a healthy perfume we live in now…

While having dinner

we tried to decide what all to get with the bounty from VegSeeds (thanks!). The burning question is: will there be still new/old varieties to come (Bonbon, Crown Prince, Hooligan, Fairy, Sutton, Medes, Javelin, Femspot, etc)?

Our cactus has managed to survive outside even this wet summer – and it seems to appreciate getting in again… It’s supposed to be a Christmas cactus but seems to be an autumnal equinox one…

Sorry, couldn’t resist the title though actually we have had a – for our conditions – reasonably warm autumn; and an unreasonably wet one (hence the colds). Most of the root vegetables are still in the ground; let’s hope they won’t stay there permanently. There are still some sweet peppers, chillies and tomatoes in the greenhouse but most of them have been already eaten/processed. The last aubergines are in the fridge – and we are already planning a colour scheme of them for next season…

Yes, the leeks are also still in the ground and doing well – here is a short video clip showing mainly how we transplant them. If you have a dozen plants or so it is of course easier to transplant them into peat pots but when you have 100+ you need to have something a bit more intensive…

OK, so we are living on a hill but that only means no wading while loading the Ark; water will be deep when it gets here (in a week or so at this rate).

It was high time to get the squashes in – especially as this is a year of voles and those &¤¤¤#”?!  sweeties have the same good taste as we have: every single Bonbon has been at least nibbled upon. So on the one and only rainless day we called in the neighbour lady to help us with the bounty and she duly came and helped.

Most of the damage is like beauty – only skin deep; but it means that we have to eat Bonbons first and not save them till Christmas. A pity. – As you see, we cannot exactly complain about the productivity of the squashes – either of the vines

A tiny part

or the fruits

A medley

The total weight of the harvest is some 350 kg – quite a lot for two people to consume. There might be a fair amount of surprises waiting for us when we really start sampling the lot; so far we have decided that Fairy (on the top of the trolley in front) will figure on our shopping list for next year – together with the staples: Crown Prince, Bonbon, Marina di Chioggia, Hooligan, Sdobnaya, Forest Nut/Uchiki kuri. Today we tried the latter – really tasty bright orange flesh.

We have also harvested the sweet peppers and frozen quite a lot of them.

Beauty Bell, Sweet Banana, Alma Paprika

The earliest one to ripen has been sun-yellow Vlasta – it remains our favourite. – Sweet peppers and chillies tolerate this kind of weather much better than do tomatoes so we can still get fresh ones from the greenhouse and even from the garden. – The aubergines are still flowering and producing.

With sweet corn it is touch and go : about half of them have ripened, the rest would need sunshine and warmth – both in short supply at the moment.

As you see, you can do a lot with home produce – our son decorated a sandwich cake for their daughter’s christening party with our tomatoes, sweet peppers, cucumbers, parsley; and just fashioned  a rose of ham to the landscape…

Somehow harvesting in the rain is much more pleasant than weeding, thinning, etc. in the rain. A good thing as rain we have, plenty of it, and weeding we have given up some time in July…

Maybe it is because harvesting is much more colourful (after all, you try to remove weeds before they flower). Chillies, sweet peppers and tomatoes are changing colour – here this year’s outdoor favourite, Red Alert

The weekend harvest of broad beans looked like sweets

- we really felt tempted to eat them as they were as unfortunately the red colour is only in the skin; the inside is green (it wouldn’t help to eat them steamed, with their skin – the colour turns greyish mauve).

In between the showers we have harvested some herbs – the plain-leaved parsley Italian Giant on its way to the freezer

And rain or not (though preferably not) there is the forest; Monday’s bounty:

Funnel-shaped chantarelles (yellowlegs) with a few girolles (chantarelles), and cowberries. Hopefully the mushroom season will last long; collecting them is such fun!

Herewith we open our Squash and Pumpkin Gallery. The first ones to figure are

a slightly oversized patisson, and

a – well – uh… I cannot say that we didn’t plant this as obviously we did – but I definitely did not knowingly buy seeds for anything resembling this. Form is OK for several varieties we bought, the size – 10 kg – completely wrong. Some time during the winter we shall learn whether the taste is OK…

It’s already evening and no rain – we are worried that the vegetation may wilt without its daily inch of rainwater…

Basically it (not this day but the previous weeks) means that  the garden has begun to suffer seriously: Pekka has been working in the greenhouse, cutting away the mouldy cucumber stems and rotting tomato leaves; the potatoes are getting the blight; picking the dwarf beans is really picking and choosing; yellow courgettes (for some reason they succumb easier than the green and white ones) get brown inside; green gladioli (my favourites) just will not open but rot….

But there are bright spots, too: we are already picking the climbing beans (mostly Goldfield) from the upstairs window – almost ten litres today; runner beans are getting on well, too, and the first broad beans have been picked and processed

Witkiem Manita, as usually – 75 litres of pods from one bed; really welcome as the other beds are nothing like so impressive and need anyway two to three more weeks to start producing.

We are eating beetroot with blue cheese on a daily basis – Chioggia is the quickest one to grow but it has an unfortunate tendency to bolt. The first Florence fennel has appeared on the dinner table. Chillies are turning red, which makes them more decorative for the chilli-seasalt grinders. The trouble with our chillies is that you don’t know which pods are hot and which only lukewarm – there are huge differences even within the same plant (I still savour my daughter’s expression when she thought she had popped a mild one in her mouth – and was wrong).

As a compensation for the vegetable patch frustrations we have been mushrooming. A few days ago we hit the jackpot

small glades in a forest, full of horns-of-plenty (trompettes de la mort) in perfect condition and without the all too common slugs. A friend of ours needs them for her catering enterprise, so we can even feel useful while enjoying ourselves.

As mentioned, I like green and very dark flowers – and in addition spotted ones

so the garden is arranged (not quite the right word here) accordingly.

Last time I was whining about the non-performance of cauliflowers – now we are steaming and freezing them for dear life; florets for everybody else, puree for the brand-new granddaughter (who will reject it if she takes after her father…). All the heads seem to be maturing at the same time and now we are wondering whether we should next year keep to the early varieties or add a mid-season one to the repertoire, to extend the harvesting period.

Or maybe we just hope that the calabrese will follow the example – as we sow it directly (we pre-grew the cauliflower), it would anyway be maturing later and thus provide us with fresh florets in August-September.

Because of the hot spell in July the herbs are beginning to flower – there is already quite a lot of Greek oregano and sweet marjoram drying in bunches in the sauna

The poppies – for poppy seed cakes – also flowered early; it was quite a spectacular sight though a single flower lasts only one day (and of course there were heavy rains just at that time). Now I just need to find the recipe for that cake…

At the moment I’m trying to think where to plant more Egyptian onions; perennial plants are a bit of a challenge in our vegetable garden.

We got a couple of bulbs from an old lady some years ago and I’d like to plant the top onions till we have enough of plants to be really reveling in caramelized top onions…

Bilberries are plentiful this year but because of the rains they are rather watery. Good enough for bilberry pies, though, so we are alternating the picking of them with the collecting of chantarelles and ceps (porcini) – also very plentiful just now.

This year we decided to grow greenhouse cucumbers, for the first time ever. We bought seeds for us and for the neighbour lady, 4 Femspot and 8 Flamingo altogether – wickedly expensive they are! Having obtained the seeds, we turned to guide books and Internet. We learned that painting the Sistine Chapel is child’s play compared with growing cucumbers – you have to disinfect the soil, use absolutely pure water (distil it?), build a small hill for every plant, cut the main stem/branching stems/let the plant grow like an umbrella, have only 4 fruit at any given time on a plant… They didn’t actually say you should sow the seeds at full moon (and a blue moon at that) but the implication was more or less such. We considered seriously whether the winter birds would thrive on cucumber seeds but decided that even a bullfinch wouldn’t survive a day on our store, so kept them and sowed them in May. Ten of them germinated. We shared them with the neighbour lady and in time replanted them in the greenhouse and mentally waved them goodbye.

To our astonishment they grew and started flowering

and producing…

Now we are eating them, giving them away and wondering what would have happened with disinfected soil and distilled water…

There is quite a lot to eat already; this formed the basis of yesterday’s dinner

The broad beans and the first climbing beans are flowering; so are the courgettes. The cauliflowers are growing – but this far only the leaves. When can one hope for the edible part to appear (we are first-timers in this, too)?

And all kinds of flowers – for the name of this one I had to trawl the Net

Spider lily Sulphur Queen

Traditionally, last night the bonfires were burning on lakesides and hilltops

Our neighbour's bonfire at 22:30

and the Finnish flags have been flying from yesterday evening to this evening. The weather has been traditional, too: rain and thunder – but then we tend to count that the summer really begins only after Midsummer (no pun intended).

And actually, there is not much to complain. The vegetable patch is getting greener and greener, and not only with weeds

True, the parsnip Javelin still refuses to make an appearance but Countess has emerged. All varieties (plenty of them) of broad bean are up and growing, lettuce is overwhelming, spring onions delicious.

Pekka has spent the last few days carting hay for the garden – one tractorload has been used up, the second is vanishing at a high speed

It makes all the difference to courgettes and squashes, leeks, cauliflowers, broad beans – oh well, easier to say that we don’t use it for lettuce, onions or herbs.

Speaking of herbs, dill has self-seeded last autumn all over the place; the plants are already tall so we are confidently waiting for the appearance of swallowtail caterpillars – they love dill (and we find the caterpillars really sympathetic). In the meantime, we admire tortoiseshells

About the only thing the blackberries are useful for – they don’t ripen here.

In the greenhouse the tomatoes are growing fast, the cucumbers seriously consider flowering and even the aubergines have at long last decided to get down to business.

Two small ones this far but as Pekka is highly suspicious of aubergines it might be quite enough… We have already eaten several chillies and one green sweet pepper (it wasn’t ripe yet but there were four of them growing on one small plant and we thought it wiser to remove one of them).

Lots of flowers, too – different hues of columbines, coral-pink poppies, speedwells, old orange lilies that grow wild everywhere in the yard – and snapdragons

Appeal Sunset, this one is called – not without cause…