A deluge

Every year it’s the same: in June you look at your courgette plants and worry that they are not producing; in July you look at them and worry that they decided to do an overkill…

Today’s harvest

The basic trouble is that there are so many interesting varieties and when we cannot choose between them we take them all and thus we have now 8 plants… For quality the top one this year is Latino F1 (in the photo the pleated-looking one or rather two) – really flavoursome and decorative! It is also extremely productive – a mixed blessing at the moment….

Given the courgettes, mangetout peas, carrots, etc. the dinner tends to be a discussion of urgencies (“We HAVE to have mangetout today – they are so big they must be picked without delay!”); the exception is when there is something that is season’s first – today climbing peas, tomatoes, a white aubergine and a Hungarian Black chilli (the first one to turn from black to red).

As you can see, not a single courgette in sight.

The sweet corn is flowering – at least partly; I cannot understand why with maize the female flowers appear more than a week later than the male ones – a pretty long time for the pollen to hang in the air… Every year I’m quite sure nothing will come out of the exercise – let’s hope I’m wrong again.

The wild raspberries are ripe and I have spent several days picking them – the first time in three years when there is a decent crop. The best ones are frozen, the rest we use in juice-making (red and white currants, raspberries and spices).

In our family, you start the bilberry picking young…

 

Colour in life

It has been so cold, grey and miserable that we decided to add some colour to our life – or at least to our food. So, for starters steamed beetroot with blue cheese

Our beetroot selection: white, golden, chioggia and giant striped

and for the main course a stew of white, yellow, orange, pink and red carrots (off camera); black and dark purple aubergine, red onion, garlic, chanterelles, sweet peppers, chillies, vanilla basil and cinnamon basil – and of course tzatziki salad.

A riot of colours

The dessert was wild raspberries in white wine and wild strawberry liqueur.

After that it was much easier to find colours in the rainy nature, too.

Great sundew

Never mind the weather

Well, we do mind; +8 at night and +12 by day is nothing to grow lyrical about – but we try to infringe the Pollyanna copyright and look at the bright side of things, however painful.

And bright sides there are: our cherries have ripened (or at least one treeful has)

and we have been making our favourite conserve: cherries in honey and rhum. They are delicious with icecream, in hot spiced wine, in desserts – and perfect as presents.

It’s the main harvest time for mangetout peas – yesterday we froze six litres of them; stir-fried with garlic they are one of our favourite side dishes. They are still flowering freely so we’ll get more for our winter use. The New Zealand spinach is already producing enough for the whole family and for the freezer. – The cucumbers don’t seem to mind the weather; there is an overflow of them. Last summer we tried to cube, steam and freeze the surplus harvest. We do NOT recommend that.

This summer we have found out that the slim sweet pepper variations do better in our conditions than the bell peppers. They are faster to mature and more productive so we’ll have more of them in the future – most greenhouse plants have 6+ fruits already now.

And of course there are the forests and the bogs – one cannot feel gloomy there. For the first time in the twenty-odd years we have lived here we’ve got more than a handful of the local delicacy: arctic bramble. Arctic bramble (we call it honeyberry) is a tiny plant growing on edges of meadows and getting very rare as it doesn’t survive fertilisation with lime that is nowadays widely used. The flowers are pink, the berries ripe when soft and translucent – usually dark red but can be even white. The flavour is unique – getting a litre of them equals a lucky draw in lottery.

Wild strawberries, cloudberries and arctic brambles

And there is also the entertainment side of life – the other morning we had an aerial show as a pair of Eurasian Hobbies was chasing our resident crows and magpies (hurrah!). They were not in earnest – after all they feed on swallows so the clumsier corvids would be an easy though oversized prey – just having fun: chasing and diving and harassing the bigger birds for an hour or so just above our vegetable patch. All the time our resident squirrel sat on the terrasse and munched stolidly through her breakfast without an upward glance.

 

Wild harvest

Yesterday we decided to go wild: the berries are ripening some two weeks ahead of the normal schedule and we wanted to see whether we could find at least a few cloudberries; they are not common this far in the south. And yes, we did find some – enough to taste – although the majority of them was still red, i.e. unripe. If nobody else finds that bog we’ll get a few litres next week.

Ripe cloudberries

And then we crawled amid horseflies and slash grass for wild strawberries – they are THE traditional Christmas dessert in the extended family – fortunately the year seems to be reasonably good; we would need at least five litres of them.

A pity the photo cannot convey you the smell!

The first wild raspberries will be ripe in a week or so  – hopefully before the seeds of rosebay willowherb fly…

There were also a few early chanterelles (the earliest of the earlies we have been eating since Midsummer); in every sense they add sunshine to the day!

The only trouble with this gathering life is that you tend to tear madly after the things you see – butterflies, dragonflies, orchids, etc. – and so your concentration to the task at hand is sadly diminished.

An Arichanna melanaria pretending to be lichen