Lovage and vegetable soup

 

We have an abundance of lovage but it won't last much longer. We have therefore picked some to use in soup. We found some vegetable soup in the freezer, decided it was time to use it up, thawed it and added in chopped lovage before simmering it again.

Well into preserve-making season

 

We have had a good crop of redcurrants and gooseberries but the amount of raspberries and blackcurrants has been disappointing. Nevertheless, we are making lots of preserves including fruit liqueurs. For the first time, we have used apples in fruit liqueurs (apple vodka). Most apples aren't ready for picking but a handful were just about big enough to collect.

Jam-making has progressed well but we still have a big quantity of gooseberries and redcurrants to use up. I'm about to turn some of the gooseberries into jelly. This is a 2 day process - boil up and then simmer the fruit, strain it and then put back into the preserving pan with sugar and heat.

A mountain of redcurrants

 

We have just harvested our biggest crop of redcurrants. Quite what we will do with them is the great unanswered question of the day. So far we have made redcurrant gin. We have 2 bucketfuls still to use up. I suspect most will be used to make jam.

Firewood in abundance

 

Some of the big branches that broke away from our oak trees at the south end of our hayfield have been chainsawed. They still need to be split but we have started to move them to our compound where the log splitter will be used.We won't use them this autumn and winter on our stove. Instead, they will be left to dry for a year. We have plenty of firewood from other sources.

Rotten to the core

 

There are some large oak trees at the top of our allotment. One of them recently lost some large branches. We have been using the chainsaw to chop them up but you can see just how rotten the cores of the branches are. Nevertheless, it will make great firewood.

Nettle hay

 

We have moved our goats from our Nearside allotment to our farm. The Whinnies Community Garden, from whom we rent our two allotments, have revised the rules (for insurance purposes) on keeping livestock on the site. No goats can be kept there. We kept some of our goats on the Nearside when they were needing extra attention, such as when they were expecting but the entire livestock setup is now on our farm. The problem now is that we had a runaway surge of nettles growing across the Nearside. I've spent the last few days stripping out the nettles and leaving them to dry out. This nettle hay proved to be very popular with the goats.

Lovage

 

We have a good crop of lovage this year. Great in salads and soups.