Our first honey crop

Lots of awful weather this year means that the bumper honey crop we were hoping for never happened. We had hoped to get honey in the late spring but all we got instead was swarms of bees. That at least meant we expanded from 2 hives at the start of June to 8 now. The good news on the honey front is that on Saturday we were able to take honey off one of our hives. There were only 5 frames but it's a start.

Green tomato chutney - the video

This is the video I shot of how to make green tomato chutney earleir this week. Since I first posted about this recipe, people have been in touch with ideas about other recipes to try. So watch this space, I'll have a couple of old American recipes I hope to try shortly.

Our first duck egg

I opened the duck house this morning to find an egg. So one of our ducks has started laying. Excellent news. We have had them for nearly a month so hopefully the other adult will start laying soon as well.

Meanwhile, our ducklings are growing rapidly, though I have to report sadly that a couple of weeks ago, one of them (one of the aylesburies) died.

Green tomato chutney recipe

The miserable weather has knocked the tomato crop this year. I should have been harvesting lovely red tomatoes two months ago. Instead, I have a greenhouse full of green tomatoes at the start of October. They will not ripen so I will be picking them green. The same problem has affected people on neighbouring allotments. We have been engaged in a great deal of trading over the past few days. My eggs for their green tomatoes. I now have quite a green tomato mountain, and I haven't even started picking my own.

Today I used a bag of green tomatoes to make chutney. Here is my recipe.

Ingredients:

• 2kg green tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 900g chopped onions
• 900g chopped apples
• 100g raisins
• 4 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 450g soft brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 600ml white wine vinegar

Add all the ingredients to a preserving pan and bring up to the boil. Leave to simmer for about 2 hours, until the ingredients have reduced by half and the consistency is that of a thick sauce. I got 9 jars from this quantity (3 of them in the picture below).



I filmed the making of this chutney so the video will be ready shortly. Meanwhile I'm looking around for interesting green tomato recipes. I found a very old one from America for green tomato mincemeat. I'll need to translate the measures but watch this space, I'll be making it shortly.

A secret stash of eggs

My hens have taken to wandering onto the neighbouring allotments. At this time of year, with little around for them to damage, they are causing no harm and the other allotment holders seem to enjoy having them as company and to help get rid of bugs, slugs and snails. Anyone who takes to digging up the ground however is likely to be mobbed by the hens as they race to beat each other to the worms.

Wandering off like this adds to a problem of laying out of the henhouse. The two boss hens, Snow White (a coral nick) and Atilla (a light sussex) seem to have an agreement to lay in the same place as each other, which is almost always away from the henhouse. When I know where they are laying, that is not a problem. Until about two weeks ago they were laying behind the hedge on the path leading to the allotment. And then suddenly they stopped laying there. Egg production figures were down overall in the absence of their eggs. Both are good layers, typically laying 9 out of 10 days on the trot.

I kept searching the hedgerows of the other allotments. Today I even checked under someone's shed. But there was no sign of eggs. And then Liz, on the neighbouring allotment, called through to tell me she had found where they were laying. There in her old greenhouse was a heap of 20 eggs, all but one laid by Snow White and Atilla. I gave Liz a dozen and took the other 8 back to my house to add to the egg mountain that has grown up in my absence. (I was away for 10 days last week doing some filming and photography in London and Brighton.)

I have been pickling eggs today but somehow, the number of eggs waiting to be used never seems to get smaller. I will be taking the eggs to a market a week tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll be currying them, pickling them, making egg custard, poaching them, swapping them, doing whatever I can with them.

Picking sloes

The sloe crop where I live in the North East of England has failed, a result of our awful weather. The blossom was hammered by the heavy rain in May and the bees could not get out to pollinate the flowers that did survive the deluge. I was in London over the weekend and took a walk around Crystal Palace Park. And there I found a modest quantity of sloes. It is nothing like the abundance we had last year but it was enough to make it worthwhile picking them. Our apple crop has failed as well but a friend in London also gave me a bag of apples from a tree in his office garden. So, back home in the North East and I am now making sloe jelly. Alas, I won't have enough to add any to the hedgerow jelly I make each autumn. And there is certainly not enough to make sloe gin.

Interviewing beekeepers

I went to the Harrogate Flower Show in September and when I was there I interviewed beekeepers for the Horticultural Channel. We discussed the impact of the weather on honey production and why the bees have swarmed so much this year.