Self seeded winter salads

 

Radicchio:  bigger than when I transplanted it!  Oct 2020

After a few months off, we're eating little side salads again.  Even I can see the incongruence:  summer is salad time, winter is cooked vegetable time, right?  Well, I just so happen to be lousy at growing actual lettuce and stuff.  I mean, the slugs and bugs almost always get them--I even lost some once to a rogue rabbit (how did it even get here?  We're a long paved maze of side streets away from the nearest field)!  I've mostly given up on traditional lettuce--though I do have a few small ones at the allotment from a free packet of seeds, still alive.  But very small and not likely to get much bigger now at the end of November.

However, this time of year I have some non-lettuce salad greens which have been successfully self seeding for me for a while;  the best of them are chard, miners lettuce and mizuna.  The celery I have is a cooking variety, though when blanched it makes for a tender and mild salad addition.  I'm not currently blanching any, though I really should do a few.  These are all self seeded plants too.

When there's a heavy frost these plants can't be picked for salad, but they tend to shrug it off once it thaws again.  My kind of food!

The radicchio pictured above is a new experiment for me, and though the plants are marginally bigger now than in the photo, I really don't know if they're going to be salad worthy this winter.   They were not self seeded:  I sowed them in trays and transplanted.  I do however, have self seeded Belgian endive growing in various places which I am attempting to blanch for later salads.  I cut down the tall flowering stems and put a bucket over the plants.  Hope the slugs aren't having a party under there.

Coming up: homegrown Thanksgiving

Cauliflowers in front, Brussels sprouts behind, Oct 2020

I'm kind of impressed with myself and the family for getting enough work done on the garden and allotment this year to still have measurable fresh food out there.  It's mainly brassicas, celery and some leeks;  however there are also a few more runner beans and tomatoes, and the winter self-seeding greens are now coming up:  mizuna, miners lettuce, lambs lettuce.  That's not counting the potatoes, pumpkins and squashes still hanging out in the kitchen (and living room)!

I really can't take all the credit for this, as the husband and son did step up this spring and summer while I was recovering from anemia.  I did my part too however, and we're all looking forward to some homegrown holiday eating. 

This year our Thanksgiving menu will feature:

• Mashed or roast potatoes
• Brussels sprouts, cabbage, leek, green beans (frozen from earlier this year)
• Gravy with herbs and garlic 
• Pumpkin pie (including our own hens' eggs)
• Blackberry/elderberry wine (while I did not grow these, I picked them and brewed the wine myself)
  

We're only feeding our own family of four, as the country is in lockdown and we're not allowed to meet our friends as usual.  I've suggested a pie swap as a consolation--we normally both bring a pie, and my offering is always pumpkin of course.

Bonfire Night at the allotment

A photo of my allotment! That's me in the center, Nov 2020

We're back in lockdown, starting on Bonfire Night (5th of November), so what better way to celebrate/commiserate than take our bonfire to the allotment!

We had a good view of the our neighbors' overly large fireworks, being somewhat central to the village but just on the edge where it meets the fields, so no pesky streetlights obscuring the explosions, but also far enough off for it not to be overwhelmingly loud (which they were as we walked both to and from the allotment that evening). 

I expected to see a few more bonfires than just ours there, as they are permitted after dark except in high summer, but the only other one we saw was not on the site.  

That morning, the son (and daughter in her buggy) and I carried three plastic garden chairs up to our allotment, and after he had cared for the chickens and gone on to school, I collected some discarded sunflower stalks from the communal waste area, along with a very large branch with a lot of smaller branches and twigs on it.  These I broke up and separated into kindling and wood.  After digging up a few clumps of grass for the chickens (which I try to do every morning when I visit), the daughter and I went home to prepare there.

I put together a sack of newspapers with matches, and another with hot dogs and marshmallows--and hot chocolate in a thermos later on.  When the son got home from school he collected one more sack of small cut wood from our woodpile plus three green bamboo lengths (to skewer our dinner on) from the Perennials section out back.  We were ready to go!

And go we did.  When the husband got home from work we walked straight out and started the fire, toasted our hot dogs and marshmallows, drank our hot chocolate, and enjoyed the night.  Even the daughter at eight months was content to sit and watch the fire and have a bite or two of hot dog.  We stayed until the fire was down to embers.

Speaking of embers--that was my main motivation for celebrating with a bonfire (well, it was more campfire size than bonfire) this year.  I had a bright idea that burning one at the allotment would put a check on the grass and weeds there.  In fact, I've suggested we have a little fire there every weekend this winter, in a slightly different spot, and maybe that'll knock back the grass long enough to get the vegetables going next spring. 

Some pumpkins from the allotment

Not all of them, Oct 2020

The son and I picked most of the pumpkins and squashes last week and brought them home from the allotment over two days (we were walking and couldn't carry them all in one go).  The above photo is the first day's haul;  after the second trip the bench was covered completely, despite the fact that we'd carved one and eaten three small ones.

RIP, Oct 2020

We were given a pumpkin two years ago by a fellow allotmenter and have growing and saving seeds from that one specimen since.  I don't know the variety, other than it's a culinary pumpkin with very thick flesh--not thin-walled like the carving varieties.  For Halloween we carved the orange-est one anyway, then baked it the next day for our Sunday lunch, plus pumpkin pie.  A very tasty pumpkin.

They all had several days to dry out and are now inside on display, to be gradually eaten.  I'm a little disappointed in the squashes:  all pretty small, and most not fully ripened unlike the pumpkins.  We'll eat the unripe ones first and I'll dehydrate some for later this winter, to go in stews and casseroles.  I'm going to try and dry a batch of "zoodles", long thin strips to be used like pasta.