Laura's Spanish chicken

I got one portion from all the purple sprouting broccoli I grew - yes, that's right, just one! I ate it with my own recipe, Laura's Spanish chicken, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to put the recipe in my blog. It's a really quick and simple recipe that tastes really good (and is unusual in that it is completely without onions and garlic, so very handy for anyone who doesn't like or can't eat them). Anyhow, here it is:

Prep time: about 10-15 minutes. Cooking time: 30-45 minutes.

375 g diced chicken (large chunks)
8 rashers smoked streaky bacon
1 tbsp olive oil
3 peppers (1 red, 1 yellow, 1 green)
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp rosemary
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 chicken stock cube

1. Chop/cut the bacon into approximately 1 cm bits.
2. Put diced chicken and chopped bacon into a large pan or casserole dish.
3. While browning the meat, chop peppers into 2 or 3 cm x 1 cm slices.
4. Add peppers to pan, stir and simmer for 2 minutes.
5. Add cayenne pepper, thyme and rosemary and stir.
6. Add tin of tomatoes and a bit of extra water.
7. Add white wine vinegar and chicken stock cube and stir.
8. Simmer for 30-45 minutes.

Serve with mashed potato or couscous. Home-grown purple sprouting broccoli optional :)

Out with the old, in with the new

I've been having a bit of a clear up this weekend. This time it was the turn of the brassicas.

I've completely removed the kale, as most of it had bolted. The bolted (flowering) kale has gone into the compost heap and the rest has come into the kitchen to be eaten for tea, along with a couple of pieces of purple sprouting broccoli. The broccoli has survived the clear up so far because I found a couple more edible pieces, so I thought I'd give it a shot at producing a bit more.

But I've cleared the rest of the area and planted some broad beans I got at a local seed swap last night.

I've learnt from last year, so my label is therefore part way along the row and not braving the lawnmower right next to the grass (I now have a large number of snapped labels, which is a bit of a shame, as I bought them to be reusable).
My other half did the hard work clearing the bushes from the other side of the garden and then I finished it off with a final dig in of fish, blood and bone, chicken manure and some compost and a bit of a rake, before planting some radishes. That's me done now till March. Yay, two whole days off!

New cloche

I bought a new cloche from Wilkinson's. Well, actually I bought two at a fiver each, although I currently think one might have been enough. The reason I wanted it was for the hoops, so I could use them to protect my carrots from carrot fly with fleece. But I've now realised that actually I can bring my veg on faster by using them as cloches with the plastic they came with.

I've used it with carrots for now anyway. I'll probably set the other one up so that I can start hardening off my seedlings in April later. It was easy enough to make. I just put the plastic rods together with the connectors to make longer rods, then pushed the ends of these into the ground to make hoops. They didn't make beautifully even ones like in the photo on the packet, but then the cover the hoops come with isn't the same one as on the packet either. They're good enough, and it was never going to be a beautifying feature for the garden.

The instructions said to do them about 50 cm apart, but actually the plastic they came with was cut on the generous side, so I ended up doing them about 55 cm apart. Although, to get the full 200 cm the packet advertises, you'd need to put the hoops about 67 cm apart, because there are only 4 of them. I'm not convinced the plastic is long enough to quite do that. Someone in the instructions and marketing department hasn't quite thought this through. Luckily I wasn't banking on a length of precisely 200 cm.
You pin the ends down with metal pegs.

You can buy more to pin the sides down or you can do it with stones. I used pretty heavy stones, but they've come off one side already because of the wind. I think you probably need something as heavy as a brick. I'm not going to buy any more metal pegs because I think if I put them straight through the plastic, the wind will just tear the plastic. And also, I'm pretty sure I can make good enough metal pegs myself out of an old metal coat hanger if I need any. I might try trapping the plastic under bamboo canes and pinning the ends of those to the grounds.
Having bought the cloche, I've ended up changing my original plan of how to plant the carrots and beetroots. The carrots are now going to be all along the cloche, which now encroaches into the area I'd planned for the beetroot, and I'm going to plant a line of beetroot along the back of the cloche because it doesn't need to be protected from carrot fly.

I've got one more cloche left to put up, but I haven't thought through where yet. Best to give my back a rest and leave it till next week I reckon.

Edited: in the end I completely ignored my own intentions and decided that the £2 for 10 metal wire pins was well worth not having to try to cut through a metal coathanger. I stuck an extra one at the far end that had come loose, then pinned the side that kept blowing up down with two metal pins keeping down a piece of bamboo, but not piercing the plastic. I also found a couple of extra bricks in the garden, so added those and it looks a lot messier, but it hasn't come loose yet.

Never again – some veg won't be making it back into my garden in future

I've come to the conclusion that I'm never going to try the vegetables in this post again (or at the very least not until I'm such an experienced gardener that I know how to overcome the problems I've had with them).

1. Purple sprouting broccoli (or any other sort of broccoli)

This picture looks pretty good and I'm hoping to eat it soon, but it took me more than a metre square of soil to grow what is probably less than one portion worth. Part of the problem is that it grew taller than the netting I had put up, so most of it ended up exposed and outside the netting in autumn and winter. This resulted in most of it being eaten:

There don't seem to be many plants that insects - especially caterpillars - flock to more than broccoli and even the normal broccoli I've grown in the past has ended up more caterpillar than floret by mass. So this is the last time I will be trying broccoli unless I can get my insect netting situation a lot more sorted.

2. Celery

I don't know what Mr Fothergill did to get his celery sticks to look like the ones on the packet, but mine had only reached a few spindly millimetres thick by the time the first frost came in the autumn, and they looked pretty manky by then anyhow. My guess is he grew them under glass or in another country. At any rate, it proved a complete waste of space for me and the Internet says I'm not the only one. Celery is somewhere between hard and impossible to grow to full size outdoors in the UK (and all my other salad vegetables were over long before the celery had even the faintest hope of being ready).

3. Cabbage

Cabbage definitely has the potential to be successful in the UK, but you need to be in a low slug and snail area (or to use a ton of slug killer) and to protect it from caterpillars. Even with all my best attempts with copper slug collars and the occasional fit of slug pelleting, I only got about 2 cabbages worth of cabbage out of about 1.5 sqm of earth (and even then I had to pick the slugs and snails out). Protecting them from caterpillars is definitely easier than protecting them from slugs, so if you live in a low slug area, then just cover your cabbages in butterfly netting and watch them grow. These plants are happy to grow to full size in the UK, the problem is how yummy creepy crawlies find them.

4. Cauliflower

Actually, I'm going to be attempting to grow a romanesco cauliflower because they look so cool, but only one or two of them, as I doubt it will work. I am yet to manage to fertilise them sufficiently for them to grow more than the sparsest of florets. This year's romanescos will be swaddled in manure and hope.

5. Fennel

These grew stalks and leaves absolutely fine. The problem is a) you're supposed to eat the bulbous base of this particular variety of fennel and those stayed quite small, and b) I only actually know one recipe using this and the effort to deliciousness ratio isn't worth it. If I had successfully grown them I'm sure I could have overcome my lack of good recipes – or at least found one with a better taste to work ratio. But they didn't even grow to usable levels, so they're out. On a side note, I had no pest or disease problems with them at all, so it's a shame they didn't do better.