Pretty much everything you see came from our garden or the field

This is why I grow food

This meal was inspired by the popper thread on the chillisgalore forums ( @chilliesgalore.co.uk : popper thread ). I'd like to thank Davetaylor for posting it

I've had to wait ages to try this recipe since I first saw it on the chillisgalore forums, and I mean ages! As with all good meals it started with a compromise, the problem was that I didn't have any chillis that were big enough to stuff so I had to use a pepper instead and add chilli to the stuffing. Other than that I pretty much followed the original recipe.

Ingredients

The Chicken Poppers

The chicken poppers ready for the oven

• Chicken ... obviously
• Bacon
• Ham
• BBQ Sauce
• Soft cheese ... we used philly
• Strong cheese ... we used mature cheddar
• Black peppercorns .. crushed
• Basil ( purple )
• Garlic ( Thermidore )
• Onion leaves ( Paris Silverskin ) ... I had loads left after pickling the bulbs
• Coriander ( Leisure )
• Sweet Pepper ( N.Napia ) ... you'd normally use chilli here
• Chilli ( Pretty in Purple ) ... these are a smidge to small to stuff

The rest

The finished poppers, damn they tasted good ... even the string tasted good

• Cabbage ( Greyhound )
• Broccoli ( Quick heading callabrese )
• Onion leaves ( Paris Silverskin ) .... told you we had loads left .... we're thinking of freezing them
• Garlic ( Thermidore )
• Broad Beans ( Aquadulce )
• Sugar snaps ( cunningly named Sugar Snaps )
• Courgette ( Verde di Milano )
• I forgot to use the tomato, so technically it's not an ingredient

Lets make poppers

That was one meal I really enjoyed

1. First of all we'll make the filling by chopping the ham, chillis, onion, garlic, basil and coriander up and then throwing it all into a bowl with the soft cheese and the peppercorns. Give it a good old stir until it's all mixed together.
2. The mixture should then be dolloped into chillies that have been cut in half lengthways and de-seeded but I didn't have any chillis big enough so I used sweet peppers instead. Pop a few thin slices of the strong cheese on top of the stuffed peppers and then wrap them in strips of chicken and then wrap the wrapped poppers in bacon as well ... smoked bacon worked for us
3. Finally, baste the whole lot with BBQ sauce and throw them onto a baking tray.
4. Turn the oven on and set it to gas mark 5 ... assuming you have gas, if not then there's always googy converter ... anyway, turn the oven on and then go grab a beer whilst you wait for it to pre-heat
5. Once the oven's hot enough slap the tray of poppers in and leave it there for about 20 minutes.
6. Whilst you're waiting chop up all the other ingredients to a size that suits you.
7. Once the 20 minutes are up whip the tray out of the oven ( and turn the oven off huh? ) and put it on one side for a few minutes to rest
8. In the meantime bang a wok on the cooker over a high heat and throw a generous dollop of olive oil in.
9. Once the oil's fairly hot, but not smoking, throw in the cabbage, broad beans, courgette, garlic and broccoli and stir them round in an energetic way.
10. Keep that up for a couple of minutes and then add the sugar snaps and onions and use another minutes worth of energy
11. Finally, throw the poppers on one side of a plate and the veg on the other side and drizzle the juice from the poppers over everything in sight
12. Eat

You can find a few more images in the gallery
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I can't begin to describe the feeling you get when you can grab a load of veg that you've grown yourself, slap it in a pan with a few other bits and bobs and then sit down and eat it, all in a matter of hours after the veg was in the ground/on a plant. If you haven't experienced it yourself then I heartily recommend that you do. Anyway, this weekend I brought some veggies home from the field and I was in the mood for a curry so I decided to throw one together.

Ayam Kebun

Feeds as many people as you throw ingredients in for

Ingredients

We grew everything that you see here, including the pickled cabbage and onions you can see in the background

Home grown

• Fresh chillis : Pretty In Purple
• Radish : Cherry Belle
• Spinach Beet : Perpetual Spinach
• Garlic : Thermidrome
• Onion : Red Baron
• Potato : Pentland Javelin
• Broad Beans : Aqualduce
• Courgette : Verde Di Milano
• Broccoli : Quick Heading Calabrese

Bought stuff

• Chicken : we used chicken breasts because that's what we had
• Root ginger
• Tinned chopped tomatoes
• Spices :
  • Coriander : Need to spark some more off!
  • Cummin
  • Garam Masala
  • Tumeric
  • Mustard seeds
  • Salt
  • Black Pepper

Preparation

Feel free to adapt this workflow to suit your own needs, but this is what I did :

1. Chop one of the innocent looking minute chillis in half and, wisely, decide to scrape out the seeds.
2. Cut a slither off one half of the chilli and eat it.
3. Wait a few seconds and then run round the kitchen with your eyeballs sweating and your hand wafting your mouth whilst reciting "fuff me thass fuffin' hot"
4. Gain a whole new respect for a chilli that's smaller than a 5 pence piece and decide to only use four of the bigger ones in the curry
5. Top and tail the radish, saving the leaves, and then cut into rough quarters, or what ever size rocks your boat
6. Peel and roughly chop the onion and garlic and ginger, how rough is your own decision
7. If you're using the head of broccoli/calabrese then you'll probably want to break it down to spears
8. Roughly chop the radish and spinnach leaves
9. Chop the potatoes and courgettes up into chunks, how big is down to the size of your mouth.
10. Shell the broad beans
11. Take the lid off the tin of tomatoes
12. Chop the chicken into chunks

Voila, Garden Chicken Yabba style

On with the cooking!

1. Heat a small pan on the cooker until the base is pretty hot, remove from heat and throw all of the spices in so that they get mildly roasted, which will take bugger all time, and then crush them down with a pestle and mortar ... or use some fancy electronic toy if you're that way inclined
2. Throw the chicken, onions, garlic, ginger, salt, pepper, chillis and spices into a bowl and mix them all around until the chicken is well coated.
3. Put some water into the pan that you used for the spices, add the spuds and then slap it back on the cooker and boil away until the spuds are just starting to soften ... ie/ really firm when you push a fork in but without needing the biceps of a female russian weightlifter
4. Drain the spuds and save the water
5. Get a pan that's big enough for all the stuff you're about to cook and slap it on a high heat with a bloody generous dollop of olive oil or ghee ... if you remember that you've got ghee before you throw the olive oil in
6. Once the oils nice and hot, without burning the house down, throw in the chicken mixture and get a nice bit of colour on it, then take it out and put it on a plate for a tad.
7. Reduce the heat to something a tad more bearable, add some more olive oil and then cook the courgettes and the spuds until they have some colour as well.
8. Whack the heat back up high and throw the chicken back in and give everything a good stir until it's mixed together
9. When you can hear everything start to sizzle, throw the radish, broad beans, radish leaves, spinnach leaves and broccoli on top and then pour over the tin of tomatoes and turn the heat down to a low simmer
10. Don't stir the pan until you're just about to serve, it'll really keep the colour in all the veg
11. Whilst that's cooking away nicely, throw some rice in the pan that had the spices, and then the spuds, in it and cover with twice the depth of water as rice, that'd be the spud water that you saved before.
12. About 15 minutes before you decide the chicken will be ready, put the rice on the heat and bring it to the boil. Give it a quick stir and then put a good fitting lid on it and turn the heat off.
13. Wait ten minutes and then turn the rice out onto plates, one per person is a nice touch
14. Turn the heat off the curry and give it a good stir and then slap it on the plates with the rice, I'm really crap at the artistic plate stuff.
15. At this point I put a dollop of last years cucumber and apple chutney on each plate as well.
16. Eat

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These will soon be rooted up and well on their way to being full plants

Get out the scalpel

Damn these buggers grow fast! Less than a week after we put the tubers on the benches and they'd already started to throw off new shoots so it was time for Barry to get his scalpel out. Different people grow dahlias in different ways. Some, like The Mighty V, just leave the tubers in the ground and let them regrow ( if they survive ) the next year, but the plants start looking crap by the third year, so I'm always replacing them with fresh ones. Others, mainly the yanks I believe, split the tubers into individual "chicken legs" and then plant each of them up, which allows them to get about 1/2 dozen or so off each parent plant. We just throw the whole tuber into a tray, water it and then take cuttings .... lots of cuttings ... from the first flush off about a dozen Trelyn tubers we've already taken 70+ cuttings, which is about all we need for this year, but we could easily get a couple of hundred more if we needed them.

When you take cuttings it's really important to to make the cut directly below a leaf joint as this is where next years cuttings will come from, assuming you want to take cuttings next year of course but we always do. They're easy enough to root up, if you have some rooting powder then just dip them in that and them slap them in some seed compost. If you haven't got any rooting powder then just slap them in some seed compost. If you haven't got any seed compost then just slap them in some compost ... as I said, it's real easy ... then stand welllllllllllllll back, because these buggers grow like there's no tomorrow.

Each of the trays holds 77 cuttings, so we're about half way there

The greenhouses

The large greenhouse is now cleared, so during this week I'll be rotovating it ready for sterilising the beds next week. Then I'll be doing the same in the small greenhouse which means that I need to get all my seedlings hardened off ready to move into the top end of the large greenhouse so that they don't get killed as well. It's taking me a fair tad longer this year than normal as I've been a smidge ill for the last few weeks and haven't really had the energy needed, but we seem to be winning so far. I'll also be dropping the sides on the large greenhouse to help keep the warmth in and the wind out as the sterilising agent needs the soil to be over 10°C before it's active ... cool, I'll be in my shorts in no time

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We finally got round to sparking off the dahlia tubers this week although, like everything else to do with the dahlias this year, we're a fair tad behind as some of them should have been started a month ago. Unlike growing veg, or non-show flowers, this may come back to bite us on the arse as everything about their life cycle is strictly timed and we may have just irreparably screwed up that timetable, it pretty much comes down to how fast they start to throw cuttings. With a tad of luck everything will work itself out in the long run but if it doesn't then it's not the end of the world as we're less interested in showing this year due to other time constraints, so it's mainly about preserving our varieties. The fact that this is also our last year as world champions, and we have no hope of defending our title as they're being held in Canada this year, doesn't really help I guess.

And they're off!

I've been around dahlias for years, so I *know* how much they can change from day to day .. hell, sometimes you feel that if you sat there quietly enough then you could actually watch them grow ..... but the speed that the tubers have started throwing shoots is pretty impressive to say the least! We've only had the tubers on the beds for a week and already the majority of them are throwing shoots, even the mary's and bryn's which are normally a tad on the lethargic side when it comes to recognising that it's a new year.

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Gary shows off the results of his brainwave

The experiment begins

As I mentioned in my previous post I'm having a go to see if I can get tomatoes to fruit by the end of May beginning of June by starting them off this month, although I'm only going to spark off half the plants I want just in case it all goes tits up. The rest will be sparked off around the end of March, which is the normal time to do these things. After deciding that it wasn't worth switching the heated beds on early, they'll be switched on in a couple of weeks for the dahlias, in the potting shed for the small area of it that I'll need I had to come up with another solution.

At first I was considering putting them under my computer desk, where they could keep the 77 chilli pepper seeds company, as this seems to be pretty successful so far at being warm enough to germinate seeds, but there's only so much room and lots of seeds. Then Gary had a bit of a brainwave! As you may or may not know Barry ( that'd be Gary's dad ) runs an aquatics business which has a pretty big tropical & marine fish room which is kept at a constant 22+°C and the excess heat is vented down a storage corridor and then pumped outside ... so, the corridor should be about 22° as well, and my seedlings need a heated area, and it's the off season so there's a fair few empty shelves, and my seedlings need a heated area, and they'll easily fit in the empty bits, can you see where this is going? ... so, now the corridor has become a propagator. Hopefully, by the time the seedlings germinate the heated beds will be switched on so I can move the plants in there and put them in one of the light tents otherwise my computer room is going to become very full very fast and I'll be getting a tan as I sit here pretending to work.

The other problem I'm going to have to overcome is at planting out time. As I'm starting them off this early they're really going to be to big for the light tents come March and will need to be put into the small greenhouse which is unheated, but it is near the outlet vent for the corridor so I'm going to see if I can find a way of redirecting the warm air into the small greenhouse to help keep the temperature a few degrees higher, especially at night. IF it works then bonus, if not then I have the other half of the seeds and I'll just have to wait until later in the year for my first crop, but if you don't try you can't fail huh?

Onions and Leeks

I've also sparked off about 300 onion seeds, half of them are Ailsha Craigs and the other half are Red Baron, the good news is with these is that they'll be happy enough in the potting shed under the lights without needing to turn on the heated beds, and by the time they're ready to be hardened off the small greenhouse should be warm enough for them to be happy. We'll have to see how that goes I guess.

Being the dumb blonde that I am I managed to misread the date for sowing leeks, so now I've got the best part of 200 of them starting to germinate, which will be interesting as they're faaaaaaar to early and I won't have the space for them in the beds until about June, oops. Rather than try to shove the seedling back into the seed I've decided to grow them on and then just use them as baby leeks when they're big enough, so at least they won't go to waste. It'll be interesting to see how long they take to get to baby leek size, as we like leeks and I'm considering successional sowing specifically for baby leeks.

Let there be light

Due to the fact that the chilli pepper seeds germinated a lot faster than I expected I now have another problem! They should have taken a couple of weeks before they poked their noses out of the seeds, by which time the heated beds would have been on and I could have moved them out from under my computer desk and into one of the light tents in the potting shed ... ahhh well, time for plan 2 ... unfortunately I didn't have a plan 2 so some rapid thinking was required. What I needed was a warm place with plenty of daylight.

The "warm place" bit was easy, it's more than warm enough under my computer desk, unfortunately it's a smidge lacking in daylight under there, mind you it's a smidge lacking in daylight outside as well. So, I needed some daylight, and I was stood in an aquatics shop that's full of bulbs specifically designed for growing aquatic plants. Time for another chat with Gary ... Half an hour later I was wending my way home with a four foot light setup which was going to be the start of my home made grow box.

As well as the light I also managed to acquire some 2 inch thick sheets of polystyrene that were big enough to do the job. After spending 10 minutes with a tape measure and an old knife I'd reduced them to the sizes I needed. I then ransacked the kitchen cupboards for some tinfoil and sellotape and proceeded to cover both panels with the tinfoil. Hopefully between the tinfoil and the light there should be enough daylight available to the seedlings for them to grow without stretching. At the same time I also raised the seed trays up so that they were about a foot below the lights, as the seedlings grow I'll gradually lower the tray so that the tops stay about the same distance from the lights.

So all that's left to do now is to wait and keep my eye on how things go ... and hope it doesn't all go tits up, even if it does though I have plenty more seeds I can sow at the right time, I'd just have to wait for my first crop of tomatoes

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• Sown169 Bleu de Solaise leeks
• Sown11 Rose de Berne Tomato
• Sown11 Galina Tomato
• Sown11 Gold Medal Tomato
• Sown77 Various test seeds
• Germinating11 Orange Bell Sweet Pepper
• Germinating11 Pretty in Purple Chilli Pepper
• Germinating11 Lemon Drop Chilli Pepper
• Germinating11 N. Napia Sweet Pepper
• Germinating11 Unknown Chilli Pepper #1
• Germinating11 Unknown Chilli Pepper #2
• Germinating11 Unknown Chilli Pepper #3
• Growing1 Optimistic basil Plant
• GrowingThermidrome Garlic
• Growing10 Jermor Shallot
• GrowingThermidrome Garlic
• Growing10 Jermor Shallot

After getting bitch slapped for having the most un-profound New Years post on the internet, I thought I should defend myself .... mainly because I can't afford a solicitor .... soooo, here's my shiny new New Years post ... pretend you read it days ago.

A very optimistic basil plant

So, my New Year kicked off months ago when I found out I had a smidge more room to grow in next year ( which is now this year ) than I normally do. No more playing around with a couple of small beds and just bringing to the table the successful bits, this year I've got to be FAR more serious .... and I'm not renowned for being shit-hot at serious ... Anyway, I was daft enough to ask, so the least I can do is make sure it all happens close enough to a game plan to declare a technical draw ... With this in mind I instantly went out and bought enough seeds to sink a small tectonic plate by several inches ... and in true blonde fashion I charged them to Barrys credit card ( must remember to pay him back ) .... and all of this happened before my holiday ... in october .... and so my new year began.

Shortly after the seeds arrived I came to 2 conclusions .... 1) I'd bought faaaar to many seeds, and 2) It was time to sod off on holiday .... anyway, after I came back, it was time to start planning the new year. Even with all the extra space that we have to grow in this year, the Mighty V and I decided that we need to make more use of our space at home to grow food in, as well as making as good a use of the field as we could. So we decided to slap in a couple of "raised" beds to define what was growing where. Being the total cheapskate that I am, I nicked a few pallets from the field and slapped enough planks together to convince the Mighty V that they were the best thing since sliced bread .... not much of an achievement when you consider the fact that she's blonde as well, but you take your victories where you can huh?

We promptly slapped some garlic and shallots into them, that the Mighty V had bought from somewhere, some of them even have labels, and then we sat for a bit and watched them ... well, we actually watched the cat and decided that it *really* needed to find a new toilet ... so I froze my arse off one day and put a net over them, that pretty much killed any "and last week I was swimming in the sea" mentality that was lingering, vainly, in my mind ... ahh well, at least it wasn't snowing.

7 Varieties of chilli peppers, 3 of which are "unknowns"

Then it snowed

It didn't really, that was just to cheer scott up .... it's to bloody cold for snow here ... anyway, a couple of weeks later the first "short 'n' green" bits, that'll eventually turn into summat we put on the table, arrived ... how cool, I can already taste it, even though it's going to be about August before they're ready. Continuing with my "I'm an optimist" / "make a concerted effort" mentality, yesterday I slapped some chilli/pepper seeds in .... I'm convinced they'll grow this early ... but just in case I only planted half of them .... but that's still 77 seeds! 11 each of 7 different varieties, Lemon Drop, Pretty In Purple, Orange Bell, N. Napia and 3 "unknown" ones that someone on the allotment forums sent me. I know 77 sounds a lot for an 8' x 6' greenhouse, but they have a poor germination rate so I'm only expecting about 1/2 of them to make it ... if not then I guess I'll just have to sneak a few into the potting shed.

During the next week or so I'll be trying to spark off some very early tomatoes, which means that I need to remember to turn the heated beds on in the potting shed. If it works then I should be harvesting by the end of May, which is a fair tad ahead of last years which we started harvesting at the end of September. For those of you who are into names and numbers I'm hoping to grow 20 Rose de Berne, 10 Galina and 10 Gold Medal, all of which are vine types ( you can see pictures of them on Real Seed ). After a couple of conversations with an ex-commercial grower I've decided to try and grow them the way they do. Basically it involves growing them up a string and then when they reach the top you *should* have cropped the lower ones, so you undo the string, lower the plant and move it along the bed to where the next one is planted. Then you just tie the string up again and do the same for all the plants which gives them all another foot and a half to grow. It's a technique called layering and is also used by professional/commercial sweet pea growers.

Besides sparking off 77 chilli peppers, 40 tomato plants and a very optimistic basil plant I'm also going to be sparking off a few hundred onion seeds this week. I've never grown onions from seed before so this'll be interesting. The good news is that a member of the allotment forums called vegmandan is pretty good at growing onions and, like the rest of the nutters members, he's happy to share his knowledge if you ask him .... and quite often even when it's not asked for If you follow the link then the observant amongst you will notice that his New Year started in October as well .... so it's not just me that's strange.

The list goes on

Other things that need doing in the next couple of weeks are closing up the small greenhouse so it can be used as a cold frame for storing all the pot tubers that are currently occupying the heated beds. Later on I'll also be using it to harden off the onions before they get slapped in their final bed in the main greenhouse and then, sometime around the end of March / April the tomatoes will go in .... if they've survived that long. I also need to get the main greenhouse cleared up and ready for the dahlia season as well, so that's 500+ tubers to dig up and the stakes to pull out, and it really needs to be all done and dusted before the middle of the month as we'll be sparking off next years plants in February, damn the potting sheds gonna be a smidge crowded! On top of all that, I really need to clear out our own lil greenhouse and give everything a good scrub so it's ready for the new season as well.

Hopefully by the end of the month all of the greenhouses will be ready for the new season and my seedlings should be taking their first glimpses of daylight, although some of the daylight will be coming from bulbs because the suns a smidge crap at making an appearance for more than a few hours a week at this time of year. You can be sure that I'll take lots of pictures for you to be bored by and, if I pull my finger out, I might also get round to finishing coding my seed site which I'm hoping to use to track my progress through the growing year in a way that the blogs probably couldn't cope with. There's still a long way to go with it though, so don't hold your breaths

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Yeah, it's showtime! Usually we don't have enough flowers to enter the Southport Flower Show as the majority of our blooms are timed to come out the week later when all the serious championship events take place, but this year all the shows are in a very brief period, the majority of the ones that we enter are done and dusted 3 weeks from now! So, we went to Southport with a few blooms ... and trounced them .... I can't wait until they realise that Barry thought we had some right crap flowers ( the first ones usually are ) and that we should have far better for the rest of the shows .... maybe they should just all give up now?

As usual Barry and Wendy set off with a van full of flowers and came back with a van full of trophies. Of course the only reason that we ever win is to down to my dedication to bimbling and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they actually know one end off a flower from the other. Such is the burden I must bear Of course the fact that we're into the showing season means that the large and samll greenhouses are now filled with some fantastic dahlias .... several of which are planted in the wrong spot, glad I'm not the one that labels the cuttings! ... The downside is, it hasn't really been sunny enough to truly appreciate the time that I spend with them every day. Whilst they cheer up even the most grim day, they really look there best when the suns shining and your sat amongst them with a beer and a smoke, reading a good book .... of course you have to get up every now and then to turn the next irrigation system on ... but it's worth the hardship

Our next show is tomorrow, Barry's picking our entries as I'm typing this, but I'll get some pics before he sets off. I'll also be able to update you with the show pictures a lot sooner as well, as this show is our own Societies show and is being held in Lancaster, which is just up the road from here. For now you'll just have to drool over last weeks flowers

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I've not made a post for ages because I've been busy recoding my gallery plugin to make the whole process shedloads less manual and a lot more idiot friendly ... although I'm currently the only idiot using it ... I've also had the ballache of recoding the demo magento skin to make it work with the release version of the software .... ah well, at least it'll be a very custom skin I suppose .... anyway, enough about coding, this post is meant to be about the field.

As usual we've had a fair amount of mixed weather, about all we haven't had is hail, thank god it's summer huh? Whilst rain isn't exactly my idea of perfect shorts weather, hell it's not even my idea of "go outside" weather, at least it put our new drainage system to the test ... it passed with flying colours ... in fact, all of the beds are in pretty good nick this year. Anyway, seeing as I had to go water the beds that were already under cover, I decided to nick Gary's camera and take a few pics.

Wow! a ball of fire in the sky!

In all fairness to the weather, the sun has *almost* managed to fulfil it's contractual duties of 12 hours of sunshine for summer ... of course, we hoped it'd do it all in one day, not spread it over several weeks :-S. Ahhh well, at least I got some good photos that didn't involve water

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