Thanks again for all of the entries and votes in this month’s competiton.

Voting was close right until the end, and then there was one person pulled slightly ahead with just over 50% of the vote. So, this month’s winner is …

Emma’s Tomato & Chilli Chutney

Congratulations Emma! Please send me your address either through the contact me page on here, or by email, so that I can send your prizes onto you.

Well done to everyone, and there will be another Cultivate, Cook & Click competition next month!

Thank you for all of the entries for this month’s competition.

Remember that you choose the winner of this month’s competition, so once you have chosen your favourite, continue down to the bottom of the blog, and complete the form to register your vote. You might want to cook some of these recipes too to help you decide which one is your favourite.

The vote closes at 12 noon on 31st August, so get voting!

Here are this month’s finalists …

Melanie’s Mixed Vegetable Balti

Ingredients:
3 tbsp vegetable oil
1 large white onion, diced
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
4 heaped tbsp Balti curry paste
2 large carrots, peeled and diced
500g potatoes, peeled and diced
1 large cauliflower, stalked and cut into small florets
1 tin chopped tomatoes
600ml vegetable stock
3 tbsp fresh coriander, chopped roughly
150g green beans, diced
1 tsp sugar
Salt and black pepper to taste
Extra chopped fresh coriander and natural yoghurt for garnish

Method:
1. Sautee the onion and garlic in the oil for five minutes, covered, to soften.
2. Remove the lid and cook for a further couple of minutes, or until beginning to brown.
3. Add the curry paste and stir in the onions, cooking for 1 minute. Stir in the diced potato and carrots, and cook covered for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Add the cauliflower, tinned tomatoes and vegetable stock, and cook covered for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
5. Add the green beans, coriander, and sugar and cook for further 15 minutes
6. Season to taste. Check that the vegetables are all fully cooked, and serve.

Have a look at Melanie’s blog for more of her recipes!

Emma’s Tomato & Chilli Chutney

Ingredients:
1 kg ripe tomatoes, quartered
2-3 chillies, roughly chopped
5 cloves garlic, sliced
1 onion, cut into wedges
3 tbsp balsamic vinegar
100g brown sugar
Olive oil

Method:
1. Preheat oven to 200c
2. Put the tomatoes, chilli, garlic, onion, vinegar and sugar into a large, shallow roasting dish. Pour on a large glug of olive oil and mix everything together with your hands.
3. Roast in the oven for around an hour until everything is soft and the onions have caramelised.
4. Allow to cool a little and transfer to sterilised storage jars.

Emma has her own blog “Mummy Musings” where she details juggling motherhood and a career.

Vicky’s Greek Beans

In Vicky’s own words, this dish is called ‘Greek Beans’ – “because they are based on beans I remember eating in Corfu on one of my first holidays abroad. They were meltingly tender, heavy with garlic and oil, and some tomato. This is one of those recipes that probably tastes nothing like the original, but has been filtered through my memory and has popped out like this.

This is my way of dealing with the French bean glut from our allotment every August (and probably Greece’s way of dealing with the same situation). These are bottled in recycled cook-in sauce jars, because they are cheap and because I can get 3 of them at a time in my pressure cooker; Kilner jars are just too wide.

They MUST be pressure cooked for 40 minutes, to kill dangerous enzymes that may cause spoilage and worse. Once sealed they keep for at least a year.”

Ingredients:
French beans, 3 big handfuls, topped and tailed
Creamed tomatoes, 2 x 500gms packs (Smooth, thick, sieved tomatoes. Good, cheap passata!)
Garlic cloves, to taste (I’d use 5 or 6)
Generous splash olive oil (4-5tbsps. Virgin recommended)
Salt
Sugar (1 dessertspoon approx – again, keep checking to get the taste you want)
3 cook-in sauce jars

Method:
1. Make tomato sauce by crushing garlic and salt, frying in lots of olive oil, without colouring. Add creamed tomatoes, salt and sugar and bring all to the boil. You only need to bring it to the boil at this point, as it will undergo further cooking during the processing time.

2. Thoroughly wash jars and lids (which must have safety buttons). Sterilise jars by putting in an oven at 100C for 10 minutes. Put lids in a small bowl and cover with boiling water. The pressure cooker will need a trivet in the bottom; the jars shouldn’t touch the bottom of the pan, or each other. Get boiling water ready. The key to success with this process is to make sure everything is as clean and hot as possible, and that the process isn’t interrupted at all.

3. Loosely pack the hot jars with the beans. Put in half the sauce, then squeeze in a few more beans until the jar is tightly packed. Top up with hot sauce. Give it a good shake, or poke around with chopstick, or similar, to make sure there are no air pockets. Fill it right to the top and apply lid, screwing on tightly.

4. Make sure the water is boiling in the pressure cooker and position jars as in pic below – not touching each other. Put on the lid and bring up to pressure. Pressure cook for 40 minutes. The pressure should be gentle, but not allowed to drop at any time. After 40 minutes, turn off and carefully remove from heat. Allow the pressure to drop in its own time. I leave it for half an hour or so before removing the pressure cooker lid. Forcing things at this point can cause a pressure difference that makes the sauce squirt out! Undesirable.

5. Sit back with a cool drink and await the delightful ‘pop’ from each jar as it seals. Any jars that don’t ‘pop’ and suck the safety button down should be refrigerated and used within a week. In truth, they’d probably last much longer than that – everything is sterile, after all – but, just to be on the safe side.

To serve:
1. Straight from the jar, in a salad, or
2. The Greek way, lukewarm with some crusty bread. You could crumble some feta cheese on top.

Vicky has her own blog called “High & Tight In Brixham.”

So now it’s over to you to vote and to pick your winner. Remember that voting closes at 12 noon on 31st August.

Take Our Poll

After a short break last month, here is this month’s Cultivate, Cook & Click Competition.

So, here is a reminder of the rules …

Each month around this time, I will pick four or five vegetables or fruit that are in season, and you then have to devise a dish that uses at least one of those ingredients.

There are no restrictions on the style of cooking, so it can be a recipe plucked from anywhere in the world, but it has to be one that you have cooked yourself!


Each entry has to include:

• A picture of the vegetables or fruit that you are using in the recipe. This has to be ones that you use in the recipe, and not some random picture from Google! Extra points will be awarded when I shortlist the entries if you have grown it yourself.
• A copy of the recipe
• A picture of the finished dish that you have cooked yourself

You can upload your entries by going to the contact form of my blog or by clicking on this link.

I’ll then shortlist the best five, and then publish those on my blog. I’ll then open it up to the public vote, who will choose the winner each month.

The prizes for this month’s winner have been supplied by the lovely Phil & Kay at Dartmoor Chilli Farm, who grow their chilli plants naturally and holistically without any pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. They are a very eco friendly business and run our nursery using wind and solar power. The majority of the ingredients in their sauces and other products are either grown on their farm or very close to it.

The prizes for this month are Beast Of Dartmoor Chilli Sauce, Dartmoor Dynamite Chilli Sauce – which I helped to name , Dartmoor Chilli Jam, Fireball Pickled Onions, Sweet Chilli Sauce, Extreme Apple Chutney and five bars of chilli chocolate.

This will be a fabulous prize whether you like your chillies mild, blisteringly hot, or in between!

So, for August, the vegetables or fruit that you can choose from are:

• Chillies
• Carrots
• French Beans
• Blackberries
• Sweetcorn

You have until 12 noon on 17th August to get your entries to me, and I’ll be publishing the five finalists that night, and giving details on how you can vote.

Voting will then close at 12 noon on 31st August, and the winner will be announced later that night!

As I’ve mentioned before, apart from the short break last month, this will be a monthly competition, so don’t get downhearted if your recipe doesn’t get shortlisted, as there will be many more chances to win. In the meantime though, get your thinking caps on, and get those entries in!

It doesn’t matter whether you have a small garden, or a large allotment plot, you always seem to run out of growing space, especially in the busy late Spring and early Summer months.

However, there are a couple of techniques that can be used, which will ensure that you get the absolute most out of your growing space.

Intercropping

Intercropping (also known as ‘intersowing’) is a method of growing two different crops in the same row or bed, one fast growing and the other one slow.

Although both may be sown or planted at the same time and then grown together, the faster of the two will have been harvested and out of the ground before the slower one is ready to fill the space. Tall crops, such as sweetcorn, also leave adequate space beneath them for lettuces to grow.

Fast growing crops include Oriental salad leaves, small lettuces, corn salad, spinach, radishes, and spring planted shallot sets. Slow growing crops, amongst which the quicker growing ones can be grown include sweetcorn, tomatoes, leeks, parsnips, and winter brassicas such as cabbages, cauliflowers, sprouting broccoli, and Brussels sprouts.

Catch Cropping

Catch cropping means sowing and harvesting a fast growing crop in the brief period when a bed may be free or empty, in the period between two separate plantings of slower, more long term crops. For example, there may be a bed empty in late spring or early summer before planting out leeks or winter cabbages.

Or perhaps after lifting early season broad beans or new potatoes, you will have enough time to grow a fast growing crop before the ground is used for hardy kale or autumn sown Japanese onions.

So, as you can see, you can grow even more in that small piece of land than you originally thought!

Time for a little bit of a catch up I think, since I have been a bit stingy with blog updates recently!

I was a little worried about Gladys, one of our ex-battery chickens for a while, as she seemed to be very much out of sorts, and would not stand up for more than a few seconds at a time. We had to lift her in and out of the nest box and place her near the food, and we were dreading the day when she stopped eating.

Then one day we went down to open them up, and after the other three had come down the ramp at Mach 3 to head towards the food, Gladys then announced herself in a flurry of squawks and feathers as if to announce “I’m back!”

She’s now barging the other three out of the way at the feed, and instead of being very scrawny, is growing all of her feathers, and giving the others a run for their money!

All of the chillies are benefiting from having more room in my new polytunnel and have put on a massive growth spurt and are producing bucketloads of chilies. It’s good that I discovered the trick of how to freeze them last year, as I’m going to need to do the same this year.

All of the spuds have been lifted, so we have enough to feed an army. We want to have fresh spuds for Christmas Day, so we are going to plant some more in a patch of our allotment that could do with some help in being cleared, and the soil being broken up.

The sweetcorn is also teasing me as it looks like it is ready, but everytime I pull back its covering to have a peek, it is not quite there, so I have to wait another day at least before I can fire up the BBQ.

I’ve also harvested four bags full of purple top turnips which will come in useful in stews in the Autumn and Winter. Planted up some more as well, as I love them!

We’re also having the usual game of hide and seek with the courgettes, but still miss the odd one which then turns into a marrow in the blink of an eye. However searching for those means we can spot all of the pumpkins that have kicked into life that will be used in due course to make pumpkin and chorizo soup. spiced pumpkin risotto …..

Both myself and @luckylottielisa have been busy bees over the weekend.


Despite only getting our allotment plot in January, and also all the late frosts doing their best to kill anything we took the chance to plant out, we had our first major harvest from the plot this weekend.

We’d been able to pick a few peas and broad beans here and there, but this weekend, we lifted all the first and second early potatoes, and now have enough of them to feed an army! The picture above is me planting two varieties of pumpkins and some climbing courgettes in the place where they used to be.

The planned third installment of building ‘Chickenopolis’ was postponed as I had a monumental hangover, so instead I used the carcasses of some old drawers as raised beds, and planted the baby turnip seedlings.

The onions are also looking suspiciously ready, even though technically we shouldn’t be pulling them until August. They have swelled that much with the changeable weather, that we had to pull a few onions anyway to give the others more room to grow. We used them in a Shepherd’s Pie for dinner yesterday, and they weren’t bad at all!

The sweetcorn is really kicking into life now as well, so it looks as if we will have an OK crop from those as well.

What I can’t work out though is why some of the chillies in my greenhouse have decided that they want to flower, even though they are only about a foot tall!

What a fantastic weekend. Sunny skies all the way through, and I ended up with red arms!

We spent all of Saturday building frames for the beans and peas to climb up, and then we planted the “Hugh’s Huge” peas and “Crimson Flowered” broad beans. I have a load more of both, together with runner and french beans coming up in the greenhouse.

We were also frantically trying to clear the overgrown bit on the right hand side of the lottie, as we have 42 sweetcorn plants (they all germinated!!), and several other things in the greenhouse that will need a new home at some point. Luckily, one of our friends there has a petrol rotavator/tiller that made the job a lot easier.

I’ll try and take some pictures tomorrow night when I go down to water.

Hope you all had the chance to enjoy the glorious weather this weekend.