Jamming

So we're having a loooot of strawberries in our garden this year, so much even, that we decided to make strawberry jam. I hardly ever eat jam, actually only at high teas (with scones) or when we're staying in a hotel that doesn't have any other bread spread things for breakfast. My SO does eat a lot of jam, in very varying tastes, usually provided by his father, who also has lots of fruit in his garden. But for our first try, we decided to make just plain old strawberry jam.
So we saved up the strawberries from several days, even the slightly slug-eaten ones that we'd usually throw out, and then we weighed them all and turned them into jam. We had about 800 g of strawberries in total, which is quite a nice harvest. It took a while to clean and slice them all, getting rid of the dirty and partly-eaten bits, and then we put them in a pan to heat up.

Strawberry pan.

Then we added what is called 'jelly sugar' in Dutch, I have absolutely no idea what it's called in the rest of the world, but it's the sugar that you put in to make jam. Usually you add the same amount of sugar as you have fruit, but with this sugar we had to add less, so that took a bit of calculating. We also added a big squeeze of lemon and lime juice, because just strawberries and sugar is way too sweet.
After boiling it all for a while, the jam was transferred to the jars, with some big strawberry pieces still in there. You can boil it down for longer and get a really smooth jam, but a bit of texture is nice to have. These pieces do mean that you get jelly in the bottom and more strawberry pieces at the top, because they float on the more liquid part, but that does make it look kinda nice.

Blurry jam transfer.

Split-level strawberry jam.

Then it was a case of putting on the lids and letting them cool, until we could put them in the fridge. The lids of our new special strawberry jam jars didn't fit quite as well as we'd hoped, so we're going to have to eat those a bit quicker than we thought, but I don't imagine that's going to be a problem. We tasted the jam when it went into the jars, and it's really nice, sweet but not to clingy, with a nice sour note. As I said, I'm not really much of a jam-eater, but of course I'll try our own home-made jam when I get the chance.
We still have loads of strawberries in the garden, some of which are still green and some of which are just becoming red, so we'll be eating 'normal' strawberries (maybe with cream) for a couple of days as well. But this was a very nice home-grown food experience already!

Garden update - in bloom!

Remember the veg patches I wrote about a while back? Well, they have gotten bigger. A lot bigger. As did all of the other stuff that we bought for our vegetable patch. Somehow you always start off with lots of small things, thinking that most of them won't take and you'll have plenty of space for those things that do grow. But then suddenly everything is growing and getting bigger and sprouting unpredicted leaves and flowers and what not, and we start dreaming about a bigger garden again...
So how are things doing? Well, of the 7 'veg patches' (aubergine, broccoli, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, thyme, spinach and endive), the thyme never really did anything, and neither did the strawberries. I don't really know what happened to the spinach or the endive, they may still be around in some of the smaller pots, but I've kind of lost track of them.
We planted the 5 proper broccoli plants out into the garden, only for them to be eaten by the ferocious slugs that prowl our garden at night. So the only things left are the aubergine and the cherry tomatoes, and they're doing really great!

Cherry tomatoes and peas

(Now I took these pictures with my phone camera, which appears to be the worst camera in the history of camera phones, on a really bright day, so bear with me.)

So apart from the small supermarket veg patches we also have some other plants which we either got as small plants or which we planted out from seed from last years crop or from housewarming gifts we had a couple of years ago. The peas in the picture above came from a packet that we bought about 4 years ago, but surprisingly they still managed to become proper plants.

Our vegetable patch on 1 June

So this was the 'bit plot' about 3 days ago. We've had a lot of rain and even more sunshine in the days in between, so everything has grown out a lot more since then, but I didn't want to bother taking another picture. The sticks are all anti-kitty protection, because they do like to dig their holes in this area.
On the far right you can see our potato plants, which we grew from potatoes that had sprouted roots after being left out too long. Next to the potatoes are the broccoli plants. The biggest one, the one on the left, is actually the remainder of the supermarket veg patches which we grew from seed, the others were bought as small plants. In front is a small row of onions (actually lasts year's crop; they were too small to eat, so we left them in the shed and planted them out again). Behind them is a line of cucumber plants which we  grew from seed, and behind those is a line of beets, also grown from seed. Then we get to beer slug, who tries to keep everything from being eaten (these things are wonderful: you fill them with beer, the slugs want to drink the beer, they fall in and drown. Much better than spreading poison. Works perfectly with pots or jars not in the shape of snails too). The courgette plant on the far left has already been savagely slaughtered, as you can see. All the way behind the beets you can see our leeks, which were bought as really small plants and are really doing well. There is a kind of empty area in front of beer slug that may or may not contain any seed, I'm not really sure what happened there.
Apart from this plot we have some smaller pots containing the aubergine and possibly the endive or spinach. We will plant these out into the ground if and when space appears, but as I mentioned before, these plants do tend to get larger and larger...

So much for vegetables, what about fruit? Well, our apple tree, after its bumper crop of last year, decided not to do anything at all. No flowers, that is, it's sprouting plenty of leaves. But there will be no home-grown apples in our future.
The strawberries on the other hand...

...doing better than ever!

We're usually on holiday when the strawberry season hits, but this year we won't be going anywhere in June or July, so there will be loads of lovely strawberries to eat!

In short: our garden is in full bloom (both figuratively and literally). Even with the attacks of the snails and the extremes in weather, I think we will manage to grow some things this year, so we will be able to eat from our garden again. Which I still think is one of the best things; eating something you've grown yourself, preferable from seed. It always tastes better than store-bought stuff. And maybe next year, we'll have even more space...

Veg patches

So most of you will probably know by now that we have a small vegetable patch in the back garden, in which we try to grow some food, with various outcomes. Potatoes, apples, pumpkins and strawberries appear to love it here, while carrots, lettuce and cauliflower don't really want to do anything. This year, we're sticking to our success stories, and therefore we've already put the potatoes in the ground (in a different place than last year, of course).
We started quite early this year, because the major supermarket chain in the Netherlands decided to jump on the whole 'authentic food' bandwagon and give out miniature vegetable patches with every 10 Euros of groceries you bought. Technically they're not only veg patches but also herb gardens, as you can also get stuff like thyme and rosemary, but they called them 'moestuintjes' (= veg patches) nonetheless.
I've talked to several (freelance) marketing professionals in the last few weeks who cannot comprehend how this supermarket chain has another 'hit' by giving away stuff that most people usually turn up their noses at, but somehow little boxes are popping up left right and centre on the window sills. How many of these will actually turn into proper plants or be planted out when the time comes remains to be seen.
Of course, we will take our little plant proteges very seriously. We got 7 'patches' in total: aubergine, broccoli, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, thyme, spinach and endive. Luckily, most of them are plants we've already grown and/or plants that like our soil. We've put the first 5 of them in their boxes already, and the broccoli and cherry tomatoes have come up really quickly, so we've put them in bigger pots ready to be planted outside when the temperatures get a bit higher. The thyme is now also showing two very tiny leaves, but the aubergines and strawberries don't appear to be doing much as of yet. We won't put the leaf vegetables out until about halfway through April, because these tend to grow pretty quickly and we don't want to see them wither away in the cold March air.
Apart from these new plants, we still have a lot of strawberry plants from last year, plus the apple tree, and a lot of pumpkin seeds from the two pumpkins we grew last year (and didn't eat, because I really just like to look at them and marvel at the fact that we've grown these things in a small, shaded garden in the middle of the city). We may buy more peppers at some point, but with the 'free' veg patches our own patch is filling up pretty quickly. Hopefully, this will be the last year we grow stuff here, as we are now seriously looking at moving to a place with a bigger garden before next spring. But even if we get half the amount of food we grew last year, I'll still be a happy gardener!

Apple cake

Our apples have been steadily growing bigger and redder, and after another few attempts we have conclusively decided that they are not fit for normal 'eat an apple' consumption, as they are far too sour and tough and somehow just plain yuck. But that doesn't mean we can't put them in other stuff! I've made two apple crumbles already, and yesterday I made an apple cake. This is a recipe my grandmother used to make when my mom was little, but it's not one of those teary-eyed family heirlooms because frankly, it's too simple to put into words.

Ingredients
200 g flour
200 g sugar
200 g butter (softened)
2 eggs
(baking powder)
apples
sultanas/raisins (soaked if you're using dried ones)
cinnamon

Pre-heat your oven to 180 C.
Simply mix together the flour, sugar and butter and add the eggs when the mixture becomes too tough to handle. I added some baking powder because my flour was pretty old, but you can leave that out. Mix thoroughly for about 3-5 minutes and then put into a rectangular baking tin (which you've lined with baking parchment etc).
Cut the apples into little slices and put these on top of the cake mixture, slightly overlapping (in Dutch we call this 'roof tile style'). I used three small apples and my baking tin was filled, but you really just have to try how many will fit. If you have some left over you can always sneak them in between some others.
Dry off your raisins and sprinkle these over. Also sprinkle over some extra sugar and cinnamon.
Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until it's dry in the middle.

There is cake mixture underneath, hard to see at this point.

Now the idea is that the cake will spread around and over the apples, partly covering them, and leaving nice 'apple trails' on top. This usually works, but this time, probably because I used baking powder, the cake went a little crazy and gobbled up most of the apples:

Hello cake!

So usually it looks like the bit on the top left, but hey, who cares what it looks like anyway?
It tasted great, moist in the middle and nice and crunchy on the sides. I wanted to add some lemon zest in the mixture but it's a good thing I forgot as these apples are really too sour to be adding some more. But if you're using quite sweet apples, lemon zest may be a nice addition.

There are still lots of apples left on the tree, so I may be trying out some new apple recipes soon, maybe even a tarte tartin if I'm feeling very adventurous!

Garden update (3)

I could simply add photos to the previous post (when my computer was refusing to cooperate) but so much has been happening in the garden that I think it deserves a new post.

To begin with, have a look at these marvellous strawberries. A second crop is growing on the plants as we speak, but I'm afraid they won't nearly be as big and tasty as these ones were...

June strawberries

We removed some of the apples from the apple tree to lighten its load, and then I turned these apples (tiny, very very sour, but ripe enough (the seeds were brown, which is the main point, I was told)) into an apple crumble.

Miniature apples

Also, another pepper has been developing, and now we have two:

Peppers!

And one thing I forgot to mention last time are the beans (green beans, to be exact) which have staid very low but still produced some very nice beans. But those have already been eaten, I'm afraid. As have most of the leeks, before they sprouted flowers
We've also eaten the first of our potatoes, which has produced really a lot of offspring, some of which almost too big to fit my hand. We can eat 2-3 times from this first one, and we put 5 in the ground, so I'm thinking that leaving your potatoes to sprout roots and then put them in the ground because you don't know what else to do with them is working out pretty fine. Their 'alpha' potatoes, which normally grow on Malta, but with the warm and dry weather we've been having also seem to thrive here.

Our courgettes and pumpkins haven't started flowering yet, but they're producing lots of leafs that haven't been eaten by the slugs, so I'm hopeful they will do something yet.

And finally, this weekend, our trial aubergine also went to work, and produced this:

Baby aubergine

Yes, that is a baby aubergine. It's about the size of my thumb as we speak, but we're hoping to make it into a proper sized purple egg.
I never would have guessed that a garden this small, with so little attention given to it, would produce this much food! Just imagine what we will do when we get a proper plot on our hands. One can only dream...

Garden update (2)

So last time around it took a while for a 'garden update'  to appear, but this time I'm going to keep all of you posted. Because a lot has been happening in our garden, much of it good, some of it less good.

One of the not-so-happy things is the fact that a looot of slugs have chosen to call our garden home. And they have an appetite. Strangely enough, they're also eating the leafs on the potato, which I thought would make them sick but somehow only seems to make them bigger slugs. Otherwise, they love eating fresh strawberries, especially during the night when they're just doing their final ripening before we take them off. And also young courgette and pumpkin plants, with their tiny leafs just coming out, are wonderful food.
The good thing is that we did have strawberries, and several other edible things actually growing. The only thing that failed massively were the carrots, of which exactly 3 showed some fizzy leaf, which then disappeared after a while (whether the slugs were involved, we don't know, it may be that they're just unhappy growing on our clay soil). But we've had a loooot of strawberries, which in true strawberry fashion were ripe during Wimbledon, so it's been a week since we had the last ones. Otherwise, we've had some broccoli, and the leeks are really starting to become proper leeks. We've eaten some already and are going to have to eat the rest of them soon before they start flowering and become inedible.


Our apple tree also did surprisingly well, its little branches laden with apples. Every rain storm or gust of wind I'm afraid the weight of the apples will break the branches, but so far it's holding up pretty good. Then there are the aforementioned potatoes, and we've gotten a new batch of courgette and pumpkin plants for a do-over. We're also having a pepper plant (one small pepper already growing away) and an aubergine plant, which doesn't really seem to be doing a lot. And both of our berry plants are still completely without leafs, but we do have a lot of butterflies around from the caterpillars that ate all those leafs, so I guess it's been good for something.
In the non-veg area our thyme plant has been eaten twice, we just put in the second reserve in the hope that this one will survive. Most of our other plants are doing really well, especially the butterfly-bush, which is attracting a lot of bees, butterflies, and other nectar-loving insects. Sadly, it's also attracting our little neighbour girl, who likes to pull off the flowers because they smell so nice. But all in all the garden is doing a lot better than I expected, given the lack of sun, abundance of rain, and lack of attention from us. We'll see if the potatoes, peppers, apples, courgettes, pumpkins and aubergines turn out to be any good later in the year. For now, it's most used to enjoy the wonderful weather we've been having.

PS: I was going to add some photos, but my computer is being especially difficult tonight, so pics still to come.

Feathered housemates

So, after a year of waiting, the moment is finally there: we have a little birds' nest in our nest box! The fact that I still get manically excited about these things shows how much of a biologist I still am (Dutchies: you may want to watch the documentary 'MeesTV' that was broadcast a short while ago to understand this). I have spent a summer ploughing through forests and fields to check up on literally hundreds of nest boxes and their inhabitants, so you would think I'd be done with them by now, but nope, it's still great.
We'd put the nest box up on our eastern wall, which is the one facing the garden, as high up as possible. This had two reasons: safer from the cats, but also longer sun time. We put it up quite early last spring, in the hope of catching some late breeders, but nothing happened, apart from some stray twigs being put into the box.

Then this spring, some great tits took an interest in the box (incidentally, a friend of mine who is now teaching proficiency classes in English put a question about a 'great tit' on her examination, which led to the test supervisor having to grab the microphone and inform the sniggering first years (and anybody else in the exam hall at the time) that "a 'great tit' is a kind of bird". Seriously, who doesn't know that?). We held our breath, but the birds disappeared again. The house sparrows have been in a frenzy of breeding for a couple of weeks now, so I'd lost all hope, but then last week I came into the garden from the bike shed, and two great tits left the nest box. Very exciting! But also a bit disturbing: if they were leaving when I entered the garden, how would they ever start to breed in there?
Then it started to rain, and it kept on raining for at least a week. So I was sure nothing was happening, as they couldn't have possibly already started a nest, and now they wouldn't be starting one because of the rain. But then today I came into the garden and heard the unmistakable sound of little birds begging for food. So I stood still for a good minute, and as expected: one of the parent birds went into the nest box carrying food, and came out with a little white parcel of poo. Which makes our box officially inhabited! Woo!

The box has a little window up the side through which you can look inside, but as it is about 4 meters of the ground I think I'm going to pass on that one. I think there must be 4 or 5 chicks in there at the moment, reckoning from the sound, but more may still hatch.
The only downside is that the box is quite close to our (always open) bedroom window, so we may get some sleep disturbance from the begging noises. But I'm guessing they've been out of their eggs for a couple of days now, and just aren't as loud as we thought they would be. And otherwise, they'll be gone in two weeks, so I will enjoy their presence for as long as it lasts!

Garden update

I called this post 'garden update' to give an update on an earlier post I wrote about our garden plans - but it turns out I'd never actually written said post. So I guess it's just a first garden post for this year, following up from the first-ever post about our new garden from April last year. Ahum...


This year we moved around some plants that weren't doing too well in the spot they were in, such as the grape, which was pining away in a dark and wet spot. Then we dug out some plants that had gotten a bit out of control (mint, anyone?). But that is not all. Of course we also have the strawberries, aforementioned grapes, and the artichoke still left over from last year. But now we get to the good part: we also put lots of new vegetables in.
We have created a dedicated vegetable patch, which now sports broccoli, leeks, onions, carrots and potatoes.

Dedicated vegetable patch area

You can't actually see the carrots, onions or potatoes in that picture, but the top ends are poking out a tiny bit. The potatoes were actually less planned than the other things: we had some that were left in the cupboard to long and started sprouting roots, so we decided to put them in the ground and see what happened. What is happening right now is that they're putting little purpley bits through the soil, so I think they are doing good. We're growing the carrots and onions from seed, which is a first, so we'll see how that goes. Obviously, we bought the leeks and broccoli as small plants, otherwise they'd never gotten this big this quickly.

But there's more (and I honestly have no idea where we're going to put these when they start growing properly): we also have several little greenhouses filled with even more veg.

Baby vegetables-to-be

From left to right you can see rocket, radishes, and peas. They have all been sown from seed, and kept nicely snug and warm in their greenhouses. The peas are a little bit less enthusiastic, but they are coming. Somehow, somewhere, these will be put into the ground once the weather gets a bit warmer and they get a bit bigger. We planted out some rocket last year, which came up but then disappeared under a massive courgette that was groping its way through the garden. We had radishes in the garden at our other house but the snails ate them all, and tried peas before but they never really did anything. So, this is sort of our 'second chance' box.

I'm very curious to see what will grow and what will wither in our new garden, and I fully intend to keep you (more) up to date!

The Birds

As you may know by now, the garden that came with our new house isn't really a garden in the true sense, it's more a patch of yellow sand and clay with some tiles dropped in. We've tried very hard to change that, and some nice plants are starting to grow, but it will be at least a couple of months before it can really truly be called a garden (I will add pictures!). And even then, it will be one of very very few in the neighbourhood, as most people just pave the whole thing over and throw in some expensive 'lounge' furniture and an oversized barbecue.
Which is why I am so very happy that one little sparrow has found its way into our garden and is hopping around the (small, just coming in to leaf) birch tree. We left the bird feeder up because it was still quite cold, and the sparrow has been spreading seed husks all over the surrounding area, in a great show of appetite. Our first bird! Apart from the colony of jackdaws living next door, of course, but they don't really visit the garden, they just hop around on the shed and in the raingutters.
But there has been some activity in our birdhouse as well: small twigs are now sticking out of the creaks in the bottom. We're not sure whether it is the same sparrow (they tend to nest in groups) or whether a lonely blue tit or great tit has found it, but we're keeping our fingers crossed that we may even get a bird-in-residence.
And then yesterday we were sitting outside in front of our house, because that's where the sun is in the late afternoon, and we heard this frantic chirping by little chicks, and discovered that there are several nestboxes under the raingutters of the houses on the opposite side of the street. They're of the type more commonly known as 'sparrow flats', with several openings for sparrows to nest together. One family had clearly already hatched, and both parents were flying in and out bringing food.
All of this made me very happy.
One of the first things I learnt when I started my biology studies was that most biologists study birds because they're a) not nocturnal and b) one of the last patches of nature that can actually withstand the pressure of the city. This area is not extremely bad, naturewise, there are lots of trees and bushes next to the railroad tracks, and if you cross the ring road you're in the middle of the fields (with complementary manure wafts if the wind turns that way), but it's no bird heaven, especially with all the cats and dogs and small children running around. But, as ever, nature finds its way, even if it is with the help of some man-made nest boxes.
And then to top it all off: yesterday evening we had a bat in the garden, gracefully swooping around to clear out the mosquitoes.