Year: 2013
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The Plant Nutter’s Virtual Book Club
My friend (and newly qualified Ethnobotanist) Emma Cooper has started a virtual book club. More about Emma’s studies later, as we were a case study in Emma’s thesis. Her idea is that participants will read a set book every other month and we then discuss this online. For more details about how this will work…
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Please help now to save our spuds
If you’ve grown potatoes, you’ll probably know the heartbreak that late blight can cause you. It can wipe out your crop. If you eat potatoes, I’m sure you’d like to eat ones that are free from copper (a heavy metal), fungicides & pesticides. But to prevent crop losses, conventional farmers use the copper & other…
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November Posy
November Posy The weather forecasters are promising a drop in temperatures and frosts next week. This will put an end to some of the flowers still soldiering on in the garden, giving their all. We are usually lucky here: we live on a peninsula and so we’re surrounded by the sea; our frosts are mostly…
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Apple Day Recipes
Today is the day to celebrate the wonderful variety and bounty that apples give us. To help us celebrate, here’s a list of some of my favourite recipes. Apple recipes Apple cider vinegar A doddle to make, very healthy for you and lots of fun. You can use damaged apples, or scraps. So this is…
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Orange & coffee liqueur recipe
Delightfully simple to make: satisfyingly complex to taste. That sums up this grand liqueur which you could make now and enjoy over the festive season. If you can bear to part with some, it’d make an ideal present for a very special person. The aroma of the brew is what a perfect sunset should smell…
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How to make vanilla extract
This is so simple to do, you’ll wonder why you ever spent the money on the shop stuff. The picture shows my 500ml bottle of vanilla extract. Here’s how I make it… Method Take 6 to 8 vanilla pods and split them with a sharp knife, leaving them just attached at one end. Pop them…
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Easy courgette cake recipe
What to do with all those courgettes now that we’re having a summer at last? Here at Legge Towers, the courgette harvest is ‘extensive’. Not surprising as we have eight plants for the fruit and six for the flowers… And the flower producing plants also produce some fruit too. So I had a good trawl…
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How to make Guanciale, cured pork cheek
Guanciale is the perfect preserved pork. It’s wonderfully versatile & tasty, easy to make, economical to buy & use and looks brilliant. What’s not to like about that? You can see what I made in the picture above: I’m so pleased with the result. Guanciale means “pillow” in Italian, the reason should be obvious. My…
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Potato soda bread recipe with cheese, garlic & thyme
Kaethe from SPUDS (The Sustainable Potatoes United Development Study!) in Ireland said: Cheesy, garlicky soda bread made w/blight resistant Blue Danubes sounds fab, but where is the recipe? Any new take on soda bread ROCKS for us Irish, especially if it incorporates SPUDS…Send a link pronto! Who can resist a request like that? Not me…