Botanical gardens, Berlin

I've been in Berlin for a few days on a business trip this week, with two days free at the end because of stupid flight pricing. Yesterday I went on a fantastic bike tour of the city centre with a group of other tourists from all over the world. That was great fun (especially the part where we were cycling through the Tiergarten: the park is really beautiful at this time of year).

Today I headed for the botanical gardens. I got there just before they officially opened, but the entrance gate was already manned, so I paid my €6 and set off into the garden, armed with a printed guide to the best parts to visit in the autumn. For about half an hour I didn't see anyone else at all and felt as though I had the whole space to myself. It was a sunny, dewy, morning with just a touch of mist in the air.

I wasn't expecting to see many flowers, so late in the year, but the trees more than made up for that. The season is less advanced here than it is at home and the trees are looking beautiful. The arboretum is full of interesting-looking small paths which beg to be explored: it doesn't feel at all formal, apart from the labels on the plants.

One that caught my attention in the North American part of the arboretum was this witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). I hadn't realised that this was native to our part of the world. Looking at its range, we're right at the northern edge of it, but it would be great if we could grow this in our woods at home.

Also in flower in the arboretum was this striking plant:

This is Cimicifuga simplex, otherwise known as bugbane. This is native to Asia, but the North American equivalent is Actaea (or Cimicifuga) racemosa, a.k.a. black cohosh, black snakeroot or fairy candle. Another one to look out for at home.

The roses in the garden were mostly showing off their hips. These are from the dog rose:

There were one or two brave roses still flowering. I didn't make a note of the variety, but this one looked lovely with its light spritzing of dew:

The glasshouses and their contents were architecturally impressive:

I narrowly missed taking a photo of a small brown newt which was sitting on this plant the second before I pressed the shutter button:

I've never been wild about cacti, but there's something about this group that's almost cuddly.

And did I mention that the trees were gorgeous?

Having spaces like this almost makes it worth living in a city, although I must admit that I liked it best in that first half-hour when I felt I was only sharing it with the birds. By the time I left there was quite a long queue at the entrance, so the garden is clearly appreciated by the city's inhabitants and visitors.

Tarte au citron chocolat

We're having our official Thanksgiving meal a week late, as my dad and his wife will be with us next weekend and we thought we'd wait until then for the big feast. But there were small murmurings of discontent from the children at not having a celebratory meal this weekend, so I'm putting a bit more thought and effort than usual into tomorrow's Sunday lunch.

I made my Christmas cake and pudding this week and as a result had a dezested orange and lemon to use up. My original vague thought for a Sunday dessert was to make a lemon tart to use up the juice of the lemon. Google wafted me over to David Lebovitz's site where I got sidetracked by the amazing recipe for the pastry shell of the lemon tart he made. I adapted it slightly by cooking the butter mixture on the stovetop rather than in the oven, but it seemed to come out fine. Then while it was baking I wandered off to look at his other tart recipes and immediately fell in love with his description of his chocolate tart:

A good chocolate tart doesn’t need to be fancy, but it needs to be deep, dark, and yes, somewhat decadent.

Sold.

The method looked a little scary, involving making caramel and warning about being "sure to avert your face" when you add the liquid to the hot sugar. But it all went smoothly (I love David Lebovitz's reassuring and straightfoward instructions) and I did use up the juice of the orange in the recipe, so at least some of my original intention was achieved!

Here's the finished tart:

Now the main challenge is going to be resisting cutting into it before tomorrow...

Global success

I thought the globe artichokes I grew from seed this year had been killed by the dry spell in July. But they came back from the dead once we had some decent rainfall and are now looking quite healthy.

My next problem is whether they will survive the winter here. I think I'll cut the leaves back once we get a frost and then pile hay over the plants and see what happens. I grew one in one of the greenhouse beds, too, so that plant might have a better chance of making it through the cold season.

Has anyone else successfully brought globe artichokes through a Great Lakes winter?

Crumble tart

Mike and I made a bit of a lifestyle change in mid-August when we started following the 5:2 way of eating. This involves eating perfectly normally most of the week, but drastically cutting back calories on two days to 500 for me and 600 for him. It's been going pretty well and I've set up a separate blog about it, with recipes and so on, as it doesn't really fit into the theme of this one.

Today was a not-a-fasting day (hurrah) and I took advantage of it by making this delicious tart. The recipe is from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess, where it's called German Plum Tart. In my version I used two slightly spongy apples (which were sitting neglected in the fruit bowl and destined to become compost if I didn't do something creative with them) and two peaches instead of the plums called for in the recipe.

The tart consists of three layers. The bottom one is a sweet yeasted dough which is pressed into the bottom of a roasting dish:

Then comes the layer of fruit with three tablespoons of brown sugar, which makes a sweet syrup with the juice from the peaches:

The final layer is a crumble of flour, sugar and butter (I didn't have the walnuts or pecans that the recipe called for). The syrup sinks into the dough and the crumble on top crisps up beautifully.

A perfect treat after a day of abstinence!

Plenty

It's that time of year when I think things like 'I'll just pop outside and pick a few tomatoes'. And then I stagger back indoors, an hour later, laden with a little bit more than my planned harvest:

And then there is an hour or two of feverish chopping, trimming, blanching, boiling, labelling, and freezing to get through before I can walk through the kitchen again without a burden of guilt at the sight of all the unprocessed abundance.

Quite a lot of today's haul got turned into supper:

Moussaka is about the only thing I can do with eggplant that is likely to be welcomed by the children.

As problems go, having too much produce is hardly one to complain about. And I do know that the February me will be grateful to the me of today for freezing all this food. I just wish she was here to help me do it!

Eggs, tomatoes and kale

We've been having a disappointing performance from the chickens in recent months: ever since we merged the new chicks in with the remainder of our original flock we've only been getting one or two eggs a day. In recent weeks this has gone down to just one egg a day and sometimes none. This means that we've been feeding 31 birds and only one of them has been deigning to return the favour.

About 12 of those birds are males, so I'm not expecting any eggs from them, but it would be nice if the remaining 19 could pull their weight a bit. I was therefore very pleased to find two eggs today, one of them quite small. I hope this means that our new flock have started to lay: with any luck we will soon be overrun with eggs again, instead of portioning them out as though they're made of solid gold.

I had a go at making oven-dried tomatoes this weekend, using some of my crop of cherry tomatoes. It takes quite a while, but it's really worth it: they taste amazing - a really concentrated burst of tomatoey sweetness.

I was away at the end of last week and in my absence the cabbage worms have done a good job of eating nearly every leaf on the young Tuscan kale plants which had been doing very well in the greenhouse. I spent half an hour yesterday morning picking the little blighters off.

On a broccoli plant I found that one of the caterpillars had already matured enough to build itself a cocoon. I know there's not much logic to it, but I left the cocoon in place. It may well hatch out and lay another devouring army of eggs on my plants, but there's something so wondrous about the transformation of caterpillar to butterfly that I can't bring myself to interfere with it.

Recovering

We lost the top layer of plastic from the greenhouse over the winter and the remaining layer has been looking increasingly battered and torn.

On Friday it was really windy and we had to make some emergency repairs to stop the damage getting much worse. The forecast on Sunday was for a sunny day with little wind, which are ideal conditions for trying to put new layers of polythene over the structure. Four years ago Mike and I did this as a two-person job. This time, the children were old enough to help pull the sheets over the greenhouse. It was still very hard and hot work, but by the end of the day the sheets were in place and secured along three of their edges.

This morning Mike finished securing the fourth edge, along the arch on the eastern side, a job complicated by a phalanx of curious wasps. If you don't like wasps much (and I don't know many people who do), being at the top of a ladder while they are buzzing around your head can be rather stressful. As if being up a ladder, doing a tricky job, in blazing hot sunshine is not stressful enough. My job, as usual, was as ladder ballast. Silently-praying-that-Mike-doesn't-fall-off-the-ladder ballast.

We still have to sort out the 'skirts' of the greenhouse, securing the long edges which roll up below the wooden battens, but at least those can be done with feet on terra firma!

Spiderfly

One of the over-ripe tomatoes in the greenhouse had burst on the edge of the raised bed last night and was proving to be a magnet for flies and wasps. I was surprised to see a spider nibbling on some of the fragments of tomato: vegetarian spiders aren't exactly common (there is one, apparently, out of 40,000 species!).

A closer look reveals the truth of the matter: it's really a fly cleverly disguised as a spider.

After a bit of internet-delving I think it's a member of the family Tephritidae (fruit flies); a species with the rather unattractive name of Walnut Husk Maggot (Rhagoletis suavis). According to Wikipedia, the genus name is partially derived from Ancient Greek rhago "a kind of spider". The BugGuide site also notes that some members of this fruit fly family "mimic jumping spiders. The wing-waving apparently deters the approach of jumping spiders, important predators of the flies."

Pumpkin seed granola

Remember the spaghetti squash I used on Sunday? I confess that I usually just put the seeds in the compost, as my one earlier attempt at roasting pumpkin seeds failed for some reason. This time, though, I was determined to make it work. I'd been meaning to make some granola, too and somehow these two intentions ended up being merged into one. Mainly because I didn't have a huge amount of granola ingredients, if I'm honest.

Making granola is so easy that I'm always amazed that I didn't work it out sooner. Here's what I threw together yesterday, once the cleaned squash seeds had been drying for 24 hours.

Recipe (makes around 5 servings)

2 cups rolled oats
Cleaned and dried seeds from two spaghetti squashes
Handful of flax seeds
2 tablespoons of peanut oil
¼ cup of water
¼ cup of maple syrup
¼ cup of brown sugar

Mix all the ingredients together, then spread out on a baking sheet and bake at 300°F/150°C for about 40 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes or so until the mix is a uniform golden brown. The ingredients are very flexible: I would have added cashews, almonds or peanuts if I'd had any.

Baked beans and spaghetti squash

I'm reading Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy at the moment, which features a lot of cowboys. Perhaps that was why I thought of baked beans as a meal for today. I'm not fond of commercially-canned baked beans, but home-made ones are a different proposition entirely and they're something we eat fairly regularly in the colder months. I use dry haricot beans (called navy beans here) and soak them overnight. Then you boil them for an hour or so in fresh water.

Usually I add onions, ketchup, molasses, mustard powder, salt and pepper (in unscientific quantities) to the cooked beans  and the water they've been boiling in. Today I had a batch of rather battered tomatoes which I had to do something with in a hurry, so instead of using ketchup I cut out the good parts, whizzed them in the food processor then boiled the tomatoes down into a thick sauce (while the beans were boiling). I added a splash of vinegar to the tomatoes to get roughly the same effect as making ketchup.

Here's how the mixture looked before it went into the oven:

It's quite runny at this stage, which is what you want, as it then bakes for two to three hours at 325°F/160°C and a lot of the water is absorbed or steamed off. You can leave the lid off the pot towards the end of cooking to make sure that the texture of the sauce is the way you want it. I'd recommend stirring the beans every half-hour, too, so that they don't stick to the bottom.

After baking, the beans looked like this:

You can see from the line on the side of the pot how much the liquid level has dropped.

While I had the oven on, I also baked a couple of our Small Wonder spaghetti squash. I've been picking these for two weeks now and on Thursday I harvested the first of the New England Sugar Pie pumpkins, too:

In the past I've always cut spaghetti squash open (usually rather nervously, with a big knife and a conviction that I am about to lose a finger), scooped out the seeds and then baked them in the oven for about an hour. This week I discovered that you can also microwave the fruit, with much more speedy results. I also found out that you can cook them whole and remove the seeds after cooking them, which makes them a lot easier to deal with. The important point to remember if you cook them whole, whether in the microwave or in the oven, is to pierce the skin in several places with a knife. Otherwise you'll have an exploding squash on your hands. And all over your oven...

I tried this new method out today. It was a great improvement: once cooked, the skin was easy to cut through and the seeds came out with no bother at all, leaving the soft yellow flesh to fall away from the outer shells. This is definitely the best way of cooking them: no more near-accidents with big sharp knives and smooth-skinned squashes for me!

Spaghetti squash is a versatile vegetable - you can serve it as a side dish with some butter or oil and pepper, or use the strands in the place of pasta as part of a low-carbohydrate main course. With these ones I'm planning to stir in some parmesan and seasoning and then form them into cakes, coat them in flour and shallow fry them for supper. Rather like rösti or hash browns. Hm, the thought of that's making me hungry already and I've only just eaten the baked beans...

UPDATE: I mixed some crushed garlic, parmesan, salt, pepper and flour into the cooled squash, then coated them in more flour, egg, and breadcrumbs and shallow fried them in a mix of oil and butter:

They tasted great and, for once, everyone agreed with me. This is quite an achievement when you consider that Child#2 has recently taken to supervising me at mealtimes to make sure that I haven't sneakily inserted any zucchini into his food.

Has-bean

Another crop that I thought had been completely done-for by the dry spell were the runner beans. They've been gamely flowering all summer but without setting any fruit. I think it's just been too hot and dry for them this year.

Today I noticed that one of the flowers appeared to have a yellow centre. How strange, I thought, a bi-coloured bean. A closer look showed me that I was wrong about that. But underneath the flower with the Goldenrod spider* was something even stranger: yes, a young runner bean! So maybe this is another back-from-the dead vegetable.

*"The Goldenrod Spider is a member of the crab spider family. It is best known for its ability to change its color from white to yellow in order to camouflage among flowers. Goldenrod Spiders are found wherever there are yellow and white flowers." Clearly this particular specimen is colour-blind...

Seasonal confusion

This morning was very autumnal - lots of heavy dew and spiders' webs losing their effectiveness everywhere.

But in amongst all the signs of the end of summer were some completely contradictory ones. Some of the trees which suffered so much in the dry spell are now putting forth leaves of a decidedly Spring green. Here's a mature European buckthorn with new leaves alongside this year's fruit:

And these are very young ash trees, showing new leaves next to the ones damaged in July:

This renewed growth is very similar to what's happening with my cabbage plants. This is the first year I've seen it happen.

Brassica massacre II

Yes! My first ever sequel post! And it's about brassicas! I can see you now, hunched forward on the edge of your seat with anticipation.

The July Dry left the cabbages, sprouts and swedes looking... well, looking pretty much like this, if the truth must be strictly adhered to.

The bed is in an elevated part of the garden and even with regular watering there seemed to be no way of saving these plants from the baking heat and unrelenting rainlessness of July. Consequently, I left it alone, leaving the weeds to have their way and giving it an occasional sad sideways glance as I walked past. If I had needed the space I would have got Mike to plough it over, but I didn't, so I just left it to get overgrown.

Last night I noticed that the sprout plants were somehow looking fairly good, in amongst the weeds and I decided perhaps I'd better weed at least that part of the bed.

Then I noticed new growth coming on some of the broccoli, swede and cabbage plants, too:

So perhaps this bed will not be a complete write-off, after all, this summer. Of course the downside of these discoveries is that I've had to spend the last hour getting rid of all those weeds...

Pumpkins' progress

In late May, the pumpkin patch was just a newly-ploughed part of the hay field:

After a dry July, the plants were just about getting going but there were still a fair few bald spots to be seen in between them when I took this photo on July 19th:

Now we've had some reasonable rainfall, the plants have really taken off and there's hardly any earth visible. It's well-nigh impossible to tell where one plant starts and another finishes.

The only clues are in the fruit growing on each vine. This one is Crown (I think):

And I'm not sure what this one is (there are a few candidates), but it's a lovely buttery colour:

And this one (possibly New England Sugar Pie?) is just beginning to turn orange:

Maybe I read Cinderella too often as a child, but I always think there's something magical about pumpkins and I love watching them grow. Pumpkin is a great word, too - originally (the OED tells me) it was 'pumpion', but it turned into 'kin' somewhere along the way.

Indoor corn

I nearly didn't grow corn this year as I seem to have spent the last few years growing it exclusively for the consumption of the neighbourhood raccoons. Then in early June I read somewhere about a person eating early corn that had been grown in a hoop house and it occurred to me that this might be a solution to my raccoon problem.

With the dry spell in July, the corn in the fields around here is looking stunted - by now it is usually towering above my head. But my greenhouse-sown and regularly-watered corn is looking stately:

Silks are forming on some of the plants now. I love the wanton way they unfurl and cascade down the stem of the plant: like Rapunzel letting down her hair.

There will be less wind in there than there would be outside, which means I might need to give the plants a bit of extra help with pollination. And of course it remains to be seen whether the greenhouse will offer the corn enough protection to prevent the raccoons from having their annual corn-feast. They are devious little beasts, after all. But I'm hopeful...

Second chance

The dim robins who built the ill-fated nest on the barnyard fence in May had another attempt at rearing a brood in July when they constructed a new nest on a joist inside the barn itself. This nest I needed a ladder to see into, so I was more hopeful that its contents might survive. On 22 July their one chick looked like this:

More beak than anything else...

It has been growing fast and today the chick left its nest and is now exploring the (rather cobwebby) delights of the barn. I've kept the cat indoors while the new robin gets used to its wings.