The Joy of Soup

One of the things about having lots of vegetables laying about is trying to think of what to do with them so they're not wasted. For example, I've lost count of the number of different ways I've served courgettes - our poor friends and family have had them in any number of guises all summer. Mind you, the Chinese fried courgette sticks never stay on the plate long.

So, my new favourite thing to do with a big stack of vegetables is make soup. I've never done it before, and even if I say so myself, my first efforts have been a resounding success. I should explain, my earliest experience of making soup. It was late 1995, and involved a packet of powdered mushroom and garlic soup from my best man's kitchen cupboard. We decided it would be a great idea to make it at around 3am, but we both fell asleep waiting for it and boiled the pan dry, much to the chagrin of his ever-patient wife who was trying to sleep through the noise and disgusting smell of our drunken antics. Therefore, I thought making 'real' soup would be really hard, and involve large black pots bubbling away for several days, maybe carefully adding eye of newt and toe of frog every four hours, only for the whole thing to get spoiled if someone rings the doorbell and distracts me. But no, they're dead easy.

So far I have made leek and potato (which nicely hides the diminutive stature of my leeks) and carrot and coriander. Both delicious, filling, and 100% nicer than anything I've ever had out of a tin or packet.

Autumn photo gallery

In my continued effort to keep up to date, here are a few photos from the last few months down on the plot.










First, my sunflowers eventually started producing blooms, and we had a fair few vases full of these in the house for a while. I happened to notice them on sale in the florists for an extortionate amount! Mine cost the price of a pack of seeds, about £2, and now, of course, I have an airing cupboard full of free seeds for next year! The hyperbole on the seed packet led me to believe I would need sunglasses to look at these, and people would be coming from far and wide to view my many-coloured blooms. Far from becoming something of a local celebrity, I was a bit disappointed that the ‘harlequin’ seeds produced mostly bog-standard yellow flowers.










I was quite excited at the beginning of autumn, planning what to plant for next year, but the excitement has worn off in the face of regular rain showers and the return to GMT which have both been keeping me off the plot.

Here, however, are pictures of my first winter veg. Parsnips have been slowly growing away all year, thanks to early identification by John they didn’t get pulled up. They’re nice and sweet.

Pak Choi are now coming along well. These are to be used in the spring, or whenever they are big enough. I seem to have solved the flea beetle problem by applying simple cardboard collars (as seen on Gardener’s World) and covering them with a mini polytunnel, excellent value from B&Q only £9.99. Also in the polytunnel are spring onions and overwintering lettuce. I’ll see how the spring onions get on, but I may not bother with many more of those – they’re easy to grow but never seem to be ready when I want them, and don’t seem to store well – when they’re so ridiculously cheap in the shops all year round I might devote the space to something else.









Not pictured here are my leeks. I couldn’t get a picture because they’re too small for the human eye to detect. The biggest ones are only like the baby leeks you get from the supermarket. I suspect a combination of poor soil and late planting out.

Everyone else at Stacey Hill seems to have grown leeks as big as American fire hydrants, with their luxuriant, rust-free foliage waving and mocking me as I pass. Mine are more like pencils. And not even those big novelty pencils you get at the seaside. Mind you, they still taste good.

Late summer on Plot 29

The Moog and I have been a bit busy to update the blog recently, or possibly a bit lazy, take your pick. I'm going to have a go at bringing things up-to-date over the next few days. Let's start with the end of August.

It occured to me in August that it's a full year since I've had my plot. You may have read that I invested my £7 winnings from second place in the 2007 "Britain in Bloom" competition; this year, ta-da, I have won first prize! a whopping twenty Great British Pounds, and a certificate to boot. I will post some pictures of my front garden for curious blog readers when I get round to it. This year, I invested my winnings in a delicious curry from Cafe Balti in Wolverton.


Also in late summer (Hmph! What summer?! I hear you cry) harvesting was in full flow. I was a bit worried about carrots splitting, so I pulled most of them up in late August and put them in storage. There were loads, as you can see from the picture. Some of them were forked, some of them were split, but overall they've been pretty good. No carrot fly attacks. To store them, I bought a grow-bag for about £1.25 from the nearest DIY shed, and filled two cardboard boxes with layers of carrots and compost. So far (November) they're as fresh and crunchy as they were when they went in. Mind you, the bottom did fall out of one of the boxes last week, covering my shed floor in carrots and compost, you can imagine how pleased I was.


Onions were also dug up, dried in the garden at home (between rain showers), and strung up in the shed. We've been gradually working our way through them, and they're storing really well.

From the greenhouse at home, we collected a big bowl of green tomatoes and ripened them on the window sill. I have to say I couldn't tell the difference between ours and shop-bought ones (that is, ours were not the delicious globes of sweet flavour that I'd been led to expect). And if one more person mentions green tomato chutney, I may have to set an angry Moog on them.

The final crop I started harvesting in late summer was potatoes. The Sarpo Mira variety have been really successful, lots of nice big potatoes, no blight, and they seem to store really well. They eventually all came out of the ground in mid-September, although I think they might have been happy to stay in the ground a bit longer, they were starting to receive attention from slugs, so they came up.