Worms and horse manure soup

The worms have gone a bit quiet in my wormery, producing less liquid feed than I am used to. Really I need to face up to the job of emptying the whole stinking, festering mess out and returning the worms minus the compost they've made, but for fairly obvious reasons I've been putting that job off. Therefore I have been trying other ways of generating my own fertiliser. The first is to collect some of my comfrey and stinging nettles and submerge them in a bucket of water. I am led to believe the resulting 'tea' is a good tonic for plants. Second, I have put some horse manure in a trug and covered that with water too. Drawing off the resulting brown ooze is not for the faint hearted, and only marginally beter than tipping out the wormery, but I've started mixing that in to my watering can at a rate of about 1/4 brown ooze, 3/4 water. I got the idea from Terry Walton's book 'My Life on a Hillside Allotment', although the technique is not described in detail he does mention making fertiliser from bracken and sheep manure. Hopefully my version will do some good and not totally burn my plants, time will tell.

Finally time to write!

Finding time to write has been difficult recently, but work continues apace down at the allotments. I am motivated to write having just finished making a batch of fresh leek and potato soup, made from two crops that have fared very differently this year.

First of all, I am pleased to report that the leeks have been very successful, in size at least, they are a bit rusty again but that doesn't really affect the eating quality. Last year's were like pencils, these are proper leeks. The variety was 'Porvite' and they have come up nicely. Still not quite as good as I'd hoped, but I blame the long dry spell in August and September this year for stressing out my crops. I have tried a tip, which was to coat the tiny spots of rust with vaseline when they first appear, this stops the fungal spores from spreading. I can confirm that this doesn't work at all. I remember being impressed when I saw my neighbour harvesting his leeks when I first started, now I've got some to match. The smell, in particular, is amazing.

Potatoes have been terrible this year. I grew three varieties and had really small crops from all three. I mean, really small - only two or three potatoes under each plant, when I would expect a good bag full. I tried a 'heritage' variety, with dark blue skin and creamy white flesh, called Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy. They plants grew well but the potatoes were small and knobbly, meaning that by the time you've peeled them and cut out all the bad bits, you've not got much left. Now I know why people stopped growing heritage varieties. I have still had some success with Sarpo Mira, thankfully enough to make my soup.

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.