Birdie Feast

Our good friends over at the RSPB are running a Feed the Birds Day – over this weekend 24-25 October. In the winter when food is pretty scarce many birds are forced to come into our gardens.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/feedthebirds/

Here at the little gardeners we have a regular supply of food out for our little feathered friends, and we have some regular visitors, Gary our resident Goldfinch has taken his Mrs on their holidays to Africa, we're hoping he'll be back next year. (that's one of his little babies in the top piccie)

The RSPB have loads of tips on what you can do to help the birds and are running loads of events over the weekend. I tried my hand at making some fat balls. Pretty simple, melt some suet or lard in a pan and pour over yummy birdie ingredients. I used peanuts, sunflower seeds, some dried fruit, dried mealworms and wild seed. About 1/3rd fat to 2/3rds ingredients. Give it a good old mix and pop into your containers of choice. I put a piece of string in mine to hang it up although I'm not sure it will hold.... we'll see. Anyway, it smelt disgusting but I'm sure the birdies will love it! Hopefully we'll get a Siskin or a Redwing having a nibble, how exciting would that be!

The RSPB have a great list of household scraps you can put out, dead easy and cheap as chips. You can follow them on Twitter here

Now the clocks have turned back, it's dark so early I won't get to do my little bit of bird watching when I get home from work :-( Just at the weekends now.

What do you call a man under a pile of leaves?

Russel!

Our garden looked a complete shambles this morning. Our neighbours have a Sycamore tree and it's well and truly shedding it's summer canopy. So rather than let them get blown away by the wind we collected them up to mulch them down and use as some good compost for next year. I managed to get a good dustbin bag full today and looking at the tree I reckon I could probably get another 2/3 bags from it.

And god forbid, whilst I was leaf collecting, what did I see? SLUGS. Little baby ones, three of them. They'd better not even think about eating my swedes. I will not be a happy bunny.

Where of where has the flavour gone?

OK, I admit these don't look the most beautiful of carrots but we've never let that put us off before. We'd already devoured our baby carrots which, even if I say so myself were probably the best we'd ever tasted. So, obviously we were looking forward to their older cousin being just as sweet and juicy. But no?! We dived straight in and quite oddly, they taste of, well, pretty much nothing? We're quite baffled by the lack of flavour...

Not quite sure what to do with them, maybe then can add some crunch to a salad? They're definitely not going to do anything else!

The Tomato Glut Preserving Post

Wow, we sure did have a bumper tomato year. Just before we went on hols we picked everything that was ripe (and some that wasn't) and we had a bumper preserving Sunday. We wanted to preserve them in a number of different ways and decided to do some bottling and then to make a couple of chutneys.

So here goes...

We ended up picking about four kilos, a mixture of yellows and red with a few greens thrown in for tang. First on the list was the traditional bottling. I was following the instructions from Preserves: River Cottage Handbook No.2, great little book.

http://www.rivercottage.net/ShopProduct334/PreservesRiverCottageHandbookNo2.aspx

It's a pretty simple process really. All you need is some airtight jars, I used Le Parfait, some sugar, a roasting tray and a tea towel.

Firstly you'll need to make up a batch of syrup which is simply some sugar dissolved in water. I made a light syrup which is 100g sugar in 600ml of water. You can add honey, alcohol, spices, herbs etc to your syrup to give it some added interest. I made a batch of plain syrup and then added my spices to the various jars so I could have a good mixture of flavours. Below is the basil pot but I also did thyme and chilli options.

Preheat your oven to 150c and stand your jars in your roasting tray which is filled with water at a depth of about 3cm. You'll need to put either a tea towel or a wad of newspapers in the bottom to stop the jars touching the bottom of the tray otherwise they'll crack in the heat. Cover with the jar top and rubber ring but don't fasten them just yet.

60-70mins for jars up to a litre and 70-80mins for 1-2 litres jars. Once out of the oven clip the lids on and leave to cool.

Don't they look delicious! Kept in a cool dark cupboard they should last up to a year. So that was bottling, think all in all we've got about 8 jars of varying sizes. Next – chutney! I love making chutney and jams but this is the first time I've been lucky enough to make it with homegrown ingredients! Two types, a yellow/green combo and a red spicy paprika.

OK, starting with the red spiced chutney. Ingredients are:

• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 red peppers, halved, deseeded and finely chopped
• 1 red chilli, deseeded and diced
• 1kg (2lb 31⁄2oz) ripe tomatoes, chopped
• 450ml (3⁄4 pint) malt or white wine vinegar
• 350g (12oz) soft light brown sugar
• 100g (31⁄2oz) raisins
• 1 level tsp black mustard seeds
• 2 level tsp smoked paprika
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1⁄4 level tsp ground cloves

Easy peasy to make. Whack everything in a large pan, stir togther and bring slowly to the boil. Simmer for 1.5-2hrs until it becomes chutney consistency. Job done! This is really nice and smokey, will be brilliant with a strong cheddar or if you're a meaty eater maybe some gammon (although I'm guessing at that as I don't think I've ever eaten gammon!)

Next up was the yellow/green combo. It was really just a recipe for green tomato chutney as I couldn't find one I liked for a yellow variety. The yellows are quite tart anyway so I just reduced the amount of sugar a little to compensate.

Ingredients are:

• 2lb green tomatoes chopped
• 8 oz onions chopped
• 1 lb cooking apples peeled & chopped
• 8 oz dried fruit
  
• 8oz brown sugar
• 1 pint vinegar spiced or malt
• 2 tablespoons mustard seed
• 1 inch fresh ginger peeled & finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon

Again, pretty simple as before. All goes into the pan and simmers uncovered until a nice sticky consistency. Probably about 3 hours. Into sterilised jars and seal.
I managed to get all the ingredients for the chutneys without gluten or wheat in so these are all ceoalic friendly. The thing that nearly caught me out was the dried fruits as some of them contained gluten, from what exactly I don't know? But I managed to get some in Waitrose that were gluten-free.

As with most chutneys they improve with age so keep in the cupboard for a few weeks before using. Managed to get five pots of each so we'll probably give some as presents for Christmas, that's if we can bear to part with them!

Bee Nice

There we were, last Saturday digging around for a few potato's when we noticed this fella, looking very sorry for himself indeed.

We'd read a fair bit about exhausted bees and we reckon this was what we had before us—basically the little guy has run out of energy and can't fly and if nothing was done, eventually he'd die.

Little Gardners to the rescue! We rushed indoors and dipped a little sheet of paper into some honey and he lapped it up. We left him to sunbathe on his white sheet of paper and went indoors for 10 minutes or so, when we came back outside he'd flown away.

We both feel quite pleased with ourselves, the bees need all the help they can get at the moment, populations are crashing in the UK and every little helps. Bill Oddie would be so proud :-)