Preparing for Winter V

nannygladys

My outside tomatoes got blight but as yet the inside ones are ok, but it's been a terrible year growing them for me, one plant had no fruit on and another only had one small truss, the others only have a couple of trusses, only one plant has three!! Not sure what's gone on as they have lovely foliage etc, anyway there's always next year ....

Jellytotts - I have acquired a cardboard box and put an old tatty jumper in it for the cat.

Primrose - my freezer is full of veggies for the winter, so I'm eating green beans, cabbage etc. I did make damson jam this morning from the communal trees on the allotment so have a good jam supply for the winter, and looking to make the cucumber and apple preserve.

Anyway mushroom and kale risotto for tea, as they both need using today, so better go and make it.
Nannyg

Primrose

Damson jam is lovely.   A childhood treat was having a spoonful On a bowl of semolina.  Neither seem to be on today's modern menus very much.

nannygladys

Not sure about the semolina but a dollup is nice on rice pudding!

fionaandphil

@Jellytotts we have Luckyberg cups from the large river company site. They've been in use a few years. They keep drinks hot for a good few hours and no aftertaste,  they also don't leak if you remember to put the button in the correct position 😁

florain

Tomatoes - the Blightalert website is no longer operating, was very useful when it sent alerts to remind me to spray both tomatoes and potatoes. I have an allotment on a site with 120 plots so always spores around. I have been using soluble aspirin as a spray for the last 3 years and have done ok. 10 tomato plants at home,6 still on the plot(have lost 8 up there), all outside. Garden ones are all still clean.
Have bottled 7 litres of puree and frozen lots skinned and chopped. And eaten lots of course!
Spray is 75mg of soluble aspirin to a litre of water. Have sprayed at least weekly, more when warm and damp.
Hope that helps.

-taff

Oh no! what a disappointment greenbee...DoQ, that was lucky..you caught them in time...weirdly this year, I haven't had blight [yet] on the two leftovers I planted outside...Come to think of it, I think I did have it in the greenhouse once, but that was a different greenhouse in a different position. The old one was at the bottom of a very big garden and open to the wind across the garden when the door was open. This one is sheltered from the front where the door is so wind hardly ever makes it inside. Might be why I've been lucky so far....

Whic brngs me to runner beans [ it doesn't really but I want to aks the question] When freezing, to blanch or not to blanch? Does it make a difference? I've salted them in the past and not been too impressed with that and I know I've frozen them but I can't remember what I did.

C_J

I know that blanching is supposed to be better for beans in terms of preserving their colour, taste, texture and longevity in the freezer, but I have never blanched beans. I think I may be lazy. I just slice them, divide them up into portion sized bags and chuck them in the freezer - and they are still perfect when we get to the last bags of them almost a year later.

Primrose

Our climbing French bean crop this year has been copious and I must confess a few times I,ve been tempted to do the same to save the trouble of blanching, drying them and open freezing before bagging up.   Think I must do a trial bag your way and run a comparison.

we,ve had a lot of blackfly this year and at least any stray ones lurking on the beans get cleaned off during the blanching orocess .

Laura_Elsewhere

Primrose said:

  Makes you wonder how they coped in the Middle Ages when they had none of our modern food preservation techniques.  Preparing for winter must have been a far more difficult task  and I  imagine a lot of food was wasted or went rotten because they had fewer ways of preserving it.  Diets must have been very boring. 

For one thing, there were many, many more varieties of plants, so you would grow peas and beans that matured at different times throughout the season - we still have some vegetable varieties labelled "early" or "maincrop" or "late" but our ancestors almost certainly had their local weather patterns and local varieties down to a fairly fine art. Beans and peas were dried; onions and garlic stored; some, like root-vegetables (parsnip, turnip, etc.) might be left in the ground for a while... 
And diets not as boring as you might think - herbs were used for medicating but also for flavour, and far more different herbs than we use now, and even in Britain you can grow or find plants whose seeds or buds you can dry and grind to use as spices - mustard, obviously, but others as well. And they had vinegars and verjus (a similarly-sharp liquid used in recipes). and they preserved fruits by drying but also by making fruit-cheese, the last survivor of which is the Portuguese 'membrillo' quince preserve ('cheese' meant anything made in a straight-sided mould, typically then turned out and wrapped in cloth or paper until wanted, and then sliced and eaten with milk cheese (ie the sort we know as cheese!) or with hot or cold meat. 
In the 15th century, a courtier from France toured England and when he went home he wrote about what a rich diet the English peasants had, drinking small beer (barely-alcoholic, just enough to make it safer than most water to drink), having salt on their food as they wanted, eating meat and all sorts of things that were viewed as a privileged diet in other countries... 

Floss

When I had my plot and grew copious amounts of French beans, they were top-and-tailed, washed in cold water and loose frozen on a tray before being chucked into a freezer bag with their friends. I don't recall having any issues with them.