A Cook and her Windowsill

#23 Go to a live event every month - January

2012-01-20T18:43:00.002Z

So... this year in addition to blogging about the tales of the windowsill I'm going to attempt to keep everyone updated with my 30 before 30 escapades. So the first thing to get ticked off the list is January's "live event".

Headed down to the Apollo Victoria last night to see Wicked and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Would highly recommend it to anyone that finds themselves in London with a spare evening on their hands.

January tomatoes

2012-01-17T19:50:00.006Z

The window boxes did become casualties of all of the activity surrounding the wedding and honeymoon in the latter half of 2011 and as such got rather left to their own devices for the last quarter of the year.

However, one of the upsides of this is that with the mild winter all of the green tomatoes that were left on the tomato plants have been gradually turning red throughout December and January and every week or so we get another 15-20 red tomatoes to put into our dinner. My new favourite cookbook is Plenty by Yottam Ottolenghi and I used this lot in his Lentil and Aubergine recipe.

Very tasty indeed!

30 before 30

2012-01-14T08:57:00.003Z

So... here it is, my 30 before 30. I thought that by drawing it out, making it pretty and sticking it on the kitchen door it would inspire me to do things and encourage me to keep planning through the cold winter nights after a long day at work. Here they are written out in a more user friendly list:

Food
1. Start a sourdough mother
2. Eat an oyster on Mersea Island
3. Make chutney with vegetables I have picked myself
4. Make a cassoulet
5. Catch a fish and learn to fillet it

Exercise
6. Run a 10k
7. Stand up on a surfboard 5 times in a row
8. Swim a stretch of the Thames
9. Walk the Ridgeway
10. Go skiing

Culture
11. Read To Kill A Mockingbird
12. Write a blog with a readership of over 250 people
13. Do an oil painting
14. Knit a Christmas jumper
15. Use my Tate membership card in all four Tate Galleries

Garden
16. Grow an aubergine on the windowsill
17. Plant a sunflower on International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day

London
18. Walk the Capital Ring
19. Visit Highgate Cemetery
20. Eat a steak at Hawksmoor
21. Walk from our flat to the Olympics
22. Drink champagne at the St Pancras Champagne Bar before departing on Eurostar
23. Go to a live event (concert, theatre, sports match etc...) every month

Outside adventures
24. See a basking shark
25. Go skinny dipping
26. Watch the sun rise on the east coast and set on the west coast
27. Sleep under the stars

Miscellaneous
28. Give blood
29. Drive a car with nobody else in it
30. Spend some time volunteering

I am very excited at the prospect... Best get planning!

2011 highlights

2012-01-05T20:34:00.012Z

So... whilst the blog didn't get written in 2011 we did try our hardest to keep the windowsill alive and kicking. Here's a few picture highlights from the year - more stories to come over the coming weeks...

It's been a while...

2012-01-04T08:23:00.004Z

Well... it's been a very long while indeed since I sat down at my computer and updated the blog. I do have an excuse though, we got married at the end of last year and then spent a month on honeymoon where we moved around a lot and we planned the whole thing ourselves. The stresses and strains of planning a wedding followed straight after by a big trip like that sadly left little time for blogging and tending to the windowsill.

But now I'm back and looking forward to all of the excitement that 2012 has in store. They say that after a big event like a wedding and honeymoon where you have spent so much time building up to it that you need to ensure you have things to look forward to afterwards. So that, combined with the fact that I'm turning 30 at the end of this year (eeek!!) has led me to create a "30 things to do before 30" list. Which leads me nicely back to the windowsill and the blog as one of my 30 things is to:

"Write a blog with a readership of over 250 people"

So here it is, I'm back and ready and raring to go!

Packed lunches

2011-02-16T06:43:00.005Z

Here in the flat we always take a packed lunch into work with us. The problem comes with trying to find new tasty things to take in that transport well, fit easily in a lunchbox and so that you have different things each week. There seems to be a real lack of topics on this in cookbooks so I find myself constantly scanning our cookbooks for ideas of what we can have now. As I presume others might find themselves in the same situation I thought that I might start a relatively regular "What's in the lunchbox this week?" feature to share ideas for interesting packed lunches.

And this week...? An onion and camembert tart slightly adapted from Nigel Slater's Appetite. It's pretty easy to make too which makes it ideal for slinging together on a weekday evening whilst you've got other stuff going on.

6 onions
good chunk of butter
pack of puff pastry
1 camembert
bunch of thyme

Peel the onions and chop them into fat wedges. Melt your butter in a pan on a lowish heat and sling the onions in and leave them for quite a while to sweat down giving them a push around every now and then - I ended up leaving mine for about an hour whilst I was finishing up a bit of work and checking emails. When they're done they should be translucent and golden. Roll out your puff pastry into a large flat rectangle and place on a baking sheet. Run a knife to create score lines a few centimetres from the edge and scatter the onions over the area inside these score lines. Brush the edges of the pastry with some of the onion butter. Then break your camembert up into little pieces, place them inbetween the onions and scatter a generous sprinkling of thyme leaves over the top. Place in a preheated oven to 220 degrees for about 15 minutes until the pastry is golden and the onions slightly browned.

We've managed to get five portions out of that which we'll take into work and have alongside some chutney and mixed salad. Delicious!

Sunflowers and tomatoes!

2011-02-15T21:56:00.004Z

As the title of the post suggests as of today we have sunflowers and tomatoes! Nine of the sunflower plants have come through and we have seven little tomato plants so far. So exciting to see the first signs of life!

Prarie fire and jalapenos

2011-02-13T21:23:00.003Z

The Wahaca chillies did so well last year that I've bought some more chilli seeds. Last year we had serrano's and I think another trip to Wahaca is in order so I can pick myself up some more seeds but in the mean time I did a bit of chilli ordering from the guys at the South Devon Chilli Farm. I was in need of some dried chipotles to make chipotles en adobo and I thought that whilst I was paying for postage and packing I may as well pick up some seeds.

So... I bought some prarie fire which are really pretty little plants that you can keep inside in pots and some jalapenos as they're used in loads of recipes and you can never find them in the shops. However, I'm not quite sure how windowsill friendly the jalapenos will be so that may have been a mistake if they start shooting up... We'll see!

The first seeds of 2011 are in!

2011-02-12T09:02:00.003Z

So... I've planted up the first seeds of 2011. Last year we planted all the seeds at once but this year I've decided that I'm going to go for a more staggered approach in an attempt to not end up with quite such madness in terms of hundreds of plants that all need attention simultaneously. But we'll see how that goes!

As chillies are the trickiest to get to germinate without a propagator I've put lots of chilli seeds in so that I've got time for a second and third go at them if this time is unsuccessful and I've also put in some tomatoes and some sunflowers that were left over seeds from last year. Hopefully they're not too old to germinate - I guess it's wait and see time now!

Cheese, pickle and winter leaves

2011-02-09T18:01:00.006Z

Our winter leaves were getting a bit on the large side so I decided to chop them down today and shove them in a sandwich. After I'd cut them all down I suddenly realised that they're probably supposed to be "cut and come again" so I should have just chopped off a few leaves from each plant and left them growing (is that the idea with cut and come again salad leaves??) however unfortunately by then it was too late and the deed was done! But what a fabulous sandwich it was - brown seedy bread, pickle from Fortnum and Mason's (a Christmas present), mature cheddar all topped off with a big pile of windowsill grown winter leaves.

As I felt a bit guilty for having pulled up all of the little plants I then went on a planting extravaganza. So I've now liberally scattered more seeds for the mixed winter leaves throughout the front of the trough they came out of (there's the line of slightly worse for wear looking spring onions along the back of the trough), on the soil around the three garlic plants which are looking really healthy and in the other round pot that had a serrano chilli in it last year. In the remaining trough that didn't have anything in it I've scattered Cos lettuce seeds - it said on the pack that they should be started out in seed trays but I had absolutely no luck with the salads I tried to grow in seed trays last year so I decided to sow them straight outside and see whether they germinate or not.

All in all an eventful day's action out on the windowsill!

Moules mariniere

2011-01-17T21:14:00.005Z

Full of enthusiasm and inspiration having spent a lot of last week watching the various programmes as part of Channel 4's Big Fish Fight campaign, yesterday night we attempted to cook mussels for the first time and they were fabulous!

I'd been a bit wary about cooking mussels as it seemed there was a lot of preparation needed but the time you spend doing the prep is more than made up by the fact that once you've got them ready to go they literally take about 30 seconds in the pan to cook and hey presto! We decided to go plain and simple with moules mariniere and used the good old Jane Grigson Fish Book for our recipe. The sauce in her recipe is just made up of shallots, garlic, butter and white wine flavoured with a bouquet garnis which suits me as I'm not a massive fan of creamy sauces and it was divine all mopped up with a good chunk of warm ciabatta. So... in the words of Jamie, Hugh et al - get yourselves down the fish counter and give the old favourites (cod, tuna, salmon, prawns) a break and try something else for a change.

Amazing!

New Year, New Post

2011-01-11T12:23:00.005Z

Well I haven't blogged in a long while and things on the windowsill have been moving pretty slowly but we do have movement and the leaves, spring onions and garlic that I planted back in November are all plodding away nicely. The growth rate is considerably slower than it was for the plants that were out in the windowboxes over the summer but for such little plants they do seem to have coped remarkably well with all of the snow they've been bombarded with!

Here's the first pictures of how the windowsill is doing in 2011...

Our three garlic bulbs have all sprouted...

...our spring onions have sprung...

...and our winter leaves are looking strong (although I'm not sure we've got enough for a salad!!)

Out with the old and in with the new!

2010-11-01T19:26:00.005Z

Well over the weekend I took the opportunity to do some tidying up and armed with all of your suggestions from the other week headed off to the garden centre in search of some winter windowsill produce. I managed to get hold of some garlic, winter salad leaves, sping onions and cos lettuces which all said that they were ok to be planted at this time of year and I also picked up some cress and mustard too to keep me busy.

When I got back I spent some time pottering around and cleared out one of the windowsills where all of the former tomato plants were dead (I have left a little clump of oregano which was clinging on for dear life in the hope that it is going to revive itself) and in their place I have planted a row of the winter leaves and a row of the spring onions. It didn't mention anything on the label about starting them off inside so I have just planted them straight into the windowbox outside (not sure if this was a good idea or not!?!). Then I also removed the chilli plant which had only produced one short fat chilli and have planted three cloves of garlic in its place. Am looking forward to seeing whether anything sprouts or not!

I've left the other two windowboxes for the time being - one of them is still bursting with chillies and to keep them fresh I don't want to be picking them until we need them and the other one has lots of tomatoes that are a yellowish colour at the moment so I'm clinging on in the vain hope that they might turn red for me some day soon. I've also left the pot of mint in place and tidied it up removing all of the dead stalks and it's sprung back to life amazingly!

The last of the red tomatoes...

2010-10-24T13:04:00.003+01:00

I decided to use up the last of the red tomatoes yesterday in a Jamie Oliver sausage and tomato bake for a hearty late lunch. This is an old favourite of ours but to make it into a one-pot wonder we add Charlotte potatoes that have just been sliced in half into the mix. It's so easy - you just throw it all into the roasting tin, whack it in the oven and give it a stir a few times and out comes a delicious meal! Yesterday I also added in a few sprigs of our fresh windowsill oregano too. And the best thing is, we had quite a bit of the gorgeous tomatoey, balsamicy sauce left over which is going to go great with some penne for today's lunch, finished off with some gratings of parmesan and more fresh oregano leaves over the top.

Winter windowsill

2010-10-21T06:59:00.003+01:00

Now that the fruits of my labour over the summer are on their way out I have been wondering whether there is anything that I can put into my windowboxes over the winter months so that I've still got something exciting going on and I'm not just staring at bare earth with a few scrappy plants for several months. From an initial Google I was rather disappointed as it seemed very much that I'd missed the boat and should have been thinking about this a long while back in August. However, then I found this great page on the Garden Organic website which shows that October is a fine month to be planting a whole range of things - garlic, autumn set onions, chinese leaves, lambs lettuce, winter lettuce and more... I was watching an episode of the City Gardener the other day on 4oD where they were putting garlic and onion sets into pots for the patio so I'm fairly confident that I should be able to grow them in pots on the windowsill but of the leafy suggestions, not having an idea of size, I can't work out which might be ok for the windowsill.

Any suggestions?

Food from the sky

2010-10-19T08:05:00.005+01:00

Well a few weeks ago I promised to report back from a garden that I visited on the Capital Growth Open Gardens day when garden's across London opened their doors to the public. Keeping in the vain of my windowsill garden I decided to visit another aerial garden called "Food from the Sky" which is on the roof of Budgen's supermarket in Crouch End in North London.

I found it a fabulously inspiring visit with old recycling boxes carefully placed around the roof that had all manner of exciting vegetables growing in them from salad leaves, tomatoes and peppers right through to fruit trees and there were some flowers thrown in for good measure as well along with egg boxes dotted around the place that had been put to equally good recycled use as seed starter trays. Amazing!

A pleasant surprise

2010-10-17T08:44:00.008+01:00

Continuing in the theme of the dying contents of our windowsill our mint was not looking at all happy. All of the branches and stems had gone woody and the leaves crinkled and brown and so there I was about to chuck it out when I had a look down into the pot and there were loads of small bright green leaves growing up from the base of the pot.

So it looks like I might have a mint revival on my hands!

Excellent!

Disillusioned

2010-10-16T08:53:00.010+01:00

As a novice gardener in her first year of gardening I was becoming a bit disillusioned - the excitement of the spring and summer when new things seemed to be happening every day had passed and the plants just seemed to be on a slow decline to death. I'd been walking past them and rather than getting the joy of earlier months I was getting a sinking feeling as they just started to look more and more dead every day.

But the other day I decided to pick myself up and have a proper look at them all and look for the positives - we had lots of bright red chillies and tomatoes just waiting to be picked and the oregano still seems to be coming on great guns.

We also had no food in the house for dinner and had just got back from a trip away so the fact that we had these bright juicy fat red chillies and tomatoes just crying out to be picked was a great little present. So I heated up the hob and chucked four of the chillies in the pan to blacken them all over. Then in went the tomatoes along with some chopped spring onions, garlic and the finely chopped stalks of a bunch of parsley that I found lying around in the fridge. Meanwhile I got a big pot of boiling water on the go to cook some pasta in. Once all of the veggies had fried down a bit I bashed up the chillies, added a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tin of drained chickpeas and left it all to simmer away while the pasta cooked. Once the pasta was done I added a ladelful of the pasta water to the sauce, chucked the pasta in and stirred it around along with the chopped parsley leaves and salt and pepper to taste. A perfect meal inspired by the windowsill and the store cupboard!

Roasted peppers and chorizo

2010-09-26T15:04:00.006+01:00

So on Friday night we attempted to use up our two sweet peppers that had turned red. There's a delicious chorizo, roasted pepper and rocket sandwich that I first tasted at Borough Market from the Brindisa stall about 10 years ago (they still sell them so if you find yourself in London on a Friday or Saturday head down to Borough and check them out for yourself!) which I thought would be perfect for using up our two little peppers.

So, I covered them in olive oil and placed them in the oven on 180 until they were blackened all over as usual. Unfortunately I hadn't banked on the fact that little peppers will have thinner skins and sadly by blackening them all over they were actually just burnt straight through and so there was no sweet, roasted flesh behind the blackened skin to peel away. Luckily though as they were so tiny I had supplemented them with a larger shop bought pepper that was perfectly cooked so stuck that in the plastic bag until the skin was ready to peel off.

Then I fried up my chorizo and placed them into a ciabatta loaf along with the roasted peppers and a good wedge of rocket. Served alongside a cold beer and some roasted anya potaotes it was the perfect way to unwind after a hectic week at work.

Urban places, growing spaces

2010-09-25T10:45:00.004+01:00

Earlier on in the summer, following a tip-off from camillap at Seeds and the City, I popped along to the South Bank to visit the Union Street Urban Orchard. It was a tiny space on a back street in Southwark next to a parking lot and the railway line which had been taken over for the summer by some enthusiastic growers as part of the London Festival of Architecture. It was overflowing with fruit trees and vegetables that were busy ripening in this unusal setting. I found it completely inspiring and hopefully made some passers by think about the unusual spaces that they might have available to them to start growing some fruit or vegetables in.

In a similar vain it's the Capital Growth Open Gardens Day today so I've been having a look at what gardens there are nestled in amongst the city. Along the windowsill lines there's a garden on the roof of Budgen's in Crouch End, North London so I thought that it would be interesting to go and check it out. I'll let you know how it goes!

Autumnal cooking

2010-09-24T19:16:00.006+01:00

Well as the days get colder and the nights close in, it feels more and more right to get some warming autumnal meals on the table. And so the other night we cooked up a cracking shepherd's pie. To give it a windowsill twist we used up some of the chives and parsley that's been growing all summer to make the mash all herby and delicious.

I tend to vary my recipe for shepherd's pie each time I make it depending on what ingredients I've got in the flat at the time so here's what went in to this one. Finely chop and fry up an onion and some garlic, add diced carrots and celery and let it all cook over a low heat until all of the vegetables are soft and collapsing. Meanwhile fry the mince in a separate pan and, when browned, drain off all of the excess fat. When the vegetables have softened add thickly sliced large, flat mushrooms and cook them down as well. Stir through the mince, add a good glug of Worcestershire sauce, a tin of chopped tomatoes, some tomato puree and dried mixed herbs. Stir all of the ingredients together and season with salt and pepper. Place into a pyrex dish with a lid and then into an oven preheated to 180 degrees and leave it all bubbling away and the flavours mixing together whilst you get on with the mash.

Add chopped potatoes and parsnips to salted boiling water and leave them until they are soft enough to fall off a knife. Drain, reserving a small amount of the cooking liquid and mash with lots of butter, salt and pepper. Add in chopped chives and parsley and stir through.

Remove the meat from the oven and scoop the mashed potato and parsnip mix on top. Smooth it out so that it evenly covers the surface and make a nice pattern with a fork. Cover with grated Gruyere cheese and place back in the oven without the lid this time. Leave for 45 minutes and then it is ready to serve. Serve with peas. Yum!

Green tomatoes, brown patches

2010-09-21T06:35:00.007+01:00

Over the past few days I've noticed that some of the green tomatoes have developed small brown patches. From googling the phenomena the only thing that I've been able to find is that they might have late blight, although all of the photos of tomatoes with late blight on the internet look a little different to the patches on my tomatoes. Has anyone got any advice about what has happened to my tomatoes and what I should be doing about it?

Cabbage white butterfly eggs

2010-09-17T07:15:00.003+01:00

A few days ago I noticed that some more eggs had been laid on one of our chilli plants. Following an internet search I think that they must be the eggs of a cabbage white butterfly. All of the blogs that I have read on these say that you should destroy the eggs, rubbing them off with soapy water but I like the idea of encouraging biodiversity through our windowsills and don't really want to go around killing eggs. Is this a really bad idea and will the caterpillars end up munching right through our windowbox?

It also seems that it must have been quite a confused butterfly that laid it's eggs there. From the information on the British Butterfly Conservaton Society's website the eggs are normally laid either on brassicas or on nasturtiums or wild mignonette. So a serrano chilli plant seems a little far removed from any of them!

Homemade harissa

2010-09-16T18:36:00.011+01:00

One of the chillies out on the windowsill is starting to change colour which reminds me that I never blogged about what we did with our first chilli harvest a few weeks back now.

We had four bright red, windowsill grown chillies just waiting to be cooked with something tasty and so we decided to make harissa paste with them. Unfortunately it is a tale much like the cherry tomatoes of the other night where to make the harissa you need 250g of chillies (great for those of you out there with heaving chilli plants!). This is slightly more than four so our trusty chillies were added in with some others.

The recipe that I used was out of the Moro cookbook and it says that it will last in the fridge for a couple of weeks. So to make the paste you have to cut the chillies in half and remove the seeds. Then you blend them in a food processor with ground caraway seeds and cumin seeds, 4 cloves of garlic and a pinch of salt. Then add a roasted, skinned and seeded red bell pepper and blitz again until smooth. Once it's smooth stir in a dessertspoon of tomato puree, a dessertspoon of red wine vinegar, two level teaspoons of sweet smoked paprika and six tablespoons of olive oil. And there you have it!

We then took our homemade harissa paste and used it to make harissa roast chicken (see p217 of the Moro cookbook) accompanied with fried potatoes (p232). Absolutely gorgeous!

Indoor chillies: Outdoor chillies

2010-09-15T20:00:00.007+01:00

We've been noticing a funny phenomenon in our windowsill chillies. The chillies that are outside on the windowsill appear to have grown in a completely different shape to the ones that we've had to keep inside on the table as there wasn't enough space out on the windowsill. The ones outside are long and skinny whilst the ones inside are short and fat.

It could be the temperature difference, or it could be the difference in pot sizes (the ones inside are still in those tiny pots that we initially transplanted them into).

Anyone else noticed this type of phenomenon and have any idea why it has happened?

Cherry tomatoes on the table

2010-09-14T06:50:00.005+01:00

Well last night we used up all of our cherry tomatoes that were currently red. Unfortunately one of the problems with the windowsill is that whilst everything is very tasty and it is hugely satisfying to have grown this veg ourselves, quantity-wise we are always a little lacking in having enough of anything for a whole meal. So last night we had around ten of our homegrown tomatoes but they had to be supplemented from some shop bought ones (you can see the difference between our smaller, more misshapen but brighter red tomatoes versus the uniform shop bought ones).

We cooked them in a nice simple pasta dish that is easy to whack on and cook when you get home from work. While the pasta is cooking you put the cherry tomatoes in a pan and heat them up with a glass of white wine. When it starts to simmer nicely put in a good dollop of creme fraiche and leave it all simmering away. Then once the pasta is cooked drain it and then pour your sauce over it and at the last minute stir through a good handful of rocket (such a shame our windowsill grown rocket never took off as otherwise it could have been a windowsill grown produce bonanza). Serve with shaved parmesan and lots of black pepper on top.

Sunset on the windowsill

2010-09-13T06:29:00.002+01:00

A lovely sunset viewed from the windowsill last night.

In desperate need of some tlc!

2010-09-12T13:59:00.010+01:00

Our poor little windowsill plants have been rather neglected over the past month or so as general life has taken over and all got a bit hectic. This has led to some pretty dead looking plants as can be seen from the picture below. So today I have spent a few hours now giving them some much needed tlc and chopping away a lot of unneeded foliage in a bid to try and put a bit of life back into them.

The ones that went for a tumble unfortunately didn't get moved back out on the windowsill from the fireplace until just now and leaving them in the fireplace has made them go a bit crazy and grow all over the place. They had grown so many new leaves that they were all starting to die on the inside and some of the tomato plants needed major chopping back pretty much right to the stem. And when I started to chop heavily back I also found some pretty dead oregano plants that had been completely smothered out.

However there are some little sprigs of hope so fingers crossed it's not too late to save them. I've put the troughs back out onto the windowsill now so we'll have to wait and see whether or not it's now too late in the season for them to regrow and get any tomatoes.

It's not all bad though and we've got some very healthy looking sweet peppers and cherry tomatoes that are almost ready to harvest. Yum!

Taking a tumble

2010-08-28T16:32:00.006+01:00

Well there has been no news on the blog of late as I've been away from the windowsill with work. And what a time to go away! A few days in to my trip I had an email from the guy that lives downstairs saying that our troughs were in his front garden. Oh dear... the weather has been so awful in London that the wind had picked up the two troughs on the living room windowsills and deposited them in the garden. Thank goodness they were only plastic ones and not terracotta!

The damage doesn't seem too bad anyway, we lost quite a few green tomatoes and one of the sweet peppers (which is starting to turn red as well!) has split but asides from that they don't seem to be too bad which is lucky. They've had a few days to recouperate back in the fireplace but I think we'll need to pluck up the courage to put them back out on the windowsill soon or otherwise they'll start growing in that crazy way like they did before in the fireplace.

There was some damage to the chilli plant in the trough on the kitchen windowsill which didn't tumble in to the garden too and the plant snapped right in half so has had to be chopped right back unfortunately. Fingers crossed the worst of the weather is now behind us!

Feeling hot, hot, hot!

2010-08-16T06:34:00.005+01:00

Look at our chillies now! From being completely green a week ago, to starting to see red patches on Thursday, they are now bright red all over!

I never realised that when they turned red it would happen so quickly. You can see them shining out now in all their red glory when you're walking back down the road - puts a smile on my face every time.

Verdict: Wahaca chilli seeds - success!

Perfect hangover cure

2010-08-15T09:17:00.005+01:00

Last Sunday we both woke up feeling pretty special having had one too many beers/gin and tonics the night before... After a rather slow start to the morning we managed to drag ourselves out of bed and become compos mentis enough to think about getting some pans out of the cupboard. A glass of orange juice and this Mexican breakfast - from the good old Mexican Food Made Simple by Thomasina Miers again - sorted us out completely.

Fried corn tortillas layered with smoky tomato sauce made from tinned tomatoes, chillies, garlic, onions, sugar and lots of chopped tarragon topped off with a fried egg, grated crumbly cheese like Wensleydale or Lancashire and more chopped tarragon and accompanied by a good cup of coffee. A great pick me up after a heavy night the night before and perfect Sunday soul food.

Daddy long legs...?

2010-08-14T08:47:00.003+01:00

The other day we had a long-legged visitor to our pepper plant. He was moving so quickly all over it that it was really tricky to get a good photo but I managed it eventually. Looking at some spider i.d. guides online the only spider with long legs I can find is the daddy long legs but I'm not sure that he looks exactly the same as them.

Does anyone know if he is definitely a daddy long legs or not?

Flowers on the sickly tomato plants!

2010-08-13T07:53:00.003+01:00

Well the poor little tomato plants that I had to completely chop back to pretty much nothing after I put them out on the windowsill and they got battered by the wind have just started to produce flowers! It's great to see how they've sprung back to life after the ordeal. I'm not sure that we'll get massive amounts of fruit off them but I'm pleased to see they recovered.

A shade of red

2010-08-12T21:53:00.003+01:00

I should blog about my discontent with the plants more often... Check this out!

Just 4 days after I blogged about the lack of progress with the chillies changing colour, tonight we have realised that two of our chillies are on the turn. So despite the fact that it has been pretty much pouring in London all week the chillies are battling on through and getting on with getting red anyway. That's made my day. Fantastic!

A few more sunny days like today is what we need!

2010-08-08T16:31:00.004+01:00

If only the weather could stay sunny like it is today. Then maybe my poor green chillies would have more of a hope of turning red at some point soon. They are all looking very healthy and now all, bar one of my plants have got several chillies on them each (even the ones that I've had to keep indoors!) but they are all still staying resolutely green with not even the tiniest hint of redness coming out yet.

Being entirely new to this gardening malarkey I have no idea how long I should be expecting to wait for chillies (or peppers in general I guess?) to turn red. Can anyone offer me any advice as to how long these things normally take? The three chillies that have been around for the longest don't seem to have changed at all in three or four weeks now since they stopped getting any bigger but they are still showing no signs of changing colour...

New cookbooks!

2010-08-06T22:07:00.003+01:00

I had some money left at the end of last month so I decided to order a couple more cookbooks and they've just arrived!

Bit of a restaurant themed cookbook shop with the first of the River Cafe and Moro books. Great to have some new inspiration and can't wait to get started cooking some of the recipes out of them.

We're actually off for dinner at Moro in a few weeks time too, been once before and really looking forward to heading back again!

Honey and peanut butter booster bars

2010-08-03T07:07:00.006+01:00

Not strictly something that would come from the windowsill (although I guess you could claim that sunflower seeds could have done if our sunflowers had produced any...) but these booster bars are so tasty that I couldn't resist blogging about them! They make the perfect addition to a lunchbox to munch on when you get a little peckish whilst working. The recipe comes from Hugh's book River Cottage Everyday which has a fabulous section all about lunchboxes.

You start off by warming unsalted butter, honey, soft brown sugar and crunchy unsweetened peanut butter over a very low heat until it is all melted and mixed together. Stir it occasionally to make sure everything is getting properly mixed.

Once it is melted down take it off the heat and add in porridge oats, dried fruit (one or a mixture of sultanas, raisins, apricots, figs, dates, prunes etc...) and seeds (I used a mix of sesame, linseed, pumpkin seed and sunflower seed). Stir it all together so that the melted concoction is nicely holding all of the fruit and seeds together and then spread it out into a baking tray that has been lined and greased. Scatter the top with a few more mixed seeds and drizzle with some extra honey.

Place the tray in an oven preheated to 180 degrees and leave it for half an hour until it is nicely golden all over. When you take it out of the oven place it on a rack to cool and make sure it is completely cold (this takes quite a while!) before trying to cut it up into perfect lunchbox sized bars.

A week in the life of a pepper plant

2010-08-02T20:30:00.005+01:00

I am completely amazed at the speed at which our sweet peppers are growing! I can pretty much see them growing day by day with the increase in size from when I leave for work in the morning and get home in the evening. And where last weekend we had two little peppers, at the start of this week we've got five! And properly pepper shaped peppers now too rather than the little green nodules I blogged about before (the picture below is of the same fruit that is in the photograph of the July 24th post).

In other windowsill news our most productive fruiting tomato plant is getting more tomatoes by the day and we've started to get a few buds and flowers on some of the other plants.

It's amazing how much joy a few little plants on a windowsill can bring...

Itsy bitsy spider

2010-08-01T08:13:00.003+01:00

We had a spider visitor to the windowsill the other day. I think that it was a male garden spider (Araneus diadematus) although if you think otherwise then please let me know! It never ceases to amaze me how much wildlife actually manages to find its way up onto our windowsill considering it's only a few small plants but it's wonderful none-the-less. Here you can see one of the chillies on the chilli plant that was placed outside a few weeks ago. That plant has now got six little chillies coming along on it. Still waiting for the big chillies to even look slightly like they are going to start turning red though... They are still looking green as a cucumber!

Tomato plant recovery

2010-07-27T18:59:00.005+01:00

The poor little tomato plant that took such a battering in the wind when I first put it outside a few weeks ago seems to be recovering well. It's got loads of new shoots on it now that are doubling in size every day at the minute so it seems to be fighting back.

I'm really hoping that it's going to come back from the brink and actually produce some flowers and fruits!

Gnome from the north

2010-07-26T20:17:00.005+01:00

With the transfer of our green troughs out to the windowsill a few weeks ago our little chrome gnome from the north has moved outside with them. Here he is shining away happily watching the world go by. He also appears to bring good fortune to the plants he shares a windowsill with as we've now got chillies, sweet peppers and tomato plants all fruiting out on that ledge. Maybe it's the sun reflecting off his shiny hat...

A lamb steak with peas and mint

2010-07-25T10:34:00.006+01:00

Some of our windowsill mint was put to excellent use for dinner last night. A quick, very tasty and summery dinner (if a little light on the carbs!) can be found in Nigel Slater's recipe for a lamb steak with peas and mint in Tender Volume 1.

You just blitz the mint together with melted butter and peas to make a pea puree, top that with a lovely grilled lamb steak and then finish off with a little pile of pea shoots and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. A divine and easy supper for a summery weekend evening.

However, due to the lack of carbs it's not going to fill any big holes if you are feeling hungry. Luckily I had a blueberry and peach cake on hand for dessert to do the honours. Another Nigel in fact, the recipe appeared in the newspaper a few weeks ago.

Sweet peppers on the way

2010-07-24T10:35:00.003+01:00

I think that I've got two little sweet peppers on the way!! I can't be sure as having never grown sweet peppers before I'm not sure what they're supposed to look like but the sweet pepper plant that went out on the windowsill two weeks ago now appears to have two little green bulbous nodules in the place of where flowers once were.

Exciting times out on the windowsill indeed!

Redesign

2010-07-24T08:47:00.003+01:00

The original design was only ever meant to be temporary, I had never blogged before and didn't really know what I was doing and so just chose a template for a short while until I figured things out a bit more. And so this morning comes the redesign. Tomatoes were the first vegetable (fruit!) our windowsill produced and so seemed a fitting background. I hope you like.

Windfall chilli enchiladas!

2010-07-23T22:08:00.008+01:00

Well the chillies that managed to survive the winds are going strong still out in the occasional patches of sunshine that we've had this week but the windfall chilli met a good end too. As the chilli seeds originally came from Wahaca it seemed right that our first chilli produce should be used in a recipe from Thomasina Miers' new book Mexican Food Made Simple and so chicken and tomato enchiladas it was!

The chillies go into the smoky tomato sauce and to make that you quarter an onion, peel four garlic cloves and blacken them in a dry frying pan along with two chillies and twelve tomatoes.

You want everything to get really blackened and the skins of the chillies and tomatoes to be bubbling and blistering. Once things are going nice and black remove them from the frying pan. They won't all cook at the same speed so some will need removing earlier than others. Once they're all out of the frying pan, peel the skins off the chillies and tomatoes and remove the chilli stalks and then blitz the lot in a food processor to get a lovely sauce. Add to this a good glug of red wine vinegar and then place in a saucepan and allow to reduce for half an hour or so. When it has reduced nicely, add a handful of chopped tarragon and chervil along with a teaspoonful of demerera sugar and some salt and pepper. Separate your sauce into two halves. Shred the meat off half a pre-cooked chicken and stir that into one half of the sauce.

Now it's time to make up the enchiladas. Pour enough of the sauce into the bottom of an oven-proof dish to cover it. Get your corn tortillas one by one, fill them with the chicken mixture, roll them up and place them in a line in the dish as you would with canneloni. Once you've got them all snugly fitting in the dish and have used up all your filling pour the remaining tomato sauce over the top. Then cover this with a good layer of sour cream and finally top off with grated cheese. Place in a pre-heated oven on 180 degrees for 40 minutes. Sit back and relax with a glass of wine while it cooks.

...reddening tomatoes that used to be green...

2010-07-20T08:20:00.005+01:00

When I was little we used to sing a song in school at harvest festival time called Paintbox. I absolutely loved it and it is such a cheerful song about all of the growing fruits and vegetables that it has stayed with me all my life. Anyway, now we have some of the song in action with our first bright red ripe tomatoes. We picked the first three the other day. As there were only three of them there wasn't enough to actually make anything from them so we just sliced them into quarters and munched on them. And they were lovely! The tomatoeiest tomatoes ever!

Yum.

the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees...

2010-07-18T16:31:00.013+01:00

Over the weekend life out on the windowsill has been positively buzzing. Yesterday one of our tomato plants was visited by a green stink bug. A little bit of Googling enlightened me to the very interesting story of Nezara viridula, which is an invasive species that was found in the UK for the first time six years ago and apparently now has a well established population in London. The bug is an African native but arrived over here as a stowaway in shipments of fruit and veg and has now been able to establish itself as a full-time UK resident due to the warmer weather we are receiving as a result of climate change.

Meanwhile over on the chilli plants we noticed a little cluster of orange eggs on the underside of one of the leaves. Turns out that these are ladybird eggs and a little later in the day there was a ladybird wandering across the plant. I wonder if it had come back to watch over it's brood...

And last but not least earlier on today I glimpsed some pollination in action with a bumblebee visitor to our tomato plant visiting each of the yellow flowers one by one. I've been trying to identify him using the ID guides on the Bumblebee Conservation Trust website but am finding it rather tricky. If anyone can help me out with the identification that would be great. All in all though I'm very encouraged that even the small number of plants on our three tiny windowsills are doing their bit to help in the fight to save our bees and that the great pest-munching ladybirds are loving our windowsill garden as well.

And so came the winds...

2010-07-17T12:24:00.006+01:00

...well it was a little breezy yesterday! A little too breezy for our poor tomato and chilli plants which I had just placed outside following the removal of the decidedly dead looking windowboxes of sunflowers and salads.

One of our windows is a bit sticky to open and so so far I've only placed one of the troughs that was in the fireplace outside but yesterday it took a bit of a battering. The long sprawling tomato plants that had been slowly creeping their way across our carpeted living room floor were tossed this way and that in the wind, causing the leaves to all shrivel up and several of the branches to snap completely. And the poor chilli plant in the middle of the trough was looking rather the worse for wear too when I got back home from work last night.

So this morning, deciding that such long sprawling plants were never going to survive out on the breezy windowsill I took the executive decision to massacre them. I have severely cut the two plants back. They look like they've got some good strong shoots on their way from out near the base so I thought that it would be better for them to concentrate their efforts on those rather than on the shrivelled snapped branches. However, I did no reading up on whether or not that was a good or bad thing to do before I did it so we'll have to wait and see if it works or not!

Our best cropping chilli plant also lost two of its chillies to the wind unfortunately. I found one of them lying in the pot but think that the other one must have blown away. So now we only have three chillies growing on the plant. Although amazingly this morning I have noticed that despite all odds and still being in the tiniest pot ever one of the chilli plants that we haven't even transplanted has got a chilli on the way! Incredible!

Some like it hot! (and some not so much)

2010-07-11T19:23:00.009+01:00

Well as London has been basking for days 30 degree heat our south-facing sunny windowsill has been taking a battering! So long as they get their water twice a day the chillies and the tomatoes are loving the heat and we've now got five growing chillies and I've counted six tomatoes although it's tricky to see them so there may be more. In exciting news on the chilli front I was surfing around the other day and discovered that the kind people at Wahaca had linked through to my blog update on the chillies from their Facebook page. Rather a shock to see my blog in amongst all their other news but a pleasant suprise none-the-less!

Unfortunately the salad leaves are not enjoying the full sunshine so much and are completley frazzled, with just a couple of the rocket plants still fighting on. I guess full sunlight for the whole day is just too much for salad leaves and equally the nasturtiums seem to be shrivelling up a bit as well. As for the sunflowers, they died a good few weeks back now and I still haven't got around to doing anything with them so parts of the windowsill are looking a little sorry for themselves at the moment.

Back inside the flat, our two troughs with tomato plants, sweet peppers and chillies that we've had in the fireplace are starting to take over the floor. Unlike the ones on the windowsill the plants have gone much more straggly in a bid to grow towards the light, the tomato plants in particular just aren't producing any flowers and despite my best efforts at cross-pollination on the sweet pepper and chilli I don't seem to be having any luck. So because of this, and because the salad isn't working and the sunflowers are now long gone I think we're going to have a switch around and get the troughs in the fireplace outside. A job for tomorrow!

Blackfly invading!

2010-07-09T06:38:00.005+01:00

I noticed a week or so ago that one of our nasturtium plants had started to get some little black flies on it. They have slowly been getting more numerous and I have been wondering what to do about it and thinking it a little odd that they were only on one plant but I have just this morning noticed them also on one of the oregano plants and so think that it is time to act before they take over the windowboxes! A quick Google suggests that nasturtiums attract these black fly and when plants get infested people just pull them out but now that they have spread to the oregano as well will that work or not?

Windowsill grown produce on the table!

2010-07-06T07:45:00.006+01:00

So at the start of July we have had our first windowsill grown produce on the table! The oregano that is out on the windowsill has been growing like crazy and so it was with great excitement that I scoured the cookbooks on our shelf for a tasty looking recipe that I could throw a whole load of home grown oregano into and Sarah Raven came up trumps! It is quite fitting that it is a recipe from this book that is the first one the windowsill produce is used in as it was Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook that first inspired me to attempt to grow something edible on the windowsills. To any edible growers out there who do not already own a copy I would highly recommend getting yourself down to a bookshop and picking one up.

So we cooked a wonderful oregano, olive and lemon chicken which is apparently a classic Greek dish. It was a lovely easy recipe too - just stick it in the oven and let it get on with it. I altered from the book slightly by using chicken legs and thighs rather than quartering my own chicken but here's what I did for the two of us:

Chicken legs and thighs (3-4 pieces per person)
Juice of 2 lemons
1 heaped tablespoon coarsely chopped oregano plus two whole sprigs
Salt and black pepper
500g Charlotte potatoes
15 kalamata olives
Olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. Lay the chicken in a roasting tin and pour half the lemon juice over it, then sprinkle with some of the oregano, salt and pepper. Cut the potatoes into wedges and place in around the chicken. Add the olives, pour over the rest of the lemon juice and sprinkle over the remaining oregano. Using your hands make sure the potatoes are well coated in lemon juice and herbs. Pour over the olive oil, add the sprigs of oregano plus a cup of water and cook in the pre-heated oven for one and a half hours. When the chicken is cooked, remove it and allow it to rest while you turn up the heat to crisp up the potatoes in a very hot (220 degree C) oven for 15 minutes.

We accompanied this with the lemon bean salad which can be found on page 210 of the garden cookbook and a nice cold glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Perfect!

I have entered this post on a website featuring "grow your own food". You can check it out and enter yourself here.

Wahaca-ca-ca

2010-07-05T20:46:00.006+01:00

Well the flowers did indeed lead to fruits and one of our Wahaca chilli plants is now the bearer of one huge serrano chilli and a further four smaller ones that are growing bigger and bigger by the day. I'm so chuffed that all my worries about the coldness of the flat back in February and the fact that they hadn't been under heaters hasn't stopped them from being able to produce fruits.

Only two of the six plants that we've got left (I gave two of them away to other homes) are currently out on the windowsill but both of those are reaping the rewards of the gorgeous long sunny days that we've been having over the past couple of weeks. Three of them are still in the tiny little pots that we transplanted them into from the seed trays and they really need some more root space but it's finding the space in the flat to put them that's the problem!

Blooming marvellous!

2010-06-23T12:05:00.005+01:00

Another week away from the windowsill and so much has been coming on with the green foliage taking over more and more space every day. The most exciting thing is that one of the chilli plants that is outside has started to flower so I'm really hoping that flowers will lead to fruits and we'll have some serrano chillis to look forward to later in the year.

The salad leaves that we planted in the old daffodil window box are also coming along nicely and looking much stronger than the little sickly ones that I attempted earlier in the year in the seed trays.

A new addition...

2010-06-22T19:46:00.003+01:00

So we'd been back in the flat for a couple of hours after returning from holiday when all of a sudden I spotted something glinting out of the corner of my eye. And sitting there nestled down in between the tomato plants was a little silver gnome left to watch over the plants by our friendly waterers! A very welcome addition in amongst the vegetable pots.

Tomatoes!!!

2010-06-10T08:04:00.002+01:00

I really am tremendously excited!! We have tomatoes on the windowsill!! Two little beautiful green tomatoes! Excellent!

It's raining, it's pouring...

2010-06-09T07:33:00.005+01:00

Well there must have been a massive rainstorm at some point in London yesterday. I got home from work to find half of the soil from the old daffodil trough all up the side of the window!!

On closer inspection though as well as the soil being all over the place the rocket has started shooting up just 3 days after we planted it! I'm hoping for more success this time than I had when I tried it in the seed trays...

The rain didn't seem to put off the sunflowers either and now four of them are out. Makes me smile when I'm on my way back to the flat and see these bright yellow sunflowers beaming out from a first floor window.

Windowsill gardening at last!

2010-06-07T06:42:00.010+01:00

Well at long last this weekend we managed to get around to actually planting the plants out in their troughs and the majority of them are now actually living out on the windowsill. Outside the kitchen window I've transplanted the mint into a much larger pot and am hoping that the plants will get stronger and larger now that they've got more space to move. I also have the trough out on that windowsill that the daffodils were in - nearly all of the daffodil foliage had completely died back so I cut nearly all of it down and have planted a row of nasturtiums at the front, rocket behind and spinach behind that. Hopefully with the leaves in a deeper tray I'll have more luck than last time...

Then on the two living room windowsills I've got two pots that each have a chilli in the middle and nasturtiums round the edge; one trough with the five sunflowers in and I've stuck in some nasturtium seeds in front of them and one trough with some tomatoes in.

I've also split the chives and the basil plants into more bigger pots (although kept them inside) as they didn't seem to be getting any bigger. And in an attempt to get our table back so we have somewhere to eat once more we have moved the two indoor troughs that we planted up a while back to the fireplace although I'm worried that they might not get enough sun there so will monitor them and see how they do...

All in all a good weekend!

Flowers again...

2010-06-06T09:33:00.006+01:00

Well we returned from our trip to the Hay Festival to find our plants were blooming again which brought a smile to my face. The gorgeous custard sunflower we spotted straight away but it wasn't until a few hours later that I noticed the orange nasturtium flower hiding under one of the big leaves.

Hardening off in the sun

2010-05-29T10:18:00.004+01:00

So we took 9 days off and left the plants to fend for themselves with the help of a friendly waterer coming round to look after them (thank you!) and they've come on leaps and bounds! The ones that we haven't planted out into the troughs yet really are getting a bit too big for their tiny containers now so I've spent the past few days since we've been back hardening them off outside on the windowsills, leaving them out for increasingly lengthy periods of time each day to get them used to the outside world. We're away again for the bank holiday weekend but when we're back I'm going to get them out of their pots and into the troughs.

The empire expands...

2010-05-14T19:11:00.008+01:00

Today there has been a flurry of activity on the windowsill involving some of the plants actually moving temporarily off the windowsill. Over the past couple of days I have been trying to plan out where things are going to go now that I know what plants I've got that have grown and we're going to have the three windowboxes outside and another two inside that have got special trays in them that stop the water leaking out the bottom.

I've been getting a little worried that some of the tomato plants are getting a bit too big for their little pots and so today I planted up the two troughs that are going to remain inside (as I haven't got around to hardening off any of the plants yet). It's amazing how much compost you need just to fill up two troughs and I had to pop out to pick up some more half way through.

Anyways, at the end of the days planting I've got one trough with a sweet pepper in the middle and a tomato plant at either end and the other ones got a chilli pepper in the middle and tomatoes at the end. I also thought that I'd have a go at putting some of the oregano around the base of one of them and so split two of my pots of oregano up and planted them in four patches at the bottom. I hadn't quite anticipated how tricky it would be to split the root balls of the little oregano plants though so they all fell apart a bit and I've got a feeling that the roots of some ended up with the shoots of others... so we'll wait to see whether their transplantation ends a success or not.

In other exciting news the sweet pepper plant has now got buds on it and all of the sunflowers are developing little buds.

The only down side of planting everything out is that until I get around to hardening off the other plants so that they are able to go outside the troughs have now taken over the kitchen as well as the table!

Tomato flowers!

2010-05-12T20:56:00.003+01:00

Well all has been rather quiet on the windowsill for the last week or so with the plants just quietly getting on with their growing and we were away from the flat for the weekend too so no time to put any work in. But we've got some movement in the tomatoes and the first of the little yellow flowers have started to bud on a couple of them! Everything else just seems to be getting slowly bigger but nothing else to report...

Daffodils dead

2010-05-03T10:58:00.005+01:00

The torrential rain of the last couple of days has finished off the last of our windowbox daffodils. Over the past few weeks we've had some gorgeous narcissi with multiple yellow flowers coming from one stem but now their time has passed. Unfortunately it would also seem that the wildflower seeds that I planted in the pot a month or so ago have failed to germinate (I think that the seeds were just too old) so I am left with a windowbox without flowers. I have been reading about what to do with daffodils once they've died and learnt that you should leave them for 6-8 weeks after they have died to allow the nutrients to return to the bulbs and so I need to think of something to do in the meantime. I thought that given my failure at attempting to grow salad leaves in a seed tray that planting some salad leaves in and around the dead daffodils might be an idea and then once the daffodils have gone it can become a fully fledged salads windowbox.

In other flower news and in light of international sunflower guerilla gardening day on Saturday our five sunflowers are looking healthy and strong.

I think that all of our plants are starting to outgrow the small pots that they are in now and have been advised that in London the frosts pass quicker than in other parts of the country and so will be starting to think about potting them on in the not too distant.

Oregano runners?

2010-04-30T14:25:00.003+01:00

Over the past week or so I've noticed that the oregano plants appear to have developed two different types of leaves, the normal oregano looking ones and then these shoots that are growing towards the light quite rapidly with a different type of leaf. A little bit of reading around oregano plants suggests that these might be runners looking for new soil to root themselves into. As my intention is for the oregano to be in pots would it be worth me snipping these off when I see them so as to divert all of the growing into the edible leaves or am I best to just leave them growing?

One Pot Pledge

2010-04-27T16:57:00.004+01:00

I found out about the One Pot Pledge initiative yesterday and today have just signed up as a budding novice gardener growing veg in a pot on my windowsill! The initiative aims to get first time growers planting a pot of fruit or veggies on a windowsill, patio, balcony or roof. They'll send you updates and advice on things to be doing and schools and groups can also get involved. It's not just for novice gardeners either - those more experienced amongst you can sign up as a Gardening Guru to offer advice to first time growers. By the end of the summer they aim to have encouraged 30,000 people to have signed up to grow a pot of their own harvestable food.

The trials and errors of a first time gardener...

2010-04-26T21:20:00.005+01:00

I knew it was all too good to be true. I didn't know what I was doing, I planted a whole load of seeds and they grew! Surely such luck could not last. And so the first of my gardening failures are springing up (or wilting down more to the point). I was convinced after reading a few articles on growing salads and then reading Elevated Agriculture's very comprehensive guide to planting windowsill lettuces that the seed trays I had tried to start off some early rocket and spinach in would be too shallow and so, 3 weeks after planting the spinach and 5 after planting the rocket they have completely wilted up and keeled over. It all happened quite quickly too - in the space of a few days they went from being healthy looking little plants to being shrivelled and dead. Still... in our trip to the garden centre last weekend we bought our deeper pots for the window ledges so once we pot them up hopefully we can get some salad leaves going in them.

And our once strong nasturtiums also seem to have taken a turn for the worse. Most of them are still looking ok but a couple of them are starting to get shrivelled leaves. Could this be a sign that they have outgrown the pots that they're in? This specimen has been the only one to have stripy leaves the whole time so I thought that it was just a colour variation but now I'm wondering whether it has been slightly sickly all along. Also having heard that often nasturtium seeds are planted straight in the ground in May I'm thinking that starting them off in pots might not have been the best idea for them after all.

It wasn't the best weekend in the kitchen either. I attempted to make fudge for the first time and somehow ended up with a very sticky toffee instead which unfortunately couldn't be salvaged and ended up in a ball in the bin. It was supposed to be for a present, I had brought all lovely ribbon and organza to wrap up little parcels of sweets in although luckily I'd had the foresight to plan a few different parcels and the coconut ice and shortbread recipes worked much better so all was not lost!

And as they say - the best lesson is to learn from your mistakes!

Fertiliser

2010-04-23T06:41:00.007+01:00

On the weekend we had a trip down to the garden centre. A week or so ago I'd written about my herbs which seem to have hit a bit of a brick wall in terms of getting any larger. Jo at the Good Life suggested that they might have used up all of the nutrients that was in the compost originally and therefore I might need to start adding fertiliser. So off we trecked to the garden centre with "fertiliser" written on the shopping list.

I hadn't quite anticipated how many fertilisers there would be. We were confronted with an entire wall of Baby Bio, Seaweed extract, Miracle Grow, Tomatorite coming in boxes, bottles and jars... Not deterred by the huge range on offer and the fact that I hadn't got much of a clue what I needed I read a few of the labels and settled on some Miracle Grow that said it was organic and for fruit and vegetables (mildly hoping that herbs were included as a vegetable as I wasn't really in the market to buy a seperate fertiliser for herbs!).

On reading the label it suggests that for vegetables it should be applied once every 7-14 days from shortly after germination and so on Wednesday morning I mixed it up in my watering can and gave both the herbs and the vegetables a good water. Early indications show that for the herbs in particular the leaves seemed to get larger before my eyes and when I came home from work the leaves on the oregano and the parsley seemed much larger than they had been just that morning!

Chilli leaves

2010-04-20T20:52:00.007+01:00

Today I'd like to post about something that I've been wondering about for a week or so... why do all of the leaves on my chilli plants appear to have one big leaf at the back and then a small leaf at the front? Presumably it must have something to do with catching as much sunlight as possible but I can't see why that would mean that the one at the front would be so much smaller... Is this a common trait in chilli plants or are my ones abnormal?

In other windowsill news the spinach leaves are growing longer and longer by the day. I'm wondering what is going to happen to them, whether they are just going to keep on elongating or if the plants will be getting extra leaves some time...

Home fried potatoes for breakfast

2010-04-17T12:56:00.004+01:00

Well there's nothing quite like cooking up a leisurely breakfast to celebrate the start of the weekend and this morning was a day for using up some left over potatoes in the bottom of the vegetable bin.

After an early morning run it was back to the flat to potter in the kitchen making up the recipe as I went along (although it rougly follows a lot of fried potato/home fries recipes).

I used all of the potatoes that we had lying around which was a mixture of new and baby new, chopped them up and part-boiled them. Then to start I slowly fried an onion over a low heat and once it was soft added a thinly sliced red pepper and some chopped garlic. Leave that all to cook together on a very low heat for quite a while until everything is soft and super-sweet. Just before adding in the potatoes I stirred through a couple of teaspoons of sweet smoked paprika (the proper Spanish stuff that you can get from Brindisa is what you need!) and a teaspoon of harissa paste. Then I mixed in the potatoes and turned up the heat. Leave it to cook for another half hour or so turning occasionally. Just before you serve it season with salt and pepper and stir through loads of fresh chopped flat leaf parsley and torn basil. Serve in a pile with a fried egg on top.

To pot or not to pot...

2010-04-16T20:07:00.008+01:00

Well the tomatoes and the nasturtiums seem to be coming on like wildfire at the moment and the spinach has absolutely shot up since this morning.

The tomatoes and the nasturtiums have got to the stage now though when I'm wondering how long they can stay in the pots they are in. For space issues inside I'd quite like to be able to go straight from the pots they're in out to the windowboxes but is it still to cold and early for them to brave the outside? For tomatoes I have read everything from early May to late June but have also heard of some people putting their tomatoes outside from mid-April so I'm not sure what to do! Also, before fully transplanting them into outdoor windowboxes do we need to acclimatise them to outside a bit at a time or will they be ok if they go straight out? From a bit of nasturtium research it seems that they would probably be ok to go outside straight away (and they are getting a little unruly on the table!) but would it be ok plant them in a window box now that we then add more to later?

Outside on the kitchen windowsill the last of our three types of daffodil is looking like it will burst into flower any day. And these ones will have multiple flowers from one stem which I'm looking forward to seeing.

A sunny windowsill weekend

2010-04-13T21:39:00.005+01:00

Well I've had a few days off the blog but over the weekend we decided to put the five herb pots out on the windowsill for a while whilst it was really sunny to see how they fared. They've been doing ok (and the basil seems to have perked up since I stopped watering it so much - thanks for the tips!) but what seems to have happened is that they've hit a bit of a stage where they don't seem to be getting any bigger particularly quickly so I thought some time out in the sun might do them some good. Unfortunately for the coriander by the time it was brought back in again it seemed to have flopped over completely. I'm not quite sure what to do about it to get the stalks stronger so that they can support the weight of the leaves. In the other pots I keep thinking that some day the skinny little chives are going to be getting a bit thicker but they don't seem to be showing any signs of that yet. The parsley seems to be doing ok, I was worried before that only one of our seeds had germinated but then I was informed that parsley always takes ages to germinate and since then we've had two more seedlings so things are on the up! And last but not least the mint still seems to be lingering behind as lots of very small little plants. So a bit of a hotch-potch with the lot of them but any advice on what these herbs should be looking like nearly two months after sowing would be much appreciated!

In other exciting news the spinach seeds that I sowed a week ago are starting to pop their heads up which is fantastic.

More flowers

2010-04-09T06:36:00.002+01:00

This morning I woke up to a beautiful Jack Snipe narcissus that has opened its petals overnight. A lovely way to start a Friday.

Pie!

2010-04-08T20:06:00.005+01:00

It has been pointed out to me that the blog has become a bit more of the windowsill and a bit less of the cook.

So here's a post to even things out a bit! Last night I made a chicken and mushroom pie for the first time ever and very tasty it was too. I just got the recipe from the BBC website although altered a few things using large flat mushrooms rather than button ones and using the remaining half of a roast chicken rather than three chicken breasts but it all turned out very nicely. Alongside it we had new potatoes and I dressed them following a "tip" on the side of the packet to shake them up with lemon zest, thyme leaves, olive oil, salt and pepper. Delicious!

So pie, peas and potatoes for dinner and two very satisfied customers!

Taking stock...

2010-04-07T12:21:00.007+01:00

Well I've finally got around to transferring the chillis and the sweet pepper out from the seed tray and into some pots. Hopefully now they've got a bit more space they'll continue to thrive and start getting a bit larger. One of the chillis is looking a little sickly and it's leaves are curled up but it was previously sharing a seed plug with another plant so maybe now it's got a whole pot to itself it will perk up a bit. So in the windowsill garden stock take the grand total of the fruits of our labour in terms of the seed tray that we planted back on 6th March is:
8 tumbling tomato plants (Lycopersicon lycopersicum);
8 serrano chillis;
1 sweet pepper (Capsicum annum);
5 pots of Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare);
5 dwarf sunflowers (Helianthus annus);
10 nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus).

In addition to that we've got the other herb pots from the seed mats (basil, coriander, chives, curly parsley and mint) and the seed tray of salad leaves. As well as potting out the remaining plants I've also just added some spinach seeds (Lazio F1) to the seed tray with the rocket so looking forward to some tasty leaves...

As only one of the five sweet pepper seeds that we planted germinated I'm quite tempted to have another go at planting some more. Is it advisable to chuck away the seed tray that has just been vacated by all of the other plants or if I give it a good wash would I be ok to repot it with some more sweet pepper seeds?

Windowsill on the wild side

2010-04-06T15:12:00.006+01:00

A couple of year's ago as a stocking filler at Christmas I got a matchstick garden of wildflower seeds. It's been sitting on my shelf ever since waiting until I had some soil and a watering can and at long last its day has come. I've just planted the matchsticks in amongst the daffodils in a bid to keep the flower windowbox in bloom long after the daffodils have gone. It's a lovely sunny day on the windowsill and I've given them plenty of water so they're off to the best start in amongst the daffodils. Encouraged by the success from the Wahaca chilli matchbox I'm hoping for similar success with the wildflowers. If all goes well we should be getting cornflowers, shasta daisies, corn marigold and field poppies so we'll have a rainbow of colours. I love poppies so really hoping that those seeds germinate!

You might just be able to see in the windowbox that one of our Jack Snipe narcissi looks like it's going to flower any day now too...

Tomato plants and butternut squash scones...

2010-04-05T10:37:00.004+01:00

Well we've been away from the flat for a few days over Easter again so the plants have been having to fend for themselves. I was a little worried that when we came back they would have suffered a little from a lack of tlc but they seem to have survived remarkably well and the tomato plants have come on leaps and bounds. Their tomato plant shaped leaves have got so much bigger in just a few days.

We were back in the flat briefly yesterday morning and I got busy in the kitchen for a couple of hours baking bread to go with scrambled eggs and streaky bacon for a quick breakfast and making some parmsean and paprika scones, made with grated butternut squash rather than butter, to take around to a family Easter lunch/dinner yesterday afternoon. Blueberry pancakes are on the menu for a late breakfast this morning and the batter is sitting on the side aerating at the moment...

What to do with the coriander and basil...?

2010-03-29T19:17:00.006+01:00

The herb pots have been on the go for about a month now but I'm getting a little worried about the coriander and basil pots. I think that we might need to thin out the coriander as it has gone a little haywire and the stems are all very floppy and unable to support the weight of the leaves. I was wondering whether anyone had any advice on whether it will be possible to pull out and repot some of the individual plants or if that is likely to be tricky - they were grown from "seed mats". Are seed mats usually designed for the seeds to be spaced far enough apart that they shouldn't need thinning or not?

As for the basil, it just seems to be looking a little on the yellow side rather than the bright green that I was expecting. Might this be because the compost is running out of nutrients? I wasn't expecting that to happen so quickly so am thinking that probably isn't the case but can't think what else it might be unless it is also an overcrowding issue.

Any thoughts?

Need more pots!

2010-03-28T16:55:00.006+01:00

So more repotting went on today with all except one of the tomatoes now in little pots along with all of the sunflowers and some of the oregano. This time rather than running out of compost we ran out of pots and so the chillis and the pepper will have to wait a little longer to get out of the seed tray. The kitchen table has now been pretty much engulfed in pots and once we've got them all potted up I don't think there's going to be anywhere to eat at all for a few weeks until they're big enough to be moved out onto the windowsill...

In the kitchen windowbox the two daffodils that have flowered are looking lovely and it seems that we have a bud on a very short and stumpy Jack Snipe narcissus - don't think it will be tall enough to be seen from the road at all!

What a difference some sun makes

2010-03-25T08:01:00.002Z

I've been away from the windowsills with work for the past couple of days and it's absolutely amazing how much everything has shot up with the arrival of some sun. Our two lines of rocket that we planted have popped their heads up and most of the Wahaca chillies now have two plants growing in the seed plugs. Now that we've got some more compost I think that we need to start getting on with repotting the tomatoes which have also shot up over the past couple of days.

In other news out on the kitchen windowsill the second of our daffodils has also come into bloom.

Our first flower

2010-03-23T07:05:00.004Z

We have our first flower! The tallest one of our daffodils has finally flowered. I've been watching it for the past week thinking that it must be about to flower any day and finally yesterday it burst into flower. In other flower news all of the sunflowers have now come back from the brink so it must have been a lack of water that was causing the problems.

Out of compost!

2010-03-20T16:47:00.004Z

Well we've had a good stab at potting up the plants from the seed tray. I thought that it would be good to repot the nasturtiums, the stronger of the sunflowers, the oregano and the tomatoes. However, we ran out of compost about half way through. So the tomatoes and some of the oregano are still in the seed trays for the moment.

It's amazing how much space everything takes up once it's potted out though... Now about half of our dining table has been taken over with pots! I'm also a little worried that when we did the repotting we might have disturbed the roots a bit too much (the soil all fell apart rather than staying in tight plugs) but I figure that it's still early in the year and we're learning as we go so if we lose a few now we've still got time to plant more up.

We also did a little more sowing and have now got a seed tray with two lines of rocket seeds in it. Looking forward to some yummy homegrown salads very shortly!

Not too cold for the peppers and chillies!

2010-03-20T09:04:00.006Z

Well I had resigned myself to the fact that we weren't going to get any germinating chillies or peppers because we hadn't made it warm enough for them.

When we had planted the seed tray up we hadn't realised that people normally either place them on radiators or under propagating lamps to get them to germinate and hence had planted them with a row of tomatoes in between. However, lo and behold, this morning when I went to check the tray we've got a little pepper plant and three chillies that have all come up at the same time!

In other news it appears that one of the sunflowers that was drooping yesterday has started to fight back a little but the another one has begun to wilt. So now we've got two healthy sunflowers and three that are not looking so good. Today we will pot them up!

Disaster strikes the windowsill!

2010-03-19T08:12:00.003Z

I'd just got up this morning and went to check on our little seedlings and two of the sunflowers appear to be completely wilted over! I don't know if this is because they've not had enough water or because they're getting too big for their seedling trays. I'm suspecting that it might be not enough water as they are two of the smaller sunflower shoots. Anyway, I've given them a good water this morning so hopefully they might perk up again. I did also yesterday invest in a whole load of pots and saucers so we can start repotting some of the bigger seedlings today.

...and busy times in the kitchen

2010-03-17T18:20:00.004Z

As well as a flurry of garden activity there's also been a flurry of kitchen activity over the past few days with baking and cooking galore. Over the weekend I opened my Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache book for the first time and had a cupcake baking session. All the cakes in the book have vegetables included within them and I made some orange and lemon cupcakes with butternut squash and some raspberry and elderflower cupcakes with courgette. Not sure the presentation's quite there to open up a cupcake business to rival Lola's or Treacle yet but both were delicious and vanished suprisingly fast! Also going on in the kitchen we've been baking foccacia and making roasted pepper soup for lunches at work.

Busy times on the windowsill...

2010-03-17T18:11:00.004Z

Well the internet's been down for a few days so there's been no blog action since the weekend but that hasn't stopped the activity on the windowsill. Two of the daffodils are developing buds so I'm hoping that they're going to spring into flower any day soon, the coriander has developed it's first coriander shaped leaves, the nasturtiums have absolutely shot up and we've now got six little tomato seedlings too that seem to be doing fantastically.

Flower (window)garden

2010-03-13T09:10:00.007Z

The longest standing members of our windowsill garden experiment haven't even been introduced yet! We planted some daffodil bulbs in a windowbox outside our kitchen window back in November and all seven bulbs are doing well. We've got three different types in there, one of which was supposed to flower in January (!!) and the other two March/April flowering varieties. To date we've got lots of green shoots but no flowers.

Here's some photos of the daffodils story so far...

Snow covered - December 2009

Peeping through - (Early) February 2010

Getting taller - (Late) February 2010

Sunflowers and nasturtiums

2010-03-12T12:45:00.003Z

Well the sunflowers and nasturtiums seem to have just shot up. It's 2 days since the first sunflower popped out and only 6 since we planted them last weekend. Now we've got four sunflowers and six nasturtiums on the go. The sunflowers had started to hit the clingfilm so I've removed it from the top of the flower rows to let them stretch out taller.

Elsewhere in our seed tray the oregano seems to be doing well and a couple of tomatoes are starting to peek out.

Parsley and mint!

2010-03-09T20:27:00.004Z

Well over the last couple of days since we did all of the planting the parsley and mint have sprouted so now we've got our full complement of herbs from the seeds we planted in pots a few weekends ago! At the moment we've got just one solitary parsley plant and several absolutely tiny mint plants. Meanwhile the coriander continues to shoot up and the chives are going from strength to strength...

Wahaca chillis

2010-03-07T14:34:00.003Z

So the chillis that we have planted are serrano chillies are from a matchbook that came free of charge when we paid the bill following a very tasty meal at Wahaca. Hoping for great things and that as well as the lovely dinner that we had there, we've got many more lovely dinners to come from our chilli crop.

The seeds are in!

2010-03-06T16:21:00.008Z

So today the majority of the seeds have gone in. Not wanting the windowboxes to be completely devoid of flowers we have planted seeds of a mixture of veggies but kept a few flowers in there too...

From the "pizza and pasta pot" collection we've got some tumbling tomatoes (Lycopersicon lycopersicum), some sweet peppers (Capsicum annum), some serrano chillis and some Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare). To add some colour to windowboxes (and because I love sunflowers!) we've got some Irish Eyes sunflowers (Helianthus annus) and some nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) whose leaves we should be able to add to some tasty salads as well as the flowers looking pretty. All are dwarf varieties so hopefully they should be able to cope in our windowboxes.

The seed tray is now nestled on the table in between the herb pots and some bread dough that is rising in the late afternoon sunlight and the stock is bubbling away on the stove so that it's ready in time to stir in to tonights risotto.

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails

2010-03-05T19:04:00.010Z

I do have a little previous gardening experience... A couple of years ago I spent a year living up in a little town called Menai Bridge in Anglesey. We had a lovely house that looked right out over the Menai Strait and when the summer came we were excited at the prospect of getting out in the garden and growing our own fruit and vegetables. Keen and eager we got in the grow bags and planted them up with salad leaves, tomatoes, courgettes and strawberries.

All were doing fabulously and then the slugs hit! With a dog living next door we didn't want to put down and slug pellets. But no matter what we tried they kept on coming back - beer, cracked egg shells and straw just couldn't stop the power of the Anglesey slug population and we ended up losing nearly all our lovely produce! Due to my distress and disbelief at the sheer number of slugs that there could be in one small garden my boyfriend bought me the fabulous book "50 ways to kill a slug" to bring a smile to my face.

I'm keeping my fingers and toes crossed for better luck this year and that we won't get too many slugs up in the windowsill garden!

Two weekends ago

2010-03-04T18:59:00.005Z

We were lucky enough to be given for Christmas by my boyfriend's brother a starter kit for getting going with our edible window boxes. Goodies included some window troughs, seed trays, a trowel and seeds to get us going on a "pizza and pasta pot". Two weekends ago we planted up some of the herb seed mats in little pots.

We left them covered in clingfilm on the table by the window and 11 days later the basil, coriander and chives have popped their heads up! As of yet there's still no sign of the parsley or mint... Fingers crossed they're just taking their time.

How it all began...

2010-03-04T08:05:00.000Z

A keen cook, inspired by Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook and Nigel Slater's Tender, I have decided in 2010 to see how much I can grow on three sunny windowsills in my first floor London flat. Fully armed with seeds, pots and plenty of enthusiasm I intend to chart my successes and no doubt failures on these pages and hope to get a tasty meal or two at the end of it!