Roasted peppers and chorizo

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.

In desperate need of some tlc!

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!

Daddy long legs...?

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?

A week in the life of a pepper plant

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...

Taking stock...

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?

Not too cold for the peppers and chillies!

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!

The seeds are in!

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.