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!

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...

Sweet peppers on the way

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!

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

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!

The empire expands...

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!

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?