We did get aubergines...

Hmm... it appears again that, as in 2011, I managed to start the year with the greatest of intentions in 2012, blogging a few times and then life got in the way and I didn't manage to keep it up. We didn't give up on the windowsill though and did indeed get aubergines! In fact, the aubergines were our most successful windowsill crop last year - whilst we got some tomatoes and chillies, they didn't fare so well with the relentless rain that we had. Here's the 2012 highlights:

Seedlings getting bigger

Plants go out onto the windowsill

Some windmills add colour

We had a wildflower windowsill alongside our veggies

Pea flower

More wildflowers

Beans!

Aubergine flower

First bean harvest

Aubergine getting bigger

First aubergine harvested

Yellow tomatoes in the rain

Sunflowers in the rain (these self-seeded from the seeds the birds dropped out of the windowsill feeder)

Great tit in the windowsill feeder

Chilli and bean harvest

So here I am again, in 2013, starting the blog up again with the greatest of intentions. Fingers crossed I'll find the time to keep it going this year!

Seeds!

I have just ordered my seeds for the 2012 windowboxes. I am slightly later this year than I have been for the past two but hoping that this won't cause any problems... As some of you will be aware one of my "30 before 30" for this year is to grow an aubergine on the windowsill. This may be a tall order but I'm hoping that I'll be able to do it. The variety that I have gone for is the dwarf "Ophelia" plant. Fingers crossed they like sunny spots and will thrive on the windowsill. Only time will tell. To go alongside the aubergines I've gone for another newby to the windowsill - the dwarf runner bean "Hestia" and last but not least I have the old favourites which have done very well both years - tumbling tomatoes and some chilli seeds (another new variety of chilli this year - going to try Caldero).

Now just got to sit back and wait for them to arrive in the post!

2011 highlights

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...

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!

Sunflowers and tomatoes!

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

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!

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!

New Year, New Post

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!!)

The last of the red tomatoes...

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

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

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!

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.

Green tomatoes, brown patches

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

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

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

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?

Sunset on the windowsill

A lovely sunset viewed from the windowsill last night.

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!