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.
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.
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.
Nigel Slater's recipe for a lamb steak with peas and mint in Tender Volume 1.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!).
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!
