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!!)

A pleasant surprise

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!

Autumnal cooking

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!

Taking a tumble

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!

A lamb steak with peas and mint

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.

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!

Windowsill grown produce on the table!

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.

Windowsill gardening at last!

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!

Hardening off in the sun

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.

Oregano runners?

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

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.

Fertiliser

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!

A sunny windowsill weekend

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.

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

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?

Parsley and mint!

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...

Two weekends ago

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.