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!!)

Out with the old and in with the new!

Well over the weekend I took the opportunity to do some tidying up and armed with all of your suggestions from the other week headed off to the garden centre in search of some winter windowsill produce. I managed to get hold of some garlic, winter salad leaves, sping onions and cos lettuces which all said that they were ok to be planted at this time of year and I also picked up some cress and mustard too to keep me busy.

When I got back I spent some time pottering around and cleared out one of the windowsills where all of the former tomato plants were dead (I have left a little clump of oregano which was clinging on for dear life in the hope that it is going to revive itself) and in their place I have planted a row of the winter leaves and a row of the spring onions. It didn't mention anything on the label about starting them off inside so I have just planted them straight into the windowbox outside (not sure if this was a good idea or not!?!). Then I also removed the chilli plant which had only produced one short fat chilli and have planted three cloves of garlic in its place. Am looking forward to seeing whether anything sprouts or not!



I've left the other two windowboxes for the time being - one of them is still bursting with chillies and to keep them fresh I don't want to be picking them until we need them and the other one has lots of tomatoes that are a yellowish colour at the moment so I'm clinging on in the vain hope that they might turn red for me some day soon. I've also left the pot of mint in place and tidied it up removing all of the dead stalks and it's sprung back to life amazingly!

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?

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?

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!

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!

Feeling hot, hot, hot!

Look at our chillies now! From being completely green a week ago, to starting to see red patches on Thursday, they are now bright red all over!

I never realised that when they turned red it would happen so quickly. You can see them shining out now in all their red glory when you're walking back down the road - puts a smile on my face every time.

Verdict: Wahaca chilli seeds - success!

Flowers on the sickly tomato plants!

Well the poor little tomato plants that I had to completely chop back to pretty much nothing after I put them out on the windowsill and they got battered by the wind have just started to produce flowers! It's great to see how they've sprung back to life after the ordeal. I'm not sure that we'll get massive amounts of fruit off them but I'm pleased to see they recovered.

A shade of red

I should blog about my discontent with the plants more often... Check this out!

Just 4 days after I blogged about the lack of progress with the chillies changing colour, tonight we have realised that two of our chillies are on the turn. So despite the fact that it has been pretty much pouring in London all week the chillies are battling on through and getting on with getting red anyway. That's made my day. Fantastic!

A few more sunny days like today is what we need!

If only the weather could stay sunny like it is today. Then maybe my poor green chillies would have more of a hope of turning red at some point soon. They are all looking very healthy and now all, bar one of my plants have got several chillies on them each (even the ones that I've had to keep indoors!) but they are all still staying resolutely green with not even the tiniest hint of redness coming out yet.

Being entirely new to this gardening malarkey I have no idea how long I should be expecting to wait for chillies (or peppers in general I guess?) to turn red. Can anyone offer me any advice as to how long these things normally take? The three chillies that have been around for the longest don't seem to have changed at all in three or four weeks now since they stopped getting any bigger but they are still showing no signs of changing colour...

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...

Tomato plant recovery

The poor little tomato plant that took such a battering in the wind when I first put it outside a few weeks ago seems to be recovering well. It's got loads of new shoots on it now that are doubling in size every day at the minute so it seems to be fighting back.

I'm really hoping that it's going to come back from the brink and actually produce some flowers and fruits!

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!