A View From The Greenhouse; Hooptedoodle

A normal Sunday morning, or so one might think. The end of August is damp and fairly breezy up here in the hinterlands, but nothing out of the ordinary for the time of year. My intention was to pop round to the greenhouse, water what needed a drink, pick some plums and take the rest of the day to myself. The plum harvest hasn’t been huge, but at least those that the birds haven’t taken and the wasps haven’t burrowed into are very tasty and the skins are, in the main, blemish free. This is the first harvest since we cut the tree back and the new growth’s resisting the canker (so far). I think we’ll call it a “qualified success”. I connected up the hose to the spray gun, turned on the tap and set off to pull the hose to the back of the house and water my way back. So far as I’m aware, nobody had entered the greenhouse since I left it the previous day, but on a plant, about halfway up, a single tomato still attached to the vine, looked for all the world as if someone had sliced it in half. There’s no trace of any seeds or flesh on the ground and no indication of who (or even what) may have done such a thing. There was a young wren flying about in there, but, so far as I’m aware, they aren’t known to carry knives. A bit of a conundrum!

Not really knowing that much about maize, or corn on the cob, or baby corn, I’d been impatiently waiting for something to emerge from the tops of the plants. It turns out that the cobs emerge as side-shoots, between leaves and stem. We’re not really fans, but these were a B&M department project, anyway. What does emerge from the top of the plant, once the cobs begin to form lower down (some of you will already know this) are “seed ears”. I don’t know if it’ll be viable or not (I may look it up), but I’m going to find a corner somewhere in early spring and plant some, to see if it’ll adapt and thrive being in untended soil. Nowt ventured, nowt gained, as they say.

As is customary at this time of year, I start to look for ideas, outside of soup, that can put lovely, fresh and very tasty tomatoes to good use, apart from eating them on salads and in sandwiches (which I do most days, anyway). How about a simple tart? The recipe for this little gem couldn’t be anymore simple. Make some pesto (or buy a jar), spread it on a ready rolled puff-pastry sheet, leaving a border, lay ripe tomatoes (slightly overlapping) on the pesto base, bake in a moderately hot oven for 20-25 minutes. I did “innovate” a bit, by making the pesto with cashew nuts instead of pine nuts and seasoning with salt and aleppo pepper, rather than black, and it worked a treat. Definitely something I’ll try again.

One of the downsides of having the outside area is that you can’t control the amount of water it gets. One week it’s lashing it down and everything (especially the potatoes) gets too much, the next week there’s baking hot sun for days on end and you just know everything (apart from the potatoes, which had their fill the week before) is going to need a drink. Any road up, the B&M department must have got sick of listening to me moaning about it and came up with a simple, but ingenious solution, utilising a couple of lengths of aluminium “misting” pipe, a couple of clamps, a short length of hose, several cable ties and a selection of snap connectors of different manufacture. The result does the job perfectly. The mister nozzles are adjustable and the pipe can be turned in the clamps to avoid watering the spuds, should they not need it. An excellent addition to the tool bank, it’ll save an hour on the days that it’s deployed.

I’ve mentioned my seasonal Sunday breakfast before (I think), but there’s no need to restrict it to only those times when the tomatoes are ripe. Accordingly, I chopped up about five pounds of cherry tomatoes of differing hues (if similar flavour types) and cooked them down in a little bit of olive oil with salt, sugar (a soupcon) and the now almost obligatory aleppo pepper (I’ve only recently discovered it). By the time they’d reduced down to the right consistency I got seven portions for the freezer and strained off just over half a pint of what I can only describe as “essence of tomato”, which I added to some soup I’d made the previous week. TBH, once it had cooled I could have drunk it straight from the jug.

Almost a year since Puglia. You know the old saying “you can bring the man back from southern Italy, but you can’t take southern Italy out of the man” (summat like that, anyway). I have to be honest, the purple, yellow and white carrots may look nice in a picture, but they taste much the same as the orange ones do. The purple variety are slow to develop, too, and as the seed’s mixed, there’s no telling which is which until you pick them. Having said that I’ll give them another go, they all roast nice and go well mashed with swede and seasoned with salt and white pepper. Not bad for a first go, IMHO.

I think I may have mentioned about taking a staggered approach to the potato planting, any road up, I was left with five Charlotte seeds and not wanting to leave a row only partly planted, I stuck a couple of reds in which had been kicking about in the shed for months (I’d brought them from home). I couldn’t be faffed to make a new label for the row, so simply move one across from a now harvested stitch. Over the weekend I went to get some spuds and really wanted main crop (for mash), although I knew the ones I’d put in were a couple of weeks from ready. “You’ll have to make do with crushed news” I said to myself as the fork went in. Imaging my surprise when I lifted the top to find these beauties! I suppose, to be honest, you needed to be there for it to mean owt.

Another use for tomatoes (one which I’m sure really needs no introduction) roasted with a splash of olive oil, sea salt and (you guessed it) aleppo pepper and topped with shredded basil just as they come out of the oven make a great accompaniment to go with grilled chicken, steamed white fish, a pork chop, or even a nice, thick juicy steak (if you can afford a nice juicy steak, that is) Buono Appetito!

I was going to write about the rise in overt authoritarianism, our increasingly arrogant, tattooed, scruffily bearded and politicised police force, the thoroughly compromised judicial system (overrun as it is with Common Purpose Fabians and “Yooman Rites” experts), “left wing” X accounts with (allegedly) huge followings that call everyone who doesn’t buy into the current narrative “far-right fascist Nazis”, the ongoing demonisation of “Englishness” and the English flag, the openly corrupt and tin-eared politicians who are supposed to be governing us, the ever increasing numbers of “fighting age” men who illegally cross our borders virtually unchallenged, the creeping influence (and subsequently increasing boldness) of Islam within all of our political parties and the consequent utter disdain with which the ordinary British citizen is treated by all of the people, organisations and above. But then I thought, what’s the point? I’m only going over the same old ground and, TBH, until there’s a seismic shift in the national political continuum I don’t see much changing any time soon, the forces of evil are many and hold extreme levels of power. I’m getting so I can’t tell a false flag from a real flag, an ally from an enemy, or even a dragon slaying patron saint from a Turkish/Palestinian adventurer who may have once trodden on a serpent of some kind.

Any road up, old Jacks’ house still stands empty, the yard’s overgrown, the buildings are starting to look their age, the old wooden gate to the side of the house has all but disintegrated and the window frames are starting to rot. To be honest, the whole place has an air of sadness about it, but, having said all that, trees tend not to worry too much about those things that permeate the thoughts of mortals and the old apple tree, covered in ivy as it is, and lovingly untended since long before Jack shuffled off his coil, is heaving with copious amounts of fruit. I’d long had permission from Jack to help myself and I don’t consider that as being rescinded, but we did let a relative know, as a matter of rural courtesy, that we intended to go “a’scrumpin”.  Being the resourceful country bumpkins that we are, we deployed the butterfly net as catcher (it worked after a fashion) and the B&M department yawked up a couple of lengths of aluminium pipe with a convenient bracket fused to one end, as a “branch agitator”. We probably gathered around 30-40 pounds of apples between us and there are countless pounds still on the tree. I doubt that, as we were going about our business, there could have been more of an example of eccentric “Englishness” than three blokes, with a combined age of nearly 200 years, giggling like schoolboys as they dodged falling apples. We had a great time!
 

© Colin Cross 2025