Last Autumn I planted a couple of rows of Radar onion sets, just to see how they’d go. Radar are a super early variety of onion. Although really I was super late in getting them in, which is why they’re only really ready to pull now. But my bad timing aside, these Radar onions have been a bit disappointing. I don’t want to give this variety a bad name because I’m pretty sure it’s all my fault.

You see, I didn’t bother to condition or feed the soil much before I put them in. I think I may have sprinkled a bag of compost over the area, but didn’t do much else. And I’d already grown potatoes, followed by leeks in that area. Our soil here is quite sandy and very poor in places, so I’m guessing that any nutrients that were in the soil were sucked out in the first year.

Of course last year I had grand ideas about green manure etc. But I got lazy, impatient and forgetful and hastily shoved the onion sets in and hoped for the best really. I did put fleece tunnels over them during the winter for a bit of extra help. But the result is that they’ve grown pitifully small this year. So when I cook, I have to pull up four or five, sometimes six to equal a ‘normal’ portion of 2 onions. And I love onions. In fact, I’m a big allium fan all round. So I don’t want them to go to waste, but boy are they annoyingly fiddly to deal with when you’re cooking.

So I want to come up with some ways to use them elsewhere. And I think possibly the only things I can do with my current limited time and expertise is to try pickling them. And maybe a filo roasted onion tart if i’m feeling particularly exotic that day.

I myself am not an avid fan of pickled onions. Rich loves them, and my cousin Deborah could happily eat them by the jar (and has been known to).  So I don’t know an awful lot about them. My Mum’s best friend Sue is one of those people that knows how to do almost anything, and do it well - cooking en masse, sewing a cushion/curtains/dress, plant up a beautiful hanging basket, knit, grow veggies, crush coal with her bare hands and make diamonds etc. But her pickled onions are legendary, so I may ask her for some tips. I’m not sure that these Radar onions will work - do I need specific pickling onions? Should I opt for shallots? All I can say is by the end of my onion chopping session this evening, my eyes were stinging so much that I could barely keep them open, so I think they’ll do. Forget pepper spray, if you want to deter a criminal from attacking, rub a couple of onions in their face. It was quite torturous for all of 2 minutes.

It’s a good thing there’s been a lot of rain about. Because I have been so overloaded with work, I’ve had time to do little else (apart from sneakily watch Harry Potter on You Tube whilst gobbling down my dinner). The Smallest Smallholding is falling into decline, the weeds are threatening to take over and it all seems to have slowed into a weird state of perma-slow motion.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse have started fruiting at a perculiarly slow rate, they’ve been suspended for what feels like weeks, plump and green slowly swelling in size. But no ripe ones yet. Last year I had the tomatoes growing in the conservatory, where it gets ridiculously hot in sunny weather. This resulted in a jungle of triffid-like leggy tomato plants that needed watering twice a day and churned out more fruit than we knew what to do with. This year it seems the opposite, like a strange waiting game. Growing in the cooler, unheated greenhouse seems to have produced stockier plants, but I’m guessing the tomatoes will be of a good quality. Mum grew hers outside last year and they did really well. Needless to say, the figs are in suspended animation and I’m wondering whether they’ll actually ripen this year…

Down on plot 101 at the allotment, the onions are a sight for sore eyes. Rows of juicy red and white onions are waiting to be pulled and cooked with. Last night I used one white (Hercules) and one red (Red baron) onion in my chana masala. THEY TASTE SO GOOD. Really makes all the difference. I’ve been told to treble my onion output next year. I’m definitely open to it. The garlic is also almost ready - smells divine when you pull it up. It’s currently air drying in the kitchen, can’t wait to use it.

I’ve been pulling up a few turnips to use in cooking. The thing is, I’m not so sure what to do with them all. I decided to plant an early-harvesting, fast growing variety called ‘Snowball’. And true to form, they’ve grown wonderfully quickly and only needed thinning out. They’ve pretty much taken care of themselves (always handy) but I’ve come unstuck because I have a crop that could be harvested right now, but not sure how I can use them, apart from being really unimaginative and chucking them in soup! Their supermarket counterparts seem to be harvested when they’re slightly bigger than a golfball. Mine are well beyond that, but still surprisingly tender and fleshy. I thought I’d let them get too big, and expected them to be quite woody. Glad I was wrong!

Carrots are going well, although the weeds are creeping in left, right and centre. I’ve been pulling a few carrot top stalks out to feed Bunbuns, nice frugal way to feed them, seeing as I didn’t manage to locate (or indeed grow) any kale this year. A bag of kale in Tesco costs 98p, in Waitrose costs £1.19…and I’m not sure it’ll be in the farm shop. The farm shop scares me a bit. I don’t know why. I think it’s because I’m not used to shopping in smaller, intimate spaces where you can be watched from the counter. But then, I’m probably spied on from all angles in the supermarkets, I’m just not aware of it (note to self, don’t unwedge knickers/rearrange bra/vainly check makeup in mirror down deserted aisle, someone is still probably watching!).

Mehh, anyway I digress. We’ve been battling to keep our chicken Pattie from sliding into seriously bad health. She’s got a mystery reoccuring ailment that’s not linked to our EYP. We think. So we’ve sent off a faecal sample to a vet lab in Nottingham to see if there’s something amiss. Should have results tomorrow. We’re also putting Yoko through some photoperiod manipulation, as her EYP swelling was getting too big. It seems to have worked - she basically goes to bed around 5pm and it seems to have made a huge difference to her energy levels and eating. And she doesn’t go and sit in her carrier-come-nestbox (she can’t manage the henhouse ladder at present) when she has the urge to lay (internally). We know she’s feeling better because she’s become a big, barging bossy boots again.

And Maureen-the-wonder-hen-that-never-moults-and-never-gets-ill has got a limp and hasn’t laid in 5 days. She’s so reliable usually that it’s worrying. So having to deal with all that is an ongoing trial. Poor chookies. They’ve been so used and abused in the intensive battery system, it’s no wonder they have these problems later on. Still, they are still enjoying life. And that’s the main thing.

This weekend I finally finished digging out the big veg plot. It’s not that big really - it’s only about 5 or 6 metres long, but when you consider that I have a crappy back, and Rich resolutely left me to do it all myself, you can understand why it’s been quite an undertaking for me. I managed to unearth about 12 small bag’s worth of rubble and hardcore (bricks, ceramic roof tiles, drainage pipes etc), about 30 ant’s nests (hens ate the eggs, bit of a delicacy) and untangled an underground thicket of root systems.

Last time we went down to Biggin Hill to see Rich’s family, his Dad gave me two bags of compost which have been put to use in the plots. Otherwise I’d be growing vegetables in dirty sand. The soil is so poor that I think it’s going to need some super manuring, conditioning and feeding over the winter. Still, my Autumn King carrots like it, despite their daily dose of being rolled and slept on by Lilla the cat. And the Hercules onions are coming along. I’m hoping to get my ’snips in (for a roast dinner without ’snips is a sad sight to behold) too.

A couple of days ago I also moved my tent cloche (another gift from Rich’s parents) to cover my newly transplanted Kilaxy cabbages. I’d started them off in seed modules outside, and they’d vastly outgrown my Primo cabbages that had been sown earlier. So I decided now was a good time to transplant them. I took the seed tray off the garden table and put it down beside me whilst I made little holes for the cabbages to go in. My back had been turned for a few seconds, during which time Yoko had strode over and discovered a tray of tasty morsels.

In the space of about 10 seconds, she’d decimated about 5 of my cabbages. Good work, Yoko. I think she thought she was helping - a sort of quality control and selection process, as I always make a point of growing a few extras. Feeling that her work was done, Yoko soon got bored and wandered off somewhere else leaving me to plant in the remaining cabbages. I didn’t want to take any chances though, and staked down my tent cloche. Because I actively encourage the birds to come and feed, I don’t want to inadvertantly invite a load of pot-bellied woodpigeons down to finish off the rest. I still have a tray left to plant down on the allotment, but have nothing to cover them in. So there it’ll be a case of blind, foolish beginner’s luck where brassica growing is concerned.

Today though, I have to resign myself to a few hours of cleaning. So I’m just about to brandish my Mum’s super duper Dyson in one hand (our vacuum is, for want of a better word, crap) and a bottle of Bishop’s Finger real ale in the other. BORING!

I love my food, there’s no doubting that. I’ll never be one of these stick-thin types, a) because I have child bearing hips and b) because food has an important part to play in my life - growing it, cooking it and savouring it.

I come from a family where every occasion is marked by some sort of meal or foodie event. We’re a bit continental, in that our extended family often gets together and feasts. In the summer and autumn, a lot of the food we eat is home-grown, and tastes all the better for it.

I really enjoy cooking from scratch. In fact, I rarely don’t cook from scratch, unless I’m whacking something like a beanburger on. It might sound extremely tragic to those that are living high-flying careers, but cooking my dinner is a highlight of my day. Rich is far more experimental than me with his dishes -I tend to stick to my favourites (I could live on home-made soups for months on end) and cook them on a rotation. He went through a phase of making proper italian pizzas, the dough, the tomatoes, the buffalo mozzerella, fresh basil, baked on the back of a hot cast iron dish. They were stunning. He inspires me to try harder.

We both like to cook, so a lot of the time we cook our separate meals, which sometimes results in jostling and cries of “can you get out of the way!” and “oi, I need that pan!” or “do you have to stand there?”.

This summer I’m aiming to find interesting uses for all the produce at the Smallest Smallholding. I can’t wait until I’m able to walk a few yards, ponder over the vegetable patches about what to pick or pull up, and what I can do with it. At the moment though, there’s not a lot of edible stuff here, it’s all growing, germinating or yet to be sowed. I still have yet to master the whole productive year-round and storage thing.

Which means that at present, I am relying on the supermarket (bleurgh) for my ’scratch’ ingredients. Veg, passata, frozen peas et al. Farmer’s markets are thin on the ground, a bit like my cash situation. No cash, no food from the market or farm shop. The supermarket isn’t so bad at the mo, there’s a nice looking security guard there that I don’t mind ogling from afar, much to Rich’s bemusement (”…but he always looks so moody! You’re weird.”).

ANYWAY - I will finally make my point. Cash flow is crap at the moment, thanks in part to humongous vet bills, quarterly sky-high gas bills (despite our best efforts to be efficient) etc etc. So we are on a very very very tight, strict food budget. I needed to go on a bit of a diet anyway. 7 chocolate brioches, a few doughnuts, cookies, cakes and crisps later and I’m not exactly looking my best. Remember I have this school reunion to go to - I really don’t want to be the “one that got chubby”.

But being on a budget means that I am actually eating three GOOD square meals a day. I can’t afford the extras. So it’s like putting a little in and getting the maximum out. I don’t understand all this “I’m poor so I can’t afford to eat healthily” stuff. If anything, money makes me fatter! I have no self discpline when it comes to cakes, biscuits, bread and crisps.

On the allotment, I managed to inherit two large patches of rhubarb with some impressive crowns. I was actually surprised at how early you can harvest rhubarb, even without forcing it. See, I still have a lot to learn about growing veggies.

So off I trundled on Sunday, having decided that rhubarb crumble was on the menu for dessert, following our Sunday (veggie) roast. Whilst being blown to pieces, I pulled up a whole armful of sticks of rhubarb of varying sizes and thicknesses. Here’s a completely au naturel action shot of me approaching aforementioned rhubarb:

The ones that were far too thick and stringy were cut up (to aid decomposition - yep, MORE compost talk) and thrown (literally, from afar) onto the compost heap. I’m rubbish with portion sizes so I kept pulling and snipping the leaves off, and deciding that I didn’t have enough for one rhubarb crumble, would pull some more. This went on for a fair few minutes. I have a fear of cooking and not producing enough food for a meal that will leave me feeling satisfied. Or full to bursting. So as a consequence, I pretty much always cook far too much.

Now, bear in mind that there are only two of us here at the Smallest Smallholding. This is how much rhubarb I ended up with for my one crumble:

Once I got home, I washed and chopped up the rhubarb, cooked it with about 3/4 of an inch of water in the saucepan, and added about 6oz sugar. Once it was soft, and wafting delicious sweet acidic smells out of the kitchen, I strained it a bit and had to divide it into two dishes. I rubbed together 8oz of plain flour, 4oz of (fair trade) demerera sugar and 4oz (organic) butter together for the topping, sprinkled it on liberally, put a little more sugar on top and put both in the oven at gas mark 5. After about 20 minutes, my rhubarb crumbleS were ready. We served them up with Green & Black’s caramel and hazlenut ice cream.

Fan-bloody-tastic. My first allotment harvest was a veritable success.

My mother informs me that this year the price of onions is set to increase a fair amount. I think this is in part due to last year’s soggy summer, which proved a blight for onion growers. My Hercules onions that I grew last year were utterly fantastic - bursting with flavour and so sweet when cooked in soups and stews. I use onions almost every day in my cooking, and so it just made sense to grow as many as I could. However, last year I didn’t grow enough to store - only 50 sets or so that were each pulled, peeled, chopped and cooked and eaten within the hour.

Mum visited an onion growing farm last year - they had crates and crates bursting with literally tonnes of onions that had been rejected by Tesco, and were going to be binned. So the farmer threw Mum and her friend a few sacks and they filled them up. Crazy. I had a few of these onions, and they were perfectly fine.

I think I blogged (or possibly posted on my forum) last year on the fact that red onions in particular were going to be hit the hardest by the price increase. So earlier this year - safe in the knowledge that thanks to my allotment and new veg plots at the Smallest Smallholding, I now had ample space - I put some money aside for loads of onion sets. I tried growing onions from seed, but they failed miserably, probably due to the fact that I put them in far too late and didn’t nourish the soil enough beforehand. But from my reading and other people experiences, I have come to the conclusion that the general consensus is that sets mean bigger, faster-growing delicious onions.

I think if you’re going to grow from seed you could generally expect a smaller onion - or possibly have to extend your growing season considerably. If space is an issue - and last year, for me it was - then having sets means that you can pull them earlier and use the space for somethig else over the winter. Smaller onions can still obviously be used in cooking, but as with shallots and pickling onions you can preserve them, or do scrumptious things like roast them whole.

Did you know that your average British pickling onion does a few thousand miles? A typical journey might go something like this - grown here in the UK, picked and sent off to places like Poland, where they are peeled, sent back to Britain to be pickled, sent back to Poland to be bottled up and then finally brought back to be put on our supermarket shelves - and sometimes labelled as British. Food miles? Well, for me, about 40ft.

Anyhow, this year I have the following either growing, or going in the ground very soon:

• Stuttgarter Giant
• Red Baron
• Radar (super early, should be ready around May)
• Hercules (my absolute favourite)

The weather forecast looks more promising, so I will be heading down to my veg plots at the Smallest Smallholding, as well as down to the allotment to get them all in. Still got a packet of Bedfordshire Champion onion seeds from last year that remain unopened. I won’t be growing them and will happily swap them for something else if anyone is interested?

Just got back from the vets again with Pattie. £146. We’re still waiting on fecal results and probably having her in tomorrow for blood tests. Then she may have a general for x-rays. That may cost us almost £300. She only cost us 50p.

This is the thing about having animals that are primarily pets. You want to do the best for them, so you pay through the nose to give them the best chance you can. What else can we do? This country produced her, exploited her, and was going to chuck her away. So fingers crossed little Pattie will pull through whatever is making her ill.

In other news…

I was going to post on this a while ago, but with the ten million other things occupying me I didn’t get around to it. On Easter Sunday, instead of the traditional chocolate egg, my mother turned up on our doorstep with a freshly baked apple and raspberry crumble which turned out to be quite a family affair. Let me explain myself - no, Mum didn’t mill the flour by hand or churn the butter herself (although, if you vigorously shake double cream in a bag until your arm almost falls off, you can make butter yourself), or refine the sugar at home. But she did collect the raspberries from my grandmother’s raspberry canes, and she did use the cooking apples that my aunt had been storing from last autumn’s bumper crop. So with my family’s input, we were presented with a very tasty crumble. Needless to say really that it “mysteriously” completely vanished overnight, never to be seen again.

When I was madly baking cakes for people at work, when I had a ‘regular’ job, i started off by using what we referred to as ‘Ditch Jam’. It was basically jam made from the pickings of a few rambles in the countryside by my Mum’s best friend. She’d pick up a few bits and pieces each time she went for a walk (leaving enough for the mice, birdies et al) and chanced upon a hedgerow (not too close to a road either), and then would go home and make up a nice big batch of jam. There’s no set Ditch Jam recipe, it’s a case of bung in what you can find - wild blackberries, sloes, haws, elderberries, crab apples (fantastic for adding pectin into the mix), wild damsons, rosehips…

I am a jam and preserving novice, our grandmother’s preserving pan does the rounds in the family, but I’ve yet to make use of it. I asked on freecycle if anyone had one spare to no avail. I would like to try something with our crab apples, damsons and Victoria plums here on the Smallest Smallholding, but the moths get them every year. I’m too soft to put up those horrible moth traps, so I’m on the lookout for a plum moth deterrent this year.

Ok, so I’ve been really busy (lazy) and haven’t actually got around to sowing ANYTHING. I’ve managed to get the potatoes chitting, but despite my carefully drawn-up plans, timetables and schedules, the seed trays are still vacant.

I was planning on starting earlier this week - honest guv - but work and cold weather put a stop to my plans thus far. I thought spring was on it’s way (see pic, a Clematis currently starting to flower at the Smallest Smallholding) but it appears not to be the case quite yet. A bitter stiff northerly breeze soon reminded me otherwise. However, a cursory glance over at Metcheck reveals that it’s going to warm up from Thursday, so I reckon that’ll be a good time to break open the seed packets here at the Smallest Smallholding.

I think I’ll start by making some biodegradable seed pots out of loo rolls, which will house my broadbean seeds (yes, I really am THAT late in sowing, so not many successive crops for me this year) and sweet peas. Then there’s the Tendersnax carrots that I’ll probably whack into some spare large terracotta pots. The aubergines and peppers will be sown too, and I’ll leave them germinating in the conservatory, which heats up nicely in the mornings if the sun is out. I’ll stick my tent cloche up tomorrow (Weds) and sow the parsnips straight into what ground I’ve managed to excavate in the new big veg plot.

I’ve also got a tonne of herb seed packets stowed away somewhere that I haven’t even looked at yet. Sometimes it’s all talk and action with me. Blargh!

We’re close to starting the seed sowing at the allotment, the plan being to get at least half dug and ready for sowing, before concentrating on the more intensive tricky end, where the twitch-infested mountain range lies.

But that’s all to be tackled in a couple of days. At the moment I’m feeling grotty. I managed to spend half the day swathed in my purple fluffy dressing gown, armed with a mug of hot chocolate and a couple of lazy cats. I have given up chocolate for Lent (all part of my effort to try and live without certain luxuries and remind myself that they ARE actually luxuries), and when Easter arrives I am willing an army of Easter Eggs (organic ones, of course) to appear. However, in the meantime, my sweet tooth is threatening to turn me stir crazy, so in an effort to subdue it I will do a bit of baking. My last chickpea lemon cake was a bit of a disaster as I didn’t read the ACTUAL drained weight of chickpeas in the tin, and ended up using only half of the chickpeas in the recipe that I was supposed to (utterly stupid, as I’ve done the recipe so many times before). So the hens enjoyed the Disaster Cake (as I christened it) instead.

I’ve been running a chat forum for a few months now. It’s basically a place where like-minded souls can chat about many subjects including green living, foodie subjects and recipes, rural issues and politics, smallholding, sustainable living and allotmenteering, arts, crafts and traditional trade skills, health & wellbeing, or just partake in a bit of random general chat! We currently have members from around the globe, as far reaching as Germany, South Africa and Australia, as well as a core of English folk.

The hope is that I’ll be able to expand the website to include a proper online magazine in addition to the forum. There will be articles covering subjects such as rural crafts, ethical shopping, seasonal produce, recipes, wildlife, hen and bee keeping as well as gardening tips and ways and means to live the good life. Some members have already volunteered their services to write articles on their specialisms, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting contributions. I’m also currently compiling a (free) business listing for anyone that has a service to offer or products to sell, and is a member of the website, or related to a member of the forum. The hope is that this will grow in time to provide a really comprehensive list that will prove useful for both country and town dweller.

The forum is called Rural Muse and can be found at www.ruralmuse.co.uk

I’m the worst sort of vegetarian - a fussy one. I could be possibly the only vegetarian on the planet than doesn’t really like salad. I could eat it if it’s with something - say a beanburger in a bun - but a bowful of salad is one of my worst nightmares. And funnily enough, I don’t really like eggs either. The ones our hens lay get used by Rich, or sold for £1 a half dozen to friends, family and from the garden gate. Any eggs that I eat go into cakes and bakes - try a sponge with 3 large fresh free range eggs and really taste the difference. We’re only getting a couple a day at the moment - Cynthia is probably waiting for a turn in the weather and Yoko with her sterile EYP is a non-goer. She’s actually better at the moment, her swelling has gone down and she’s running around again, despite looking a bit raggedy as she’s in the throes of her moult.

You may be thinking “well what on earth does she eat then”, and I would reply, plenty! I’m expanding my horizons you see, trying to plant out new vegetables this year to add to my cullinary experiences. So far I’ve invested in some pink fir apple seed potatoes, as well as trying aubergines, a variety of squashes/curcubits and broad beans. I’ve got completely stuck in a rut with my cooking, and although I often manage to get my 5 fruit and veg a day, typically they’re the same 5 fruit and veg. Oh of course I’ll be growing potatoes, onions and carrots this year, I’ll probably have them growing out my ears by the end of the season. I wouldn’t be without them, they’re the basis of any good meal. But I’m taking Carol Klein’s advice from her Grow Your Own Veg book - try and grow things that are hard to find or expensive in the supermarket. One thing I’ve got to look into is some fruit cages this year - both Rich and I are ardent fans of berries in all shapes, colours and sizes.

I’m also trying to eat seasonally, the plan being that one day I’ll just have to walk out the back door and pull up or pick dinner. Last night I made one of my favourite simple seasonal dinners, my Simple Leek Soup:

Simple Leek Soup (for 2 people):

2 or 3 medium potatoes (chopped)

3 or 4 leeks (chopped)

1 large onion (chopped)

Olive oil

Sea Salt and Cracked Black Pepper

Cayenne Pepper

Veg stock (preferably marigold)

Directions: Put some olive oil in a pan, add the potatoes, leeks and onions and sweat down for about 10 mins on a very low heat. Then add about 2 pints of water and veg stock (1 heaped dessert spoon of stock per pint) and stir. Add a dash of ground cayenne pepper or chilli powder (schwarz is probably best), sprinkle of salt and plenty of ground cracked black pepper. Bring to the boil and then leave to simmer on a low heat for about 50mins, stirring occasionally. Take off heat, and then whizz up with a hand blender to a smoother consistency. Serve immediately with crusty bread, or leave to cool and store in fridge overnight and reheat the next day for slightly deeper flavour. Easy and damned tasty!