Quinta das Abelhas

We never seem to do very well with cucumbers. Normally only a few plants survive the spring and the heat of early summer, and only one or two plants go on to develop very well. But we do normally get quite a few cucumbers from those few plants.

This year we only have one very good plant, a few that may get some fruit late in the year, and half a dozen strugglers. The best plant, in Sophies garden, is buried in beans and seems to like the shade. Its produced one cucumber so far, but plenty of tiny ones on the plant.

There are also some very well developed aubergine plants in Sophie’s garden, plus quite a few strugglers in mine. The first aubergine is growing. The need the heat to do very well, and this year has been cooler than normal.

We’ve been eating trail of tear beans for some time now, and also have a few bags of chopped up beans in the freezer. All the books say to blanch veg before freezing, but we never do, and they seem fine. Anything that cuts down on work is good. Heres a pic of some of the beans. They are very prolific and even the dried beans taste fantastic.

The rhubarb we brought back from the UK seems very happy, under a tree in Sophie’s garden. We recently we offered Rui Barbo at Vale dos Amores Restaurant. ‘What’s that?’ we asked. ‘Its a vegetable’ was the reply. We scratched our heads, and ordered to see what it was. Rui Barbo, someone’s name? Their special dish? N0. It’s rhubarb! Duh!

We love rhubarb crumble!

In amongst our courgettes and pumpkins, there are a few rather strange plants. They are the shape of a courgette plant, but the fruit looks more like a gourd or squash. I bought so many different things in the spring and so much that i planted got cut down by late frosts, that I simply dont know what this is. I dont want to cut them as courgettes, and they dont cook all that well. So I will wait and see what happens to them over time. If the plants stop producing I will cut them to encourage more.

Our seeding wild leeks and leeks and onions are being visited by these big scary looking bees. I’ve not seen them before, but we have loads of them buzzing around the allium flowers. They are about an inch long. I wonder if they have stings (but dont really want to find out).

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I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks “what are these plants?”, looking through my records, scratching my head. There were a few possibilities. It just says ‘big pot at back’, and there were several big pots at the back! Today I made a list of the few possibilities, and did some searches for pictures on the net, eventually coming up with Tea plants. That’s right, Camelia Sinensis, the plant that is grown to make tea. Apparently our conditions are almost perfect for it, acid soil, hot summer and not too cold in the winter, but they would prefer to be higher up. Fantastic, in three years we’ll be able to make our own pots of tea!

I also harvested our oats today. I am not sure how to go about getting the oats off the stalks. Worse scenario is that I will have to pick every one off, but for now I am allowing them to dry out properly.

So, there we have it. Oats for my muesli, and tea, a proper breakfast of champions, and here’s the perfect place to eat it, where i can start my mornings thinking about the jobs needing to be done in my garden:

Unfortunately the coffee beans haven’t germinated, perhaps they will, and I will be able to have homegrown coffee with my muesli.

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Summer is here. Cassey and the kittens are taking a break in the shade of an olive tree:

These heirloom climbing beans are doing very well, but no beans to eat yet:

The bed is very simply some bricks, in a circle, filled with horse manure. Obviously the bean plants love the manure.

The Goji berry plant, which was just a stick in a pot, has been growing fast too. We are watering roughly every two days now, and, even with the manure, the beds dry out. Luckily our well has an underground stream flowing into it, so we have plenty of water (but we still need to be careful with it). There are no berries on the plant, also known as wolfberry, but it seems that flowers should start forming soon, and we’ll get berries through the autumn. Some info here.

I think we need to build some kind of frame around it to keep the berries off of the floor.

We have our first augergine (eggplant) flower of the year. I love aubergines chopped small, cooked with beans, olive oil and soya sauce. We’ll be eating them in a few weeks if this heat keeps up.

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Courgettes, pumpkins, dinosaur squash, spaghetti squash, butternuts… we love ‘em. Easy to grow, full of carbohydrates, hugely productive and easy to store for the winter.

Sophie’s garden has a couple of beds full of various squash, which are loving the sun and the moisture-retaining horse manure, which of course also feeds them to make them grow big big big!

The above was a new bed with nothing in it just over a month ago, and now contains a few courgette plants, several pumpkin or butternut plants (I forgot which was which when i gave her the germinated seedlings!) and some borage plants that attract the bees. The courgettes stay within the bed, but the other squashes tend to grow out, trailing over the paths, other plants and generally getting in the way. We’ve talked about trying to grow them up a trellis, but I wonder how this will work with plants that produce larger fruit. I think butternuts would be good to grow vertically, instead of horizontally, taking up less space in the garden. This may be a must-do next year, as we are growing more varieties every year and space will eventually be limited. We really love butternuts, and they kept on a shelf in the adega for over 6 months, alongside several hard-skinned pumpkins.

Heres the first pumpkin of the year, growing in a bed that was an old compost heap. Its almost the size of a football, and growing. I hope it keeps growing before it turns orange. There are lots of other baby ones appearing everyday, so we should have plenty of pumpkin through this winter.

At the other end of that bed, a self-seeded New Zealand spinach is doing very well. It doesnt require much water and is perennial, spreading over time. A very useful plant to grow in this climate, supplying us with a decent bunch of greens every few days - cut the branches just above a side shoot and it multiplies.

My garden is, as I have said before, much more of a chaotic jungle. Heres a shot of a bed with courgettes on the left, various pumpkin-type plants on the right, growing out over the paths and under the vines.

You can’t see the pumpkin side, but here we have courgettes planted in mounds of compost in the middle. Behind them, growing up the trellis are butter bean plants. I’ve had no luck with these before, because they don’t seem to like the hot sun. This seems to work, allowing the courgettes to shafe the beans. There are also a few self seeded tomatoes in between, a few tiny cucumber plants hopefully about to shoot up the trellis, some sunflowers, which I plant everywhere (their roots are meant to inhibit weeds and they act like secondary trellis uprights for the butter beans) and some bush beans, which are also benefitting from the courgette shade. In front of the courgettes there is a row of salsify, long thin root crop, which are delicious and also don’t require much water.

And, here is yesterdays harvest for dinner:

I include this here, because it contains the first proper sized round courgette, about the size of a cricket ball. A few leeks, some purple sprouting broccolli, lettuce, green beans, swiss chard, several courgettes, rocket leaves and a few beetroots made up yesterdays pick. For dinner I made a green salad, boiled a pan of small home-grown potatoes and stir fried the leeks, courgettes, beans, some chickpeas, broccolli and a few sausages, that needed using, chopped into small bits. All with a dash of olive oil and soya sauce.

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We eat a lot of beetroots (beterrabas), normally grated raw, with carrots (cenouras) and a mix of toasted seeds, and whatever else is around that might complement.
Yesterday I had no carrots, so I grated half a dozen small beets, toasted some sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and chopped up ten well ripe plums (ameixas) from one of our trees. And, then the magic ingredient that just brought out the taste of the plums and beets, a small clump of basil (manjericão) chopped very finely.

Delicious.

Other things I have sometimes added include apples (maças), pears (peras), sprouted seeds, cheese (queijo), pineapple (ananas), parlsey (salsa) or other herbs. But you could add almost anything. The plum idea I think is the best yet (thats why I thought I’d post it here), and I prefer to use things we’ve grown ourselves. Enjoy!

While I am here, another thing we are eating quite regularly, simply because the chooks are laying plenty, is a kind of egg-fried rice thing. Stir fry a wok full of veg, including plenty of chopped green (kale, cabbage, chard, whatever you’ve got), while a pan of rice is cooking. Add the rice, stir in well, and then break 4 or 5 eggs into the mix. Stir in briskly for 5 minutes, to ensure the eggs are cooked properly. Viola, a filling meal, making use of the egg glut and whatever veg is abundant in your garden. Obviously wholegrain rice is better (and more filling) but white is fine if you prefer, and very cheap still (rice prices are escalating around the world. Hopefully in Portugal this won’t affect us too much as rice is grown on the plains near Coimbra).

Perhaps I should keep posting my recipes here, until I have enough for a little book? I’d be interested to hear from readers who try these recipes, perhaps with your own modifications - all my cooking changes with the seasons and what is available in the garden - what worked? What didn’t? What recipes did you try and love and keep coming back to?

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