The 5 pumpkin plants that were given to us by
our neighbours really are starting to become a concern not least because we
were expecting them to be traditional round orange pumpkins and they’re very
long large mostly green although some are totally white. Having lost control of this patch and lost
count of the pumpkins growing in it, we’re not sure what variety they are or
when they’re considered ripe. I took one
off the vine while still green because I’d heard from another friend that they
should be between 40cm – 80cm long and this one was nearly 60cms so I figured
it was probably ready and delivered our first fruit to the neighbour who gave
us his plants (sadly his pumpkin plants haven’t yet produced a single pumpkin
which is excellent news for us so we finally have someone we can share some
produce with – it must be the only vegetable our neighbours don’t have a glut
of themselves!!). They were very
gracious in thanking us before telling us we’d picked it too soon and if left
it should turn yellow/orange in due course and so we’ve left them alone
although there is still no sign of any yellow or orange but they’re getting
bigger by the day and so I may have to invite the neighbours round just to
inspect and give us some advice on what to do and when they should be
picked. Some photos below of the glut
that will soon be coming our way!
In trying to decipher what variety we have
growing, I googled pumpkins and discovered that we’re a long way off from
winning any competitions as the record for the world’s largest pumpkin is held
by someone who grew a pumpkin that weighed in at 2,009 pounds!! I’m quite relieved that we don’t have that
variety growing in abundance although by the end of it we may have that weight
in total.
The other exciting development having eaten
our way through our first crop of heirloom lettuces, we’d planted a second
batch, 9 different heirloom varieties, just before we left for Geneva and
Burgundy and some of these are now ready to eat – they’re all spectacularly
delicious and there’s just something quite special about making a salad for
lunch made up entirely of produce from the garden now that we have the tomatoes
we’d salvaged, green peppers, carrots, onions, many more cucumbers (photo of yet another cucumber to be picked
this afternoon), beetroot, snap peas and green beans, delicious yellow
courgettes and fresh parsley, basil, mint, tarragon, thyme, sage &
rosemary.
The item from the garden we’re still looking
forward to is the fresh corn – Tony planted 80 plants and we’ve now got 2-3
ears popping up on each plant so there is a corn eating regime in our future
and possibly the purchase of a chest freezer finally so that we can store some
of this, the freezer we currently have is bursting at the seams with courgette lasagna,
our neighbours green beans, courgette loaf cake & courgette soup!
Our next door village holds a night market
every Thursday for the months of July and August and last week we invited our
neighbours to join us for a bite to eat – it’s always a fun time with a meal of
duck and fries or a duck sandwich and fries accompanied by a glass of
local wine for EUR4! This is all enjoyed
with a live band playing (usually a local band with an accordion player) and
various market stalls selling local produce and crafts and so it was here that
we met our local beekeeper. When we
returned this year we noticed that our neighbours had lots of hives on his
land, the field immediately next to ours and we can hear them on occasion, apparently the beekeeper uses his land to keep his bees on occasion. We
are understandably very happy to have bees in the neighbourhood to help with
the pollination of all we’ve been growing.
But, even better is that we bought his Acacia honey and this was made
form the Acacia trees that we can see from our house and were all in full bloom
when we arrived in May. I don’t think
I’ve ever had honey that’s literally been made next door and it’s absolutely
delicious so we’ll be heading back to the night market tomorrow with our EUR8
for dinner and a drink and a few extra euros for the honey so that we can stock
up – it does go particularly well with our homemade yogurt for breakfast.
I shall leave you with another recipe, this one for Spanish stuffed marrow - we tried it with half of one of our neighbours marrows the other night and it was absolutely delicious although still enough to feed 6 people! I've posted the link below it's a BBC Good Food recipe - I recommend reading the comments before making it (note to cut the canned tomatoes down although I used fresh from the garden, I also substituted parmesan for manchego) and if not overly keen on spice, be careful of the cayenne or do as we did and serve it accompanied by a nice fresh tzatsiki (yogurt, dill, garlic and cucumber) which will offset the spice.
Bon apetit!
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