Last night it was rhubarb as you can see below. This morning it was a sheet of the last green tomatoes, sliced. Tonight more of the tomatoes. And so it goes on day after day, until there will be nothing left to flash freeze.
The last guests of the year arrive at the Greek Hovel today. It is October but the sun has kept the pool warm and it stays open until the end of the month. Then it shuts down until April. But you can still swim in the sea in November and it will be a lot warmer than Whitby in August. In fact, the best time to visit Greece is about now. For starters, everything from air flights to hotels (and hovels) are so much cheaper.
As a progressive sort of chap, the second team I support in International soccer is, after Northern Ireland, our friends across the border in the Republic. But the Irish girls team don’t seem to like folks like me very much.
It has been a busy year for jams, chutney and relishes and so, as I pot my last jam, I am forced to use recycled Lloyd Grossman sauces jars. It is that time of the year again.
In writing this admission, I reckon it is a good bet that some moron invested in a fraud I have, or am exposing, will take time out from discussing with other internet warriors about having me killed to report me to social services in Wrexham or our esteemed dear leader here in Wales, Mark Drakeford. The idiots at the Badger Trust have yet to apologise for harassing me after I was maliciously reported to them as being a badger killer. So, nothing surprises me although the local rozzers do now know about this sort of harassment and are thus ignoring spurious complaints from crooks like Julie Meyer rather than interviewing me as I laugh at the silliness of it all. Back to green tomatoes.
A kind reader sent Joshua some old fashioned postcards of railway trains. Half of them are now framed and sit at the top of the landing. Beneath them are just some of the books written by family members. One has a very famous pair of pants.
I can never understand when folks cheer on the untimely death of their fellow man. But day after day we are treated by the Western media to videos of Russian tanks being blown up and articles delighting in how many Russian dead now lie on the fields of Ukraine. I am in no doubt that some of those soldiers dying horrible deaths were bad men who did very bad things. But many, probably the vast majority, were just young men fighting what they were told (wrongly) was a just war and fighting by Geneva rules. Why should we celebrate their deaths?
The fried green tomatoes continue to win rave reviews from the Mrs and myself and so we enjoyed another batch yesterday after the arrival of two large bags of “old fashioned cornflour” with a big picture of what used to be known as a Red Indian on the front of each. I suggested that the flour might have been produced by Native Americans but the Mrs, a woman once known as the deluded lefty, gave each bag a dirty look, suggesting that – like the Washington Redskins – a makeover was needed for these enlightened times. I think I shall order some more bags to ensure we have a lifetime’s supply with the current design. Meanwhile, I have more of the green tomato glut to deal with, without resorting to chutney as we already have more than one winter’s supply of apple chutney.
My late uncle had a facebook page, thanks to his eldest son and, though he died more than three years ago, I wake up to a reminder to wish him Happy Birthday. He would have been 85 today and would, no doubt, have thought the world had become an even sillier place since his death. For starters there have been massive advances in the numbers of women with penises ands facial hair over the past three years. And our Universities have made great strides in purging Shakespeare and other dead white authors from the curriculum and eradicating folks with any link, however obscure to the evils of colonialism from the history books. All hail progress!
As I waited for the pasteurisation of the juice to complete late last night, I threaded another 60 chillies and hung them up to dry. There are now about 140 threaded, 40 more waiting to be threaded and, I guess, 300 more in the garden turning redder by the day and awaiting harvesting. We are still working our way through last year’s dried chillies so I guess what I am producing now will make even more Christmas presents to go with surplus apple chutney and the usual Greek Hovel olive oil.
The sprawling massd you see before you are the two butternut squash plants I put down earlier this year which seem to have merged into one. Behind them lie half my tmatoes and under the white netting winter cauliflower and cabbages. I hope that the last of the cabbage whites will soon bugger off and I can remove the netting allowing my plants to shoot higher. Underneath the squash foliage I have, so far, found five squashes but there may be more. The first two picked are shown below.
I am the first to say how dreadful Liz Truss is at almost every level, not least the way she portrays herself as the new Thatcher when she so obviously is not in every way. But some attacks on her are just hugely unfair and plain bonkers. Yes I refer to the dreadful, offshore owned, tax avoiding, Guardian, the paper that supported the slavers in the South in the US Civil War and which spouts a non stop diet of left wing bilge. Is this peak Guardian madness?
Gettig folks to eat apples here at the Welsh Hovel is something of an ask. Which is an issue as we now have two apple orchards and also a highly productive cooking apple tree. I just hate things going to waste. We are now past the blackberry season so there can be no more blackberry and apple crumbles. Rhubarb and apple? Maybe that will work.
I do not want you thinking that all my tomatoes are green. We have been enjoying tomatoes that are ripe and red and orange (depending on the plant) for five weeks and as you can see in the top photo below have enough to be storing some in Greek Hovel olive oil for use later this autumn. But I would be lying if I did not fess that the 20 or so plants I have grown this year – some from seed others donated as small plants by friends – are not now bursting with green tomatoes. Not more chutney, surely, is there another way?
Some folks said that I did not give them enough notice about ShareStock 2022 so they were on holiday, could not find anywhere to stay or had accepted a prior engagement. So for 2023 I am giving you almost a year’s notice of an even more unusual event! We start with some amazing new speakers:
