We expanded the herb patch last year following a fragrant, fascinating, and rainy excursion to one of the Jekka’s Herb Farm open days. We returned from our trip, smelling strongly of every herb imaginable, with two huge, damp, paper bags full of baby plants. Salad burnet, caraway, chervil, lemon verbena, orange and lemon thymes, winter…
Savoury
Rainbow Chard with Fennel, Chilli, Wild Garlic and Rosemary
It has been a rather unusual weather week. Most mornings started with frost, icy water buckets, and gloved windscreen scraping. Then fierce daytime sunshine took over and our winter coats were swiftly replaced with t-shirts and sunglasses. As night descended, so did the temperature, which meant lighting the log burners remained essential in our stone…
Borage Leaf, Pea and Garden Mint Soup
The borage pops up in the vegetable patch every year without fail. It would almost be considered a weed if the dark green leaves and starry flowers weren’t so welcome in our garden. We grew a few borage plants in a module tray in our first year here and planted them out in the corners…
Pickled Wild Garlic Flower Buds
The wild garlic is as abundant this year as ever. It carpets the woodland floors and lines many of the shaded roadside verges. Open the car window on a sunny afternoon or stumble over a patch on a walk, and its scent is almost instantly noticeable. Here on the smallholding, we are lucky enough to…
Pine Needle Vinegar
There has been a lot of rain here over the last couple of weeks. The ground is saturated with water. The stream is swollen and lapping at the edges of the daffodils. And the geese have found themselves inundated with muddy, pond-sized puddles to dabble in. But, in the moments of sunshine between heavy showers,…
Onion, Leek and Bay Soup
It seems that winter is well on the way. The orchard sparkles with early morning frost; the very last of the russetted autumn leaves are clinging onto the branches; and there’s hardly a honeybee to be seen (they are mostly staying put in the warmth of the hive). The garden birds know it too. They…
Sausage Rolls with Pear, Stilton, and Sage
Now that the clocks have turned back and the nights are continuing to draw in, everything is beginning to slow down here on the smallholding. We’re no longer rushing to harvest and process vegetables from the raised beds, or fruits from the orchard. The honeybees are hunkered down for the cold months so, aside from…
Beetroot Leaf and Potato Gratin
The last of our beetroot have reached the size of Bramley apples and are starting to turn a little woody. They need harvesting quickly before they reach the point of no return and end up on the compost heap. So, at the weekend, we pulled up a huge basketful, leaving just a couple of the…
Chanterelle, Kale and Purple Sage Tagliatelle
Back when we were living in the city, we borrowed a scrappy and crumpled old book from the local library called Urban Dreams, Rural Realities by Daniel Butler and Bel Crewe. It was about a couple who had moved from London to the Welsh countryside to live life on a smallholding and we were curious…
Mulberry, Goats Cheese, Rocket Leaf and Fennel Toasts
We tried our first mulberries at a family barbecue on a sweltering summer day. There was a sprawling black mulberry tree by the garden wall, crooked and aged. It looked like something out of a fairy story. Enveloped below its heart-shaped leaves were fruits so ripe they were falling off the branches and smooshing on…